Eli Lake
The Free Press, Sept. 7, 2024
“What leads a person to put down their placard and pick up a gun?”
Last year, American universities exploded with protests over a war half a world away in Gaza. In solidarity with the perpetrators of October 7, keffiyeh-clad students covered campus grounds with “encampments,” took over buildings, waved the flags of terrorists, and menaced Jewish classmates.
As fall semesters begin this week, some major universities—from NYU to UCLA—have implemented new rules to protect Jewish students from the protesters who declared sections of campus no-go zones for “Zionists,” which often just meant Jews.
Nonetheless, the chaos appears to be returning.
A week ago, at Temple University, protesters marched in solidarity with Palestinian “resistance against their colonizers.” As students returned to class at the University of Pittsburgh, a man attacked a group of Jewish students with a bottle. Meanwhile, at the University of Michigan, four protesters were arrested during a “die-in.”
“The longer the war in Gaza, the longer the unrest in the Middle East continues, the greater the fertile ground for an escalation or expansion of protests,” Bruce Hoffman, a scholar at the Council on Foreign Relations and expert on domestic terrorism, told The Free Press. Hoffman believes serious violence is not out of the question, if campus encampments are dismantled and protesters become convinced they are the victims of an oppressive state bent on usurping their rights. …Source