Editors at National Review Online highlight extreme protests on American college campuses.
Ever since the October 7 massacres in Israel, antisemitism has exploded on college campuses. Universities that had embraced DEI and canceled students and faculty for imaginary microagressions suddenly took an expansive view of free speech when it meant allowing demonstrators to take over campuses, disrupt classes, chant genocidal slogans, harass Jewish students, and target Jewish spaces. No matter how heinous the actions of the protesters, they have been framed as coming from idealistic students expressing genuine humanitarian concern for the people of Gaza, and as mere criticism of Israel.
But it turns out that some of the students were going further than just admiring the terrorists.
Earlier this month, two student activists at George Mason University in Virginia who were sisters (the current and former leaders of the school’s Students for Justice in Palestine chapter) were banned from campus for four years. A search of their apartment turned up guns, ammo, Hamas and Hezbollah flags, and Arabic patches reading “Death to America,” “Death to Jews,” and “Kill them where they stand.”
The ban of the sisters triggered outrage in predicable quarters, with the Council on American–Islamic Relations (which has long attempted to shield radicals by shouting about Islamophobia), claimed the move was “draconian” and “fit a pattern nationwide of attempts to silence or intimidate those who seek to end the Israeli genocide in Gaza and the Biden administration’s complicity with that genocide.”
Following these revelations, last week brought the news that Abdullah Ezzeldin Taha Mohamed Hassan, a George Mason University freshman, was charged by federal prosecutors for plotting an attack on the Israeli consulate in New York.
As laid out in charging documents filed by the FBI in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia, Hassan, an Egyptian national in the midst of deportation proceedings, had praised ISIS and al-Qaeda on social media, describing Osama Bin Laden as his idol and martyrdom as a path to paradise.
