HOSTAGE SQUARE, TEL AVIV –
They haven’t missed it. They’ve seen what’s happening on our campuses.

They’ve seen and read the news reports – reports showing over-privileged white Gen Z and Millennial types in keffiyahs, demanding if the visitors to their campus encampments, their “Little Gazas,” are Jews. They’ve seen the chanted tributes to Hamas and Iran and the horrors of October 7. They’ve seen all that.

And they’re disgusted. They’re shocked. They’re appalled. They’re absolutely baffled why young Canadians – and young Americans, and young Europeans – are openly expressing so much contempt towards the Jewish state.

In other circumstances, at other times, Israelis are used to seeing protests against them in Canada and the United States and Europe. Those protests have been happening, more or less continuously, since Israel was founded in 1948. They’re not new.

But the anti-Israel encampments at places of higher learning in North America – the pro-Hamas, pro-Iran, pro-terror encampments, in too many cases? That, they can’t believe. That is new.

At a table selling T-shirts and bracelets to raise funds for the families of the 128 October 7thhostages, Judy Goldman shakes her head. Goldman is a former Montrealer, and still has family in Toronto and the Vancouver area.

She’s present this day with a dark-haired friend, whose son, 23-year-old Yosef Haim Ohana, is still being held hostage by Hamas. Her friend doesn’t want to talk about politics, she says. But Judy does. She has a few things to get off her mind.

“I am shocked by what I have seen at these campuses,” she says. “Shocked. It is pure anti-Semitism.

“Anti-Semitism is always there. It bubbles underneath the surface. Any excuse can bring it out. But I’m very surprised to see what young Canadians, at universities in places like Toronto, are doing.” She shakes her head again.

She continues: “It’s shocking, because universities are supposed to be places where morality is taught. And what’s happening in those places is just outlandish. It shouldn’t be happening! At places like McGill, too, which I know well.”

It’s normal for young people to be preoccupied with issues like climate change or the future, says Judy. But to praise Hamas, who slaughtered 1,200 men, women, children and babies on October 7, 2023? “It is absolutely beyond words,” says Judy.

A few feet away, at a booth that has been set up for the hostages taken from the kibbutz Nahal Oz, Iris Shellhav Nahal is talking to whoever will listen. She’s wearing a T-shirt bearing the images of some of her neighbours who were killed or kidnapped on October 7.

“It’s terrible,” she says of the encampments and protests.  “What I have seen? It’s not good. Where did [the students] get these terrible ideas? They’re ignorant. They don’t know history – they don’t know what Hamas means to us!”

Iris softens a bit and leans back in her chair. “Some of the students, I’m sure they’re not bad people,” she says, pausing. “But how can they say we are so terrible when we are the ones who were attacked first? It’s just terrible.”

Next door, there is a booth to promote the memory of the victims of the Re’im Music Festival on the 7th. There’s an older man sitting there, but he doesn’t speak English. Two women who are present, Liora and Aziza – they speak a little English, but not so well, they say – won’t give their last names. “It makes me mad,” says Liora of the encampments. Says Aziza: “We know kids who were killed at the music festival. Why don’t these kids in Canada and America understand? They look like our kids.”

Asked why they think young people in Western universities have embraced the hateful rhetoric of Hamas and its ilk, all of  the women have theories about that, too. They speculate that there are many anti-Israel Muslims or Arabs at North American universities who have manipulated the protests they see in TV. They also wonder if the ones camped out have been brainwashed by their professors.

At the same booth where Judy Goldman volunteers, a lovely woman from Manchester is working. Her name is Sara Omer and she still has a thick Manchurian accent.

Sara explains she has three sons in the Israel Defence Force, one stationed this day in the South of Gaza. He’s been sleeping under the stars, she says, and he’s excited that some toilets and showers have finally been shipped in. She smiles when she talks about him.

Sara’s husband was killed in military action a few years back, and she works with the hostage families, she says, because she understands what it means to lose someone to the fight for Israel.

She doesn’t, however, understand how any North American young person can raise their voice in support of a racist, hateful death cult like Hamas.

“I read the New York Times every day, ” Sara says.  “I read over the weekend was that in Columbia University 60 per cent at the encampments are just outsiders. They’re not students. They’re outsiders and they’re coming and they’re firing up the others.

She goes on: “And some of the students who were interviewed –  they don’t even know what they’re protesting. They don’t understand.”

“It makes my blood boil.”

Two things to conclude with: everyone here – everyone this writer spoke to – is here because they want to be. Not only do they not work for the Netanyahu government – they’re furious with the Netanyahu government. They want the hostages home, now, and feel the Israeli Prime Minister has botched the job.

The other thing: everyone here is carefully watching what is happening in North America, at supposed places of higher education. They haven’t missed it.

And they don’t understand it. At all.

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It was happy and sad. Happy, because I fulfilled the promise I made to my Dad 20 years ago. Sad, because we all love them so much.

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The anti-Israel, pro-Hamas protestors are getting paid to protest.

Not all of them. But enough of them – enough to raise concerns about the “reality” of what we are seeing on our TV and computer screens, says the evidence and experts.

This newspaper first revealed in January that Israel-hating protesters were getting paid to show up. We detailed how a group called the Plenty Collective in Victoria, B.C. was paying out $20,000 a month to people to attend carefully stage-managed anti-Israel protests in and around that city. The “protesters” were actors, in effect, and were being given food, drink and professionally-produced signs and banners.

We also reported that it was happening in bigger cities like Montreal, as well. There, the city has been divided up into precincts by paid organizers, each acting as a “captain” responsible for quickly putting together protests in select neighborhoods. Sources there told us protestors were getting $150 per event.

Then, in the past week, other media published similar reports. The New York Post revealed that anti-Israel “fellows” at three U.S. colleges were getting paid via the U.S. Campaign for Palestinian Rights – in some cases getting as much as $5,000 (Can.) a week in exchange for just eight hours of agitating.

That revelation was followed by the Daily Mail detailing a report authored by the Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy (ISGAP). That report showed that the main group behind the occupation of Columbia University and other campuses had received more than $3 million (U.S.) a year from charities linked to Hamas.

In the 73-page report, ISGAP revealed that Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) – with chapters in Canada and the United States – had been funnelled millions via myriad non-profits like the Westchester People’s Action Coalition (WESPAC), Tides, American Muslims for Palestine (AMP), its parent organization Americans for Justice in Palestine (AJP), and Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP).

In their report, ISGAP said: “It is clear that individuals who previously worked for Hamas-linked charities are now a driving force behind [campus protests]. The Department of Education (DoE) should carry out an immediate investigation into which universities are funding and/or supporting SJP activities and instruct those universities to cease such funding and/or support…ISGAP calls for SJP (and its affiliated organizations) to be banned and for Jewish students to be protected.”

As this newspaper reported in January, groups like B.C.’s Plenty Collective were using their non-profit status to financially assist other anti-Israel “partners” in that province. After this newspaper published our report, the Plenty Collective hurriedly returned thousands to one of its largest donors.

And, now, an expert who runs a Beverly Hills firm that openly acknowledges it pays for protests, called Crowds on Demand, says he has no doubt that the practice of paying people to show up at protests is much more widespread than anyone knows.

Adam Swart, who operates his firm in Canada as well as the U.S., has been providing paid-for crowds for everything from red carpet events to audiences at speeches since 2012. And, in an interview with the Toronto Sun, Swart said “extremely lucrative offers” have been made to Crowds on Demand to provide bodies. So far, he’s declined, he says, but he generally defends the practice.

Swart says there is no doubt the anti-Israel side has lots of money, too. Says he: “There’s obviously money in these protests. In my business, I know that some of the professional banners that these people have – those are $200 and $300, and the signs can be up to 100 bucks. Someone’s paying for that, here in the United States. So, you have essentially an unlimited amount of money coming in to potentially violent organizations that are tax exempt nonprofits here, and are social advocacy groups in Canada.”

The Canada Revenue Agency, which oversees such groups, was asked by the Toronto Sun whether they have any active investigations into funded protests in Canada.

At press time, they had not replied.

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Who benefits from these metastasizing campus encampments? Who loses?

The losers are easy to spot. They’re the families who scrimped and saved and borrowed to send junior to an Ivy League school – only to learn that he/she/they have adopted Yasir Arafat’s fashion stylings, and are sleeping through final exams in a tent beside a guy who now calls himself “ISIS Bro.”

The losers also include the university presidents, who fret about “free speech” while losing  scads of support from alumni, public opinion, GOP congressmen, new students and assorted millionaires/billionaires with big social media followings.

And the losers also include (sadly, unfairly) Joe Biden, who is in danger of being defeated by the same addled crew who tipped the scales against Hillary Clinton in the electoral college in 2016 – clueless, gormless Bernie Sanders-loving Gen Z crypto-fascists who blame Jews (here) for the decisions of an Israeli government (way over there).

The winners are equally easy to spot.

As “encampments” spread at American and Canadian post-secondary institutions – and we use quotation marks around “encampments,” here, because they’re actually illegal occupations which claim to oppose illegal occupations – one group, in particular, is deliriously happy about the Infant-fada.  And that’s Iran’s H Team: Hamas, Hezbollah, Houthis and haters.  They’re overjoyed.

Just read up on what they’ve been saying.  Steven Stalinsky did.  He’s the executive director at the Middle East Media Research Institute in the U.S., and he published an important Wall Street Journal piece last week, titled “Who’s Behind the Anti-Israel Protests.”

It makes for fascinating reading.  A sampling of what the H Team are saying:

• Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah said “we should salute…the many people demonstrating in America” because they “apply pressure on their governments.”
• Hamas’ leader abroad, Khaled Mashal, urged Jew-hating supporters to protest “in cities everywhere.”  Hamas’ friends were “the global Left,” he said, and noted that they’d shifted public opinion against Israel.
• Another Hamas leader, and former Palestine Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh called the protestors “resistance abroad…strategic allies” in creating a global caliphate and “this great victory.”
• And, not be outdone, Iran’s Supreme leader and the erstwhile boss of Team H, Ali Khamenei, went to the trouble of posting in English on X alongside videos of Western student protestors: “See what is happening in the world. In Western countries, in England and France, and in states across the US itself, people are coming out in huge numbers to chant slogans against Israel and America. US & Israel’s reputation has been ruined. They truly have no solution.”

Khamenei has a “solution,” of course.  It’s the same one Adolf Hitler had.

Reached in Washington, D.C., Steve Stalinsky is clearly concerned.  What the protesters are demanding goes far beyond a ceasefire, he says.  It’s about delegitimizing and destabilizing Israel and her Western allies.

Says Stalinsky: “The rhetorical support that Hamas and Hezbollah are receiving from these protests, whether it’s a Columbia or a McGill or any university on the continent at the present time? [Iran, Hamas et al.] are surprised how successful it is. It’s not totally spontaneous, either. Some elements are, but there’s also a lot of activity that has been going on online. And there’s been years of preparation in going after this younger generation.”

The younger generations – Gen Z and Millennials – were particularly susceptible to Internet manipulation by Iran and its proxies, he says.  The pandemic pushed them online, where their favoured research methodologies became watching TikTok videos manufactured in boiler rooms in Tehran.

Western governments have been “a huge failure” in fighting the online manipulations of the forces of Jew hatred, Stalinsky says. “Hamas, Hezbollah have indicated that these protests and rallies – the histrionics coming from these students – has been very influential. And it’s mind-boggling to me.”

He continues: “There’s been failure in governments and academia. But there’s been a total failure in the media, too – because they’re not reporting how terrorist groups are openly supporting the campus protests.  And the media are not reporting what’s going on on the ground, either, about how students are expressing support for Hamas and other jihadi groups, right out in the open.”

“It’s hate speech.  And it’s being ignored by the adults.”

Time to wake up, adults.  Because you’re losing the fight, too.

 

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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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