Barbaric anti-Israel protesters are causing mayhem at the gates of Columbia University By Benjamin Weingarten
That Jews were made to feel unsafe to walk the Columbia University campus Passover eve in 2024, fearing risk of assault from unchecked promoters of genocidal jihadism and the destruction of Israel, America and the Judeo-Christian West, is a complete and utter disgrace.
It is also the logical conclusion of the progressives’ long march through the institutions.
Absent a massive sea change, not just Jews but all Americans will bear the brunt of the ceding of schools to those who would destroy the very civilization from which they sprang.
Our elite academic institutions — and shamefully, my alma mater, which at its literal core, its core curriculum, mandates the study of a Western canon that contains the ideas of liberty and justice and emphasizes the pursuit of virtue and excellence, on which America is based — have for decades been petri dishes of left-wing radicalism that reject these noble ideals.
Jew-hatred has in recent decades increasingly become a central feature of that radicalism, in no small part through the overlapping ideologies and interests of the Western left and Islamic supremacists — the subject of my book that foretold the crises of post-Oct. 7 America, “American Ingrate: Ilhan Omar and the Progressive-Islamist Takeover of the Democratic Party.”
The simple explanation is the Western left, under the banner of diversity, equity, inclusion — rebranded cultural Marxism — divides the world between oppressed and oppressors and has come to cast the tiny and perpetually persecuted Jewish minority as most oppressive of them all.
Israel, the collective Jew, like America, has been branded, ludicrously and dishonestly, as an evil occupier.
To left-wing ideologues, global “justice” and “equity” demand knocking Israel and America down a peg or three and elevating our enemies, including Islamic supremacists.
Call it an Affirmative action for tyrants.
The cause of Palestinian nationalism and the idea the West is the aggressor against the Muslim world, thereby justifying genocidal jihadism, fit neatly into this worldview.
That’s no accident.
Former Palestine Liberation Organization leader Yasser Arafat worked hand in glove with the Soviet Union to generate the propaganda and develop the terrorist practices he and his comrades would employ to win plaudits in the West.
“Our struggle is part and parcel of every struggle against imperialism, injustice and oppression in the world,” Arafat reportedly said in 1969.
“It is the part of the world revolution which aims at establishing social justice and liberating mankind.”
He could be screaming into a bullhorn at the center of the Columbia quad encampments today.
The leftists and Islamic supremacists are a match made in hell, both wanting to overthrow the free world and replace it with their totalitarian visions, with Jew-hatred the glue that binds them.
All it took for this reality to explode into public view was Israel daring to respond to the Holocaust-in-a-day Hamas perpetrated Oct. 7.
Related factors also created the conditions allowing Hamas supporters to freely occupy our campuses.
Elite schools have for years on the one hand punished every micro-aggression and canceled every speaker who would dare express a dissenting view from the prevailing progressive orthodoxy while on the other refusing to enforce their rules, regulations and codes of conduct on offending protected cohorts now on parade.
Misgender someone, and you’re liable to be censured.
Call for genocide against the Jews, and “context matters.”
Schools evidently do not believe in disciplining those who hold the “right” views — consistent with their broader anti-disciplinary bent.
They cower to the radicals in their midst, for whom DEI has created a safe space.
A similar phenomenon prevails in blue-jurisdiction law enforcement — Black Lives Matter rioters and criminals get to act with impunity, Jan. 6ers and pro-lifers get railroaded.
Greed also plays a major role in how higher education operates.
Foreign students pay full freight; foreign powers fund schools to the tune of billions of dollars.
These include Middle Eastern students and countries whose dollars come with influence — extending well beyond the Middle East studies departments that have for decades been bastions of “anti-Zionist” and anti-American fervor.
If leaders at Columbia and elsewhere cared to slay the Frankenstein’s monster they created, they would expel students promoting jihad and violating school policies; they would permanently suspend all campus groups behind such activities; they would reject all foreign funding from like-minded regimes; they would dismantle the DEI infrastructure underpinning it all; then they would resign.
The US government would prohibit all funding or benefits of any kind to institutions that refuse to operate accordingly.
It would deport all foreign students participating in violative activities.
But the people who created the problems at these schools and in government won’t be the ones to solve them.
If Americans do not use every lever of power to force changes in personnel and policies — frankly from K-12 onward — Jews and non-Jews alike will pay the price.
Today’s student shills for Hamas — which has American blood on its hands, as do other proxies of an Iranian regime the Biden administration has bent over backwards to appease — are tomorrow’s State Department officers.
Ultimately, the Columbia crisis illustrates the stark choice we face as a country: Do we abide the barbarism celebrated by the school’s genocidal-jihadist promoters and ultimately succumb to them, or do we instead do justice to the names of those etched into the Butler Library façade that looms over them — from Plato and Aristotle to Dante and Shakespeare — and defend our civilization?
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