As Jews around the world commemorated Yom HaShoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day, radical Columbia University students planned another violent and hateful encampment targeting their Jewish peers. Similarly, at Yale University, a new “encampment” gathered on April 23 to terrorize Jewish students. As a Columbia graduate disturbed by her alma mater’s moral and institutional failures, I have no choice but to decry this travesty.
For the last two years, Columbia has been essentially paralyzed by its surrender to Hamas supporters, the terrorist organization responsible for the Oct. 7, 2023, massacre of Jews. In fact, Columbia’s leading anti-Israel organization, Students for Justice in Palestine, which has been tied to Hamas directly, may have had advance knowledge of the Oct. 7 attacks. It reactivated its social media account and posted cryptically to “stay tuned” a mere three minutes before the attacks were carried out.
You would think Columbia would have learned by now. Just as Adolf Hitler spoke explicitly of his plans to commit genocide, pro-Hamas protesters over the last two years have made their stance chillingly clear. Protesters literally chanted “we are Hamas” and pointed at pro-Israel students, calling them Hamas’s “next targets.” Screaming at a group of Jewish students, Hamas supporters at Columbia were recorded saying, “Remember the 7th of October? That will happen not one more time, not five more times … but 10,000 more times.” Another added, “Never forget the 7th of October … The 7th of October is about to be every f***ing day for you. You ready?” At Yale, too, extremists chanted antisemitic slogans at Jewish students and celebrated murderous terrorists such as Walid Daqqa.
One Jewish Yale student was stabbed in the eye with a flag pole by anti-Israel radicals before Yale took action to disperse the mobs. Columbia’s response was to kowtow to the jihadi occupiers. Last spring, Columbia canceled all in-person classes rather than act to disperse the mob. It then canceled the main graduation event for the 2023-24 school year. This year, the horror continued at Columbia’s sister institution, the elite women’s Barnard College, when protesters were allowed to occupy Barnard’s Milbank Hall for hours. They went so far as to force the college’s Dean Leslie Grinage to ask permission to use the bathroom in her building, and then booed her as she did.
To its tremendous credit, the Trump administration has taken these violations of student rights extremely seriously. It launched a federal investigation of Columbia’s failure to uphold the civil rights of Jewish students and revoked about $400 million in federal funding. Columbia appeared to be moving in the right direction when it expressed an openness to the government’s nine preconditions to restore funding. However, mere days later, Columbia’s interim president, Katrina Armstrong, resigned without explanation or warning. She was replaced by journalist Claire Shipman, who infamously referred to the proven allegations of antisemitism on campus as “Capitol Hill nonsense.”
On April 21, Columbia students chained themselves to the university gates, defacing them with outrageous signs with slogans such as “PIGS R NOT KOSHER,” insulting to both police officers and practicing Jews. The protesters called for “Palestine” from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea, which on a map would require the disappearance of the state of Israel. This is consistent with Hamas’s doctrine, which calls for Israel to be replaced with a jihadi theocracy under sharia law as a first step to Islamist world conquest.
Then, on April 23, the evening before Yom HaShoah, word spread that the pro-Hamas movement at Columbia planned to return to the tent encampments that effectively shut down the university last spring. About 100 people participated in the organizing meeting in Brooklyn, 12 miles from campus, all wearing masks and disguising their identities with call signs instead of using names. The encampment was designated only as “the circus.” As Jewish students prepared to commemorate the extermination of 40% of the world Jewish population from 1939-45, they also braced for antisemitic agitation by present-day peers calling for and celebrating the annihilation of Jews in real time.
For once, Columbia took the danger seriously. Perhaps cautioned by the response of the federal government to its catastrophic handling of the pro-terrorism protests of the last two years, Columbia issued a clear warning, declaring that “Public Safety will immediately take steps to remove tents or other structures and remove them from the area; Access to affected areas will be restricted, and … individuals who refuse to disperse will be identified and sanctions, including potential removal from campus and possible arrest, may be applied.”
How much of the nightmare of the last two years could have been avoided if Columbia had taken that clear position from the very beginning?
Similarly, at Yale, an encampment of about 200 people gathered in Beinecke Plaza to protest a talk by Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, pitching tents to claim the space. Instagram posts advertising the event showed Ben-Gvir with a bloody wound across his face, as if he had just been shot, and described him as a “war criminal” with “blood on his hands.” For once, Yale took the uprising seriously, announcing rules on the correct use of public space that led to the encampment disbanding, and dissolving the registered student organization Yalies4Palestine for conduct violations.
IVY LEAGUE UNIVERSITIES CONTINUE TO CHOOSE DISCRIMINATION
Across town at the City College of New York, extremists took the occasion of Yom HaShoah to take over part of the campus, including the medical school, and establish what they called the “Hilmi al-Faqaawi Liberated Zone.” Participants demanded economic warfare against and the academic boycott of Israel.
All of this is atrocious. Jewish students should be able to attend classes, go about daily campus life, and mark major occasions on the Jewish calendar, including commemorating the irreparable tragedy of the Holocaust, which the pro-Hamas crowd yearns to repeat, without being harassed, attacked, or vilified by the racist forces who have seized control of the American campus. The Columbia and Yale administrations must defend their Jewish students, or the federal government must step in to protect them.
Dr. Sheila Nazarian is a Los Angeles physician and star of the Emmy-nominated Netflix series Skin Decision: Before and After. Her family escaped to the United States from Iran.