A message on Israel, Hamas, and the demagnetizing of our culture’s moral compass among the college population.

The unconscionable attack on Israeli civilians by Hamas gunmen on October 7 was marked by murder, rape, torture, and kidnapping. Women, the elderly, and even little babies were targeted. On the bloodiest day in the country’s 75-year history, an estimated 1300 were killed, over 3300 wounded and approximately 150 Israelis were taken hostage. Karys Rhea, a fellow with the Jewish Leadership Project stated, “. . . This is the greatest loss of Jewish life in a single day since the Holocaust.”

The Hamas invaders were not soldiers; they were assassins. This was not an act of war. It was a well-thought-out, well-financed massacre of Jewish civilians. The Hamas charter calls for the ultimate annihilation of all Israeli Jews, followed by the annihilation of Jews around the world. Sound familiar?

Sadly, some people, including some right here in America, actually celebrated the slaughter and blamed those being murdered, raped and kidnapped. The reason WHY would be very difficult to explain, certainly to the mother of a reportedly beheaded innocent baby. It would be especially difficult to explain why many of America’s most respected, elite universities are not only indulging, but actually endorsing sanctioned student organizations holding celebrations for the murder of her baby, friends and neighbors and those who massacred them.

Yet that is sadly what many of our top colleges and universities are doing concerning the attack on Israel. Harvard, Yale, Georgetown, UCLA and Stanford are high-profile examples who have reacted to the October 7 attack in a manner that should raise concern, if not outrage. For years, too many of these schools have allowed pure hate-based groups to exist on campus, creating real fear among fellow students, especially Jewish students due to anti-Semitic intimidation.

These student organizations’ reaction to the Hamas attack on Israeli Jews was so appalling that it put the institution’s policies and standards on full transparent display and revealed a disturbing degree of ivy-covered “intellectual rot.”  Americans nationwide have been appalled and shocked.

The leadership of these supposedly highly sophisticated schools are so busy “virtue signaling” and coddling students who think that words are violence, but violence—horrific, inhuman violence—is social justice, that they have forgotten it is their job to teach their students to think and to test reality. Instead of training tomorrow’s leaders, these “great” learning centers are instead profoundly demagnetizing our culture’s moral compass among the college population.

A population for whom there is largely no longer a “true north,” no clarity of right and wrong. 

Senator Cory Booker commented on Tuesday that there was a time we took pride in calling out bad behavior and bad actors, calling evil – evil and hatred-hatred. Martin Luther King, Jr. said we suffer not just from the vitriol and violence of our enemies but from “the appalling silence and inaction of the good people!” This is a critical moment in time, a critical opportunity to stand up, step up and speak up against evil and not be appallingly silent.

I am no expert in geopolitics. But I don’t need to be to immediately denounce the actions of Hamas as utterly sick, twisted, disgusting and inexcusable.

Staying fully in my lane of analyzing human behavior, I will amplify some things I know for sure:

I know for sure the atrocities and ensuing celebrations committed by Hamas are inexcusable and unjustifiable. Murdering, raping and torturing civilians, is just plain sick. I don’t care how much someone feels victimized, no matter how right or “anointed” they feel; the kind of brutality we witnessed is wrong on every level. These are not the acts of honorable soldiers, freedom fighters, or militants; these are the acts of out of control, misguided monsters.

From a psychological standpoint, I can’t help but wonder what these assassins say to themselves, alone, in the middle of the night after burning or beheading a terrified and defenseless little baby boy or girl, whichever evil act they may have perpetrated.

Have they bothered to think about how many of their own children they have destined to be sacrificed in the retaliation that is certain to follow. Retaliation they have brought down on the Gazans/Palestinians (62% of Gazans supported maintaining a cease-fire? 50% believe Hamas should stop calling for the destruction of Israel and accept a permanent two-state proposal.)

I know for sure that allowing the university-sanctioned student organizations to celebrate the sadistic acts of terror without consequence confirms these “enlightened/woke” universities are failing miserably in shaping, educating, maturing the minds of those students. Even if you hold the student solely accountable for choosing their positions, evidence suggests university faculty are not challenging the students’ thinking, instead hiding behind first Amendment arguments. Ironic since the Ivy league schools have abysmal records on free speech!

We can’t control a terror group like Hamas doing such a thing as this, but we can control how we respond. It is here in the United States that the universities are failing miserably. Instead of hiding behind a weak free speech argument, it is the educator’s job to teach critical thinking that will lead to a rational response. Critical thinking is an essential mindset for combating violence, intolerance and wrong-headed conclusions, a skill set in short supply in today’s world.

Perhaps such training on how to think would have led these students and their organizations to realize several things:

• They are not actually supporting Palestinians and Gazans when they are supporting Hamas.
• Hamas are not even Palestinians (whom they exploit). Hamas are an avowed, ultra-radical terrorist organization that originated in Egypt.
• Many now say they didn’t know what they were signing and are being unfairly blackballed by alumni and national employers. Not good critical thinking to sign what you haven’t read.
• You cannot negotiate with people whose only acceptable outcome is to murder you and your entire race. The conversation pretty much dries up when that is the singular credo.
• You are incredibly inconsistent in demanding University administrators discipline or fire professors over “micro-aggressions” then celebrate, and aggrandize terrorists who take human lives solely because their targets are Jewish? This is insane, backwards thinking and it’s hypocritical, intellectually dishonest, and an obvious sign of moral decay.

I know for sure, that I have the right to be disgusted that some of our supposedly elite universities and many of their students seemingly have no moral compass and politicize acts of inhumanity when there is zero justification. I am exercising that right, and you should be too.

Seriously? Have some of these people gotten together and collectively lost their minds? We know right from wrong, and we must stand up for what we believe in and know is right. We must call these institutions out and signal to the world that “No! We have not all lost our minds; we have not all lost our moral compass.”

How is any of this acceptable to anybody? How is it not recognized as incredibly racist? How do elite educators not recognized this should be a huge teachable moment in these students’ journey?

The heads of these schools needed to simply say, “On this campus, we don’t celebrate racism, antisemitism, baby-killing and murdering.”  What they are doing instead is “distancing” themselves in hopes it blows over.

Israel is our friend and ally.  They don’t need us to just be their friend in good times.  They need us to be their friend in bad times, to be their friend when it is easier not too be. Good friends are the ones coming in the door when everyone else is going out. This is a really great time to show Israel and the world who we are.