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Antisemitic protests across America are largely driven by one man

Palestinian students cheer Hamas ahead of student elections at Birzeit University in the West Bank on May 17, 2022. Hamas won by a landslide. (Abbas Momani/AFP)

American campuses nationwide have been overtaken by pro-Palestine student protesters as they hold rallies, erect blockades, and occupy school grounds in tent encampments. The protests are often explicitly pro-Hamas and invariably antisemitic, although many of the students involved are just there to skip class, do drugs, and hang out with friends. In fact, most have no idea why they are there or what they are saying.

One video by

Konstantin Kisin

shows protesters chanting “from the river to the sea” but, when asked what that means, they say they have no idea. I have seen other videos like this. Another video posted by Visegrád 24, who recently appeared on the podcast, includes the following haiku.

“What would you say is the main goal with tonight’s protest?” the interviewer asks.

“I think the main goal is just showing our support for Palestine and demanding that NYU stops,” a student replies. “I honestly don’t know all of what NYU is doing.”

“Is there something that NYU is doing?”

“I really don’t know. I’m pretty sure…” the student says, then turns to a friend and asks, “Do you know what NYU is doing?”

“About what?” the friend says.

“About Israel. Why are we protesting here?”

The friend replies, “I wish I was more educated.”

This 22-second clip encapsulates these Hamasniks better than anything I’ve seen. The thing about Hamasniks, tankies, and Nazis is that their motivations can be more social and less ideological than we assume. The environment is electric out on the grass lawn with everyone else. Inside is an empty dorm and homework. Maybe you’re already lonely or in a new place. Besides, it’s fun to play rebel. And you make friends.

Most of these protesters seem to care little and know less about politics or what’s happening in Israel in much detail, but as they see it, you can be a liberator or a colonizer, join the Resistance or the Empire, stand with nonwhites or with the politically white.

This is the textbook definition of the useful idiot and the problem appears to be spiraling out of hand here in the United States. Last week, police arrested over 100 protesters at Columbia University. This week, police arrested over 100 protesters at Emerson College in Boston. Things got violent at Emerson and four police officers were injured.

How did all this get kickstarted so quickly and scale up so impressively when so much of it appears to be made up of students who aren’t that serious?

For one thing, beneath the organic and relatively mindless outer layer is a hard kernel of true believers. The deeply racist, easily angered, violent kind. Then you have communist groups making signs and putting together rallies. Watch Kisin’s video above and you’ll hear the protesters who don’t know what they’re saying explain that they got the signs from a nearby stall of communist activists.

But a third factor, and one of the most important with the campus protests we’ve been seeing, is unsurprisingly an antisemitic professor at an elite university in California.

Many of the protesters, including those at Emerson, are part of the National Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), which Vox describes as “one of the key groups currently leading protests for Palestine across US campuses,” and which has organized “encampments that have sprouted up at campuses in the last week.”

This group was created in the early 1990s at the University of California Berkeley by a professor at that school named Hatem Bazian, who teaches post-colonial studies, critical race theory, and Palestine studies. Many of you are no doubt rolling your eyes and thinking, because of course he does. But that’s not all he does.

As the Jewish magazine Tablet reported in November 2017, Bazian has shared posts on social media that question the Holocaust as well as posts that deny Jews even existed during the time of Jesus.

On October 21, just weeks after October 7, Bazian spoke at a pro-Palestine rally in DC where he celebrated the attack.

“There are history before October 7 and there is the history today,” he said to the crowd. “We are not going back to pre-October 7.” Then later, he shouted at the crowd, “And we’re not gonna stop!”

Bazian also co-founded American Muslims for Palestine (AMP), which is being investigated by the Attorney General’s Office of Virginia for possibly raising funds to support terrorist groups like Hamas. AMP has also taken money from the AFR Foundation, whose clients include the Muslim American Youth Association, which the FBI describes as having “played pivotal roles in building Hamas’s infrastructure in the United States.”

Also, in 2001, the U.S. Treasury designated the Texas-based Holy Land Foundation (HLF) as a source of funding for Hamas, and guess what? Multiple officials at HLF were also board members at Bazian’s AMP.

So Bazian is not merely a racist professor. He is not merely one of the main reasons we are seeing so many antisemitic protests in America. He is also connected to groups like Hamas that murder innocent Jewish people and he may even be raising funds on their behalf. We’ll have to see what the Virginia AG determines on that front.

And yes, he’s still a professor at UC Berkeley. Meanwhile, former computer science professor Jonathan Shewchuk was fired from the university last month for giving a student dating advice, saying, “If you want a girlfriend, get out of the Bay Area. Almost everywhere else on the planet is better for that. I’m not kidding at all.”

In case you’re keeping score, Shewchuk thinks the Bay Area is a terrible place to find a girlfriend while Bazian wonders whether the Holocaust really happened, but thinks October 7 should happen again, and the school fired Shewchuk and kept Bazian.

Because of course it did.