ANDREW NEIL: Anti-Semitic campus know-nothings aren’t pro-Palestine… they’re pro-WAR! And, in their stupidity, they’re making the strongest case yet for Israel’s survival

What started as legitimate and even understandable student protests on American college campuses against the Gaza massacre has quickly turned into something much more sinister.

Instead of “Give peace a chance,” as anti-Vietnam War protesters shouted in the 1960s, it is “We are Hamas,” “Destroy Israel,” and even “Kill all the Jews.”

This descent into raw anti-Semitism has been rapid and frightening. A generation of students with little understanding of history, no understanding of the complexities of the Middle East conflict, and no set principles beyond the obsessive simplicity of operation are easily influenced by rampant nihilism.

Protest leaders claim they are pro-Palestinian. In fact, they are pro-Hamas, with all the evil baggage that entails.

A leader of the so-called ‘Gaza Solidarity Encampment’, founded by student squatters at Columbia University in New York, openly says on social media that ‘Zionists do not deserve to live’.

Columbia is the epicenter of hate, but its poison has spread not only to other Ivy League universities but also to less prestigious educational institutions across the country.

Campuses are now awash with slogans and banners proclaiming “October 7 10,000 times,” “Boycott the genocidal Zionist apartheid state,” “Holocaust was not a problem,” and “Only one solution: the Intifada Revolution.”

This is not an anti-war movement. It is a pro-war movement that seeks to intimidate Jews and destroy Israel.

It is a movement born of ignorance and prejudice, always a deadly combination that leads to nothing good.

Many demonstrators have no idea what they are singing. No concept of the Holocaust. No knowledge of an intifada.

Privileged upper-middle-class white students at universities costing at least $75,000 a year attend don keffiyehs in performative protest to show solidarity with people they know nothing about.

At the University of Washington, a protest was hilariously canceled because the participants were “too white,” which speaks volumes about the spoiled, self-indulgent student elite behind these protests. They are the useful idiots of Hamas.

After weeks of shouting ‘From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free’ they still have no idea which sea or which river.

Nor are they able to define Palestine (although they are not alone in doing so). They are the textbook example of the woke rot that has gripped the American academic world.

There is no doubt that they have been influenced by radical teachers on the faculty, where rational debate and divergent opinions are now a rarity. But whatever evil comes out of their mouths, they pay no penalty.

Of course, like all Americans, they have their First Amendment rights. But the problem is not freedom of speech. It is criminal conduct, not protected by the First Amendment.

A double standard applies here too. Universities have strict codes of conduct. They would rightly not allow the “free speech” of white supremacists on campus. So why are the disgusting tropes of anti-Semites tolerated?

Jewish students are intimidated, threatened and harassed every day. How could it be otherwise, given the relentless anti-Semitic nastiness shouted and scrawled on banners on campuses across the country? Yet no one does much about it.

The university authorities are, as usual, useless. At Columbia, Jewish students were told to stay away and use distance learning.

A university rabbi was forced to tell Jewish students to go home because the university could not guarantee their safety. A Jewish professor had his identity card deactivated, apparently because he wanted to organize a counter-protest.

We’ve been here before. As the Nazi poison took root in Germany in the early 1930s, Jewish academics and students were denied entry to universities – or simply advised to stay away. We know where this leads. That makes the inaction of the universities all the more inexcusable.

Yes, there has been a stronger response to the encampments and intimidation at some universities, such as Austin, Texas, and Emory, Georgia, where rubber bullets and tasers were deployed.

But often the encampments are allowed to resurface and the protests continue as before.

Moreover, what is needed is not heavy-handed law enforcement, although there will be times when that is necessary, but for universities to announce that all students who utter the anti-Semitic obscenities and parade the offensive banners that are now ubiquitous on so many campuses will . immediately cease being a student at that university – and never be readmitted again. In addition, those suspected of harassment and intimidation are handed over to the police.

That might be a reason to pause and think about what they’re doing.

The time to get tough is now because the poison is spreading beyond campus. The FBI reports that anti-Semitic incidents are at “historic levels.” Jews make up only a small portion of the U.S. population, but are once again victims of a majority of hate crimes.

Who would have thought that it would ever come to this again – or that, given what we know now, the official responses would be so pathetic.

Ironically, even though their ignorance means they have no idea, the protesters are advocating for the Jewish state of Israel.

After the horrors of the Holocaust, Jewish leaders determined that there should be a Jewish homeland that was open to all Jews – and to which all Jews could flee in extremis for safety, should something like a Holocaust recur.

Even Jews in Western democracies who thought they did not need such a homeland took comfort in the fact that one did exist. This was especially true for American Jews who always thought the only country where they would be safe, besides Israel, was the United States.

Safe havens, like New York City, with the largest Jewish population of any city outside Israel, would suffice. Israel was an insurance policy they probably didn’t need.

As the scourge of anti-Semitism subsided in the years after World War II, some progressive Jewish leaders even wondered aloud whether a separate Jewish homeland was really necessary.

No one is asking that now, as even in America radical Muslim leaders are calling for Israel’s destruction, backed by students at the country’s most elite universities and thus by those who may (and terrifyingly) destroy the country in the coming will govern for years to come.

America’s Muslim population can only grow while Jews will make up an increasingly smaller percentage of the total population.

Violent Islamism has a strong base in many Western democracies today and its influence is likely to grow stronger. Suddenly that Jewish homeland seems more necessary than ever.

This sad story still has a long way to go. The pro-Hamas protesters have strong allies on the left of the Democratic Party. They will be in effect during the Democratic Convention in Chicago in August.

Chicago, of course, was the scene of the most violent Democratic convention ever in 1968, at the height of the Vietnam War, when Mayor Daley’s somewhat robust police force clashed with radical protesters attempting to disrupt the convention.

I’m not saying we’re in for such a repeat, but it won’t be pretty on the streets of the Windy City this summer.

To today’s protesters, the president is “Genocide Joe.” They will be intent on putting pressure on Democrats to end their support for Israel, the way they wanted the party to end its support for the Vietnam War all those years ago.

In Vietnam, hundreds of thousands of young American men had to be conscripted to fight a massive war on the other side of the world, which ultimately cost more than 55,000 American lives. That gave the protests a special touch and relevance. Israel doesn’t hold any of that, which is why it doesn’t have the same spiciness for most people.

But pro-Palestinian sentiment is the rising force within the Democratic Party, with all the attendant anti-Semitism we are currently witnessing.

With such forces, no compromise is possible, regardless of the superficial appeal of winning the youth vote by pandering to unknowing students. We will see if Biden is up to the challenge and remains steadfast in his decision to support Israel.