Tuesday, October 08, 2024
On Anniversary of Oct. 7, College Students Celebrate Rape, Kidnapping, and Slaughter of Jews
As the civilized world mourns the first anniversary of the worst attack on Jews since the Holocaust—and prays for the release of the more the 100 hostages, including four Americans, still being held by Palestinian jihadists in terrorism tunnels—American college campuses are rife with celebrations of Hamas’ atrocities.
On Oct. 7, 2023, Iran-backed Hamas militants flooded into Israel, engaging in an orgy of violence and mayhem, killing about 1,200 people, including 38 children, in their homes and at a youth music festival.
They raped women, shot children in front of their parents, and kidnapped more than 250 people, including 30 children. They even filmed and bragged about their atrocities.
But to many students on American college campuses, the Hamas militants who died while perpetrating these atrocities are not monsters to be condemned, but “martyrs” to be celebrated.
Just days after the Oct. 7 massacre, the Students for Justice in Palestine chapters nationwide called for a “Day of Resistance” on posters featuring paragliders like those the Hamas terrorists who had flown over the Israeli security barrier to rape and kill civilians used.
The Students for Justice in Palestine chapter at George Washington University projected the words “Glory to Our Martyrs” on the side of the university’s library.
Even among anti-Israel groups, Students for Justice in Palestine is particularly radical. Several chapters have openly endorsed the five-point “Thawabet” (demands on which there can be no compromise) principles, including that Arabs should “reject all normalization” with Israel, that “armed struggle is the only way to liberate Palestine,” and that “Palestine is Arab from the river to the sea, with Al-Quds [Jerusalem] as its capital.”
In other words, they call for genocidal violence against the world’s only Jewish state—home to about half the world’s Jews—until it is destroyed and replaced with another Arab state. Unsurprisingly, the infamous chant that is a common feature at Students for Justice in Palestine rallies—“There is only one solution: intifada revolution”—was inspired by the Nazis’ “Final Solution.”
On the anniversary of the Oct. 7 massacre, Students for Justice in Palestine chapters nationwide are calling for a “week of rage,” celebrating “one year of resistance” and hosting vigils for the supposed “martyrs.”
The timing makes clear that they are celebrating the Oct. 7 atrocities as “resistance” and glorifying its perpetrators as “martyrs.” At Columbia University on Monday, hundreds of students marched, chanting “intifada” and “resistance is justified.” One protester held a sign reading “Long Live The Al-Aqsa Flood” (the jihadist name for the Hamas massacre) featuring Hamas terrorists, including a paraglider.
Students for Justice in Palestine chapters and their pro-terrorist protests are not confined to Ivy League or far-left campuses like Berkeley and Oberlin. They’re even popping up at private and state universities in red states. At Rice University in Texas, the group’s chapter is hosting a “Day of Rage” on the anniversary of the Oct. 7 massacre, featuring a speech from a professor at Rice as well as a vigil to “honor our martyrs.”
At Duke University in North Carolina, the Students for Justice in Palestine chapter is hosting a “Vigil for Palestine” Monday, claiming that it “has been one year since Israel began its relentless genocide against the people of Gaza,” even though there is no genocide in Gaza, and Israel didn’t even send troops into Gaza to fight Hamas and attempt to rescue its captive citizens for more than a week after Hamas launched the war.
Students for Justice in Palestine chapters are also hosting a “Week of Rage” or “Week of Resistance” beginning on Oct. 7 at the University of Texas at Arlington, UNC Chapel Hill, and dozens of other universities. Likewise, the Muslim Students Association at the University of North Florida is hosting a “Gaza Week” starting Oct. 7.
Too often, the pro-terrorist rallies have the explicit support of university faculty and staff—which should be no surprise, given how many former campus radicals find employment on campus.
At Oklahoma State University, the psychology department’s diversity committee emailed students encouraging their participation in the “Week of Rage,” which includes a bake sale and the requisite vigil for “martyrs,” and will be capped off with a movie night.
Oklahoma Superintendent of Public Instruction Ryan Walters condemned the university for supporting the event, stating that “No school, at any level, should ever celebrate the slaughter and destruction of Israel.” Walters called on the public to demand that “OSU end this culture of hate for Israel on their campus.”
It should be no surprise that the email came from a “diversity committee” at the university. College diversity, equity, and inclusion offices have been hotbeds of antisemitism.
As former university dean and professor Stanley Goldfarb observed in City Journal, DEI “has given [antisemites] a pseudointellectual and seemingly moral framework through which to spew their hatred.”
At the heart of DEI is a simple binary: The world is divided between oppressors and the oppressed. Proponents of DEI cast white people as oppressors and black people as the oppressed.
While they apply this frame primarily to America, they often apply it to Israel, too. Apparently, Israel is a bastion of Jewish whiteness, with a racist commitment to shattering the lives of nonwhite Palestinians.
In fact, a colleague of mine—a former collegiate DEI director, no less—was told that Jews are “white oppressors” and that it was her job to “decenter whiteness.”
Hence, why the campus groups most associated with DEI are now leading the [antisemitic] charge. A good example is White Coats for Black Lives, which I encountered at Penn’s medical school. The group, which serves effectively as the medical-student offshoot of Black Lives Matter, has as its mission to “dismantle racism and accompanying systems of oppression.”
Apparently, that means supporting terrorists who beheaded Jewish babies and raped Jewish women on [Oct. 7]. In the wake of those atrocities, White Coats for Black Lives proudly declared that it “has long supported Palestine’s struggle for liberation.”
Students have the right to speak out and support any cause they wish, including hateful ones. But they don’t have a right to taxpayer dollars.
Student groups like Students for Justice in Palestine typically get access to university funds. At public universities, that means taxpayer funding. And even at private universities, students are often subsidized though government loans and tax credits, in addition to the numerous government grants universities receive directly.
Paying for young people to be indoctrinated as hate-filled radicals is more than taxpayers should be expected to bear.
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Untapped Relief: FEMA Is Sitting on Billions of Unused Disaster Funds
Although the Federal Emergency Management Agency told Congress last month that it had $4 billion in its Disaster Relief Fund, officials also warned that the fund could have a shortfall of $6 billion by year’s end, a situation FEMA says could deteriorate in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene.
While FEMA is expected to ask Congress for new money, budget experts note a surprising fact: FEMA is currently sitting on untapped reserves appropriated for past disasters stretching back decades.
An August report from the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Inspector General noted that in 2022, FEMA “estimated that 847 disaster declarations with approximately $73 billion in unliquidated funds remained open.”
Drilling down on that data, the OIG found that $8.3 billion of that total was for disasters declared in 2012 or earlier.
Such developments are part of a larger pattern in which FEMA failed to close out specific grant programs “within a certain timeframe, known as the period of performance (POP),” according to the IG report. Those projects now represent “billions in unliquidated appropriations that could potentially be returned to the [Disaster Relief Fund].”
These “unliquidated obligations” reflect the complex federal budgeting processes. Safeguards are important so that FEMA funding doesn’t become a slush fund that the agency can spend however it chooses, budget experts said, but the inability to tap unspent appropriations from long-ago crises complicates the agency’s ability to respond to immediate disasters.
‘Age-Old Game’
“This is an age-old game that happens and it doesn’t matter what administration is in,” said Brian Cavanaugh, who served as an appropriations manager at FEMA in the Trump administration. “It’s unfortunate how complex disaster relief has become, but it’s skyrocketing costs.”
Cavanaugh said neither action from Congress nor an executive order from the White House would be required to tap those funds because FEMA is operating on the sort of continuing resolutions Congress routinely authorizes. If the money is part of “immediate needs funding,” DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas could draw from the billions in untapped money to help the victims of Helene and then inform lawmakers he was compelled to do so, leaving elected officials facing charges they sought to pinch pennies when Americans were desperate.
FEMA did not respond to a request for comment about whether it could access the earmarked funds.
Mayorkas, whose department oversees FEMA, stressed the agency is not broke, and both he and other FEMA officials said last week there was enough money in the Disaster Relief Fund to meet the needs of victims of Hurricane Helene, which with a death count of more than 200 stands as the most lethal storm to hit the U.S. since Hurricane Katrina in 2005.
Most of Helene’s bills will come due in the future, and Mayorkas said FEMA can meet the day-to-day needs of operations right now in afflicted states but might be hard-pressed if another storm like Helene were to hit this year. Hurricane season officially lasts until the end of November, but historically, September and October have been the months in which the occasional monster smites the U.S.
“We are meeting the immediate needs with the money that we have,” Mayorkas told a press gaggle Oct. 2 on Air Force One. “We are expecting another hurricane hitting. We do not have the funds. FEMA does not have the funds to make it through the season and … what is imminent.”
On Oct. 3, FEMA, which handles state and local government relief aid as well as the federal flood insurance plan and individual emergency requests, said it had spent at least $20 million in North Carolina, South Carolina, and Florida—three of the states that bore the brunt of Helene as it ripped ashore. The figures FEMA provided did not include Georgia, another state hard-hit by Helene, which made landfall in Florida on Sept. 26 as a Category 4 hurricane.
Longtime FEMA critics said the looming shortfall is not surprising, given its main job is to use federal taxpayer dollars to reimburse state and local governments for recovery costs, in addition to more immediate money it provides to victims on an individual basis.
“It doesn’t strike me as too weird,” said Chris Edwards, policy scholar at the conservative Cato Institute. “Right now, $20 million is peanuts, but it’s not necessarily unreasonable to think the upcoming bills will be much, much higher.”
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