Douglas Murray asks how some of the most prestigious universities allowed themselves to become tools of Hamas and its plan to blame Israel f
by Douglas Murray
And since Hamas had always insisted that there must not be one Jew in such a state – that it must be, to borrow a sinister term from history, Judenrein, or cleared of Jews – then that meant the Jews must all either be killed or forcibly evacuated.
None of the student protest leaders or their followers ever put forward any non-genocidal plan for the removal of the Jews of Israel, so it is not a stretch to say that the chant was genocidal.
The same went for the cry of 'Intifada' – holy war. There was considerable debate as to whether this was inflammatory.
But to anyone who was Jewish, the slogan could not have been clearer. Intifada is not a neutral term, any more than 'Sieg Heil' is a phrase that simply means 'Hail victory'.
Since the 1980s, Palestinian leaders and clerics have twice called for an 'Intifada' against the Jewish state, and these turned out to be among the bloodiest periods in Israel's history.
For years, terrorist attacks against innocent civilians happened on a weekly, sometimes daily, basis.
On a beautiful summer evening in Tel Aviv in 2001, scores of young Israeli women queuing to get into a beach-front nightclub were targeted.
A Hamas suicide bomber killed 21 of them. Sixteen were teenagers. Limbs were strewn across the road; bodies lay in piles.
A student from the University of Bristol pictured at their pro-Palestine encampment in May 2024
+18
View gallery
As they called for 'Intifada', did the protesters at American colleges know this? Equally, when they accused Israel of being an 'apartheid state' did they realise that almost a fifth of the population of Israel are Arabs and enjoy the same rights as Jews?
Probably not, because two months after the Hamas massacres, an opinion poll revealed that while 81 per cent of respondents of all ages backed Israel in its fight against Hamas, among 18 to 24-year-olds an extraordinary 60 per cent thought the October 7 attacks were justified and 51 per cent in the same age bracket agreed that Israel 'should be ended and given to Hamas and the Palestinians'.
It is bewildering that these opinions come from the exact same generation of students who were brought up to believe that words are violence and that silence is violence. Yet calls for genocide appear to be just about the only thing that is not violent.
But, though the campus protests made little impression on Western government, one set of leaders was taking a keen interest.
In May 2024, a Hamas leader addressed a conference in Istanbul hosted by the Muslim Brotherhood and expressed his thanks for 'the great student flood' that had emerged at American, British and other Western universities.
What students on these campuses were doing was all part of Hamas's plan and had been factored in. A plan that led direct from campus demonstrations in America to jihad on the streets of Israel.
The endorsements kept coming. The supreme leader of the Iranian revolutionary Islamic government, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, wrote praising the students of America.
'You are now part of the Resistance Front,' he told them, 'and you have begun a dignified struggle under the ruthless police pressure of your government that evidently defends the oppressive and brutal Zionist regime.'
There's more than one irony in this, but in the years since the Islamic Revolution in 1979, Khamenei and his predecessor, Ayatollah Khomeini, have killed, tortured and imprisoned thousands of Iranian students, especially when they have come out and protested against their own government as the American students were now doing.
In one crackdown in 2009 the government's security forces openly shot student protesters on the streets, then ordered the digging of mass graves for the bodies of those who were murdered and tortured.
Students who were detained in the regime's prisons in the aftermath of these protests attested to having been raped with batons and bottles.
But the Ayatollah wasn't going to allow something like his own track record to get in the way of destabilising America.
In his letter to American students, Khamenei talked about a changing situation, consciences awakening and history turning a new page.
He concluded his salutations with citations from the Quran and said: 'I empathise with you, young people, and I respect your steadfastness.'
The fact that 2024 saw a record surge in executions inside Iran was left out of his letter, as was the fact that his regime publicly executes people convicted of homosexuality by hanging them from cranes and throwing them off high buildings.
Khamenei was clearly pleased with the ignorance of America's students and his own ability to foment dissent in a country he describes as 'The Great Satan'.
