How history will treat the post-Oct. 7, anti-Israel protests on college campuses across the United States will depend in part on how much longer they last. As we approach the two-year mark of the Hamas-led attacks on southern Israel, there seems to be little room for indifference. Normal people are rightly appalled by the Hamas Hipsters, privileged adolescents at $80,000 per-year academic institutions who are calling to “globalize the intifada.” But not everyone. Some people, especially some academics, are proud of them.
Danielle K. Brown, a journalism professor at Michigan State University who has devoted “over a decade” to researching protests and media coverage, wrote about the “disconnect” between “outside onlooker” and “those on the ground.” Whereas the former can’t see past the ugliness of the anti-Israel protests, the latter understand and appreciate “the meticulous planning by advocacy groups and leaders aimed at getting a message out.” She calls it the “protest paradigm,” noting that the divide was particularly noticeable during the spring 2024 semester of tent encampments.
Brown blames the media for highlighting “the spectacle rather than the substance,” which leaves “audiences uninformed about the nuances of the protests.” She claims that the paradigm is only broken “in the work produced by journalists, who have engaged deeply and frequently with the advocacy groups” responsible for the protest, especially students.
Student journalists may be more likely to identify with protesters than university administrations and public officials, but since the left has adopted the Hamas cause, there are plenty of enthusiastic and capable “insiders” willing to “control the narrative,” including professional journalists, politicians and professors, including Brown herself.
Where outsiders saw antisemitism, violence and a disruption of expensive educations, Brown and other “insiders” uniformly praise the protesting students for their bravery and deny that they are antisemitic. They blame someone else for any violence that occurs, and they minimize harassment of Jewish students, property destruction and building takeovers. Some even have the audacity to portray the protesters as morally superior to the universities they are protesting.
Not since June 2020, when Seattle Mayor Jenny Durkin compared the notorious CHAZ (Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone) to a “block party” and enthused that it might be another “summer of love,” has such an effort been undertaken to defend the indefensible.
Since Students for Justice in Palestine is the primary “advocacy group” behind the post-Oct. 7 protests, it’s not surprising that Faculty for Justice in Palestine has been its primary ally on “the inside.” FJP, after all, exists solely to provide public-relations services for SJP.
When University of Michigan students attempted to take over a building on the Ann Arbor campus, they were met with force from campus and local police. The university’s FJP chapter described it as “a beautiful display of unity, moral courage and justice.”
Georgetown University’s Faculty and Staff for Justice in Palestine published an “Open Letter” on May 13, 2024, calling an encampment at George Washington University, which Georgetown students participated in, “a positive, peaceful, respectful protest” and lavishly praising the “students [who] managed to create and sustain an orderly, clean and lively encampment, with two kitchens, a medical center and an outdoor classroom where students learned, discussed, sang, prayed and danced.”
Rep. Virginia Foxx (R-N.C.) saw something different: “Defacement of buildings, destruction of property [and] threats against Jewish students.”
Describing the encampments as beautiful was often not enough. It was equally important to assert that, contrary to what anyone could plainly see, they were not antisemitic. Outright denials were common, such as the University of Michigan FSJP’s denunciation of “the repressive actions and demonizing language of President [Santa] Ono … in particular, using the mendacious cudgel of antisemitism.”
But mere denials were not enough for the “insiders” defending the encampments at Columbia and GW, which received the most attention of the 100-plus encampments at schools in the United States. They found it important to impart a Jewish character to the protests.
George Mason University’s Faculty and Staff for Justice in Palestine praised the encampment at GW as “an inclusive space of free education, food security, medical care and creativity. They organized teach-ins, prayed, made art, held a Shabbat service.”
A Reuters article describing the Columbia encampment as a “living history lesson,” nonchalantly adds that protesters ate “free kidney beans and rice and kosher Passover snacks,” and asserts that “Reuters journalists have seen students peacefully chatting, reading, eating, and holding both Jewish and Muslim prayer ceremonies.”
When four of the most far-left members of the New York City Council (Tiffany Cabán, Shahana Hanif, Sandy Nurse and Alexa Avilés) toured the Columbia encampment, they wrote about what it was “really like.” Taking umbrage with descriptions of “a cesspit of antisemitic hatred and a threat to the safety of all Jewish students and faculty,” Cabán et al. countered that “far from a danger zone where Jews should fear to tread, the encampment hosted a large Kabbalat Shabbat service on Friday evening, followed the next night by an equally well-attended Havdalah service.”
Enlisting anti-Zionist Jews in the cause provides a shield against charges of antisemitism. As writer Clemens Heni puts it in Antisemitism: A Specific Phenomenon, “Jewish anti-Zionists give hatred of Israel a kind of kosher stamp.” But it is a weak shield based on a false premise.
Curiously, the same left that portrayed Larry Elder as “the black face of white supremacy” during his candidacy for the California gubernatorial recall election in 2021 is quite comfortable implying that Jews can’t be antisemitic.
Another common goal of encampment defenders is to absolve the protesters of all violence by deflecting blame onto others, especially university administrations and police departments. Georgetown University’s FSJP, in its May 13, 2024, statement, blames “Mayor [Muriel] Bowser and the GWU administration [for having] created the very conditions that it had accused the students of fostering: chaos, conflict and violence.”
Likewise, George Mason University’s FSJP “condemns in the strongest terms possible GW president Ellen Granberg’s decision to call the MPD on students who were demonstrating peacefully and endangering no one.”
The University of Texas FSJP denounced university “president [Jay] Hartzell’s decision to, once again, order a military-style invasion of the UT campus.”
While Brown criticized Texas Gov. Greg Abbott for equating protesters at the University of Texas in Austin “to criminals with antisemitic intentions” and unfairly shaping the narrative by overshadowing “rebuttal from protest participants.”
The most exorbitant whitewashing tactics portray student protesters as wiser and better at educating than the universities where they protest.
For instance, at the University of San Francisco, where the anti-Israel protesters gave their encampment the grandiose name “The Peoples’ University for Palestine,” the school’s FJP chapter, “Educators for Justice in Palestine,” praised the “peaceful movement that has created a robust learning environment where students have learned to engage in collaborative work and discussion.”
Harvard’s FJP was equally impressed: “With their encampment, our students aim to construct a liberated space for collective education.”
But the most over-the-top, bombastic hyperbole in praise of any post-Oct. 7 protest came from Timothy Kaufman-Osborn, an emeritus professor of politics at Whitman College, who wants The Federalist Papers banned from college classes.
In Kaufman-Osborn’s effusive defense of the Columbia encampment for Project MUSE, the university is “an autocratic property corporation,” and the student protesters are “the encampment’s residents.” In language only an academic would write, he explains that the protesters’ “embrace of procedural democracy was subtended by a struggle to meet mundane needs whose satisfaction is a necessary precondition of the possibility of autonomous self-governance.”
But the brave students of his tale pressed on and built their ephemeral campus utopia. “That infrastructure [which] took shape as DIY sanitation systems, communal kitchens and improvised health facilities owned by no one in particular … challenged the privatized conception of property that would soon inform the encampment’s demolition.”
Rep. Josh Gottheimer (D-N.J.) saw something different with his own eyes: Jewish students “being verbally, and even physically, assaulted. Masked protesters … cheering on and actively calling for the genocide of Jews.”
Contrary to what anonymous FJP members, Socialist politicians and others “on the ground” wrote, the post-Oct. 7, anti-Israel protesters have created nothing but hostile environments. The encampment students, in particular, pilfered university resources and disrupted the education of their peers who want nothing to do with pro-Hamas demonstrations.
If any “created food security,” it was on someone else’s dime.
They also weren’t “residents” but trespassers, and they neither saved democracy nor challenged authoritarianism. As former American Association of University Professors president Carey Nelson aptly put it, they “sought to impose their views on everyone else. They did not doubt they were in possession of the truth, and they sought compliance with it.”
What will the fall 2025 semester bring? Will there be more protests and encampments in solidarity with terror groups? Or, maybe, the Islamic Republic of Iran will be the new cause.
Whatever comes, there will be no shortage of “insiders” to explain why you should not believe your lying eyes.
This article was originally published by the Investigative Project on Terrorism.
