Paid Agitators Foment Anti-Semitic Frenzy
A wave of pro-Hamas mob actions at more than 50 U.S. universities have dramatically grabbed headlines over the past few weeks, shocking the public with its seeming spontaneous eruption.
Police have arrested hundreds of demonstrators across the country. Students and professors have retaliated by passing resolutions condemning university presidents at some schools that called in law enforcement to restore order.
In far too many cases, the university administration’s cowering response to the protesters have encouraged the agitators to escalate their tactics.
What began as relatively “peaceful protests” at some universities, quickly morphed into destruction of property, acts of violence and intimidation against Jewish students, seizure of buildings and even holding university staff against their will.
“Chants in support of Hamas, the Houthis, Iran, bombing Israel and general terrorist action have been the consistent soundtrack in the background of all these protests,” writes JNS.
While many protests have been peaceful, Hamas supporters have physically assaulted Jewish students on several campuses, the article said.
A woman wearing a shirt with a message criticizing the Oct. 7 massacre at an anti-Israeli rally at UCLA, was surrounded and attacked by a mob.
“I was physically assaulted by a UCLA student,” the woman testified in an interview. “He used a wooden stick to shove me from a ledge I was peacefully standing on. Campus police stood by and watched. UCLA faculty were involved in intimidating Jewish protesters and instigating or intentionally ignoring assaults.”
An anti-Israel protestor at George Washington University in the nation’s capital held a sign calling for the Final Solution against Israel.
Columbia student Jonathan Lederer was hit in the face and chest by objects thrown at him and his friends while holding Israeli flags. One of the protesters seized his flag and attempted to light it on fire.
“We ended up being chased out of campus and told to ‘go back to Poland’—code word for Auschwitz, and a poignant reminder that even in America, anti-Semites perpetuate Jew-hatred in its most virulent form.
Months of Training
Protestors fueled the impression that the campus eruptions were organic bursts of anti-Israel sentiment. According to reports by the Wall Street Journal and NY Post, however, nothing could be further from the truth.
The protests were actually part of a planned, coordinated campaign, the result of “months of training, planning and encouragement by longtime activists and left-wing groups,” the WSJ wrote.
The synchronized timing of these protests, the use of the same chants, and especially the well-coordinated logistics that provided sleeping arrangements with identical new tents—all stocked with food, water and medical support for the protesters—have raised burning questions about who is funding this sweeping anarchy.
“What we are seeing is not a random emotional response but the fruition of 20 years of groundwork and preparation by several anti-Israeli, pro-terror groups,” says Gerald Steinberg, head of the Jerusalem-based Monitor organization, as quoted in the JNS article.
A closer look into the organizational format of these mob actions reveals a complex interface of student groups, nonprofits and foreign governments like Qatar, the article said.
Student organizers at Columbia University received advice from the National Students for Justice in Palestine (NSJP), veterans of campus protests, the NY Post report said. It went on to outline the activities of the NSJP, which has over 300 chapters across the US, and helped organize many of the college “tent encampments” and illegal occupation of college buildings.
These and many other pro-Hamas groups, the Post has confirmed, have received generous funding from left-wing billionaire George Soros and his lavishly funded nonprofits who are “paying agitators to fuel the explosion of radical anti-Israel protests at colleges across the country.”
Well Paid Agitators
The nationwide campus upheavals were kicked off when protesters broke into Columbia University’s library, barricaded themselves inside and held students and maintenance workers hostage.
Columbia officials allowed protesters free rein after they ignored multiple calls to leave the campus. University top brass even engaged in negotiations with them—several of whom came from outside the university—allowing the agitators to voice their list of demands. Only after negotiations broke down and protestors refused to budge did officials call in the New York City Police Department to restore order.
An Israeli American professor at the university was barred from the campus, and many Jewish university students voiced that they felt “completely abandoned” by many campus administrators.
Over the Pesach holiday, anti-Jewish activists led a brazen campaign on one campus after another, seeking to intimidate and silence Jewish students and supporters of Israel. As at Columbia University, the protesters demanded that the colleges divest their finances from companies and institutions with connections to Israel.
Following Columbia’s example, copycat “tent cities” were set up at colleges including Harvard, Yale, Berkeley in California, the Ohio State University and Emory in Georgia.
All of the encampments were organized by branches of the Soros-funded pro-Palestinian groups, with some clashing with police who tried to remove them, the NY Post reported.
The article detailed how the US Campaign for Palestinian Rights, another Soros-backed group, pays organizers and “fellows” liberal stipends, ranging from nearly three thousand to over seven thousand dollars, in exchange for eight hours a week of activism to boost “revolution” in support of Palestine.
The Rockefeller Brothers are also a source of funding for campus agitators, using money to influence masses of students to become pawns in a power play waged by leftist and pro-Arab elites.
Among those eager for an opportunity to earn a share of the activist money are many poorer students whose university tuition payments cleaned them out financially, leaving them in debt. What better reason to join a campus intifada?
A War Against America’s Next Generation
NSJP already began promoting demonstrations at colleges in October, shortly after Hamas’s brutal massacre of over 1,200 Jews – calling for a “day of resistance” on college campuses, the WSJ article attested. Its rhetoric escalated over time to include verbal assaults on the U.S. government.
At the University of Michigan, pro-Palestinian pamphlets declared: “Freedom for Palestine means Death to America.” Chants of “Death to America” were reported across the country.
“The war waged on US college campuses today is ultimately not about Palestine or Israel at all. It is a war against America — and especially against America’s next generation,” suggests political commentator Dr. Naomi Wolf.
“What does it tell US students,” she asks, when a California campus simply closes, before the end of the semester and before graduation, “due to protests?” Columbia, too, just cancelled its graduation ceremonies. Other elite institutions, facing mayhem from encampments of violence-prone protesters, are likely to choose the appeasement route as well.
Citing the administrative policies of these elite Ivy League institutions, the San Francisco Chronicle asks in a headline, “How will Stanford and Berkeley React?”
“That is the question of a paid propaganda platform, rolling out a nationwide campaign, just as Covid-19 and the Lockdowns were strategically rolled out,” asserts Dr. Wolf.
College students, she notes, from the most economically stressed to the most privileged, are learning a core lesson from their university’s surrender to orchestrated chaos: “No matter how hard you worked to get into the college of your choice, your education can go up in flames overnight.”
“No matter that your parents worked two jobs to send in a $30,000 check for a single semester — that semester can be quenched with “unrest.”
Just as students are recovering from the trauma of a virus that sent them “to shelter at home” for a year and a half in 2020-2021, they are learning that chaos “is not in the rear view mirror,” writes Wolfe. “Chaos is [a useful weapon,] always waiting in the wings to shred their plans, their friendships, their learning tracks and their very futures.”
Promoting Anarchy
The lawlessness that marks the protests, expressing a culture that scorns basic civic and academic values, is alarming for all Americans.
Northeastern University in Boston reported that “Kill the Jews” was heard at a campus protest. Pro-Hamas protesters repeatedly avow that they only oppose Zionists, yet their attacks are intentionally aimed at Jews, writes JNS.
The article goes on to list a number of campus events that were headed by individuals linked with organizations such as Samidoun that have been branded terrorist groups by Israel.
During one workshop and training event titled Resistance 101, Samidoun coordinator Charlotte Kates told students: “There is nothing wrong with being a member of Hamas, being a leader of Hamas, being a fighter in Hamas. These are the people that are on the front lines defending Palestine.”
As an example of the disdain for regulation and the law, the JNS article quoted messages posted by NSJP on social media: “The Student Movement for Palestinian Liberation will not be silenced; we will escalate until our demands are met,” the group posted on April 25.
In another post the same day, NSJP, through its hundreds of chapters across the United States, advised students to flee the scene of an arrest, referring to the police as “pigs.”
“If someone gets arrested, don’t linger around or pigs will kettle [suppress] the march.”
Some university administrators, seeking to defuse the situation ahead of graduation/commencement exercises, began debating whether to negotiate with the protesters who demanded the university divest from all Israeli companies.
Smelling surrender, the NSJP announced a new chant: “No divestment, no commencement!”
The University of Florida has been a voice of sanity in the academic jungle, its leaders demonstrating moral leadership in contrast to the willingness of many college administrators to kowtow to agitators seeking confrontation.
The institution issued “protest guidelines” that stated that “peaceful protests, including speech and signs, are constitutionally protected. Camping, putting up structures, disrupting academic activity or threatening others on university property is strictly prohibited.” The consequences for students and staff include suspension, termination and a three-year campus ban.
Unsurprisingly, the school’s campus has remained peaceful.
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We Have Lost the Battle
“We have lost the battle against insanity. Perhaps we never fought it. Regardless, the world has gone quite mad,” writes columnist Phyllis Chesler.
She writes with astonishment at what she witnessed on the Columbia University campus during the mob actions which included storming one of its main buildings and locking themselves inside.
“A young white female student, draped in a keffiyeh, stood at a microphone and demanded that the administration provide food and water to the student “protesters” lest they die of dehydration or starvation,” writes Chesler.
The student insisted that the administration had an “obligation” to those students who had “paid for a meal plan” as part of their school tuition. She was speaking in front of Hamilton Hall, just broken into by criminal outsiders as well as students, destroying all semblance of normal student life.
“Some of the most privileged students on earth have decided that they are endangered war victims. This is beyond diagnosis but surely qualifies as some kind of psychosis,” Chesler writes.
“What other conclusion can be reached about the surging mobs on American campuses and street demonstrations that, in Islamist style, are pathologically arrogant and violent? Clearly, they are engaged in some kind of delusional mimicry of religious war.”
These people are blaming the Jews for having been attacked and massacred (by brave “victims of injustice”) and having dared to strike back. The action of fighting back to rescue its captured women and children and prevent further slaughter of its people is cast as not only abhorrent and genocidal, but a towering threat to world peace.
Holding Jews responsible for atrocities perpetrated against them is nothing new. Who but the Jews and Israel can be responsible for global strife and hatred, for starving Gazans, for a Middle East landscape that grows more brutal and bloody with each passing day?
As Iran is poised to achieve nuclear status, wielding the power to bully all its neighbors and the West, too, as the world inches slowly toward the abyss, who but the Jews are responsible?
It’s never the Jew-haters or jihadists or left-wing nutcases pushing anarchy and urging the destruction of America and the west who are to blame.
Never weak-kneed, gutless world leaders who pander to naked political necessity and refuse to call out evil, and are prepared to throw even their loved ones under the bus in order to remain in power.
Only the Jews are to blame.
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President Biden Finally Breaks His Silence
As campus mob actions have spiraled out of control in recent weeks, leading to outbreaks of shocking hostility and aggression targeting Jewish students in dozens of universities, President Joe Biden finally addressed the violence in a speech laced with equivocation.
“I condemn all forms of anti-Semitism,” he declared. “….And I also condemn those who don’t understand what is going on with the Palestinians.”
“Too little, too late,” editorialized an op-ed in The Hill, describing pivotal moments in which the president has allowed political imperatives to override moral certitude.
“Joe Biden is like a cat on a hot tin roof, hopping back and forth between supporting Israel and showing his concern for Palestinians,” between showcasing his opposition to anti-Semitism while slamming Israel for its efforts to eradicate Hamas.
With one hand, he sends weapons to Israel’s army, locked in a life-or-death battle with Hamas and Iran’s proxy armies, the author noted. With the other, he threatens to withhold ammunition from Israel if Prime Minister Netanyahu doesn’t halt operations in Rafah, Hamas’ last stronghold.
Biden is scared that backing Israel is alienating the Arab-American and young voters he will need in November, yet, as noted editor and commentator Carolyn Glick points out, he fears he cannot do without the massive support he and other Democrats receive from Jews.
The president is desperate to please both sides but his seesawing back and forth does not curry favor with either side. In his address he condemned anti-Semitism but softened that declaration by issuing an equally harsh condemnation of “Islamophobia” and “discrimination against Arab-Americans.”
As if American society is wrestling with a spike in anti-Muslim hatred at the same time as it is contending with an explosion in anti-Semitism, a presumption with no basis in fact.
In addition, while the president railed against campus vandalism, trespassing, violence and intimidation in his speech, he failed to connect this behavior with the repugnant Jew-baiting and hate-mongering proliferating on campuses.
“Joe Biden needs to forcefully address not just anti-Semitism in the abstract but the vile anti-Jew symbols and language that have wracked our campuses for weeks,” the op-ed insisted. “He needs to call out those funding and organizing the anti-American flag-burning protests.”
“In another effort at appeasement, Biden has proposed recently bringing Palestinian refugees with ties to the U.S. into our country, The Hill reported. “Since a recent survey found 71 percent of Palestinians in Gaza support Hamas’s October 7 massacre, such a suggestion is outrageous,” the article said.
Opportunity for Redemption?
The article mentioned the Antisemitism Awareness Act that was recently passed by the House. The bill relies on the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition of antisemitism which allows the government, in certain cases, to withhold funding from universities that fail to halt anti-Semitism on campuses. Ninety-one Democrats voted against the bill.
To demonstrate a genuine stand against anti-Semitism, The Hill op-ed suggested, President Biden could support the bill and urge the Senate to take it up. That would vindicate his pronouncements of a year ago, when the White House released what it described as the “First-Ever U.S. National Strategy to Counter Antisemitism.”
The program included “over 100 new actions and over 100 calls to action,” including “new actions to counter antisemitism on college campuses and online.” In its opening mission statement, President Biden declared that “Six years ago, Neo-Nazis marched from the shadows through Charlottesville, Virginia, chanting, “Jews will not replace us.”
He went on to say that it was “the horror of that moment, the violence that followed, and the threat it represented for American democracy” that “drove me to run for President.”
Although the much-vaunted program with its hundred calls to action proved utterly ineffective, life has a way of presenting opportunities for redemption.
The Anti-Semitism Act passed by the House and awaiting passage through the Senate might perhaps, for President Biden, present such an opportunity.
