ANDREW NEIL: Anti-Semitic campus know-nothings aren't pro-Palestine... they're pro-WAR! And, in their stupidity, they're making the strongest case yet for Israel's survival

What started as legitimate and even understandable student protests on American university campuses against the carnage in Gaza have quickly morphed into something much more sinister.

Instead of 'Give Peace a Chance', as anti-Vietnam war demonstrators used to shout in the 1960s, it is 'We Are Hamas', 'Obliterate Israel' and even 'Kill all the Jew'.

This descent into raw anti-Semitism has been fast and frightening. A student generation with little grasp of history, no understanding whatsoever of the complexities of the Middle East conflict and no firm principles beyond the obsessive simplicities of wokery has been easily swayed by rampant nihilism.

Protest leaders claim they are pro-Palestinian. In fact, they are pro-Hamas, with all the evil baggage that entails.

One leader of the so-called 'Gaza Solidarity Encampment' established by student squatters at Columbia University in New York openly says on social media that 'Zionists don't deserve to live'.

What started as legitimate and even understandable student protests on American university campuses against the carnage in Gaza have quickly morphed into something much more sinister. (Pictured: In Georgia). 

Protest leaders claim they are pro-Palestinian. In fact, they are pro-Hamas, with all the evil baggage that entails. (Pictured: Columbia this week). 

One leader of the so-called 'Gaza Solidarity Encampment' established by student squatters at Columbia University in New York openly says on social media that 'Zionists don't deserve to live'. (Pictured: Emory University).

Columbia is the epicenter of hate but its poison has spread not just to other Ivy League universities but to less prestigious seats of learning across the country.

Campuses are now awash with cries and banners claiming 'October 7th 10,000 times', 'Boycott the genocidal Zionist apartheid state', 'Holocaust was no big deal' and 'Only one solution, intifada revolution'.

This is not an anti-war movement. It is a pro-war movement that seeks to intimidate Jews and to destroy Israel.

It is a movement spawned by ignorance and prejudice, always a deadly combination that leads to no good.

Many of the protestors have no idea what they're chanting. No concept of the Holocaust. No knowledge of an intifada.

Privileged, upper-middle class white students at universities which cost at least $75,000 a year to attend don keffiyehs in performative protest to show solidarity with people about whom they know nothing.

At the University of Washington a protest was called off, hilariously, because those participating were 'too white', which tells you everything about the mollycoddled, self-indulgent student elite behind these protests. They are Hamas's useful idiots.

After weeks of shouting 'From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free' they still have no idea what sea or what river.

Nor are they able to define Palestine (though they are not alone in that). They are poster children for the woke rot that grips American academia.

Be in no doubt they have been influenced by radical teachers in the faculty, where rational debate and diverse opinions are now a rarity. Yet no matter what evil emanates from their mouths, they pay no penalty.

Of course, like all Americans, they have their First Amendment rights. But the issue is not free speech. It is criminal conduct, which the first amendment does not protect.

There is also a double standard at work here. Universities have strict codes of conduct. They would, rightly, not allow the 'free speech' of white supremacists on campus. So why are the disgusting tropes of anti-Semites tolerated?

Columbia is the epicenter of hate but its poison has spread not just to other Ivy League universities but to less prestigious seats of learning across the country. (Pictured: University of Texas).

Jewish students are being intimidated, threatened and harassed on a daily basis. How could it be otherwise given the relentless anti-Semitic filth being shouted and scrawled on banners on campuses across the nation? Yet nobody is doing much about it.

The university authorities, as usual, are useless. At Columbia Jewish students were told to stay away and use remote learning.

A university rabbi was forced to tell Jewish students to go home because the university couldn't guarantee their safety. A Jewish professor had his ID card deactivated, seemingly because he wanted to mount a counter protest.

We have been here before. As the Nazi poison took root in Germany in the early 1930s, Jewish academics and students were blocked from universities — or simply advised to stay away. We know where this leads. Which makes the universities' inaction all the more inexcusable.

Yes, there has been a more robust response to the encampments and intimidation at some universities, such as Austin, Texas, and Emory, Georgia, where rubber bullets and tasers were deployed.

But often the encampments are allowed to spring up again and the protests continue as before.

Moreover, what is required is not heavy-handed law enforcement, though there will be times when that is necessary, but for the universities to announce that any students mouthing the anti-Semitic obscenities and parading the offensive banners now omnipresent in so many campuses will immediately cease to be students of that university — and never again readmitted. Plus those suspected of intimidation and harassment will be handed over to the police.

That might give some cause to pause and think about what they're doing.

The time to get tough is now because the poison is spreading beyond the campus. The FBI reports that anti-Semitic incidents are at 'historic levels'. Jews make up only a small proportion of the US population but are once again the victims of a majority of hate crimes.

Who would have thought it would ever come to this again — or that, given what we now know, the official responses would be so pathetic.

Ironically, though their ignorance means they will have no idea of this, the protesters are making the case for the Jewish State of Israel.

After the horrors of the Holocaust, Jewish leaders determined that there had to be a Jewish homeland open to all Jews — and to which all Jews could flee for safety in extremis, should anything like a Holocaust rear its ugly head again.

Even Jews in Western democracies who thought they'd have no need of such a homeland took comfort from the fact one existed. That was especially true of American Jews who always thought the one country in which they would be safe, other than Israel, was the United States.

Safe havens, like New York City, with the biggest Jewish population of any city outside Israel, would suffice. Israel was an insurance policy for which they'd probably have no need.

As the scourge of anti-Semitism subsided in the years after World War Two, some progressive Jewish leaders even wondered aloud if a distinct Jewish homeland was really needed.

Ironically, though their ignorance means they will have no idea of this, the protesters are making the case for the Jewish State of Israel.

Nobody is wondering that now as, even in America, radical Muslim leaders call for the destruction of Israel, backed by students at the nation's most elite universities and therefore those possibly (and frighteningly) running the country in the years to come.

America's Muslim population can only grow while Jews will become an ever smaller percentage of the total population.

Violent Islamism has a strong footing in many Western democracies these days and its influence is likely to grow stronger. Suddenly that Jewish homeland looks more necessary than ever.

This sorry tale still has some way to run. The pro-Hamas protestors have strong allies on the Left of the Democratic Party. They will be out in force come the Democratic convention in Chicago this August.

Chicago, of course, was the scene of the most violent Democratic convention ever in 1968, at the height of the Vietnam War, when Mayor Daley's somewhat robust police force clashed with radical demonstrators trying to disrupt the convention.

I don't say we're in for a repeat as bad as that but it will not be pretty on the streets of the Windy City this summer.

The President, for today's protestors, is 'Genocide Joe'. They will be out to pressure the Democrats into ending their support for Israel the way they wanted the party to end its support for the Vietnam War all these years ago.

Vietnam involved the conscription of hundreds of thousands of young American men to fight a massive war on the other side of the world, which eventually cost over 55,000 American lives. That gave the protests a special edge and relevance. Israel involves none of that, which is why it does not have the same piquancy for most folks.

But pro-Palestinian sentiments are the coming force in the Democratic Party, with all the attendant anti-Semitism we are currently witnessing.

There can be no compromise with such forces, whatever the superficial attractions of winning the youth vote by pandering to know-nothing students. We shall see if Biden is up to the challenge and stands firm in his resolve to support Israel.