Morning Wire - Anti-Israel Protests Spread Across College Campuses | 4.28.24

Episode Date: April 28, 2024

Recent protests across college campuses have exposed a pervasive anti-Israel sentiment in the halls of higher education. Get the facts first on Morning Wire. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

This month, college campuses nationwide have been gripped by massive anti-Israel demonstrations, with thousands of students and administrators demanding universities denounce the Jewish state. Now a growing number of protesters have begun calling for and committing violence against Jewish students. In this episode, we hear from a higher education expert who's sounding the alarm over anti-Semitism on campus and calling for the federal government to begin investigations. I'm Daily Wire editor-in-chief John V. It's April 28th, and this is a Sunday edition of Morning Wire. Here to discuss the disturbing trend of anti-Jewish demonstrations on campus as Daily Wire Senior

Editor Cabot Phillips. Hey, Kabat. So you spoke to someone who's really been on the front lines of this topic. But first, give us a snapshot of what's been going on nationwide. Yeah, so first, for some context, ever since the Hamas terrorist attacks of October 7th, we've seen growing protests against Israel on college campuses. Now, in the early days after the attack, there were thousands of students. around the country, led by the group students for justice in Palestine, explicitly praising

Hamas, calling their attacks justified. But in recent weeks, as Israel's war on Hamas has continued, we've seen those protests explode. And consequently, we've seen an explosion of blatant anti-Semitism. Everywhere from UC Berkeley to NYU, University of Michigan, Yale, Emerson College, we've seen occupation-style protests where thousands of students have camped out in what they call a fight against genocide. Throughout the week, we saw a number of violent clashes with police who were there trying to clear out demonstrators illegally camped out on campus property. But the most extreme example could be found at Columbia University, where hundreds of students erected a tent city on the quad demanding the school divest from Israel.

Yeah, some stunning images coming out of New York. What are we seeing there? So after police intervened earlier in the week and arrested more than 100 students who refused to leave, the protests only intensified with hundreds more joining the fray. And look, it's important to note here. We're not just talking about students advocating for a ceasefire or calling for a boycott or some legislation. We are seeing countless instances of demonstrators calling for the death of Zionists, the destruction of Israel,

and outright violence against Jews. And in many cases, those calls have led to violence, with Jewish students around the country being assaulted, harassed, stalked, and threatened on campuses across the country, and oftentimes in public and on video. Throughout the last week at Columbia, protesters could be heard chanting in support of Hamas, while videos showed Jewish students being threatened

and at times surrounded on campus. Have a listen to one of those instances. We have Zionists. We have Zionists. Who have entered the camp. Who have entered the camp. We're going to create a human change. Where I am standing.

Walk and take a step forward. Yeah, absolutely. Go ahead and take a step forward. So that we can. So that we can. Start to push them. Start to push them. Out of the camp.

Out of the camp. And here's another video of protesters at Columbia chanting, quote, We say justice, you say how, burn Tel Aviv to the ground. Yeah, Hamas, we love you. We support your rockets too. The protests have grown so disruptive that this week, Columbia announced classes on their main campus would be held remotely for the remainder of the semester. In response, the Orthodox rabbi at the school urged Jewish students there to leave campus

altogether until their safety could be guaranteed. Those demonstrations have drawn condemnation from New York. officials and members of Congress, with New York Republican reps demanding the school's president resigned. Speaker Mike Johnson also appeared at the school on Wednesday where protesters tried to shout him down. A growing number of students have chanted in support of terrorists. They have chased down Jewish students. They have mocked them and the reviled them. They have shouted racial epithets. They have screamed at those who bear the Star of David. Enjoy your free speech. If these campuses cannot get control of this problem, they do not deserve taxpayer dollars.

The White House also weighed in saying, quote, calls for violence and physical intimidation targeting Jewish students in the Jewish community are blatantly anti-Semitic, unconscionable, and dangerous. However, President Biden sparked outrage this week when he was asked about the demonstrations and gave this response. I condemn the ancillary protest. That's why I've set up a program to do with that. I also condemn those. don't understand what's going on with the Palestinians and how they're being... So sort of a both sides are wrong in this statement. Yeah, it certainly seems that way. And while Columbia is getting the most attention,

again, similar scenes have played out across the country. From more on that, I spoke with Dr. Zachary Marshall. He's the editor-in-chief at the Leadership Institute's campus reform and has been closely tracking anti-Semitism on campus. According to Dr. Marshall, the problem has always been present within higher education, but has burst into public view. following Israel's war on Hamas.

Since October 7th, we've seen something that is not intuitive. People think it is an increase or an expansion of anti-Semitism. It hasn't increased or expanded. It's always been there. It's always been in the lecture halls, in the published papers, in the graduate student working groups. We're seeing that's different now is that it's public, is that what they have no fear, they have no shame about calling for the death of Jews, both their peers,

in the Jews in Israel, in the quad on social media. And what we're seeing right now this past weekend is what I think is these activist students last stand. They are getting desperate because the trend in the last couple of weeks or so is that universities are starting to crack down. And they're now coordinating this national occupation-style protest as kind of their last-ditch effort to stem that trend. Marshall reiterated that the protesters had crossed the line from peaceful demonstration

into calls for violence. We're seeing students, including Elon Omar's daughter, call for Palestinian liberation, but it just doesn't end there. If it ended there, that would be 100% fine, and I wouldn't be here talking about this. They are calling for the death and destruction of the Jewish people, and that gets said through coded language, such as from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,

or death to Zionists or a few Jews or a few Zionists. Jews and Zionists, you cannot separate the two because a Jewish person practices faith through his belief in the homeland of Israel. So no matter what a Jewish person thinks of Israel as a state, you cannot separate Israel from Judaism. So when they're saying something about Zionism, they're really just saying Jews. And we're also seeing this morning videos emerged that were taken while we were all sleeping, that there are human chains being formed by these Palestinian protesters, that they are blocking Jewish students from entering buildings.

They don't want them to be in. So this is not just political speech. This is the same tactics. Brown shirts used at their universities in 1930s when they didn't want to choose attending German universities. According to Dr. Marshall, university administrators initially vowed to investigate anti-Semitism on campus following those pro-Hamas demonstrations in the wake of October 7th. But since then, he says they failed to take the matter seriously. When we started seeing universities create task force, so that's at UPenn, that's at Harvard, that's at Columbia. I was glad they were doing something because their policy before this was to do absolutely nothing.

But these task force themselves are ineffective. We saw a lot of high-level resignations at the Harvard University Task Force, including a rabbi who said, this university is not going to really tackle anti-Semitism without making about everything else. And, you know, they want to talk about Islamophobia and they want to talk about racism. But when you make something about everything, you make it about nothing. And it's ironic because the left is trying to do that now with Jews. They always yelled at the right when conservatives said, all lives matter and to response to black lives matter.

But they're just doing the same thing. Every time Jews enter the picture, the left finds exceptions to their rules, and they want to change how they do business because our existence proves their worldview wrong. As Dr. Marshall puts it, one big reason students have been so quick to join these protests is because of what they've been taught in class by professors, who he says have an anti-Israel, or in many cases, anti-Semitic bent. We have seen professors indulge in their anti-Semitism and indoctrinate students how to do it,

and this is done through being chairs of student working groups or student organizations. This is done through mentoring graduate students and teaching them how to teach anti-Israel work as TAs in freshman seminars, and also when they do research with their students that gets published in peer-review journals, especially through the Middle Eastern Studies Association.

So not only do you have them culpable, you also have the administrators culpable, because the administrators never believed, and they still don't believe that what's being discussed in the classroom is not theoretical, it's not just discussion. It's actually practice for what we're seeing now. They want to this. This is what they've been planning for for decades now.

And the professors are culpable because this is what they want. If it sounds like a conspiracy, that's because it is. Now, we have seen a growing number of folks, especially on the right, call for federal action against universities who they say have not done enough to combat anti-Semitism. They say these schools are in violation of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act. Here's Marshall to that point. Title VI is a statute that's within the civil rights legislation that was passed in the 1960s. It says that institutions that receive federal funding have a responsibility and a duty to fight and prevent discrimination in the, institutions that is based on race, ethnicity, or national origin. For these investigations,

Jews fall under national origin, which is counterintuitive for some people who are not familiar with Judaism. We're an ethno-religious group, so you can be born Jewish and be secular, and you can also be a religious convert. So anti-symitism affects both elements equally. And so what I've seen is universities have these types of protests or types of messaging on social media or in the their classrooms, they do nothing about it. We saw professors cheer for Hamas and say, finally, this is I've been waiting for my whole life. And they represent their inability to teach students, you know, and make that environment safe for Jewish students, but also to teach in a manner that doesn't foster discrimination based on national origin.

In response to those violations, Dr. Marshall has filed a number of complaints with the Department of Education, which have resulted in a number of federal investigations into these universities. So I submitted over the course of about three months, 33 complaints to universities that I saw through campus reform reporting were failing in their duties to combat anti-Semitism on campus. Those complaints have resulted in 13 open federal investigations, including Brown University, Northwestern University, and Princeton University. There is now about 44 or 45 investigations that have been open since October 7th that are going to look at anti-Semitism. Semitism, so I'm responsible for about a third of what's now open nationally. I don't have any unrealistic expectations for immediate results or immediate satisfaction. My main goal here is to annoy college administrators into doing the right thing because they have plenty of opportunity to do the right thing.

Now, we are still waiting to see what response, if any, we see from the Department of Education regarding these investigations. Some have called for Columbia and others to lose any access to federal funding, while others have begun lobbying for university presidents to be forced out. We'll have to wait and see, but in the meantime, it does not look like these protests are going away anytime soon. Well, in the meantime, let's hope officials are able to keep the peace. Kabbat, thanks for reporting. Anytime. That was Daily Wire Senior Editor Cabot Phillips, and this has been a Sunday edition of Morning Wire.