There are hundreds, no thousands, of university-age students participating now in the anti-Israel protests on campuses across the nation.
Most of them have little idea of the reason for their protests, according to longtime liberal lawyer Alan Dershowitz.
He said they’re “useful idiots” to those who have a more nefarious motive behind the protests and the violence.
But the threat is that they are being groomed for future terrorists.
Dershowitz, the Felix Frankfurther Professor of Law, emeritus at Harvard, wrote in a column at the Gatestone Institute, where he is a fellow, that those protesters include university, high school and even middle school students.
They are protesting Israel, the U.S., and Jews.
“Some of the signs say ‘pro-Palestine,’ ‘ceasefire now’ and ‘end the humanitarian crisis in Gaza.’ But these benign statements hide a far more malignant agenda, the end of Israel as the nation-state of the Jewish people, the end of America as the world’s leading power and the end of democracy and the free market economy. Even if there were a unilateral ceasefire, accompanied by massive humanitarian assistance to the people of Gaza, many of these protests would continue, because Gaza is merely an excuse for a much wider agenda: to destroy Israel and destroy America,” he warned.
New York protesters, he pointed out, recently called to repeat the atrocities of Hamas’ attack on Israeli civilians on Oct. 7, “a thousand times.”
“There were shouts of ‘We are Hamas,’ ‘Death to America,’ ‘Burn Tel Aviv to the ground,’ ‘Israel go to hell’ and ‘Jews to back to Poland.’ The chant of ‘from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free’ is pervasive. Free of what? Free of Jews,” he said.
Nobody, he said, has been caught with a sign calling for a two-state peace solution.
The calls for “revolution” actually bypass the Middle East issues and aim directly at America, he said.
“As in the 1960s, many of these students are being groomed to be the terrorists of the future – in the manner of Kathy Boudin and Bernardine Dohrn back then – and, in the United States, a fifth column, the aim of which is taking down America,” he said.
The are four players in the protests: Arabs and Muslims who hate Israel and Jews, “old line radicals,” anarchists and America-haters, organizers who handle money and organize violence, and then those “useful idiots.”
They have “little or no knowledge of the substantive issues. They simply want to be part of current protest movements, which are popular on campuses and among many of their peers. It is this last group that is most troubling, because many of its members are good and decent people who are being led into dangerous territory by their elders.”
He said, “That these useful idiots are young does not make them less dangerous. Young students were instrumental in bringing to power tyrants such as Hitler, Stalin, Castro, Pol Pot and Mao.”
He conceded that because they’re young, they still can change ideologies. But he said consequences should accrue to those who are violent.
Those should include “arrest and prosecution – for physically intimidating, blocking and harassing Jews or any minorities. Such actions are not protected by the First Amendment, university disciplinary rules, or employers after graduation.”
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