What is Columbia University?

It’s a university in New York City, of course. It’s also a place that we’ve been hearing a lot about in recent days. It’s symbol of sorts, now.

It’s also 36 square acres of hate.

Listen to Khymani James, one of the leaders of the group that has effectively seized control of Columbia University’s campus, in a video he filmed and promoted: “Zionists don’t deserve to live comfortably, let alone Zionists don’t deserve to live. The same way we are very comfortable accepting Nazis don’t deserve to live, fascists don’t deserve to live, racists don’t deserve to live, Zionists, they shouldn’t live in this world.”

He went on: “Be grateful that I’m not just going out and murdering Zionists.”

Over at New York University, a short taxi ride away, some students were interviewed saying they “really don’t know” why they are protesting. (Give NYU students points for honesty, if not actual education.)

Since April 17, Khymani James and hundreds of others – some students, some not – occupied the lawn in front of Butler Library, in the middle of Columbia U. They’ve set up identical tents tents – same size, shape, color, and who bought them for a bunch of typically-penniless undergrads, no one knows – and they are living there. They’ve got up Palestinian flags and banners saying COLUMBIA FUNDS GENOCIDE.

What Columbia’s Israel-haters are doing has spread to other universities in the U.S.: Emerson College, the University of Southern California, the University of Texas at Austin, New York University, Ohio State, Yale, Princeton, Emory, and many more. Similar things have happened at Canadian universities, like McGill, York, McMaster, Western, Concordia, U of T and more.

The occupation at Columbia has attracted the most attention, however, because it’s spurred arrests and violence and confrontations – one Jewish professor, Shai David, has actually been denied access to campus because he’s a Jew – and, probably, because it’s close to many major American news organizations. It’s been ugly.

That ugliness has been made worse by outsiders. The New York Post reported Friday that hard-Left interests – such as the George Soros-funded Students for Justice in Palestine, and the Campaign for Palestinian Rights – have funded student “protestors” with significant amounts, much of it run through non-profits.

The Post reported that a campus-based “fellow” can receive up to $5,000 (Cdn.) a week for devoting eight hours to “organizing campaigns led by Palestinian organizations.” (The funding is not just happening in the U.S., either: as this reporter revealed in January, a B.C. organization called the Plenty Collective disbursed as much as $20,000 a month to those who came to anti-Israel protests in the Victoria area.)

So, that’s what the students are doing at places like Columbia, and how many of them are getting paid to protest. But what is the objective? What do they want?

A document provided to this writer provides some answers. Previously unseen in Canada, the document has been published by a shadowy group that refers to itself as “Ill Will.” The manual, written by “Anonymous,” is titled “First We Take Columbia.” (Which they have.)

Key excerpts from the manual, which they have also made available in French, Spanish, Turkish, Japanese and Chinese:

• “Occupations are effective because they are disruptive.”
• “An occupation needs to spread in order to survive. New buildings need to be taken on campus, throughout the city, and across the country. Take the enemy by surprise.”
• “Every occupation is a commune. By shutting down the normal flows of capitalist society, they open up space for something new to emerge.”
• “Occupations draw strength from the spectre of a riot.”
• “Students from other campuses, residents of the surrounding neighborhood, and outside agitators need to be welcomed in…The NYPD stood down [in the past] out of fear that violence might otherwise erupt. Similar tactics might be necessary today.”
• “This is only the beginning. A number of revolutionary organizations emerged from the 1968 occupations movement. Pushing the university struggle to its limit might contribute in a similar way to producing a constellation of revolutionary forces in the city today.”

“All power to the communes,” the manual concludes, which seemingly takes inspiration from the April 1968 occupations at Columbia, when students and others seized five campus buildings and took the dean hostage, resulting in 700 arrests.

Hopefully the current anti-Israel occupations won’t go that far. But one thing is clear about the Columbia students and others, and their opposition to the “illegal occupation” of Gaza.

Their occupations? They’re illegal, too.

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There’s a scene in William Golding’s Lord of the Flies that applies, and doesn’t, to the madness that now grips the civilized world.

In Golding’s famous book, a plane full of boys crashes on a deserted island during a nuclear war. The pilot dies; the boys survive. The boys soon realize that they need to fend for themselves – no one has come for them.

One of the boys addresses the others. Says he: “This is our island. It’s a good island. Until the grownups come to fetch us, we’ll have fun.”

“We’ll have fun.” Therein lies the contradiction. The boys want adults to rescue them. But they also don’t. So they start to form their own society, one that is replete with extreme violence and factionalism.

It’s just a book, yes, one that Golding later said readers can take from it what they will. But, observing the epidemic of anti-Semitism and anger that is now seemingly everywhere, things look quite a bit like Golding’s book. That is, young people are off on an island on their own, these days, and they are descending rapidly into violence and hatred.

But here’s the key difference: they don’t want to be rescued.

The statistics – in Canada, the United States and Europe – all show the same depressing thing: vast swaths of younger generations hate the Jewish state, and they increasingly hate anyone who does not feel as they do. Poll after poll show the same thing: shockingly-large segments of Generation Z (from 18 to 24) and Millennials (from 25 to late 30s or so) have moved to their own island, one where Jew hatred and hatred of the trappings of modern society are the rule.

Some of the polling, from across the West:

• A Harvard poll, conducted right after the carnage of Oct. 7, found that more than half of American Gen Z support Hamas. That Hamas was “justified.” A fifth of them regard the Holocaust as “a myth.”
• A March Leger poll found that 22 per cent of Canadian Gen Z have “a positive view of Hamas,” and they are eight times more likely to doubt or deny the Holocaust than older Canadians.
• A Fall Ekos poll found that half of Gen Z regard Israel as an apartheid state. Angus Reid found that three times as many young women in Canada side with the Palestinian/Hamas side over Israel’s.
• A December Harvard/Harris poll found that more than half of American Gen Z say “Israel should be ended and given to Hamas.”

That is not all. Other polling, unpublished to date, shows nearly 40 per cent of Canadian Gen Z “support the destruction of Israel.” More than 40 per cent of them say the “extreme violence” of Hamas on October 7 was “justified.”

You don’t need to be a pollster to know these things. Turn on on your TV, or glance at your computer screen, and you will see it: the protests and rallies – some violent, many anti-Semitic – are filled with young people. White young people, mostly.

But why?

All of us were as young once. When you are young, it is normal to be oppositional – to oppose your parents, your teachers, your governments. Opposing war is something every generation does – from Vietnam onwards. And, now, it’s the Israel-Hamas war – but with a difference.

RMG Research in the U.S. has attempted to answer the “why” question. Young people, the pollster found, regard Israelis and Jews as wealthy and powerful, and that is why their war on Hamas is unjust – they are the oppressors, the powerful, wreaking vengeance on the weak. Their hatred for Israel and Jews dovetails with the hatred we now see them expressing about Western society, says on of the poll’s sponsors: “Gen Z is so embarrassed about being American that a large swath of them have become terrorist sympathizers.”

It is not an exaggeration.

The anti-Semitic trope that Jews are wealthy and all-powerful is part of it. But so too is the racial dimension. Even though more than 60 per cent of Israel’s population are non-white, many North American and European Gen Z and Millennials falsely depict it as a racist state (in fact, Israeli Apartheid Week got its start on Canadian campuses). So, a recent investigation by PBS saw youthful anti-Israel protestors repeatedly citing race as a motivator, too. Previously, they participated in Black Lives Matter and Native American protests. Now they are protesting for Gaza and against the Jewish state: it’s all connected, to them.

Can it all be fixed? Can we get back the Gen Z and Millennials who seem to be drifting away into hate?

Perhaps. Maybe. But, for now, they are on their own little island, “having fun.”

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The terror groups, and their supporters, are busy.

In the neighborhoods lived in by those they hate, they have firebombed mailboxes and public buildings. They have attacked banks and the residences of politicians. They have attacked government buildings, and businesses where people go to shop.

They have issued statements about their targets, which they say include “all the symbols and colonial institutions, in particular the police…all the media of the colonists which holds us in contempt…all enterprises and commercial establishments which practice discrimination against the people…all the factories that discriminate against the people…”

It has gone on for months like that. People are scared. Some are getting hurt. So, the Liberal Prime Minister decides to act.

“The government has pledged that it will introduce legislation which deals not only with the symptoms but with the social causes which often underlie or serve as an excuse for crime and disorder,” he says in an interview on CBC.

And then he brings down the hammer.

By now, you will know that the current Liberal Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau, has done no such thing. In Canada in 2023 and 2024, the same sorts of things have happened – day schools shot up, businesses and places of worship firebombed, attacks on the police and government and citizens.

And hateful propaganda being spewed everywhere – like on the weekend, when a masked group marched in front of the Parliament buildings, and pledged allegiance to a listed terror entity.

All of those things have happened, here, in Canada, in the era in which we all live. And, apart from a couple tweets, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has done precisely nothing about the terror that Jews and others are being subjected to in the streets, online, and on campuses. Nothing.

His father, Liberal Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau, was different. When the separatist Front de liberation du Quebec did all those things described above, and more, the senior Trudeau didn’t just offer up a few tweets (he couldn’t, for one thing – Twitter/X didn’t exist back in 1970).

Instead, he acted. As the FLQ’s attacks got more and more extreme, Trudeau Senior invoked the War Measures Act. Which would give the police and the government extra powers to deal with what had become a pro-terrorist insurrection. When a couple journalists approached Trudeau Senior on the steps of Parliament, and asked him how far he would go, he said: “Just watch me.”

He went on: “Yes, well there are a lot of bleeding hearts around who just don’t like to see people with helmets and guns. All I can say is, go on and bleed, but it is more important to keep law and order in the society than to be worried about weak-kneed people.”

Hundreds were rounded up and arrested. Soldiers were deployed in Ottawa and Montreal to protect the peace. Thousands of students gathered in Montreal to protest, but Trudeau Senior was undeterred.

Ultimately, the FLQ’s leaders were caught and their terrorist movement crushed. Gallup conducted a poll showing that 87 per cent of Canadians approved of Pierre Trudeau’s actions, including applying the War Measures Act.

And, now, we have his son.

Mere feet from where his son maintains his Ottawa office, on Saturday, masked anti-Semites marched along Wellington Street. “October 7 is proof that we are almost free!” one pro-Hamas speaker yelled, about the slaughter of 1,200 men, women, children and babies.

To cheers, he yelled: “Long live October 7th, long live the resistance!”

It was a crime, all of it. Hamas and its Satanic brethren are listed terror groups in Canada, just like the FLQ was. In Canada, under our Criminal Code – over which Justin Trudeau has direct constitutional authority – anyone who “contributes to, directly or indirectly, any activity of a terrorist group” is guilty of an indictable offence. Ten years in prison. It doesn’t even matter if the terrorist group actually does anything here – it is enough to “facilitate” Hamas.

That’s not all. Multiple sections of the Criminal Code – again, for which Justin Trudeau is responsible – make it an offence to wilfully promote hatred against an identifiable group. Here, that would be Jews, who have lived in terror since October 7. Ask them, they’ll tell you: they are terrified to live in Canada now. Many are leaving, because their governments have failed them.

Despite all that – despite the hate seen everywhere in Canada, just about ever day – Justin Trudeau does nothing. Nothing.

Actually, no. There’s one thing he does: he reveals the critical difference between him and his father. His father, however imperfect he was, opposed terror and fought it.

The son, meanwhile, is a coward.

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The anti-Israel side is getting more aggressive, experts and police agencies warn.

And, now, some groups are openly embracing terror groups and their tactics – and becoming far more radical.

This week, Western democracies were provided with more evidence. On Monday, Chicago’s O’Hare airport was shut down by anti-Israel and anti-democracy protests – as was a super-highway near Los Angeles, a bridge to New York City, major streets in downtown Ottawa and Vancouver’s vital container port.

At around the same time, dozens of anti-Israel protestors occupied Google offices in three different U.S. cities, and more than 100 “pro-Palestine” students at New York’s Columbia University were arrested for criminal trespass.

And, now, a document has surfaced that suggests that some of these groups are gravitating towards crime and terrorist tactics to advance their anti-Israel, anti-democracy cause. Provided to this newspaper confidentially by a source, the “underground manual” was created by Palestine Action, a network of groups that use what they call “direct action” against individuals and organizations who are believed to support Israel.

Founded in 2020 and most active in Britain, Palestine Action has been at the forefront of an increasingly-radicalized global movement. And its “underground manual” shows that groups that oppose the Jewish state are openly embracing violence and vandalism. In emails, the group admitted to this writer that it authored the manual, but refused to discuss its contents.

A sampling of excerpts from the document, which now forms part of prosecutions of Palestine Action members in the U.K.:

• Like past terror groups – such as Germany’s Red Army Faction, Abu Nidal or the Irish Republican Army – Palestine Action members are strongly encouraged to form “cells” of just a few members to reduce infiltration and “to make it more secure.”
• The manual then urges the cells to “pick your target” – most often, anyone who “enables and profits from the Israeli weapons industry.” Some companies are suggested, such as Elbit Systems, Rafael or Teledyne.
• Palestine Action then calls on cell members to “prepare for action” and do what it refers to as “recce” – reconnaissance, even advising “borrowing someone’s dog” for a walk, to avoid looking suspicious. Extremists are counselled to map out where closed circuit cameras are located, as well as fencing, barbed wire, access points, alarms – and how far the police are from the target.
• Next, cells are advised to “plan action.” Among the suggested actions are “smashing windows and exterior equipment,” blocking companies’ external pipes – including using concrete, as anti-Israel protestors did on railway tracks in Toronto this week. This “will cause disruption for the target,” says the manual.
• “Break-ins” are also advised – “breaking into your target and damaging the contents inside is obviously a very effective tactic,” says Palestine Action. Cells are advised to map out escape routes well in advance, using a variety of means. Cells are also told to use only cash when “buying equipment, whether it’s spray paints or sledgehammers” – and never to leave a “paper or digital trail.”
• Meanwhile, as we have seen in protests across Canada and the West, “face coverings are key,” warns Palestine Action. “Do not have your face [visible] at any point during the action. Balaclava is best for this. This might seem pedantic, but cops are obsessed with [shoes]. Don’t wear shoes that you’ve worn when arrested on an action or at a protest, or that are all over your social media.” The manual also urges followers to cover the entire bodies to ensure tattoos or birthmarks are not observed.
• In all-caps, Palestine Actions warns: “WHEN TAKING ACTION, NEVER LEAVE ANYTHING BEHIND. ABSOLUTELY NOTHING APART FROM PAINT AND DESTRUCTION. THE POLICE MAY TRY TO FORENSICALLY ANALYZE ANY ITEMS WHICH ARE LEFT, SO DON’T LEAVE ANYTHING.”
• Extremists are advised to methodically record every “action,” and share with other extremists, mainly to intimidate their targets. Untraceable “burner phones” should only be used, they say, all digital identifiers should be removed, and Palestine Action should receive a copy.
• If caught, Palestine Action members are given the names of lawyers to represent them, apparently at no cost, and offered the assistance of “our dedicated support team throughout the legal process.”
When the “action” is over, followers are encouraged to “destroy all evidence” – and to avoid “bragging, gossip and loose words [which] are often how things become undone…that sort of behaviour should be avoided and called out if you come across it in your cell.”

So, as experts and police note, anti-Israel and anti-Western groups are becoming bolder and more aggressive – and more extreme.

Palestine Action’s “underground manual” is just one more example of how extreme they have become.

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