Whitewashing Anti-Israel Campus Protestsby A.J. Caschetta
Special to IPT News
July 16, 2025 https://www.investigativeproject.org/9402/whitewashing-anti-israel-campus-protests  April 22, 2024 - Anti-Israel students set up a protest encampment on the campus of Columbia University in New York. Photo credit: credit: lev radin / Shutterstock.com |
How history will treat the post-October 7 anti-Israel protests on college campuses across America will depend in part on how much longer they last. As we approach the 2-year mark, there seems little room for indifference. Normal people are appalled by the Hamas Hipsters – privileged adolescents at $80,000 per-year schools – calling to "Globalize the Intifada." But not everyone. Some people, especially some academics, are proud of them. Danielle K. Brown, a journalism professor at Michigan State University who has devoted "over a decade" to researching protests and media coverage, wrote about the "disconnect" between "outside onlookers" and "those on the ground." Whereas the former can't see past the ugliness of the anti-Israel protests, the latter understand and appreciate "the meticulous planning by advocacy groups and leaders aimed at getting a message out." She calls it the "protest paradigm" and argues that this divide was particularly noticeable during the Spring 2024 semester of encampments. Breaking the Protest Paradigm Brown blames the media for highlighting "the spectacle rather than the substance," which leaves "audiences uninformed about the nuances of the protests." She claims that the protest paradigm is only broken "in the work produced by journalists who have engaged deeply and frequently with the advocacy groups" responsible for the protest, especially students. Student journalists may be more likely to identify with protesters than with university administrations and public officials, but since the Left has adopted the Hamas cause, there are plenty of equally-enthusiastic and more capable "insiders" willing to "control the narrative," including professional journalists, politicians, and especially professors (including Brown herself). Where outsiders saw antisemitism, violence, and disruption of expensive educations, Brown and other "insiders" uniformly praise the protesting students for their bravery and deny that they are antisemitic. They blame someone else for any violence that occurs, and they minimize harassment of Jewish students, property destruction, and building takeovers. Some even have the audacity to portray the protesters as morally superior to the universities they are protesting. Not since June 2020, when Seattle Mayor Jenny Durkin compared the notorious CHAZ (Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone) to a "block party" and enthused that it might be another "summer of love," has such an effort been undertaken to defend the indefensible. Aren't They Beautiful? Since the primary "advocacy group" behind the post-October 7 protests is the Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), it's not surprising that Faculty for Justice in Palestine (FJP) has been its primary ally on "the inside." FJP, after all, exists solely to provide public relations services for SJP. When University of Michigan students attempted to take over a building on the Ann Arbor campus, they were met with force from campus and local police. The university's FJP chapter described it as "a beautiful display of unity, moral courage and justice." Georgetown University's Faculty and Staff for Justice in Palestine published an "Open Letter" on May 13, 2024, calling the encampment at George Washington University "a positive, peaceful, respectful protest" and lavishly praising the "students [who] managed to create and sustain an orderly, clean, and lively encampment, with two kitchens, a medical center, and an outdoor classroom where students learned, discussed, sang, prayed, and danced." Representative Virginia Foxx (R-NC) saw something different with her own eyes: "defacement of buildings, destruction of property [and] threats against Jewish students." Definitely Not Antisemitic Describing the encampments as beautiful was often not enough. It was equally important to assert that, contrary to what anyone could plainly see, they were not antisemitic. Outright denials were common, such as the University of Michigan FSJP's denunciation of "the repressive actions and demonizing language of President Ono ... – in particular, using the mendacious cudgel of anti-semitism." But mere denials were not enough for "insiders" defending the encampments at Columbia University and George Washington University, which received the most attention of the 100-plus encampments at schools in the U.S. They found it important to impart a Jewish character to the protests. George Mason University's Faculty and Staff for Justice in Palestine's praised the encampment at GWU as "an inclusive space of free education, food security, medical care, and creativity. They organized teach-ins, prayed, made art, held a Shabbat service." A Reuters article describing the Columbia encampment as a "living history lesson," nonchalantly adds that protesters ate "free kidney beans and rice and kosher Passover snacks" and asserts that "Reuters journalists have seen students peacefully chatting, reading, eating and holding both Jewish and Muslim prayer ceremonies." When four of the most far-left members of the New York City Council (Tiffany Cabán, Shahana Hanif, Sandy Nurse, and Alexa Avilés) toured the Columbia encampment, they wrote about what it was "really like." Taking umbrage with descriptions of "a cesspit of antisemitic hatred and a threat to the safety of all Jewish students and faculty," Cabán et al. countered that, "Far from a danger zone where Jews should fear to tread, the encampment hosted a large kabbalat shabbat service on Friday evening, followed the next night by an equally well-attended Havdalah service." Enlisting anti-Zionist Jews in the cause provides a shield against charges of antisemitism. As Clemens Heni puts it, "Jewish anti-Zionists give hatred of Israel a kind of Kosher stamp." But it a weak shield based on a false premise. Curiously, the same Left that portrayed Larry Elder as "the black face of white supremacy" during his candidacy for the 2021 California gubernatorial recall election is quite comfortable implying that Jews can't be antisemitic. It's Someone Else's Fault Another common goal of encampment defenders is to absolve the protesters of all violence by deflecting blame onto others, especially university administrations and police departments. Georgetown University's FSJP blames "Mayor Bowser and the GWU administration [for having] created the very conditions that it had accused the students of fostering: chaos, conflict, and violence." Likewise, George Mason University's FSJP "condemns in the strongest terms possible GW President Ellen Granberg's decision to call the MPD on students who were demonstrating peacefully and endangering no one." The University of Texas FSJP denounced university "President Hartzell's decision to once again order a military-style invasion of the UT campus." Brown herself criticizes Texas Governor Greg Abbot for having "equated protesters [at the University of Texas, Austin] to criminals with antisemitic intentions" and unfairly shaping the narrative by overshadowing "rebuttal from protest participants." Protesters Are Better Than Everyone The most exorbitant white-washing tactics portray student protesters as wiser and better at educating than the universities where they protest. At the University of San Francisco, where the anti-Israel protesters gave their encampment the grandiose name "The Peoples' University for Palestine," the school's FJP chapter, "Educators for Justice in Palestine," praised the "peaceful movement that has created a robust learning environment where students have learned to engage in collaborative work and discussion." Harvard's FJP was equally impressed: "With their encampment, our students aim to construct a liberated space for collective education." But the most over-the-top, bombastic hyperbole in praise of any post-October 7 protest came from Timothy Kaufman-Osborn, an emeritus professor of politics at Whitman College who wants The Federalist Papers banned from college classes. In Kaufman-Osborn's effusive defense of the Columbia encampment for Project MUSE, the university is "an autocratic property corporation," and the student protesters are "the encampment's residents." In language only an academic would write, he explains that the protesters' "embrace of procedural democracy was subtended by a struggle to meet mundane needs whose satisfaction is a necessary precondition of the possibility of autonomous self-governance." But the brave students of his tale pressed on and built their ephemeral campus Utopia: "That infrastructure [which] took shape as DIY sanitation systems, communal kitchens, and improvised health facilities owned by no one in particular ... challenged the privatized conception of property that would soon inform the encampment's demolition." Representative Josh Gottheimer (D-NY) saw something different with his own eyes: "Jewish students ... being verbally – and even physically – assaulted. Masked protesters ... cheering on and actively calling for the genocide of Jews." Conclusion Contrary to what anonymous FJP members, socialist politicians, and others "on the ground" wrote, post-October 7 anti-Israel protesters have created nothing but hostile environments. The encampment students in particular pilfered university resources and disrupted the educations of their peers who want nothing to do with pro-Hamas demonstrations. If any "created food security," it was on someone else's dime. They also weren't "residents" but trespassers, and they neither saved democracy nor challenged authoritarianism. As former AAUP president Carey Nelson aptly put it, they "sought to impose their views on everyone else. They did not doubt they were in possession of the truth and they sought compliance with it." What will the Fall 2025 semester bring? Will there be more protests and encampments in solidarity with Hamas? Or maybe the Islamic Republic of Iran will be the new cause. Whatever comes, there will be no shortage of "insiders" to explain why you should not believe your lying eyes.  Chief IPT Political Correspondent A.J. Caschetta is a principal lecturer at the Rochester Institute of Technology and a fellow at Campus Watch, a project of the Middle East Forum where he is also a Milstein fellow.
Copyright © 2025. Investigative Project on Terrorism. All rights reserved. Related Topics: A.J. Caschetta, Encampments, October 7, anti-Israel, pro-Palestine, Columbia University, antisemitism, Hamas, Israel, Students for Justice in Palestine, Faculty and Staff for Justice in Palestine | 
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