Is There Hope Amid Hatred on University Campuses?

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Passover 2024 is ending with Jewish families worldwide retelling all the events surrounding Moses’ rallying cry to Egypt’s Pharoah: “Let my people go.” In Israel, since 10/7 and now at Passover their rallying cry is “Let our hostages go!” However, the rallying cry on many prominent university campuses glorifies Hamas, the new Nazis. Their hostile shouts, such as “We are Hamas!” reverberate on campuses across the United States with help and funding from their unashamed, well-funded anti-Israel and antisemitic backers.

My rallying cry is, “Christians, arise to firmly yet peacefully oppose in word and deed the Islamic Pharaohs and all their proxies throughout the world.”

Alas, the tsunami of Jew-hatred on American college campuses is not new. In the lead-up to World War II, Hitler handed a far-reaching propaganda portfolio to Joseph Goebbels, his head of the Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda. When Hitler became dictator in 1933, Goebbels shut down Germany’s free press wielding unlimited power over universities, film, radio, and propaganda. The long arm of this 5-foot-5-inch propagandist, nicknamed the “poison dwarf,” stretched across the Atlantic to mainstream anti-Semitism into the minds of American college students.

When the “public relations” machine of the demonic duo, Hitler and Goebbels, took hold in the mid-1930s, fortunately the Nazi strategy did not appeal to all Americans. Three responses emerged: active opposition to Nazism, disinterest, and yes, on American soil, sympathy for the Nazis.

In pre-World War II Columbia and Harvard, among other elite institutions, welcomed Nazi leaders to campus, enrolled Nazi-trained German exchange students, and promoted the idea of American students studying in Germany under Nazi oversight. Some returned to the United States mesmerized into supporting Hitler’s “New Germany.”

Today’s ineffectual tolerance of the outbreak of Jew-hatred for the last six months at Columbia University is traced back to 1933 with former President Nicholas Murray Butler’s welcome to Nazi Germany’s ambassador, Hans Luther. Butler, like other Ivy League presidents, perhaps naively wished to connect with German universities in the mid-1930s—when Goebbels gradually turned halls of learning into halls of Nazi propaganda. A 2008 Jerusalem Post article pointed out that Stephen Norwood, Ph.D. from Columbia University and author of The Third Reich in the Ivory Tower, said at a conference that “Butler was morally indifferent to Nazi crimes during the critically important early years of Nazi rule.”

Not all American university students accepted the Nazi line. Robert Burke, who was chosen as president of the class of ’38, was expelled from Columbia in 1936 for leading one of the largest anti-Nazi demonstrations on campus. Afterwards, a series of strikes and protests at New York City colleges grew into what would become the longest student free-speech fight until the 1960s. These students demonstrated on the right side of free speech against an enemy, Hitler. The determined blindness among America’s higher education elites took place even with Nazi atrocities already marching against Jews in kidnappings and murders.

The pattern of anti-Semitism on University campuses continued into 2007 when for example, Columbia invited then-President of the Islamic Regime, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, to speak. Columbia President Lee Bollinger and his administration must have been aware of Ahmadinejad’s Holocaust denial and genocidal threats against Israel—including his statement, “The world powers established this filthy bacteria, the Zionist regime, which is lashing out at the nations in the region like a wild beast.”

Ahmadinejad had a dangerous knack of turning the Islamic Regime’s own evil into lies against Israel. Keep this in mind when you hear the Islamic pharaohs and their proxies’ “facts” against Israel; They always describe themselves.

On Harvard’s campus in 1934, the administration and alumni were delighted to receive Ernst Hanfstaengl, the Nazi party foreign press chief arriving from Germany for his 25th Harvard class reunion. He was regaled at the dinners and meetings where he interacted with prominent alumni in corporate business, banking, and higher education. Try to imagine the meetings and dinners where Hanfstaengl was quoted as saying, among other such pronouncements, that Jews were “vampires sucking German blood.” Yet Harvard’s student newspaper, The Crimson, had described Hanfstaengl as one who should be honored for his “high position in the government of a friendly country.”

Again, a group of 1930s students bravely rose up at Harvard’s graduation ceremonies. They filled Harvard Square to oppose Hanfstaengl’s presence, demanding that the administration should instead give him a “Doctor of Pogroms” award. University police ripped down the anti-Nazi signs posted on campus. They also arrested some of the protesting students and jailed them for six months—without Harvard President James Bryant Conant speaking a word on their behalf.

History repeated itself with the questionable ambivalence about the safety of Harvard’s Jewish students today. On January 2, 2024, President Claudine Gay resigned after her Congressional testimony, in which she did not clearly condemn anti-Semitism on campus. When asked if calls for genocide against Jews following the Hamas war were in violation of Harvard’s code of conduct, her tepid response, “It can be, depending on the context.”

Regarding Columbia University’s protesting students, the
un-peaceful encampment protests were organized by Columbia University Apartheid Divest and joined by dozens of student-led organizations. Where are the brave students of yesteryear who opposed Germany’s Nazis? Where are the students standing up for both Jews and Christians on campus to oppose the inhumane new Nazis? Where are all of us 600 million pro-Israel Christians worldwide? Far too few pastors among many thousands of churches are hesitant to stand up for our spiritual homeland.

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However, I am overjoyed to report that last Thursday night at the gate of Columbia University, Sean Feucht, a popular Christian worship leader, rallied a group of hundreds of peaceful protestors who sang and chanted their love and support for Jewish students. I hope many other Christans will follow their example! We must massively spread facts, education, and at rallies sing uplifing songs and shout truthful facts to oppose the hatred that has deformed millions of minds.

Are American University presidents and their adminstrations now merely elevated institutions doing public relations for Hamas—the beastly murderers of Jews who imitate Hitler, Goebbels, and the Islamic pharaohs (and their surrogates) cruelly oppressing freedoms within their own populations?
Is it all about money where 12 countries have donated billions to elite univesities since 2012? Qatar more than three billion? Russia, more than 141 million? Lebanon, (read Hezbollah) more than 21 million?

Century upon century—scattered across the world in the Jewish Diaspora—the Jewish community worldwide has celebrated Passover for more than 3,000 years. Jews have steadfastly remembered their exodus from Egypt amid wars, pogroms, persecution, in concentration camps, and now during the first Passover in their modern homeland following the barbaric October 7 attacks. Admittedly in their own words, the Islamic Regime’s new pharaohs finally confessed and boasted about what we already knew: their planning of last year’s horrific assault.

Although Passover is ending, chairs remain empty at their tables where families and friends-traumatized and grieving- are thinking about those lost or kidnapped, yet resolute to survive as they always have under the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. With their ancient and modern history Israelis and Jews worldwide clearly understanding shouts from American campuses and across the globe. The shouts all mean death.

“From the River to the Sea, Palestine will be free.” “Arab blood is not cheap, for the martyrs we will speak.” “Resistance by any means necessary.” “Globalize the intifada!”  “Go back to Poland.” “We are Hamas.” And from a 1930s chant, “Let us all be American Hitlers.”

An important note! If any readers personally know of Jewish or Christian students intimidated on a university campus due to protestors’ hate speech or physical assaults, contact the American Center for Law and Justice at www.ACLJ.org. Upon reviewing the situation, they are willing to represent college students for free. It is part of their ongoing outreach to stand for freedom!

As God stated in Isaiah 41:11-12 NIV, “All who rage against you [Israel] will surely be ashamed and disgraced; those who oppose you will be as nothing and perish. Though you search for your enemies, you will not find them. Those who wage war against you will be as nothing at all.”