No Excuses: Antisemitism at Columbia Must Fall

Masked and emboldened, fists raised high, chanting for “intifada” while storming a library in the heart of New York City. They called it a protest. They called it solidarity. But make no mistake: this was a spectacle of hate, intimidation, and raw antisemitism, dressed in the threadbare costume of activism.

Butler Library, a sanctuary of learning, was invaded by self-styled revolutionaries who declared it a “liberated zone” and plastered its walls with slogans dripping menace. They banged drums, stomped on tables, and howled, with chilling precision, for a “global intifada”, a euphemism, lest anyone forget, for violent uprising. They spray-painted graffiti vowing that “Columbia will burn for the martyrs.”

This was no peaceful demonstration. It was a hijacking. A desecration. A virus of extremism, metastasizing at an Ivy League university. And at its rotten core? The same old story: Jews, targeted simply for being Jews. Blocked from entering their campus library. Excluded. Singled out. Vilified. The mob danced in the streets. They waved their flags. They glorified terror. And they did it all with the smug conviction of people who believe their hatred is righteous.

History rhymes in the darkest ways. We’ve seen these tactics before: intimidation, dehumanization, and the false moral veneer that cloaks ancient hatreds in shiny new slogans. Every Jew knows how the story goes.

Let’s stop pretending. Let’s call this what it is: a cancer on our campuses.
And let’s name its enablers: the academic institutions that have looked the other way for too long, mouthing empty platitudes about “dialogue” and “diversity” while their Jewish students are harassed, hounded, and humiliated.

Columbia’s own record is damning. For years, antisemitic rhetoric has festered there like an untreated wound, oozing poison into every corner of campus life.

This week’s library takeover was not an isolated outburst. It was the latest eruption of a movement that doesn’t seek justice; it seeks obliteration. A movement that chants “from the river to the sea”, and means it. A movement that sees every Jewish student, no matter how progressive or apolitical, as fair game in its grotesque crusade.

But here’s the good news: the tide is turning. This time, Columbia acted with rare swiftness. Faced with immense public outrage and, at last, federal scrutiny, the university called in the NYPD. More than 70 protesters were arrested. The masked agitators were dragged out, zip-tied and defiant, their fists still raised even as their fantasy of revolution crumbled beneath the weight of law and order.

And from Washington? A roar of moral clarity. Enough. No more taxpayer dollars for institutions that tolerate antisemitism. No more indulgence for foreign nationals who come to this country to stoke hatred and chaos. Break our laws and terrorize our students, and you will be arrested. Do it on a visa, and you will be deported. Simple. Just. Necessary.

For far too long, universities have let the mask slip. They have tolerated, no, nurtured, a culture where “anti-Zionism” becomes the fig leaf for antisemitism. They have created sanctuaries not for scholarship, but for those who seek destruction; not for peace, but for war.

And let’s be blunt: there is no daylight between chanting “intifada” and endorsing violence. There is no moral high ground in barring Jewish students from their library. There is no academic freedom in terrorizing your classmates under the banner of “resistance.”

We owe Jewish students more than hollow sympathy. We owe them action. Bold, unapologetic action. We owe the world a reminder that the Jewish people are not alone and will not stand alone. Not in Israel. Not in America. Not anywhere.

Because here is the unshakable truth: Jews have endured millennia of hatred, exile, and genocide. But they have survived, not because they bowed to the mob, not because they stayed silent, not because they hid. They survived because they stood, and they stood tall.

The students who walked past Butler Library this week, who refused to cower in the face of jeering mobs, are part of that same unbreakable chain of resilience.

And to those who think they can break that chain? I have news for you: You will fail. Because in the end, it’s not the masked protesters who have history on their side. It’s the Jewish people, their dignity, their courage, and their unshakable right to exist in peace and security, whether in Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, or a library in New York City.

Never again means never again. On every campus. In every street. In every corner of this world.