Since October 8th, 2023, the day right after the Hamas invasion of Israel, Jewish and Israeli students on the campuses of US colleges and universities, have been repeatedly mugged, physically and emotionally, by Jew-hating, Israel-hating, America-hating protestors, Hamas-loving assaulters and vandals.
If you think you already know how bad it’s been, a new documentary film entitled October 8 , will open up your mind and slap you in the face.
The film exposes the explosion of antisemitism right after the barbaric attack, on social media, on the streets of American cities, and especially on the nation’s college campuses.
Even before any Israeli retaliation, the haters were out in force.
They want you to believe it’s just about the war in Gaza, but the film proves it’s really about antisemitism and anti-Americanism.
The protestors, the anarchists, the jihadists, are against Jews, democracy, pluralism and every western value you can think of.
But let’s focus on the Jews and their campus experiences for the past year and a half.
Jewish students have been bullied. They’ve been attacked. They’ve been blocked from attending classes. They’ve been kicked out of student organizations. They’ve been afraid to leave their dorm rooms. Their campus lives have been turned into a living hell.
University presidents and administrators hemmed and hawed and made all sorts of excuses to allow the Jew hatred to fester, and they did precious little to stop it.
Remember, calling for the genocide of Jews was all about “context.”
The Democrats, who were in power at the time, dithered. The Biden administration and the Democrats in Congress hid behind the excuses of protecting free speech and academic freedom.
So the marches, the encampments and the building takeovers continued. The harassment persisted. The antisemitism boiled.
Trump promised to put an end to the madness and this past week it started to happen.
At the epicenter of the anti-Israel protests, stands Columbia University. The vitriol on that campus, from students and from outsiders, against the Jewish state and against Jews, is gargantuan.
The people in charge at the university should have, could have, shut the haters down faster than a streaker on college walk, but they didn’t.
Ascribe any motive you want for their inaction. Maybe it was the painful memories of the campus riots of the ’60’s over the Viet Nam War. Maybe it was their overly permissive perception of what free speech is. Maybe it was a DEI culture where Jews weren’t seen as a minority group worthy of protection.
Whatever the reason or reasons, they let their Jewish students cruelly twist in a whirlwind of hate and bigotry.
But this past week, Columbia bent the knee to Donald Trump and his justice department. It acceded to the administration’s demands to start purging itself of the antisemitism and anti-Americanism on its campus if it wants to retrieve $400 million in federal grant money.
Funny how the prospect of losing gobs of money got them to act, no?
Some of the changes Columbia acquiesced to include:
- Banning masks at protests.
- Acknowledging it’s antisemitism when Jews are excluded for being Zionists.
- Empowering three dozen campus cops to make arrests.
- Placing the Middle East, South Asian, African studies and the Center for Palestine Studies under a provost, to review curriculum and non-tenured faculty hiring to “ensure the educational offerings are comprehensive and balanced.”
Yeah, basically a receivership because those departments are rife with anti-Israel and anti-American professors.
Trump got all he wanted from Columbia.
But it’s not only Columbia. Also this past week, the US Department of Justice filed a brief in support of Jewish students suing UCLA for enforcing “Jew-free zones” this past spring.
Things were pretty bad on that campus in Westwood, in LA. Jews were blocked from entering public spaces and were told they had to denounce Israel to access classrooms and libraries.
The UC system says, yeah, it knows Jews felt harassed and unsafe, but it denies it deliberately let it go on.
Deliberate or not, like Columbia, they did little to protect their Jewish students and now they’ve made Trump and his campus crusaders the guys who will.
Critics of what Trump is doing are deeply distressed, calling them threats to the independence of universities and of academic freedom.
You know what? It wouldn’t have come down to relying on Donald Trump to stand up for Jewish students if real, substantive action had been taken before he became president.
He signed an executive order and created a task force to combat antisemitism. Led by a lawyer and former Fox TV commentator named Leo Terrell, he is weaponizing Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, threatening universities with taking away their federal research money if they don’t protect their Jewish students.
That’s what he did with Columbia’s cash and the university capitulated.
The non-Trumpers could have been clear-eyed in their condemnation of campus antisemitism. They could have acted. It could have been a huge win for them. But, they didn’t.
Before the election, when Republican leaders visited Columbia and saw the Jew hate for themselves, a House investigation found Chuck Schumer advised university officials to “keep their heads down” and avoid meeting with them.
The feckless Democrats ceded the high moral ground to Donald Trump, and that was a pretty, pretty, hard thing to do.
Nice going Democrats. You snatched an ignominious defeat from the jaws of what could have been a monumental victory.
Instead, you allowed Donald J. Trump to become the new campus king of the Jews.
I have two words for you…Mazel tov!