Most Americans have been shocked by recent images of violent anti-Israel and anti-Semitic protests on college campuses. Jewish students at America’s top universities, including Columbia, NYU, and MIT, are being physically attacked and intimidated. Jewish students are fleeing Columbia University because campus police cannot guarantee their safety.
How can this happen in America in 2024? Why are we seeing the return of the vile prejudices and hatreds of the 1930s at our leading universities? Who is responsible for this?
The leadership of America’s colleges and universities bears most of the blame.
Many of these student protesters are not high-minded crusaders for justice but lazy, ill-informed morons who know little about Israel, Palestine, and the Middle East. They are also cowards who are hiding behind masks because they don’t want their anti-Semitic and anti-Israel radicalism to prevent them from getting high-paid jobs in corporations and law firms. These student protesters are afraid that heroic organizations like Canary Mission will put their names and faces on mobile billboards and list them in databases to hold them accountable for their hateful extremism.
Anti-Israel/anti-Semitic professors are the source of much of the violent protests and are egging them on. On Monday, hundreds of Columbia University faculty members staged a walkout to protest the school’s decision to have police arrest student protesters. Also in New York City, police blamed faculty and professional agitators for causing heated standoffs after university officials asked the police to remove a protest encampment and arrest 120 protesters, according to the New York Daily News.
One has to ask: if these student protesters are actually demonstrating for justice and peace, why didn’t they begin their protests on October 7, 2023, after Hamas terrorists waged the deadliest attack on Jews since the Holocaust—slaughtering babies, raping women, burning whole families alive, and taking hundreds of innocent Israelis hostage? More than 1,200 Israelis were killed. The Hamas terrorists also took about 240 hostages and imprisoned them in tunnels in Gaza. Israel believes about 100 of these hostages are still alive.
Where’s the outrage on college campuses over the rapes, murder, and brutality committed against innocent civilians in Israel on October 7? Where are the demands that Hamas immediately free its hostages?
It is important to recognize that the recent outburst of anti-Semitism and anti-Israel hatred on college campuses were not spontaneous or organic events. There are clear signs—such as students setting up dozens of identical tents at Columbia—that these protests were organized and well-funded by radical leftist organizations. Journalist Ira Stoll claims in an April 25, 2025, Wall Street Journal op-ed that some of the student anti-Israel protesters have been paid with funds from Rockefeller and Soros Foundation grants.
But even more important, U.S. college and university leadership are directly responsible for the outbreak of violence and hatred on their campuses because, for years, they have incubated and tolerated extreme left-wing ideologies that led to the current anti-Semitic and anti-Israel protests.
Our colleges and universities have been taken over by far-left professors who have imposed radical and divisive concepts like cultural Marxism, intersectionality, “diversity equity, and inclusion,” and hatred of America into the curriculum.
A 2023 survey found that 50% of professors identify as liberal, 17% as moderate, and 26% as conservative, with 58% of conservative professors self-censoring themselves for fear of retribution if they express thoughts that go against their schools’ reigning far-left ideology.
This has turned colleges into hotbeds of far-left and intolerant extremism. A conservative University of Iowa student recently told a congressional committee that “students who hold opposing views are often subjected to frequent, violent threats and other forms of harassment with no accountability.” Conservative speakers on campus are unwelcome and routinely canceled or shouted down. Conservative students are forced to pretend to support their professor’s far-left views to get good grades and avoid being harassed by other students.
Major universities have long tolerated professors who hold and teach far-left, hateful ideologies. These include professors who enthusiastically praised the genocidal Hamas attacks against Israel on October 7, 2023. Some examples:
- Columbia University Professor Joseph Massad called the October 7 Hamas attack “awesome” and a “stunning victory of the Palestinian resistance.”
- Cornell University Professor Russell Rickford called the Hamas terrorist attack “exhilarating” and “energizing.”
- Yale University Professor Zareena Grewal said after the October 7 terrorist attack, “My heart is in my throat. Prayers for Palestinians. Israel is a murderous, genocidal settler state and Palestinians have every right to resist through armed struggle, solidarity.”
On the other hand, conservative professors who spoke out against the October 7 terrorist attack or criticized the recent protests have been ostracized.
- Columbia University Professor Shai Davidai, an assistant professor at Columbia Business School, recently was barred from campus because of his outspoken criticism of the student protesters.
- University of Southern California Professor John Strauss was suspended last October after he said about the Hamas terrorists who committed the October 7 attack, “Hamas are murderers. That’s all they are. Every one should be killed, and I hope they all are killed.”
Aggressive efforts are needed now to protect Jewish students on college campuses. There must be no tolerance for violent anti-Israel and anti-Semitic demonstrations by college administrators or local, state, and federal officials. The National Guard must be sent in to break up these demonstrations when they turn violent or threaten Jewish students. Violent student demonstrators and those who threaten Jewish students must be expelled and prosecuted. Foreign students who engage in violent protests or threaten Jewish students should have their student visas pulled and deported. Radical professors who promote anti-Israel and anti-Semitic hate should be fired immediately.
But these are short-term fixes. Intolerance and violence on campus, like the current anti-Israel and anti-Jewish demonstrations, will continue and grow until there are fundamental changes to banish the radical and intolerant radical ideologies that cause them. This will be a huge undertaking that will require major initiatives to reform college curriculums and culture—including hiring moderate and conservative professors—that college administrators and faculty will fiercely resist.
Parents and potential students should boycott colleges and universities that refuse to implement reforms to deradicalize or condone intolerance, anti-Semitism, and anti-American ideologies. If a school employs anti-Semitic radical professors like Joseph Massad, Russell Rickford, or Zareena Grewal, college seniors should apply elsewhere.
Donors to schools that refuse to reform should redirect their donations to other schools committed to providing students with a meaningful education and teaching about character, citizenship, and freedom. (Some good examples: Hillsdale College, Liberty University, New College of Florida, Brigham Young University, Franciscan University of Steubenville, College of the Ozarks, Pepperdine University, and Grove City College.) Federal tax dollars should be cut off from colleges and universities that promote radical-left ideologies, intolerance, and hate.
I don’t see any prospect right now of forcing America’s colleges and universities to implement much-needed reforms to deradicalize and end anti-Semitism and left-wing radicalism. But this may change next January if there is a new president in the White House.
Fred Fleitz is vice-chair of the America First Policy Institute Center for American Security. He previously served as National Security Council chief of staff, CIA analyst, and a House Intelligence Committee staff member.
I hate to say this, because it will be misunderstood by many, but in a free country you can have any opinion you want. That is ok. What is not ok is to attempt to prevent people from enjoying the benefits of the liberty they were give by Nature’s God and that includes their right to life, and the liberty they need to pursue what is good for them and the people they care about. In other words there is no right to confiscate or obstruct the liberty of others. Such behavior would be akin to a right to create negative rights for others and there can be no such thing as negative rights in a country mindful of an individual’s inherent Natural Right to liberty. And most of all there cannot be a right of government to interfere with individual liberty. Such behavior is called tyranny. No government should police the opinion of others using laws followed by fines and incarcerations. There should never be “Thought Police”. People, including undereducated students, can have opinions and demonstrate peacefully but not anything more.
What these idiot students are doing is interfering with the rights of others to travel and to do commerce. They are also putting others in danger. They have the right to assemble… peacefully and should be mindful, as they do so, of the rights that others have, which they may be interfering with. Many have said that they represent Hamas which is a terrorist organization. Colleges and Universities, which are private, are free to enact policies that allow them to expel such students. And they should. Unfortunately, they have hamstrung themselves by adopting DEI policies which flies in the face of the very principles that were recognized to create the Constitution that established the American Republic… Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness (property). Those are freedoms that belong to every individual and should never be denied to anyone, using the power of a mob.
Israel has every right to do what they must to eliminate Hamas. There will be civilian casualties. Dresden, a civilian city with no war making abilities, was incinerated and so was Tokyo in WW II. Two atomic bombs were dropped on Japanese civilian cities. Had these students been taught, in a HS American History class, about Sherman’s March to the Sea they would know that civilian farms were targeted and destroyed. October 7 cannot be forgotten for one powerful reason. Hamas will do the same again, or even worse, when an opportunity arises. Therefore they must be eliminated as a governing body.
What is paradoxical, to the point of what many consider insanity, is the clear evidence that many Jews, including Israeli Jews, are the chief proponents of anti-semitism. How? By funding mobs which protest illegally. These mobs interfere with the rights of others. They are enemies of America and Israel. Consider George Soros as a chief among them.
The waters are still a bit muddy, but two trends are becoming more apparent. College enrollment is down. Both students and parents have come to realize that an expensive college education no longer translates into a high paying job and career—especially those who were duped into useless “social” degrees. Also, those now applying for college have shifted away from far Left Liberal Arts and Ivy League universities to more conservative southern colleges and universities.
The marketplace won’t solve the full issue, but it will extract a severe penalty on those universities who place Woke over aware.
“Many of these student protesters are not high-minded crusaders for justice but lazy, ill-informed morons”
Ain’t that the truth.
Not so long ago I took an intro astronomy class at a community college in Texas. One student became greatly concerned about stars blowing up at the end of their life and asked the professor if there was any way to recycle hydrogen so stars would not have to die.
The look on the professor’s face said, “YOU STUPID IDIOT!” or " DUMMKOPF!," because the professor was a German exoplanet hunter.
Another student began babbling about the need for renewable solar energy.
I suggested moving solar energy plants into orbit where they would be much more efficient and far less damaging to the earth’s environment. Solar energy farms are huge, subject to earth’s atmosphere, inclement weather, and devastate the fragile desert ecosystems where most of them are built.
His intellectually vapid response was a simple, inarticulate, “Nope.”
I tried to interest him in the monumental engineering challenge of such an endeavor. It soon became evident that not one student in the classroom had given a nanosecond’s thought to the subject.
They all just seemed to want to look into their cell phones and be programmed.