Hamas on Campus: The Moral Cowardice Under the Clock Tower
You don't need a Ph.D to identify terrorists and their crimes. So why is it so hard for university presidents to confront terrorism's apologists on campus?
A swastika, a burning cross, torches aloft over a chanting column. And now a hang glider. The messages need no explanation. Whatever megaphones blare about justice, human rights, or oppression of the Palestinians, the rhetoric is irrelevant. The image says it all.
Thank the National Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP). Taking a place beside goose-stepping Nazis, white sheeted Klansmen, and the Proud Boys marching to their “Jews will not replace us” cadence call, the SJP’s poster glorifying terrorism last week didn’t just draw college crowds to champion Hamas and its acts. It created the latest antisemitic symbol for the history books.
The tuition paying protesters rallying to the SJP’s call presumably weren’t ignorant of the facts. Hamas, the terrorist organization responsible for the October 7th massacre, has vowed to annihilate Israel. Launched from Gaza where Hamas seized control 16 years ago, the attack has left 1400 Israelis, the vast majority civilians, dead. As usual, Hamas isn’t sparing its own, ordering Gazans to ignore Israel’s warning to evacuate and remain in place as human shields.
As the North American champion of Hamas, the timing of the SJP’s call to its campus supporters seems implausibly coincidental. Only hours after the slaughter and as fighting still raged in Israel, its slick media package with talking points and visual aids hit the Web for use by SJP college and university chapters. In the days that followed, campus rallies praised the crime as heroism, demonizing Israel as responsible for the attack while ignoring the victims, defenseless men, women, and children, and the brutality.
The SJP’s liberation theory vocabulary portraying the killers and their horrors as brave fighters in noble combat would have made Josef Goebbels proud. “On the 50th anniversary of the 1973 war, the resistance in Gaza launched a surprise operation against the Zionist enemy,” the SJP’s Day of Resistance Toolkit proclaimed on October 8. “We witness a historic win for the Palestinian resistance: across land, air, and sea, our people have broken down the artificial barriers of the Zionist entity.”
What’s coming next, of course, isn’t hard to predict. For the SJP, the slaughter by Hamas, now facing the Israeli military response along with the innocent Gaza civilians it has put in harm’s way, represents a catalyst for more agitprop as well as so-called “anti-Zionist” action. Some 20 college and university campuses saw protests by the group last week. Several schools cancelled SJP events. Nonetheless, tensions on campuses have grown and for their part, Jewish students fear for their safety because of antisemitic attacks here and abroad.
Journals on academic affairs have published their share of pearl-clutching commentary highlighting the dilemma facing university presidents and provosts. It’s not hard to understand. As institutions chartered to nurture individual expression, diverse ideas, and independent thought, free speech in the classroom and on the quad comes with the territory. As for the performance of higher education’s chief executives, however, when it comes to their reaction to campus activists endorsing Hamas and its crimes, most seem tied up in their own underwear.
The chiefs of the top tier schools lead the list. Harvard’s president tap-danced around its 35 student groups that publicly toed the SJP’s pro-Hamas line. Her counterpart at the University of Pennsylvania did the same until, not surprisingly, mega-donors reportedly warned they were rethinking their generosity. In the mid-West, the provost at Ohio State issued a memo mumbling about the First Amendment. On the West coast, Stanford’s statement, a model of abject timidity, mewled over student mental health, dodging any mention of Hamas or terrorism.
To their credit, not all academia’s top brass has produced pablum. The New York State University system’s chancellor, the presidents of Hunter College, Princeton, Northwestern, and the University of Florida all have spoken out forcefully. But the fact that major institutions are failing to distinguish themselves when a campus organization lauds terrorists, their antisemitism and their criminal acts is more than an embarrassment. It’s a moral failing that degrades not only the universities but also the standing of those who inhabit their offices with clock tower views.
Unfortunately, it’s not a new story, as Stephan Norwood makes clear in his exceptional book, The Third Reich in the Ivory Tower—Complicity and Conflict on American Campuses. Norwood’s detailed research presents a devastating of portrait of the sympathy for Nazi Germany at American universities throughout the 1930s. The Ivy League should remember the story line well.
Harvard is a case in point. As Norwood meticulously details, its then-president James Conant “remained publicly indifferent to the persecution of Jews in Europe until after Kristallnacht in November 1938…determined to build friendly ties with its universities…even though they had expelled their Jewish faculty members and thoroughly Nazified their curricula.” Whatever Conant’s Germanophile sentiments and disinterest in the Nazi regime’s antisemitism may have been, Harvard wasn’t alone.
From the Third Reich’s book burning to its pre-genocidal repression, Norwood writes, during the 1930s Columbia University’s president Nicolas Murray Butler evaded taking any stand against Nazi Germany’s actions. Vassar and Wellesley opened their doors to German exchange students who extolled the virtues of Nazism. Meanwhile, German clubs and language departments from Dartmouth to Wisconsin and Minnesota hosted visiting Nazi officials and student exchanges, ignoring any exploration of the increasingly dire plight of Germany’s Jews.
Does this history matter? Will it make any difference if college presidents speak out against terrorism, or against the ludicrous veiled antisemitism in its campus fan clubs’ “anti-Zionist” rhetoric? Ask Abdennour Bidar, a French philosopher and writer on the Islamic world who called on Muslims to do just that in acknowledging the massacre in Israel as a crime against humanity. Writing last week in Le Monde, one of France’s leading newspapers, Bidar put it this way.
“It is the world’s human conscience that is overwhelmed by these acts, and it is unfortunately our entire humanity that is the loser here, especially as the poison of this event begins to spread almost everywhere on the planet.”