The Gaza Glampers at campuses across the country have truly outdone themselves in the realm of self-defeating contradiction. While the leftist students protest the “Zionist settler state,” they are actively supporting Iran — a sexist, bigoted, discriminatory, misogynist, terrorism-sponsoring regime — and its proxies. While these students demand that their universities divest from Israel, those same universities receive billions of dollars from nations that fund terrorism.
The campers’ delusion springs from a combination of ignorance and ideology. Some college students have said they actually “don’t know” why they’re protesting, other than that they want to support “Palestine” (solidarity!). Among the tent setups, the privileged teens have gathered powerful displays of resistance, such as: performing an interpretive dance for decolonization; weaving friendship bracelets; peddling incense and essential oils; and vaping for the oppressed.
At Ivy englampments, there is a strong overlap between student LGBTQ+ advocates and “Free Palestine” advocates. Among the hand-painted signs at “Columbia’s Communist Coachella,” some read “Trans Fags 4 Palestine” and “Trans Dykes 4 Palestine.” Who is going to tell them that they would be the first to be executed under the sharia law for which they pine so passionately?
I predict this entire phenomenon will go down in history as the most sharply curved horseshoe to ever emerge in American politics.
Ali Khamenei, the Supreme Leader of the Islamic Republic of Iran, posted his support of the college encampments on X.
https://x.com/khamenei_ir/status/1783130177788100897
How satisfying for him to watch the children of America’s elite praise Hamas and Hezbollah, which are funded, trained, and armed by Iran to effect the twin goals of “Death to America” and “Death to Israel.”
If these students were protesting in Iran, they would be sentenced to death — like the Iranian rapper Toomaj Salehi, who protested the killing of Mahsa Amini while in police custody. Amini’s crime? “Improper” wearing of a hijab.
Iranian women cannot sing or dance solo in public, ride a bicycle, attend matches in sports arenas, pursue certain modes of education, or hold offices of power. Violence against women is also a norm under the Islamic Republic. According to Iranian law,
adultery is punishable by stoning and violating the hijab is punishable by seventy lashes. Many young and middle-aged women received this punishment—a striking example of the state practicing corporal violence against women.
Homosexuality is treated brutally under the Islamic Republic’s law.
Same-sex “crimes” are subject to hudud, punishment fixed under Sharia or divine [Islamic] law, where the claimant is deemed to be God. Punishments are severe. Under the Penal Code, lavat (sodomy) is punishable by death where a judge determines that penetration was involved.
In 2022, two Iranian women were sentenced to death for their LGBT activism, the Iranian courts citing “corruption on earth” as their crime.
As for Hamas, the student protesters should be reminded that the norm in Hamas-run Gaza was to throw women in jail — or worse — for the crime of organizing Zoom calls or having extramarital sex. I would also recommend these glampers catch up on their reading of the Hamas Covenant of 1988, especially Article 13, “So-called peaceful solutions and international conferences, are in contradiction to the principles of the Islamic Resistance Movement” and Article 15, “The day that enemies usurp part of Muslim land, Jihad becomes the individual duty of every Muslim.”
They might also note that Article 18 decrees that “woman in the home of the fighting family, whether she is a mother or a sister, plays the most important role in looking after the family, rearing the children and imbuing them with moral values and thoughts derived from Islam.” Not exactly a feminist ideal.
What made so many American college students think of the Islamic Republic of Iran and Hamas as liberating forces? Behind the ideological obsession with “decolonialism,” there is (of course) a money trail. The calls for defunding Israel are themselves coming from anti-Israel sources of funding.
Top American universities — including Harvard, Yale, Columbia, Princeton, and Northwestern — have received billions of dollars in donations from countries such as Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, and Saudi Arabia, which consistently top the foreign donors’ list (although institutional reporting of foreign funds has been found inadequate).
Since 2016, even entities in the “State of Palestine” gifted at least $4.5 million to U.S. universities. The unnamed Palestinian donors also made gifts to Harvard of $275,000, $775,000, and $525,000 in 2017, 2018, and 2019 respectively. While reports do not explicitly state how the money was spent, a solid guess is support for the “Palestinian Territories” concentration at the university’s Center for Middle Eastern Studies. There, students are exposed to tendentious falsehoods such as that Israel is “deliberately using starvation of civilians as a method of warfare in Gaza,” committing genocide against the Palestinians, and wielding tools of “Zionist colonialism” to achieve ethno-supremacy.
Another recently established program at Harvard, the Palestine Program for Health and Human Rights, is funded by Birzeit University in the West Bank. This pro-Hamas university seeks to end “Israeli settler colonialism.” The Palestine Program at Harvard, which “utilizes a decolonial framework in program development, leadership, and engagement,” has produced such papers as “Towards a bidirectional decoloniality in academic global health: insights from settler colonialism and racial capitalism” and “HRW: Israel hospital attacks and limits on aid in Gaza should be investigated as war crimes.”
In 2020, a $643,000 contribution to Brown from a Palestinian source endowed a professorial chair in Palestinian Studies within the university’s Center for Middle East Studies. Beshara Doumani, a notable Hamas apologist who defines Israel as a “settler-colonialist state,” holds the chaired position.
A recent Wall Street Journal op-ed revealed how certain pro-Palestinian student activists are actually paid for their “work.” Two prominent student activists — Malek Afaneh, a Berkeley law student, whose disruption of a dinner at the home of the law school’s dean went viral, and Craig Birckhead-Morton, a Yale senior who was arrested for trespassing — have both been “youth fellows” of the U.S. Campaign for Palestinian Rights. According to the WSJ,
“Campus-based fellows” . . . receive stipends of $2,880 to $3,360 for three-month terms of roughly eight hours of work a week. That “work” could include aiding campaigns that “demand federal or state politicians cut US military, financial, or diplomatic ties with Israel.”
Not only must the universities clear the encampments. They must be held to account for cultivating young minds to scream “Death to America!”