In part three of the Mail’s exclusive serialisation of On Democracies And Death Cults, renowned author Douglas Murray asks how some of the most prestigious universities in the West allowed themselves to become tools of Hamas and its plan to blame Israel for the murder of its own citizens.
In June 2024, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) performed a daring and successful rescue mission for four of the Israeli hostages kidnapped on October 7, 2023.
They included Noa Argamani, a young woman snatched from the Nova festival. Footage of her being driven off on the back of a Hamas motorcycle, screaming in terror, became one of the formative images of the day.
When the IDF rescued her and the other three hostages they found out one of the people who had been holding them was Abdallah Aljamal. During the war Aljamal had filed many articles about the humanitarian suffering inside Gaza.
One of the news sites that he had contributed to was Al Jazeera. And it turned out that while filing these articles, he had failed to tell his readers that he was holding Israeli hostages in his own home, where they were being tortured daily.
Yet details like this were lost all the time. The world seemed so pleased to be able to throw its attentions onto the conflict in Gaza that any and every claim could be made about Israel’s actions. Almost every time, these were presented in the worst possible light. If anyone pointed out that the death tolls in other conflicts in the 21st century were far larger than Gaza, they were told that they were trying to deflect attention from the latter.
If they pointed out, as did Major John Spencer, the chair of urban warfare studies at West Point’s Modern War Institute, that the IDF had implemented more precautions to prevent civilian deaths than any military in history – far beyond what international law requires – they were dismissed as mouthpieces of the Israelis.
It had been the same for years.
When anyone pointed out any virtue of Israeli democracy they were accused of diverting attention from the ‘occupation’, the ‘ethnic cleansing’, or the always-ongoing ‘genocide’.
By the 2010s this had already reached such a pitch that anyone even pointing out that Israel has liberal rights in a region not known for the same was accused of diverting attention from the plight of the Palestinians.
A feminist philosopher at the University of California, Berkeley, Professor Judith Butler, and other ‘gender theorists’ even came up with a term, pinkwashing, to describe anyone who even said that Israel has equal rights for gay people. This allowed people like Butler (who identified as lesbian before identifying as non-binary) to try to rationalise why they had openly landed on the side of people who would kill them if they actually lived under the groups they were supporting.
During the 2006 Israel-Hezbollah war, Butler was asked whether the hesitation of some on the political Left to support terrorist groups due to their violent actions risked harming international solidarity with the Palestinians. Butler responded: ‘Understanding Hamas and Hezbollah as social movements that are progressive, that are on the Left, that are parts of a global Left, is extremely important.’
If Butler herself ever lived under a regime run by Hamas or Hezbollah, she would be executed at worst and made to cover her face from male attention at best.
Watching Western would-be revolutionaries do this to everything involving Israel is like watching someone playing chess and trying to cut off any move their opponent can make. Every fact can be dismissed.
But when it comes to Israel, the difference between ‘equal rights’ and ‘hanging gays from cranes’ is waved away as mere Israeli PR. Notice the difference between living and being hanged and you will be accused of ‘pinkwashing.’
Point out that Israel is a liberal democracy with all the benefits and complexities that that entails and you will be told that you are excusing ‘genocide’.
Notice that Israel is a pluralistic, multiracial, and multicultural society and you will be accused of being an apologist for ‘apartheid’. It is a game set up for one side to lose.
History gets rewritten all the time. But it gets rewritten especially fast in wartime. Within a couple of months of October 7 there was a narrative that went something like this: Israel had the world’s sympathy and support in the immediate aftermath, but had squandered it by prosecuting its war against Hamas in Gaza.
In fact, the world’s sympathy didn’t even outlive the first day as protests exploded on the streets of New York, London, Manchester and many other cities in the West. Two days later celebratory crowds gathered outside Downing Street, lighting flares, chanting ‘Allahu Akbar’ and praising the massacres.
In these early celebrations the vast majority of the participants were British Muslims, with the men dressed in terrorist chic and many of the women in burkas and other face coverings. But very quickly the numbers were swollen as all kinds of people joined the protest.
The first big march against Israel in London took place on October 14, this time with thousands in attendance. Whenever the crowd spotted anyone they identified, rightly or wrongly, as Israeli, they chased them. The British police stood by idly during almost all of this, just a bystander.
A week later, more than 100,000 anti-Israel protesters brought central London to a halt. That demonstration included the Islamist group Hizb ut-Tahrir, banned in a number of Muslim and European countries.
One of its members in the UK declared that the Hamas attacks ‘made us all very, very happy’ and shared a message on social media about ‘killing the Jews’.
Marchers waved the flags of Islamic Jihad and other terror organisations. Some wore clothes which featured depictions of hang gliders, of the same type as those on which gun-toting Hamas terrorists had descended on the Nova music festival party on October 7. Two young Muslim girls wearing these presumably celebratory emblems were eventually found and appeared before a Muslim judge who let them go without charges.
The protesters intimidated not just local shop owners and any locals, especially any Jews, who they thought were in their way. They also tried to intimidate the police, who had clearly lost control as protesters clambered freely over the buildings of Whitehall, covering monuments in terrorist flags.
In the year that followed October 7, I saw protests in a bewildering array of cities – in Toronto and Vancouver, in Sydney and Melbourne, in Johannesburg and Cape Town. Everywhere the same thought came to my mind: What has it got to do with you?
Why does this one conflict matter so much? Of all the conflicts going on around the world, from Syria to Myanmar, from Sudan to Ukraine, why was this the one that people from around the world had chosen to throw themselves into? And not against the invaders but against the victim. In city after city across the West, Jewish communities put up posters of the kidnapped Israelis to try to show the horror of what had happened. And in city after city, they were torn down. In Dublin, a picture of the youngest hostage, eight-month-old Kfir Bibas, was ripped apart, as if there was anything that a babe-in-arms toddler could have done to make himself a culprit or undeserving of sympathy.
But this was the way of the protests in the West, where even recognising the plight of the hostages and those slaughtered in the October 7 atrocity was seen as an affront, a terrible provocation that must be repelled.
Why did the world’s sympathy seem to be not with the victims of the massacres but with the perpetrators? Why had the whole world seemingly got this conflict so completely upside down?
Most curious of all was that, particularly in the US, the impetus for the anti-Israel protests turned out to be not among Islamist rabble-rousers on the streets, but at nearly every one of the country’s elite educational institutions, not least at its most expensive and historic Ivy League schools.
The massacre was still going on when Yale University professor Zareena Grewal tweeted: ‘Israel is a murderous, genocidal settler state and Palestinians have every right to resist through armed struggle.’ Albany Law School professor Nina Farnia wrote: ‘The Palestinians are a beacon to us all.’ And Professor Danny Shaw of New York’s City University declared: ‘These Zionists are Babylon swine. Zionism is beyond a mental illness; it’s a genocidal disease.’
Student groups at Harvard issued a statement holding the Israeli regime ‘entirely responsible for all unfolding violence’.
All this set the pattern for what would happen in the months ahead. Soon tent encampments started going up on one campus after another. The tactics everywhere looked strikingly similar and inexplicably coordinated. As replica protests sprang up at universities in the UK and Canada, there was speculation in some quarters about what level of coordination was going on, and who was paying for these protests.
The following July, US intelligence delivered its verdict: the Iranian government, the prime backer, financier and trainer of Hamas, its proxy, was also providing financial support to protesters.
It was noticeable that the protesting students at dozens of American campuses all had a similar costume. The men generally wore black-and-white checked head scarves known as keffiyehs, aping their Palestinian heroes.
From the outset, there was a major misunderstanding among the campus protesters that their own university must somehow be involved by investing in or supporting the purported Israeli ‘genocide’. It was a claim that was never explained but the delusion that America’s universities were somehow part of Israel’s war machine emerged almost everywhere.
Some of the students must have known their institution was not in any way involved. But they wanted to protest the war and so, quietly turning a blind eye to the truth, carried on pretending their university was somehow central to the conflict in order to give themselves something close to home at which they could direct their rage.
At Columbia, protests went on for an entire academic year, with protesters issuing open calls for violence. ‘Burn Tel Aviv to the ground!’ they screamed and called for the October 7 attack to be repeated ‘not one more time, or five or ten, not 100 more times, not 1,000 more times, but 10,000 times!’
The central claim of many protesters was that Israel was a terrorist state that needed to be dismantled. But added to that was a conviction that activism of the kind they were now deeply involved in would actually make it happen.
Still, it was strange to hear students pick up the slogans and struggles of the most extreme Palestinian groups. ‘From the River to the Sea’ was one of the most common chants – though many of those calling it out didn’t seem to know which river they were talking about (the Jordan) or what the sea in question might be (the Mediterranean).
But there did seem to be a general awareness that this slogan was a call for the elimination of the Jewish state and that the whole of the land of Israel should be occupied by the Palestinians.
And since Hamas had always insisted that there must not be one Jew in such a state – that it must be, to borrow a sinister term from history, Judenrein, or cleared of Jews – then that meant the Jews must all either be killed or forcibly evacuated. None of the student protest leaders or their followers ever put forward any non-genocidal plan for the removal of the Jews of Israel, so it is not a stretch to say that the chant was genocidal.
The same went for the cry of ‘Intifada’ – holy war. There was considerable debate as to whether this was inflammatory. But to anyone who was Jewish, the slogan could not have been clearer. Intifada is not a neutral term, any more than ‘Sieg Heil’ is a phrase that simply means ‘Hail victory’.
Since the 1980s, Palestinian leaders and clerics have twice called for an ‘Intifada’ against the Jewish state, and these turned out to be among the bloodiest periods in Israel’s history. For years, terrorist attacks against innocent civilians happened on a weekly, sometimes daily, basis.
On a beautiful summer evening in Tel Aviv in 2001, scores of young Israeli women queuing to get into a beach-front nightclub were targeted. A Hamas suicide bomber killed 21 of them. Sixteen were teenagers. Limbs were strewn across the road; bodies lay in piles.
As they called for ‘Intifada’, did the protesters at American colleges know this? Equally, when they accused Israel of being an ‘apartheid state’ did they realise that almost a fifth of the population of Israel are Arabs and enjoy the same rights as Jews?
Probably not, because two months after the Hamas massacres, an opinion poll revealed that while 81 per cent of respondents of all ages backed Israel in its fight against Hamas, among 18 to 24-year-olds an extraordinary 60 per cent thought the October 7 attacks were justified and 51 per cent in the same age bracket agreed that Israel ‘should be ended and given to Hamas and the Palestinians’.
It is bewildering that these opinions come from the exact same generation of students who were brought up to believe that words are violence and that silence is violence. Yet calls for genocide appear to be just about the only thing that is not violent.
But, though the campus protests made little impression on Western government, one set of leaders was taking a keen interest. In May 2024, a Hamas leader addressed a conference in Istanbul hosted by the Muslim Brotherhood and expressed his thanks for ‘the great student flood’ that had emerged at American, British and other Western universities.
What students on these campuses were doing was all part of Hamas’s plan and had been factored in. A plan that led direct from campus demonstrations in America to jihad on the streets of Israel.
The endorsements kept coming. The supreme leader of the Iranian revolutionary Islamic government, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, wrote praising the students of America. ‘You are now part of the Resistance Front,’ he told them, ‘and you have begun a dignified struggle under the ruthless police pressure of your government that evidently defends the oppressive and brutal Zionist regime.’
There’s more than one irony in this, but in the years since the Islamic Revolution in 1979, Khamenei and his predecessor, Ayatollah Khomeini, have killed, tortured and imprisoned thousands of Iranian students, especially when they have come out and protested against their own government as the American students were now doing.
In one crackdown in 2009 the government’s security forces openly shot student protesters on the streets, then ordered the digging of mass graves for the bodies of those who were murdered and tortured. Students who were detained in the regime’s prisons in the aftermath of these protests attested to having been raped with batons and bottles. But the Ayatollah wasn’t going to allow something like his own track record to get in the way of destabilising America. In his letter to American students, Khamenei talked about a changing situation, consciences awakening and history turning a new page. He concluded his salutations with citations from the Quran and said: ‘I empathise with you, young people, and I respect your steadfastness.’
The fact that 2024 saw a record surge in executions inside Iran was left out of his letter, as was the fact that his regime publicly executes people convicted of homosexuality by hanging them from cranes and throwing them off high buildings. Khamenei was clearly pleased with the ignorance of America’s students and his own ability to foment dissent in a country he describes as ‘The Great Satan’.
Adapted from On Democracies And Death Cults, by Douglas Murray (HarperCollins, £25), to be published April 10. © Douglas Murray 2025. To order a copy for £22.50 (offer valid to 12/4/25; UK P&P free on orders over £25) go to mailshop.co.uk/books or call 020 3176 2937.
