Take Back the Campus!

Don’t expel just Hamas supporters – expel the neo-Nazi Left.

Daniel Greenfield, Front Page     April 30, 2024

Who would have ever expected that the first terror bases in the country would be on campus?

Anyone who was paying attention.

In 2008, David Horowitz traveled around the nation’s universities warning about “Hamas on Campus” and a “movement for a second Holocaust of the Jews” supported by Students for Justice in Palestine and the Muslim Student Association.

Not only MSA and SJP, but Jewish campus groups, including Hillel, now under assault by Hamas mobs, denounced Horowitz and the Freedom Center. Our Islamo-fascism Awareness week, our posters naming terrorist students, and our “Wall of Truth” were condemned.

Now those same liberal organizations are wondering what happened.

What happened is that the generations of students became faculty. And when the Left and the Islamists felt strong enough, they stopped pretending and went to war.

A decade ago, SJP and MSA campus groups denied that they supported terrorism. Now they openly march for Hamas, celebrate dead terrorists as “martyrs” and put out statements in support of “armed resistance”. After Oct 7 and the unprecedented show of support from Democrats and the Left, they have launched a nationwide campus intifada.

And they’re winning because long before the riots, they seized control of universities.

How could this happen, ask liberals who remained silent when leftists, Socialists, Marxists and even Communists, took over entire departments. They signed on to every affirmative action and then DEI initiative which created new departments filled with activists who hated America.

Now they’re surprised that the Marxists in Ethnic Studies, Women’s Studies, LGBTQ Studies and numerous other identity politics departments whose only academic agenda is activism aren’t just rallying in support of Castro, the Viet Cong, the Sandinistas or the PLO, but are out there cheering the rape and murder of Jews, the way they once cheered the mass killings of Chinese shopkeepers, Russian Rabbis, Cambodian peasants, Cuban refugees, Nicaraguan Christians and all the other victims on the long march of their bloody cause around the world.

Most liberals failed to dissent from this. Some defended it as misguided idealism or a little harmless fun. They had their own memories of being student radicals in their misguided youth.

And that’s all it was. A little harmless fun in Russian universities. A little marching around in uniforms in Berlin. Some kicks and punches aimed at teachers in Beijing. Campus protests in the sixties in America and Europe. And then riots, more riots and the mass deaths of millions.

Even as Hamas supporters lay siege to Columbia, Yale and any sizable liberal campus in the country with an SJP or MSA chapter, liberals are still missing the real point and origin of this.

Universities have a Hamas problem because they allowed themselves to be hijacked by leftists.

Ivy League campuses purged conservative and then moderate professors. They became political monocultures and echo chambers. Leftist ideas, no matter how horrifying, were accepted because there were no brakes and nothing to stop any kind of radical agenda.

And the same is becoming true of our society.

The liberal Jewish groups who condemned us in 2008 have not come around to understanding that it is their politics that opened the door to this, incubated and enabled it.

When Hatem Bazian, the co-founder of Students for Justice in Palestine, was leading antisemitic campaigns at San Francisco State University in the 90s, how many of them spoke out about him or the entire supportive infrastructure of leftist and minority campus groups that he used to prop up his attacks on Jewish students?

There would not be a ‘Hamas on Campus’ if there wasn’t a ‘Marxism on Campus’, ‘Black Nationalism on Campus’ and ‘Activism on Campus’. For two generations, Jewish groups pushed back only against the worst excesses of anti-Israel campus groups, worked to find common ground with the groups and provided minimal support to faculty and students who spoke out.

And all of that failed miserably and led directly to Hamas dominating entire college campuses.

The David Horowitz Freedom Center fought to change that by bringing attention to terror faculty and students, and to the persecution of pro-Israel students and faculty. But we did it with little to no support and the establishment hated us because we were never afraid to call the enemy by its true name. When David Horowitz took the fight to the campuses, he called BDS  “a Hamas-inspired genocidal campaign to destroy Israel” and named the anti-Israel groups a “movement for a second Holocaust of the Jews”. Now that all of that has been proven to be undeniably true, it’s time for those who denounced him to accept the rest of his thesis.

This is not just a Hamas problem. It’s not just a problem isolated to Israel and Jews. It’s a crisis caused by leftist radical culture which jumps from one extremist revolutionary imperative to another. This is a culture that thrives on violence and terror. Most of the students protesting for Hamas will look back on the encampments as an exciting harmless adventure. Much like the campus protests that enabled the Cambodian genocide look like harmless fun to the students who used them as a chance to get high, hook up and have some fun before moving on.

Another generation will protest just as eagerly for ISIS as they now do for Hamas. They will call for the destruction of America as loudly as they now chant for the elimination of Israel.

And that is exactly what will happen unless we tell the truth about what is going on.

Kicking out “Hamas supporters” from campus is meaningless without changing the entire culture, purpose and meaning of the college experience. David Horowitz didn’t just campaign against ‘Hamas on Campus’, he warned against Marxist indoctrination on college campuses.

The real crisis is not that college students support Hamas. That’s only a symptom of the true crisis which is that universities and schools have become indoctrination factories for the Left.

Until that changes, it’s only a question of which terrorists, faculty and students will support next.

Universities need to reintroduce academic freedom, diversity of thought, rigorous studies and critical thinking. The purpose of higher education is supposed to be just that, education, not activism. Until education is delinked from activism at every level, hate, division and terrorism will be the order of the day. One of the most profound failures of the conservative movement is that it ceded academia along with the rest of the culture to the counterculture while dedicating itself to fighting government regulations. What’s happening on campuses should be a wake-up call.

‘Hamas on Campus’ is a wake-up call for liberals, moderates and conservatives. But wake-up calls go nowhere unless they are tethered to a program of serious action.

The campus riots once again offer a clear choice between activist terror and academic life.

The nation’s universities must either be redeemed or destroyed. Either they return to their purpose as centers of research, study and thought or they’re nothing more than $90,000 a year CHAZs and should be defunded and eliminated as requirements for employment and public life.

Don’t just expel Hamas supporters, expel the toxic activist campus culture of the Marxist Left.