Imagine being a parent who scrimped and saved to put your kid through college, only to have Graduation Day, a day that should be a joyous celebration of achievement, turned wretched by ill-informed antisemites railing about Palestine and disrupting the proceedings. That happened yesterday at Columbia University, of course, with students showily burning their diplomas and otherwise wrecking the festivities.
There have long been student protests, of course, but anti-Jew and anti-Israel protests are something new. To have antisemitism increasing across our country, and across the world, is hideous, and far too little has been done to stop it.
The acting president of the school, Claire Shipman, could barely get through her address as students booed her appearance, shouted “free Palestine” and also called for the freeing of Mahmoud Khalil, a former student who was arrested by ICE and is now cooling his heels in a detention center in Louisiana awaiting deportation. Khalil led some of the school’s ugliest protests; the Trump administration claims he has allegiance to Hamas, which they have designated a terrorist organization. It was Khalil’s group CUAD, which demands divestment from Israel, that called for agitators to disrupt graduation.
Notwithstanding the interruptions to her speech, and the intentional undermining of the festivities, Shipman chose to reward the agitators by saying, “I know many in our community are mourning the absence of our graduate, Mahmoud Khalil”, infuriating Jewish students in the audience and, undoubtedly, their parents.
But this is the time of year when college presidents can make headlines through commencement speeches that blast President Trump, or glorify Hamas, or otherwise appeal to the New York Times. Parents be damned.
What do parents actually think about what’s going on in our schools? A conservative group called Defending Education recently did a poll to find out. Turns out, most parents don’t want either admissions or hiring based on DEI, they don’t want biological men in women’s sports or bathrooms, and – guess what – over two-thirds think schools should introduce antisemitism bias training for faculty and staff. No surprise, parents are a voice of common sense.
BTW, allowing antisemitism to flourish on college campuses is deeply threatening to Jews everywhere. Yesterday’s murder of two young staffers at the D.C. – based Capital Jewish Museum by a pro-Palestinian gunman shows how dangerous this festering hatred can be.
Schools need to stamp this out, punish the disrupters, and bring order and peace back to our campuses. It won’t be easy, but coddling ignorant and sometimes violent protesters is the worst possible approach.
Maybe these schools should broadcast to their students video of the residents of Gaza protesting against Hamas. Maybe, just maybe, these numbskulls would begin to question their loyalties.
