(OPINION) Imagine walking on your college campus or the campus your son or daughter attends and being met with mobs of angry, violent people shouting pro-terror chants.
Imagine being threatened with murder and faced with vehement hatred simply for existing or being against terrorism. In a sense, you don’t have to imagine it completely because these absurdities are exactly what’s increasingly unfolding at universities.
Over the weekend, numerous videos surfaced of anti-Israel groups chanting obscenities. At Columbia University, for example, protestors were yelling, “Oh Al-Qassam Brigades, You Make Us Proud, Kill Another Soldier Now! Israel Will Fall! Palestine Is Arab!” and “We are all Hamas” as well as other cries encouraging the obliteration of Israel.
Some of the protestors even went as far as calling for the murder of the counter-protestors carrying American and Israeli flags. After some were arrested, including Rep. Ilhan Omar’s (D-Minn.) daughter, the “campus chaos” continued.
According to National Review, “Columbia University announced on Sunday that, in response to ‘extraordinarily challenging circumstances,’ it more than doubled its safety personnel per shift, enhanced perimeter safety, improved ID checks for entering campus, and added additional safety measures to the Kraft Center for Jewish Life.”
Classes were also moved to an online format to better separate students from the danger on campus. The University President Minouche Shafik spoke out against Saturday’s protest in a statement, “Anti-Semitic language, like any other language that is used to hurt and frighten people, is unacceptable and appropriate action will be taken.”
Those who watch the videos of the police action to remove the protests will be struck by their restraint and professionalism, as well as by the vicious nature of the students, who were angered by the university’s decision to rein them in.
The spectacle of entitled Ivy League students–many of whom come from privileged backgrounds–venting their contempt and calling police officers, who generally come from the working class, “pigs,” as well as expressing hatred for America itself, is as shocking as it is illustrative of the divisions in contemporary society.
Other videos from that day’s actions shared on X by witnesses were equally appalling as they recorded for posterity the way Columbia students–many of them wearing masks to conceal their identity for the same reason that members of the Ku Klux Klan wore white hoods–chanted their support for Hamas and their intolerance for the presence of “Zionists” on campus and said that they looked forward to more Oct. 7 massacres of Jews.
Indeed, nothing could better illustrate how critical race theory and intersectionality, which falsely label Jews and Israel as “white” oppressors, grant a permission slip for the kind of open hatred that was long thought to be confined to the margins of American life where only right-wing extremists dwell.
However, a closer look at what else occurred over the weekend proves Columbia is not the only prestigious school that saw such severe anti-Semitism break out.
On Saturday, roughly 500 protestors gathered at Yale University in the Beinecke Plaza, calling for more violence while tearing down American flags.
Allegedly, one Jewish student, Sahar Tartak, who was covering the protest as editor-in-chief of the Yale Free Press, was struck in the eye with a flagpole by a pro-Palestine protestor. She and her friends were singled out for their Hasidic Jewish clothes. According to Tartak, the university police and administration didn’t do anything to stop these events.
As historian Niall Ferguson has written in his seminal Free Press essay, “The Treason of the Intellectuals,” what is happening on American campuses today is a frightening replay of what was happening in European universities in the 1920s and ’30s.
Just like a century ago, the intellectual fashion of the day has made the Jews the scapegoats for everything the educated and credentialed classes don’t like.
Now a new poll shows 33% of Gen Zers, those ages 18 to 24, say that Israel does not have a right to exist as a nation in the Middle East. Summit.org, in partnership with RMG Research, founded by Scott Rasmussen, released the new poll results this week. (READ MORE)
