The Middle East Forum’s Dexter Van Zile visited Gaza Solidarity Encampments in Boston/Cambridge at Emerson College, MIT, and Harvard (he didn’t make it into Harvard Yard). MEF has posted his report “Students for Justice in Palestine Grooming American Students for Intifada: A First Person Account.” Who are these people? What do they want? What do they have to say? Who funds them?
It’s an enterprising report. I am sorry to say, however, that Van Zile doesn’t make much progress in his investigation. As I have asked a few times before: Where is the FBI? The FBI is apparently otherwise engaged. It’s not love they’re looking for in all the wrong places. They are taking their cues from the Biden administration.
What’s it all about? Van Zile turns to the work of Richard Landes:
They’re paving the way for Islamists in the West just as they did in Tehran in 1979.
And that’s the point. Richard Landes, a former history professor at Boston University and author of Can “The Whole World” Be Wrong? Lethal Journalism, Antisemitism and Global Jihad, says the encampments taking place throughout the United States are part of a “cognitive war” intended to convince Westerners to stand down in the face of Islamist efforts to transform our civilization.
The success of the encampment movement, Landes declared, “is the culmination of fifty years during which [Edward] Said’s Orientalism occupied Western academia (hence it’s most apt for [the campaign] to emanate from Columbia) pushing out any sane narrative about Caliphators’ invasion of the West.”
The encampments represent “a new stage in the Bolshevization of the movement in which outside money and outside actors are infiltrating, brainwashing, and regimenting the wannabe ‘true believers’ on the inside,” Landes reported. “Thus, the ugliest aspects of global Jihadi warfare can express their desires openly, with the support of the ‘cream’ of the elites they target. It’s hard to imagine a greater cognitive war victory for the Jihadis and a greater peril for the West.”
Daniel Greenfield has posted a sidebar to Van Zile’s story. Greenfield reports that the Biden administration has undertaken a civil rights investigation of Columbia for “extreme anti-Palestinian, anti-Arab, and Islamophobic harassment,” as alleged in a complaint filed with the Department of Education by Palestine Legal, “the same group providing advice to the encampment protesters.” The complaint challenges the suspension of members of Students for Justice in Palestine.
Well, anyone can file a complaint, but again: Who are these people? (See the Discover the Networks profile of SJP here.) Who is behind them? Who is funding them? Funding, that is, our very own fifth column.