As Israel is attacked, our next elite leaders at Ivy League schools support terrorists | Opinion

Hours after Hamas began to slaughter innocent Israeli citizens, including women, children, and the elderly, some Americans at Ivy League universities and in major cities in the U.S. were blaming the Jewish state for these atrocities. This is sobering and demonstrative of a sign of the steady demise of elite America, culturally and politically.

It started with Harvard University. The institution boasts a mere 3% acceptance rate and supposedly educates the best and brightest young people America has to offer. On Monday, more than 30 groups at Harvard wrote a joint letter stating that they hold Israel “entirely responsible” for Hamas’ mass slaughter, which has so far killed at least 900 Israelis and wounded thousands more. Hamas is also holding people, including children and Americans, hostage. So far, Hamas has killed 11 Americans.

The Harvard student groups claim Hamas’ attack “did not happen in a vacuum” and shifts blame to the Israeli government, saying it has forced Palestinians to live in an “open-air prison for over two decades.”

Next was Columbia University. A statement, started by the Columbia National Lawyers Guild and co-signed by 15 student groups, blaming the victim.

“Israel does not have the right to defend its occupation, its apartheid state or its siege of Gaza,” the statement read. “The weight of responsibility for the war and casualties undeniably lies with the Israeli extremist government and other Western governments, including the U.S. government, which fund and staunchly support Israeli aggression, apartheid, and settler-colonization.”

In New York City on Sunday, the city young people flock to in order to chase dreams, rallies in support of Palestine took over Times Square. Young people labeling themselves “Democratic socialists” and waving swastika signs were caught on camera celebrating the slaughter of innocent men, women, and children, murdered in their homes. Chicago had a similar rally, with people in support of Palestine coming out in droves,

In America, free speech is paramount. It’s one of our most enlightened and divinely given rights. But that does not mean every thought or action expressed is right and good. The ideas these students are expressing here are not just speech but a celebration of acts of terrorism akin to 9/11 in scale.

Let’s get this straight: There is no presence of Israel in Gaza. The Hamas attack is not a military initiative over a decades-old land war. This is not about apartheid in Israel. This attack launched by Hamas on Saturday was heavily funded, strategically planned, and their only goal was and remains to slaughter innocent Jews, simply because they are Jews.

This attack had no military goal and did not engage solely Israel’s Defense Forces. There are dozens of videos and photos circulating of Hamas fighters targeting a rave — an outdoor concert filled with hundreds of innocent civilians — mowing down attendees and abducting those they didn’t kill. Almost 300 died at just that event, all innocent concert-goers.

There are photos and videos of Hamas beating down doors of homes in border towns and then killing entire families, raping the women, taking the children, then desecrating the bodies of the dead.

There is no place in America for the celebration of this level of evil. To see revered American institutions such as Harvard and Columbia — places where our best and our brightest are learning — come out and deflect blame onto Israelis or celebrate the slaughter of innocent civilians, is sad and maddening.

The people who graduate from Ivy League institutions often become our lawmakers, Supreme Court justices, members of the federal judiciary, and more. These are the minds that will likely craft our next generation of politics and policy: And they are so wrapped up in their own progressive rot they cannot call terrorism what it is: evil in human form.

Progressive ideas have long dominated academia. In the last two decades we’ve seen them weaken free speech, blur the liberties of religious students, and embrace politically correct agendas to suit their narratives. Turns out, there are consequences to this: When these young people see real terrorism, when they observe pure evil toward Jewish people, they lack the courage to call it out, condemn it and rally beside one of our allies with hope and strength.

It was already awful observing the anti-Semitism and the evil Hamas displayed in Israel over the weekend. Israeli citizens must be feeling a tremendous amount of fear and hatred. To know that many in progressive cities and some of our best universities seem willing to applaud terrorism and bigotry does not bode well for the future of American culture and politics.

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