Universities tolerating anti-Semitism will find out Trump won’t

During the 2024 presidential election, Donald Trump’s critics labeled him as “Hiter” and one who would undermine democracy in America. But these same critics remained completely silent when a real modern-day Hitler was killed and a memorial service was held for him at a U.S. university.

There should be no doubt that the leader of the terrorist group Hamas – Yahya Sinwar – who helped plan the brutal Oct. 7, 2023 surprise raid into Israel that killed 1,200 innocent people while taking another 250 as hostages, was evil personified. That raid claimed the most Jewish lives since Hitler’s rampage during the Nazi Holocaust. And this was not the first time Sinwar had claimed innocent lives. He had dedicated his life to killing Jews.

After the raid, Sinwar became one of the most hunted men in the Middle East. While Israel devoted a great deal of time and resources to locating him, ironically in the end he was found and killed totally by chance. On Oct. 16, 2024, Israeli soldiers from tank and training units operating in Rafah, located in Gaza, got involved in a firefight. They launched a drone to search a house in which an unidentified terrorist was discovered still alive. Firing again, they determined the terrorist had finally been killed. Upon entering the home, they realized it was Sinwar. His body was recovered to conduct DNA testing, which confirmed his identity.

Perhaps Sinwar had felt safe in Rafah as the international community had objected to Israel attacking the city. Upon being informed of Sinwar’s demise, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said, “Today, evil has suffered a heavy blow.”

Sinwar was a 1987 founder of Hamas. Arrested in 1998 and serving 23 years in a prison, he even received life-saving surgery in an Israeli hospital before being released in a prisoner exchange. He always boasted that, when he died, he would do so among his fighters. However, despite that boast, one of the last negotiating terms for a ceasefire that he put forward before his death was that Israel guarantee his life be spared.

Despite the deaths of Jewish men, women and children for which Sinwar has been responsible, his supporters at New York City’s Columbia University outrageously held a memorial service for him and other martyrs only weeks after he was killed.

Among the groups praising the terrorists were various Students for Justice in Palestine chapters and Columbia University Apartheid Divest. Numerous posts were made honoring him with captions like “glory to our martyrs” or “rest in power.” Other groups from Wellesley and the City University of New York (CUNY) joined in, declaring “No matter how many leaders they take, new ones will rise; the resistance will never die.” It is unsurprising among Columbia University’s high profile graduates is Barack Obama (in 1983) with a political science degree.

In an act of pure Israel-hatred, CUNY posted the following in part: “The news regarding the great commander has left our hearts heavy and out [sic] chests breathless. Today, we mourn the loss and celebrate the martyrdom of the lion of Al Quds, the beloved Commander, President, Fighter, his eminence, Yahya Sinwar … Every kuffiyeh drawn on the neck of a CUNY student is tied to the neck of the great commander who woke up the world from their deep daze. We tell the Zionist entity that your assassinations have never worked in the past and they will not work today. From Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah (Hezbollah chief, killed on September 27 in Beirut) to Sheikh Ahmed Yassin [Hamas founder, killed in 2004] to Sheikh Ismael Haniyah (sic) (Hamas leader, killed July 31 in Tehran). Hundreds more will rise to take their place. … Indeed it is a Jihad of victory or martyrdom.”

It is criminal that college students memorialize killers of Sinwar’s magnitude. By any modern measure he was a barbaric animal who showed his declared Jewish enemies – regardless of age or sex – to be unentitled to life. A former Israel official who had interrogated Sinwar for over 180 hours during his captivity described him as ruthless and cruel with “murderous eyes” – a man totally devoted to the destruction of Israel and the killing of Jews.

Despite this outrageous student behavior, the West does little to eradicate such college campus antisemitism.

In the UK, a court even reinstated the visa of a student who celebrated the Oct. 7 massacre.

In Canada, a terrorist convicted in 2023 of bombing a Paris synagogue in 1980 was hired by a university as a professor to teach social justice.

Meanwhile, in the U.S., at the request of a Hamas-appointed mayor, the city of Irvine, California, is considering a twin-city relationship with Gaza. This request came months after tense public debates at Irvine’s city hall concerning the Israel-Hamas war in which masked agitators spouted anti-Jewish vitriol.

Three weeks after the Hamas raid into Israel last year, Trump gave a speech in which he promised, if elected, to deport pro-Hamas demonstrators holding U.S. visas. He declared, “Come 2025, we will find you and we will deport you.”

A Zionist youth movement, Betar USA, established in 1923 has already started collecting the names of pro-Hamas college supporters to make the task easier for Trump. Thirty of them from countries like Syria, Egypt, Jordan, Canada and the U.K. are enrolled in some of our most prestigious universities. Unsurprisingly, Columbia is one of the universities continuing to provide a pro-Hamas friendly environment.

Trump has also warned these universities that failing to put the pro-Hamas fires on their campuses out leaves them at risk of losing their accreditation. Clearly aggressive action by Trump is necessary to hold these universities accountable for a hatred not seen since the Ku Klux Klan wielded its influence on college campuses during the late 19th century.