Amid the disruptions at elite universities across the nation, it is tempting to compare the student protests over Gaza to uprisings during the Vietnam War.
Five decades after Columbia, Berkeley and other schools were rocked by student riots, police raids and chants of “Hell No, We Won’t Go,” tent cities and mass “teach-ins” are popping up again on some of the same campuses.
Now as then, quisling administrators are afraid to enforce rules and radical faculty members egg on the bullhorn bullies.
Students who want the education their parents paid for are ignored as classes are either canceled or offered on a remote-only basis.
But the comparison to the past only goes so far because there are fundamental differences in motivation.
The earlier uprising was driven by opposition to a war in Asia that produced a televised stream of American body bags and the panic of young men facing a military draft.
Today’s protests are driven by something far more sinister: anti-semitism.
From coast to coast, Jews are suddenly villains and Hamas terrorists are heroes.
The narrative is ancient, updated only with contemporary locations and storylines.
Otherwise, it’s straight out of Germany in the 1930s and carries echoes dating back several millenniums.
While many of the history-deprived students accuse Israel of committing genocide in a war started by Hamas, they ignorantly chant “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” which is a call for the extermination of Israel.
So who really supports genocide?
Cheering Israel demise
The vile nature of the allegiance is breathtaking.
The students and professors celebrating the monsters who aim to wipe Israel off the map make Hanoi Jane Fonda look like a patriot.
Outside of Israel, America is the one nation in the world where Jews have felt safe.
They have responded with grateful patriotism and remarkable contributions to the arts, science and numerous other fields.
Now many are deeply disturbed by what is happening.
Even New York, home to more than one-1 in-five 5 American Jews, is proving to be an unreliable sanctuary.
As usual, Mayor Adams and Gov. Hochul talk a good game, but do nothing of substance to change the situation.
They could begin by demanding the resignation of the college presidents who lack the courage their position requires.
Columbia’s Minouche Shafik is Exhibit A as her campus, and my alma mater, is turned into a squalid camp of Jew-haters.
After giving mostly sensible answers in congressional testimony and inviting police onto the private campus to arrest those who took over a central part of the quad, Shafik disappeared as the squatters came back in larger numbers.
She has now lapsed into blather about making all students feel safe, as if it would be a violation of evenhandedness for her to admit that it’s Jews and Jews only who are under attack.
The Post and others report that at least some students who were initially suspended for the illegal encampment have been reinstated and that all of those arrested were released without a criminal record.
Shafik cannot hide behind the First Amendment, which does not protect threatening speech and harassment — both of which are abundant at Columbia.
She is also bound to protect all students who are members of racial and religious minorities under civil rights laws.
Her failure is emboldening the activists who are motivated by antisemitism and have a crush on terrorists.
As such, they represent a fifth column in American life and a second coming of the pro-Hitler movement that appeared in New York before the outbreak of World War II.
Stirring vile memories
The prime example of that movement was an infamous rally of the German American Bund that drew 20,000 members to Madison Square Garden in 1939.
It featured Nazi sympathizers denouncing Jews, with one Bund leader claiming that if George Washington were alive, he would be friends with Hitler.
A short documentary film released in 2017 captures much of the rally, described as the largest Nazi gathering ever held in America.
Written, produced and directed by Marshall Curry, “A Night at the Garden” uses long-forgotten news footage that Wikipedia says was regarded in prewar days as “too inflammatory” to be shown publicly.
Audiences at the time often had negative reactions to Hitler and Nazisim, leading exhibitors to shy away from showing the newsreels.
The documentary, which lasts just seven minutes, shows the effort at the old Garden building to mix Hitlerian pageantry with American patriotic symbols.
A huge picture of Washington that serves as a stage backdrop is flanked by swastikas, and there are military-style uniforms and sieg-heil salutes soon after the recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance and the singing of the Star Spangled Banner.
The main speaker, Fritz Julius Kuhn, head of the Bund, rails against his depiction in “the Jewish-controlled press” and demands “Gentile-controlled labor unions free from Jewish-Moscow directed domination.”
Although this section of his speech is not in the documentary, reports say he calls FDR “Rosenfeld” and mocks New York’s mayor as Fiorello “Jew Lumpen” La Guardia.
A man who rushes the stage, a Jewish plumber’s assistant from Brooklyn named Isadore Greenbaum, is quickly surrounded and beaten by brown-shirt goons.
He later told a judge that “I went down to the Garden without any intention of interrupting. But being that they talked so much against my religion and there was so much persecution, I lost my head.”
The film ends with a printed statement that the Bund meeting came as Hitler was finishing construction of his sixth concentration camp and seven months before he invaded Poland.
The significance of those facts only later became clear, of course, a reminder that we do not have the luxury of silence or an assumption the current eruption will disappear on its own.
Not when echoes of that chilling era ring loudly day and night on the campuses and streets of New York and America.
Antisemitism at home
Indeed, attacks on Jews in public spaces were soaring even before the campus takeovers, with the vast majority of hate crimes in New York involving Jewish victims.
Last October, just three weeks after the Hamas invasion of Israel, FBI director Christopher Wray said attacks on Jews were approaching “historic levels.”
He told congress that “our statistics would indicate that for a group that represents only about 2.4 percent of the American public, they account for something like 60 percent of all religious-based hate crimes.”
Remember that pattern when you hear of groups like the one calling itself the “NYU Palestine Solidarity Coalition.”
It boasts on social media that it has a “Gaza Solidarity Encampment” and demands the end of “all war profiteering and investment in genocide” and a “complete academic boycott of Israel.”
It also wants the NYPD banned from campus and amnesty for “all students and faculty penalized for their pro-Palestinian activism.”
Is there an adult in the house willing to tell them no, hell no?
