America’s leaders foolishly surrender campuses to Hamas

The real-life, pro-Hamas nightmare unfolding on college campuses all over the United States should send chills up the spines of every person with a firm grasp on the realities of history. Those who remember formerly decent societies surrendering their streets and governments to the Nazis, Fascists and Communists. From New York City to Berkeley, California, the forces of pure evil are literally on the march across America while most politicians refuse to speak out.

From U.S. President Joe Biden to local officials at Yale University, NYU and other formerly respected institutions of higher learning, the watchword is “calculation.” Let’s figure out how to tiptoe around violent Visigoths occupying campuses, clashing with police, and rampaging through great American cities like their antecedents who sacked Rome back in the year 410 A.D.

The “academic” protests have now spilled onto the roadways leading to America’s airports and centers of commerce. News reports show airline travelers in Chicago, for example, having to abandon their cars and walk, with suitcases, the final mile to O’Hare Airport rather than miss their flights because pro-Hamas demonstrators are blocking public streets.

On Monday of this week, angry mobs waving Palestinian flags and screaming, “We are Hamas!” swarmed from the campuses of Columbia University and NYU onto the streets of Manhattan, terrorizing residents and visitors in Chinatown and other New York City neighborhoods. One Jewish college student was swarmed by these thugs and stabbed in the eye with the stick end of a Palestinian flag.

And yet, from the White House….virtual silence. Joe Biden appears to be cynically calculating, “How can I criticize all of their antisemitism and still manage to secure Muslim votes in the Michigan primary?” (Hardly what John F. Kennedy championed in his 1957 best-seller, “Profiles in Courage.”) Ditto from college administrators, mayors and many in the general public who are turning a blind eye to this madness. Columbia University even cancelled in-person classes due to the “dangerous atmosphere” on campus.

As the Irish poet William Butler Yeats wrote in 1919: “The best lack all conviction while the worst are full of passionate intensity. Surely some revelation is at hand; surely the Second Coming is at hand.”

For Christians, the Book of Revelation in the Bible – coupled with the Second Coming of Jesus Christ –offers both hope and comfort that these and other current tribulations will fade away. None of the powers of darkness can ultimately undercut the word of God and – in the end – evil will be defeated.

But until that glorious day, America must face-down the physical and ideological threats posed by violent, out-of-control demonstrators pledging loyalty to Hamas. As I outlined on ALL ISRAEL NEWS late last year, the crisis birthed by 'since-resigned' administrators at MIT, the University of Pennsylvania and Harvard University has now metastasized into chapters of “Students for Justice in Palestine” mushrooming on more than 200 U.S. college campuses.

These shadowy “student chapters” are clearly funded by left-leaning foundations and anti-Israel donors – providing everything from thousands of tents being pitched on campus quadrangles to lawyers bailing out violent demonstrators who get themselves arrested.

More than 130 protesters were arrested at Columbia this week…with another few dozen at NYU; scattered others were handcuffed at California State Polytechnic and Yale. Still, the total number arrested represents a mere drop in the bucket compared to the violent mobs disrupting universities and cities while screaming antisemitic tropes like “Go back to Poland” and calling for “Death to Israel” … and all this during Passover week.

Inevitably, there is a backlash brewing. U.S. Senators Tom Cotton (R-AR) and Josh Hawley (R-MO) have now called on President Biden to mobilize the National Guard to protect Jewish college students on American campuses. (While I fully support this action, I can hardly believe the words as I am typing them. Brownshirts anyone?) It says a lot – and nothing good – that calls to protect Jewish students must apparently come from Capitol Hill rather than from the leader of the Free World in the White House.

Personally, I believe it is well past time to expel violent pro-Hamas demonstrators from U.S. colleges and universities. If they are on scholarships, withdraw them. If they are in America on visas as foreign students, deport them immediately. Failure to crack down in concrete, no-nonsense ways risks normalizing the actions of these miscreants and – if left unchecked – turning New York City or New Haven, Connecticut or Dallas or Atlanta into American versions of Gaza City.

My friend and Salem Radio Network colleague Eric Metaxas believes that Americans are experiencing our third – and likely our final – existential crisis. In his new book RELIGIONLESS CHRISTIANITY, Metaxas declares that America’s first crisis was our 1776 Revolution, when the threat was from without; the second was our Civil War in the 1860s, when the threat came from within.

“But now,” he writes, “we face a third trial, whereby evil forces aim to steal our freedoms and national sovereignty via a globalist world system dedicatedly at war with the God from whom we derive our principles of liberty and justice for all. And the threat to us now is from both within and without.”

Like Israel, America faces deadly danger from Hamas. And like America, Israel has no alternative but to win a decisive victory over what has now become our common enemy.