Anti Israel protest at Columbia University. (Photo by ProudFarmerScholar – Own work, CC0)
I wonder how Columbia University would behave in the following scenario. A bunch of students and outside agitators descend on their campus. They are dressed in the gear of the Ku Klux Klan, being careful to conceal their faces so as to avoid any personal criticism. They then enter the university’s library and other sacred spaces of learning and chant for the lynching of black Americans.
Would Columbia University sit by while this happened? Would Democrat prosecutors and left-wing activists claim that this was simply a case of people exercising their free-speech rights? And would conservative pundits wishing to appear as being “on the right side of history” insist that the hooligans should be allowed to continue their threatening actions with impunity?
I would guess that the answer to these questions would be “no,” “no” and “no” again.
So why do so many people think that a movement which dedicates itself to intimidating and threatening another minority group in America — specifically Jews — find itself so cosily protected?
The thought occurs after a friend at Columbia sent me footage from the university’s Butler library — the main library on campus — from earlier this week. The Butler library is a beautiful building, intended as a sacrosanct place of study and education. Which was what places like Columbia were once for.
But on Wednesday those students who did want to study had to put up with a mob of fascists descending on their place of learning. Scores of students and others came in dressed in their terrorist chic. Their heads were wrapped in Palestinian terrorist scarves and some of them — as ever — decided to mix this up with COVID-19 protective masks.
Then, with drums and megaphones and microphones, they started their boring, tedious terrorist chants.
“Free, free, free Palestine” was one of them. They forgot to add that the people who the Palestinian people need to be freed from are Hamas.
But that probably wasn’t on these bigots’ radars. They also chanted their genocidal chant of “From the river to the sea” which is of course a demand to wipe the world’s only Jewish state off the map.
They boogied while chanting all this — dancing as though they were at some kind of party. Perhaps a party like the Nova party that the heroes of these Columbia protestors entered on October 7th and where Hamas terrorists proceeded to rape and murder hundreds of these students’ contemporaries. But these are details.
The protestors also hung their terrorist paraphernalia around the library. These huge home-made signs included one special beauty: “Glory to our martyrs.”
Until the last couple of years New York students did not have much truck for international terrorists. Whatever the criticisms of America’s response to 9/11, I remember no major movement on American college campuses in which students hung banners praising Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda. In fact it would have been thought to be in rather bad taste had they done so.
But the killers and rapists and torturers and kidnappers of Hamas? Oh they are absolutely fit to be lauded by students at America’s most elite universities. What wonderful role models they must be for young Americans setting out at the start of their careers.
Of course there are a number of things that need to be not just said but done to stop the spread of this unadulterated evil.
The first is for the Trump administration to act on its promises and cut off all federal funding from universities which allow terrorist movements to seize hold of campus.
There is nothing ground-up about any of this. All of the rhetoric and materials that these terrorist-supporters engage in is a pure import.
What American student, born and raised here, thinks that the terrorists of October 7th are “martyrs”? Let alone “our” martyrs. Who do these students think that “we” are? Is it an act of “liberation” to injure and hospitalize staff on campus who are just doing their job? Is this really a way to express sympathy with a cause and get people onto your side?
Colleges always have their agitators. They are usually right out front. We know who they are. They can be removed at any time, if the will or the desire exists.
What I want to see investigated is why colleges tolerate this crap. It is not for the sake of “intellectual freedom” or free speech. It is the administrations of colleges and universities who are ultimately responsible for this intolerable situation.
Speaking of the KKK, from what I saw on video, there were many black students, dressed appropriately, among the throngs of the other “student” terrorists.