Too Close for Comfort: The Pro-Hamas Crowd Dislikes the KKK Comparison

Families paying $100,000 a year to send their kid to Columbia University shouldn't think they're not getting their money's worth. Extracurricular activities aren't limited to Ultimate Frisbee and the fencing club, because there's ever so much more to choose from. There's the student group known as Columbia University Apartheid Divest, one of numerous student groups that, within minutes of learning of Hamas' slaughter, rape and dismemberment of 1,200 Israelis on Oct. 7, quite naturally endorsed that slaughter, rape and dismemberment.

The good news is that the group is expanding its agenda: Last week, they announced that their goal isn't just the narrow one of annihilating Israelis, but "the total eradication of Western civilization." So this is tuition money -- and alumni donations -- truly well spent.

One person whom the pro-Hamas crowd certainly wanted to eradicate was Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, who had the temerity earlier this year to ask this question about the mobs on college campuses who, wearing Hamas garb, expressly supported Hamas, whose raison d'etre is, in fact, the genocide of Jews. "We have to query," Shapiro wondered, "whether we would tolerate this if these were people dressed up in KKK outfits or KKK regalia."

It isn't merely a legitimate question. It's the obvious one, to which the answer is also obvious: We wouldn't.

As Shapiro stated expressly, the Ku Klux Klan comparison doesn't apply to all protesters of the war, however disinterested they are in the fact that the war is entirely due to Hamas' savage, barbaric invasion of Israel. But it sure applies to enough of them.

Pick a campus, any campus.

At Harvard University, as a federal judge put it last week, there was "an outburst of antisemitic behaviors." The targeting and the bullying of Jewish students, the blockading and the assaults and the vandalism -- all of it is amply documented.

At the University of Massachusetts, a Jewish student was called a "Zionist s---bag" and then punched and kicked repeatedly. As on campuses across America, the online harassment and vilification of Jewish students and the threats against them were vicious and widespread. At Cornell University, the university center for Jewish life was targeted by what Cornell's president called "horrendous, antisemitic messages" threatening violence against the Jewish community.

Swastikas drawn on residence halls and dormitory doors are commonplace now, too unremarkable to generate much attention. The same for calls to boycott Jewish organizations and activities, and to exclude Jewish students from campus programs.

At Brown University, students and employees received threats of violence. At Tufts University, a sign reading "Homeland or death" was placed next to a Palestinian flag. According to the Tufts Hillel Director, Jewish students have been spat on and "subjected to stomach-churning antisemitic taunts and jeering from their peers." At MIT, as elsewhere, Jewish students faced chants of "Death to the Zionists" and "Say it loud, say it clear, we don't want no Zionists here!"

Across the country, Students for Justice in Palestine host speakers who accuse Israel of harvesting the organs of dead Palestinians. At Northwestern University, mezuzahs -- pieces of parchment inscribed with Torah verses traditionally placed on the doorposts of observant Jews -- were ripped from students' doors. At the University of California at Berkeley, students holding an Israeli flag were attacked.

This isn't sporadic, and it isn't coincidental. It is part of a purposeful, well-organized campaign of intimidation, whose purpose and methods aren't readily distinguishable from those of the KKK. As campuses prepare to reopen, we can expect more of it, perhaps worse than ever before. Students who are exhorted to join in this will decide for themselves whether they want to be the new KKK's foot soldiers.

It was journalist Michael Kinsley who famously defined a political gaffe as stating a truth that no one is "supposed" to say aloud. By this standard alone, Shapiro's likening of some of the anti-Israel protesters to the KKK qualifies as a gaffe. This week, however, marking the seventh anniversary of the white supremacists' march on Charlottesville, if Shapiro's question qualified as a gaffe, it was a gaffe very much worth making.

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Jeff Robbins' latest book, "Notes From the Brink: A Collection of Columns about Policy at Home and Abroad," is available now on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Apple Books and Google Play. Robbins, a former assistant United States attorney and United States delegate to the United Nations Human Rights Council in Geneva, was chief counsel for the minority of the United States Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. An attorney specializing in the First Amendment, he is a longtime columnist for the Boston Herald, writing on politics, national security, human rights and the Mideast.