While the anti-Israel sentiment on college campuses was tempered during the final months of the election campaigns, the rhetoric is reportedly getting more extreme now.
"We're at that inflection point," Columbia University adjunct associate professor Mitchell Silber, who runs a nonprofit to provide security for New York City's Jewish communities, told The Washington Post.
"We're starting to see a radicalization of their message: Blatantly pro-Hamas, blatantly pro-Hezbollah, blatantly pro-Houthis."
Those three Iranian terrorist proxies in the Middle East have been waging attacks on Israel, leading to all-out war that Presidential-elect Donald Trump vowed to end during his presidency, if not before.
"If you get me reelected, we're going to set that movement back 25 or 30 years," Trump told donors in May, vowing deportation for foreign students spreading terrorist propaganda. "As soon as they hear that, they're going to behave."
After Trump's resounding victory this week, running away with the Electoral College and popular votes, anti-Israel campus protests are showing some desperation, moving from "Divest!" and "Cease-fire now!" chants to darker militant messages of "Glory to the resistance!" the Post reported.
The frustrations of the anti-Israel groups are starting to boil over, according the report, as student activists are done with "respectability politics."
"What we are witnessing is a realistic response to people marching and protesting for a year, and that these international institutions and the U.S. have no interest in a cease-fire. They've had a year," University of California at Berkeley chapter Students for Justice in Palestine leader Matt Kovac told the Post.
Jewish students at Baruch College in New York City are increasingly under attack, being called "genocide enablers," "baby killers," and "terrorists," according to the college's Hillel chapter vice president, Aidan Herzlinger, who has been targeted for "propaganda trips" to Israel.
"They're becoming more radical, they're becoming more extreme, and they're doing things that are just a thousand-fold worse than they were last year," Herzlinger told the Post.
"These institutions are supposed to be places of inclusiveness and open dialogue and respectful disagreement. They've created the opposite."
Research and advocacy coordinator for the Council on American-Islamic Relations Farah Afify claims the protests "are peaceful," but admits, "of course, they are increasing in urgency as the situation continues to deteriorate abroad."
But the Anti-Defamation League's Center on Extremism Vice President Oren Segal rejects that as propaganda.
"Before the blood even dried in Israel, we saw the glorification of the violence on that day," he told the Post.
"The blatant support for terror is not something I have ever seen in my over 20 years of doing this."
It will get worse, California State Polytechnic University at Pomona's Students for Justice in Palestine President Mya Ammari, a Palestinian American, vowed.
"People were a lot more afraid of speaking out" last year, she told the Post, but "people eventually became fed up and say what's on their mind.
"One man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter."
Hillel International CEO Adam Lehman agreed the rhetoric is amped up now more than ever.
"The overall picture on campus has moved from a mass protest movement that embodied a diverse set of goals and rhetoric to this more concentrated and therefore more extreme and radical set of goals, tactics and rhetoric," he told the Post.
Eric Mack ✉
Eric Mack has been a writer and editor at Newsmax since 2016. He is a 1998 Syracuse University journalism graduate and a New York Press Association award-winning writer.
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