The arrest of the student who organized anti-Israel demonstrations at Columbia University has provoked an escalating row about free speech.
Columbia has been the epicenter of the harassment and intimidation of Jewish students on campuses around America, as part of a globally orchestrated campaign against Israel’s war in Gaza following the Hamas-led Oct. 7, 2023, massacres.
The Columbia ringleader, Mahmoud Khalil, a 30-year-old Syrian of Palestinian-Arab descent, was arrested over the weekend by Immigration and Customs Enforcement and faces having his green card revoked.
A judge Monday temporarily blocked any attempt to deport him.
The Department of Homeland Security said Khalil had “led activities aligned to Hamas.”
Yet Senate Judiciary Democrats tweeted: “Free Mahmoud Khalil.”
Other Democratic lawmakers, along with civil-rights activists and advocacy groups, have protested that Khalil is being targeted merely for expressing support for the Palestinians.
Such indifference to the outrageous lawbreaking, harassment and intimidation that has consumed universities, which have echoed for months chants for Israel’s destruction and the murder of Jews, throws into even sharper relief the shocking revelation that support for Israel in America has fallen to below 50% for the first time.
The latest Gallup polling revealed only 46% of Americans say their sympathies lie more with Israel than the Palestinians, while 33%.
Thirty-three percent sympathize more with the Palestinians, up by 6 percentage points from last year.
How could this have happened?
American support for Israel has long been as reliable as the sun rising in the morning.
Israel is not only regarded as America’s indispensable bulwark in the Middle East; Americans’ support for it has been more full-throated and emotional than among many Jewish communities around the world.
The huge drop in support overall has been caused by Democrat supporters, who have registered a stunning 59% support for the Palestinians versus only 21% for Israel.
In sharp contrast, Republicans support Israel over the Palestinians 75% to 10%.
In other words, Israel has become a partisan issue.
So why have the Democrats turned against the Jewish state?
Woke victim theory
Gallup suggests the reason is the Israel-Hamas war, as well as the polarization of attitudes toward President Trump.
These are hardly likely to be the main causes, though, since such trends have been developing over many years.
The main reason is surely the Democrats have turned against Israel because the left in general has turned against Israel.
This is principally the outcome of the massive Palestinian propaganda campaign that’s been running for decades in the universities and across all the institutions of the culture, indoctrinating successive generations in a false and malicious narrative that’s scarcely been challenged.
It’s also because this Palestinian cause has become in turn the centerpiece of the “intersectionality” agenda of interlocking “victim” groups based on race, ethnicity, sexuality, gender and other categories of identity politics.
These campaigns of grievance and resentment are all based on attacking the Western nation-state as having been born in the original sins of colonialism and racism, with its inhabitants guilty of white privilege.
Israel, the Jewish people’s nation-state and regarded as an outpost of American power occupied by white Jews — though most Israeli Jews are brown- or black-skinned and 20% of the population are Israeli Arabs — is therefore held to be multiply damned.
Fringe is mainstream
The liberal-progressive world’s embrace of all these radical agendas has moved the dial so that what was once considered far left is now deemed the center ground and what was once considered the center ground is now deemed right wing or even far right.
As a result, attitudes in the Democratic Party that would once have been regarded as the fringes of politics or society in general are now considered mainstream.
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has repeatedly demonized Israel and accused it of genocide.
Rep.?Pramila Jayapal branded Israel a “racist state” and in a CNN interview was reluctant to unequivocally denounce Hamas terrorists’ rape of Israeli women in the Oct. 7 atrocities.
When two Jewish Republicans introduced a resolution decrying antisemitism, Jayapal and Ocasio-Cortez were among 13 Democrats voting no.
Another 92, reluctant either to approve the resolution or be on record as against it, voted “present.”
Their key objection was the resolution’s assertion that “anti-Zionism is anti?semitism.”
Both the Obama and Biden administrations helped promulgate distortions and falsehoods blaming Israel for obstructing peace in the region while ignoring, excusing and even funding Palestinian terrorism and anti-Jewish incitement.
And for decades, much of the mainstream media have pumped out Palestinian propaganda.
The Palestinian cause has become for all liberal progressives the must-have badge of moral worth.
But this cause is based on the demonization of Israel.
Jew hate in vogue
This poison has infected the universities.
Overwhelmingly dominated by liberal progressives, they have turned a blind eye to or actively connived at the hate marches, demonstrations and encampments that have turned so many of them into crucibles of Jew-hatred.
Rather than come to the defense of Jewish students running this gauntlet of hate, Democrats actually reinforced it.
In the face of the sometimes violent “occupations” of US campuses that consistently called for the end of Israel, President Joe Biden said the protesters “have a point,” while Vice President Kamala Harris said of one protester accusing Israel of genocide: “Listen, what he’s talking about, it’s real.”
Trump has vowed to deport foreign students and imprison “agitators” involved in “illegal protests.”
The administration announced last week it’s rescinding $400 million in federal grants to Columbia, accusing it of failing to fight antisemitism on campus.
This is extremely welcome.
But generations have been indoctrinated with propaganda demonizing Israel and sanitizing the exterminatory Palestinian cause.
And violence and intimidation have increasingly become tolerated over a range of issues such as Black Lives Matter and Antifa as well as Gaza.
These ideologies are all anti-West and anti-America.
As I write in my new book, “The Builder’s Stone: How Jews and Christians Built the West — and Why Only They Can Save It,” Jewish values are at the very heart of Western and American culture.
Concepts at the core of democracy — limited government and the rule of law founded in the consent of the people — were introduced to the world by the Hebrew Bible.
They were explicitly drawn upon by America’s Founding Fathers when they laid down the principles of the US Constitution and defined the American nation.
That nation and its foundational values have been under sustained assault by liberal universalists led by the Democratic Party.
Scratch an opponent of Israel and you’ll find someone who believes the worst of the West and rubbishes its institutions.
Scratch a protester against the West and you’ll find an enemy of Israel.
The war against Israel is a war against the West; and the war against the West is a war against the Jews.
Melanie Phillips is the author of “The Builder’s Stone: How Jews and Christians Built the West — and Why Only They Can Save It,” out now.