Freedom

Story by Josh Hammer

Story by Josh HammerIn his 1790 letter to the Hebrew Congregation in Newport, Rhode Island, President George Washington reached a stirring conclusion: “May the Children of the Stock of Abraham, who dwell in this land, continue to merit and enjoy the good will of the other Inhabitants; while every one shall sit in safety under his own vine and fig tree, and there shall be none to make him afraid.”

Washington is rolling in his grave right now at Mount Vernon.

Jews are so “afraid” at Columbia University that an Orthodox campus rabbi recently urged students to “return home as soon as possible.” The situation at many purportedly “elite” universities is dire, as jihadist mania supplants Black Lives Matter as the vogue, faux-moral cause rotting the minds of impressionable Gen-Zers.

Hamas’ useful campus idiots are, at best, blithering morons. They do not realize that Zionism—the Jewish people’s national liberation movement in their ancestral homeland—is the quintessence of the very “anticolonialism” and “indigenous people’s rights” they claim to champion. They are clueless about international law and how the doctrine of uti possidetis juris establishes that Israel has the best legal claim to Judea and Samaria (i.e., the “West Bank”). They know nothing about warfighting; John Spencer, head of urban warfare studies at West Point, has demonstrated that Israel’s combatant-to-civilian death ratio in Gaza since the war began is “historically low for modern urban warfare.”

Why let inconvenient facts get in the way of the thrill one feels for supporting a chic social justice movement … er, genocidal terrorist organization?

The activism now upending Columbia, Yale, Harvard, and other morally bankrupt institutions is done in explicit support of a U.S. State Department-recognized foreign terrorist organization. Keffiyeh-wearing mini-jihadis at Columbia recently chanted “We are Hamas!” and “Long live Hamas!” Other agitators at Columbia called for Tel Aviv—a liberal secular city that will remain in Israeli hands under any possible future settlement with the Palestinian-Arabs—to be “burned to the ground.” At the University of Michigan (where my speech in November was shouted down by a pro-Hamas mob), student Hamasniks distributed a pamphlet that says “Freedom for Palestine means Death to America.”

Give them credit for the candor.

It gets worse. At Yale, a Jewish student was stabbed in the eye with a flagpole and was rushed to the hospital. At Columbia, a Jewish parent described her husband picking up their freshman daughter to remove her from the jihadist-infested campus grounds as akin to “refugees fleeing a war zone.”

This is completely unacceptable.

Jewish students have the same basic Title VI rights as everyone else. Those rights must be enforced. Much of the organized conduct now setting these campuses aflame also runs afoul of federal laws that ban, on the one hand, material support for terrorism and, on the other hand, conspiracy to deprive individuals of their constitutional rights. Furthermore, much of the insanity now unfolding on campus under the guise of “speech” is not, as I recently argued in an Intercollegiate Studies Institute-hosted debate in Cambridge, Massachusetts, actually speech. Impersonating Hitler Youth by clamoring for Jewish genocide is not protected speech under any private university’s code of conduct. Displaying the Palestinian flag, moreover, is not an act of “speech” at all; it is conduct indistinguishable from waving a Nazi swastika.

Where are elected officials to protect Jewish civil rights, administrators to suspend and expel miscreants, and prosecutors to press charges against jihadists? Incidentally, Students for Justice in Palestine, the outfit organizing much of the campus mayhem, is surely overdue for a massive terror financing prosecution a la the Holy Land Foundation trial of 2008.

The basic formula for fighting back against Hamas‘ useful campus idiots is simple: suspend, expel, arrest, prosecute, and, as appropriate, deport the abominable mini-jihadis.

It is also well past time to send in the National Guard. What we are dealing with right now on college campuses is a sprawling—”systemic,” one might say—conspiracy to deprive Jewish students of basic equal rights. The Hamas supporters today are the spiritual, functional, and legal descendants of Orval Faubus at Little Rock Central High School in 1957. President Dwight Eisenhower was correct back then to send in the 101st Airborne Division to secure civil rights. That is needed once again.

It is perhaps fitting that it is now Passover on the Jewish calendar. At our Seders earlier this week, we read in the Haggadah: “This is what has stood by our fathers and us! For not just one alone has risen against us to destroy us, but in every generation they rise against us to destroy us; and the Holy One, blessed be He, saves us from their hand!”

It has always been thus.

But for now, order must be restored on campus by any means necessary.

Josh Hammer is Newsweek senior editor-at-large, host of “The Josh Hammer Show” and “America on Trial with Josh Hammer,” and a syndicated columnist. Subscribe here for “The Josh Hammer Report,” a Newsweek newsletter. X: @josh_hammer.