Twenty years ago, as a college student, I attended a screening at Columbia University of a documentary called “Columbia Unbecoming.” The documentary dealt with a controversy involving three rabidly anti-Israel professors who carried out terrorism on Israeli and pro-Israel students from 2002 to 2005. The main villain may be a familiar name: Joseph Massad, a Palestinian professor known for his course Palestinian and Israeli Politics and Societies, which described Israel as a racist and colonial state. Massad and Columbia’s approach to his actions arose from the 1960s penetration of academia by Soviet-backed faculty, many of whom avoided the Vietnam War draft, while others were little more than mere stooge of the Moscow Communist Party. The Soviet Union supported several liberation movements around the world, including the PLO, so it is no surprise that narratives like Massad’s took hold on campuses and over time welcomed more and more people.
On October 7th I stayed up late at night. It was Simcha Torah and Shabbat, and there was no rush to go anywhere the following day. As I prepared to call it a night, a friend in Israel sent me a video of terrorists appearing to rampage on an Israeli rooftop. It was a shocking sight to see, but my initial impression was of a small, isolated incident. As I listened to the news of a Hamas infiltration into Israel, involving at least 40 people and several cars, I turned to my family to try to make sense of the situation. Even 40 Hamas fighters in Israel was an astonishing event. The day dragged on and on as I watched in horror, frozen at the screen. The situation has upended everything I thought I knew about Israeli security. I was numb for weeks. While others were distraught, I was just blank and in an analytical state of mind, endlessly going over every detail of every failure.
Following the well-organized explosion of pro-Hamas protests on campuses across the country, I interviewed a former student activist, Adela Cojab Moadeb, who had previously faced intimidation and attacks at NYU. Adela told me how for years, before the Al Aqsa Flood, professors of Middle Eastern studies described Osama Bin Laden as a “freedom fighter” (a description also shared by the New York Times), and about her personal experiences of being removed from Arabic lessons by students who accused her of using “Jewish black magic.” The old bigotry and Soviet influences had been not only sown, but also richly fueled with billions in funding, both open and secret, coming from Qatar, Saudi Islamists, China, Iranian foundations and even South Africa, as the reports of the National Contagion Institute and ISGAP then revealed with much more detail than previously known. But Adela shared an insight that underlined an important point that I had already suspected: these demonstrations and protests were not spontaneous.
At least one of the participating organizations, Students for Justice in Palestine, a national organization linked to Hamas affiliates and with student chapters across the country, had the modus operandi of spending an entire semester recruiting faculty and students in preparation for subsequent activities . She never acted spontaneously and, in this case, was ready to leave on October 8, just one day after the attack on Israel. These protests on Israeli campuses began immediately after the terrorist attacks, when all the bodies had not yet been counted, and long before Israel entered Gaza. In essence, SJP chapters, and anyone else who had access to information about an impending development that was worth being the subject of trumped-up outrage, acted as an unindicted co-conspirator for Hamas and its various allies.
Exactly one year has passed since then, but even though several college administrators have been forced to resign, despite all reports and investigations, including those by Congress and the Department of Education, protests and harassment continue on many campuses of Israeli students by teachers. In one case, a judge allowed the University of Maryland student chapter to move forward with a celebration of the October 7 terrorist attacks, on the grounds of constitutional (First Amendment) freedoms of speech and assembly. However, there are no absolute constitutional protections for visiting foreign citizens or terrorist organizations. Yet, there has been no mass effort to expel foreign students participating in the protests, or to shut down SJP and its chapters, pending investigations into its funding and operations. Public evidence of SJP’s ties to Hamas and links to FBI investigations has been published previously by various organizations. However, as in Massad’s case, the illegal activity is treated as an issue of academic freedom, despite the compelling interest in keeping the environment free from malicious bullying, applying academic protections to all parties, and opposing certainly to security threats, such as terrorist financiers and propagandists. October 7 was long prepared, not only by Hamas operatives who planned the logistics of the attacks, but also by the networks of their supporters and facilitators in the West who prepared the intellectual ground for the support of bloodlust against Israel and the Jews, publicly traceable for at least two decades – and probably for much longer.
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