The Columbia University encampment protests have seen a startling escalation in violent and pro-terrorist rhetoric since the anti-Israel activists occupied the campus on Wednesday.
Videos of demonstrators promising to carry out more massacres similar to the one on October 7 have flooded social media, many of them posted by pro-Palestinian groups and activists themselves.
They have not only praised Hamas, calling on them to kill more IDF soldiers, shoot rockets, and burn down Tel Aviv, but they have also identified with the terrorist group, with one woman saying, “We’re all Hamas.”
Pro-terrorist chants take over the campus
The explicitly pro-terrorism chants, slogans, and speeches made by the anti-Israel activists are a jarring contrast to the rhetoric they have employed over the last few months.
Anti-Israel activists have largely used terms and phrases that provide a thin veneer of plausible deniability about their violent aspirations and objectives.
Protesters have constantly called for an intifada, obviously in reference to the waves of terrorism that rocked Israel in the 1990s and early 2000s. Still, activists insisted, as Stop the War member Shabbir Lakha said in the UK in February, that it just meant “uprising,” stripping away all context.
This same game of pretending there is nuance in the use of a word also extends to “Jihad,” which the London Metropolitan Police claimed in October had “a number of meanings.”
One of the most popular chants used by anti-Israel activists has been the slogan, “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.” The phrase implicitly calls for the destruction of the State of Israel, which lies between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea.
While the US House of Representatives passed a resolution calling it antisemitic on Tuesday, activists have been able to skirt around university policies for years with the slogan.
Anti-Israel activists have insisted that the destruction of Israel is not necessarily genocidal and that the goal of chants like “we don’t want two states, we want ‘48” is simply to establish one state where Jews and Arabs can live together with the same rights in utopian harmony.
Through obvious word substitution, “Zionist” was used in place of “Jew,” and Israelis and Diaspora Jews around the world were asked to pretend that they didn’t notice that “Zionist” was being used in classic antisemitic tropes about money and power. Antisemitism and anti-Zionism are not the same, anti-Zionist Jews assured.
Over the course of the last few months, activist groups have constantly alluded to “floods” in their rhetoric, as if Israelis and Jews didn’t understand that they were referencing the Hamas operational name for the October 7 massacre: “Operation Al-Aqsa Flood.” This often manifests in calls to “flood the street” or, like Within Our Lifetime wrote on a Saturday call to action, “Flood Columbia for Gaza!”
Almost all of the protests have fallen under the farce that they were pushing for a “permanent ceasefire” while also calling for intifada and for a Palestinian state to be established from the river to the sea.
THE PRETENSE of advocating for peace and an immediate ceasefire was stripped away on Wednesday when anti-Israel activists established an encampment on Columbia grounds; other universities have followed suit.
The mask of the protestors has come off, revealing what they truly advocate for
The mask has fallen for the same reason it momentarily slipped on October 7 itself: The anti-Israel activists are confident, comfortable, and believe they are winning.
On October 7, anti-Israel activists, many forgetting themselves, took to social media and the streets and celebrated before any IDF response had begun.
More than just celebrating, anti-Israel demonstrators called for more blood, acting as if they were on the cusp of complete victory, i.e., the toppling of Israel.
They called for the gassing of Jews in Sydney, and across X, they urged Hamas to carry out the same actions committed on October 7 across Israel.
When the moment of ecstasy was over, they composed themselves and put the mask back on. Yet every time the pro-terrorist mob felt they were winning again, they allowed us a glimpse at what they truly advocated for.
The anti-Israel activists smelled blood in the water on April 15 as organizations like WOL and American Muslims for Palestine blockaded bridges, roads, airports, and businesses in an effort to cause economic damage to Western states.
As their confidence grew, they shouted “Death to America” while burning US flags and, with Hamas headbands and Hezbollah flags, showed open support for terrorist organizations.
Anti-Israel activists feel like they are defeating the administration and the New York Police Department when maintaining their encampment.
Moreover, they believe, perhaps rightly so, that they can replicate the encampment of universities across the United States and force institutions to adopt boycott, divestment, and sanctions policies.
“Who runs Columbia?” the activists chanted during a livestream on social media on Saturday. “The students run Columbia!”
During the protests, they confirmed what was meant by chants like “Globalize the intifada,” with a protest leader giving a speech on Saturday night explaining that “it was the Al-Aqsa Flood that put the global intifada back on the table again.”
Initial calls for a ceasefire were a ploy
Calls for a ceasefire were revealed to be merely a ploy as activists urged Hamas to fire rockets at Tel Aviv.
They showed that they fully supported the actions of October 7, warning that the “7th of October is going to be every day for you.”
As they chanted “Jews” and told them to “go back to Poland” and sang in Arabic that “from river to river, Palestine is Arab,” it became painfully obvious that they wanted to ethnically cleanse or genocide Jews in the Levant.
As events continue to unfold in Columbia and other universities and anti-Israel activists get drunk on victory, they will no doubt continue to reveal even more about their true intentions.
After October 7, they put the mask back on, and they will try to do so again after this wave of chaos.
It is necessary to share what they truly think and desire as broadly as possible so that, no matter what, everyone will know the ugliness behind the mask.