Allysia Finley is a member of The Wall Street Journal‘s Editorial Board. She joined The Wall Street Journal in 2009 after graduating from Stanford University with a bachelor’s degree in American Studies. During college, she edited the opinions section for The Stanford Review. She asks: “How did our world, culture and politics become such a mess?

A simple explanation can be found in the best-selling children’s picture-book series “If You Give . . .” by Laura Joffe Numeroff. In each story, indulging a creature’s unreasonable requests—be it for a cookie, muffin or pancake— stimulates an appetite for more. So it goes in real life: 

• If college students ask for safe spaces, you might give affinity groups their own centers. Then they’ll want to feel safe in class –rooms and will ask for trigger warnings to protect them from ideas they don’t like. When you agree that certain ideas can be dangerous, students will occupy buildings and demand that speakers be canceled.

When you apologize and disinvite speakers, students ask you to excuse tardy and incomplete assignments because they were busy protesting. When you give them an A for no ef –fort, they will graduate with honors and think they don’t have to work hard to succeed.

Then, when you give them a job, they’ll ask to work only 30 hours a week. If you say yes, they’ll use their extra time to organize a union. If you recognize their union, they’ll ask for extra paid days off and eight weeks’ vacation.

When they max out their credit cards, they’ll ask for their student loans to be forgiven. When you cancel their debt, they’ll quit their jobs to get graduate degrees in community organizing. When they can’t repay their graduate loans, they’ll ask for more debt forgiveness.

• If a hungry migrant shows up at your border, he will ask for asylum. When you let him into the country, he will ask for a place to stay. When you give him free room and board at a Manhattan hotel, he will invite his family and friends, too. When you let them in, they’ll ask for a bus to New York.

• If an electric-vehicle startup asks for government support, you might agree to fund the construction of its first factory. Then it will want tax credits for people to buy its cars. Since drivers need to charge their EVs, the company will ask you to fi –nance charging stations. When it keeps losing money, it’ll ask you to subsidize its battery manufacturing.

When it produces more EVs than people want to buy, it’ll ask you to ban gasoline-powered cars so consumers have no other choice. Then it’ll ask for more money to build fac –tories to make more EVs that people are forced to buy.

• If you create a child-tax credit, liberals will demand that it be made more generous. When you increase the credit, they’ll ask to make it refundable so people who don’t owe taxes can claim it. When some stop working, they’ll ask to increase the earned-income tax credit as an incentive to work. Then they’ll ask for paid family leave to make it easier for parents to take time off work. When inflation increases because of government spending, liberals will ask for a bigger child-tax credit.

• If Iranian mullahs ask for relief from economic sanctions, you may go along because you want them to agree to a new deal to limit their nuclear-weapons program. When you give them sanctions relief, they’ll spend their bounty on manufacturing weapons, which they will give to terrorist proxies to attack Israel.

Then the mullahs will ask for more sanctions relief, which you’ll grant because you believe it will en –courage them to be less belligerent. Then they’ll manufacture more weapons, which their proxies will use to launch more attacks.

When you ask Israel to stand down, the mullahs will continue manufacturing weapons and enriching uranium. Then they’ll ask for the abolition of Israel in return for not launching a nuclear weapon.

• If Israel removes its citizens from Gaza, Hamas will take over and ask for humanitarian assistance. When you send aid, Hamas will use it for military purposes while impoverishing its people. Then it’ll use Gazans as human shields after launching attacks on Israel. When Israel tries to defend itself, innocent Gazans will accidentally get killed.

The United Nations will lambaste Israel as the aggressor. Hamas will smile and ask for more humanitarian relief. When you give Hamas more aid, it will launch yet more attacks on Israel and take civilians hostage. When you seek to negotiate their re –lease, Hamas will ask for more aid and a temporary cease-fire.

When you agree, it will regroup. Then when Israel accidentally kills Gazans while trying to eradicate Hamas terrorists, radical leftists will block traffic on U.S. bridges and demand a permanent cease-fire. When you agree, Hamas will escalate its attacks. When Israel fights back, college protesters will ask for safe spaces for Hamas.

The list goes on . . .”

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The Wall Street Journal editorial board writes: “Universities are supposed to be places where students and faculty can debate politics and other subjects without fear or censure. As the anti-Israel protests spread at Columbia, Yale, Harvard, New York University, UCLA, MIT, University of Chicago, and elsewhere, however, progressives are claiming that any restriction on the protesters is a violation of free speech.

That isn’t true, and it’s important to understand why. Under its “state action doctrine,” the Supreme Court has ruled that the First Amendment applies to government actions toward citizens. It doesn’t apply to private citizens or institutions except in rare instances when they are acting as government agents.

As University of California, Berkeley law school dean and ardent liberal Erwin Chemerinsky explained recently to anti-Israel students who wanted to protest on his lawn, his property is “not a forum for free speech.”

As a private university, Columbia has the right to set its own rules on speech as part of a contract to teach or study at the school. It does so in a way that is consistent with a public institution’s obligations under the First Amendment.

Here’s what Columbia’s Rules of University Conduct say about protests: “Every member of our community . . . retains the right to demonstrate, to rally, to picket, to circulate petitions and distribute ideas” and to “express opinions on any subject whatsoever, even when such expression invites controversy and sharp scrutiny.”

The code of conduct protects speakers’ rights even when “ideas expressed might be thought offensive, immoral, disrespectful, or even dangerous.” Sounds good.

But Columbia’s code of conduct says a person violates the rules who “engages in conduct that places another in danger of bodily harm,” or “uses words that threaten bodily harm in a situation where there is clear and present danger of such bodily harm.”

Columbia’s anti-Israel encampment and protests have included physical intimidation of Jewish students and antisemitic declarations. In October 2023, 100 Columbia professors signed a letter defending students who had flooded the campus in support of Hamas’s “military action” on Oct. 7, 2023. Columbia has every right to restrict speech or actions that threaten other students.

Protesters also don’t have a “right” to assemble on school property to disrupt the functioning of the university or intimidate students on the way to class. Even at a public university, all these rules would constitute reasonable restrictions on the time, place and manner of speech.

This new progressive embrace of free speech rings especially hollow after years of student and faculty attempts to ban conservative speakers from campus and punish students for alleged micro-aggressions.

Those who once claimed speech is violence now claim violence is speech. They don’t understand the Constitution any better than they understand the Middle East.”

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Philip Carl Salzman is professor emeritus of anthropology at McGill University, senior fellow at the Frontier Centre for Public Policy, fellow at the Middle East Forum, and Past President of Scholars for Peace in the Middle East. He writes: “The sudden uprising of university students across North America in support of Hamas and allegedly about the welfare of Palestinians does not result, for most students, from close ties with people on the other side of the world.

Of course, there is in North America a small minority of Palestinian, Arab, and Muslim students who are strong advocates based on their ethnicity and religion. But the vast number of student protesters have no such personal ties. Why have they set aside their studies to take up activism?

We know that the reason for the uprising is not that the student activists have studied deeply the history and politics of the Middle East, the history and theology of Islam and Judaism, and how international relations more broadly influence the region. Few of the students are majoring or minoring in Middle Eastern history and current affairs, Islamic history and theology, or Jewish history and theology. We know that of the many students chanting “From the river to the sea, Palestine shall be free [of Jews],” a large number cannot name either the river or the sea. How many of the students could identify Israel or Gaza on a map is uncertain.

If ties to or knowledge of the region are not behind the fevered advocacy for Hamas, what is? One factor that is undeniable is the highly organized, well-funded Muslim lobby, sponsors of Students for Justice in Palestine, and other Palestine and Islam advocacy groups, which have branches in universities across the land. Their partisanship and relentless lobbying have no doubt influenced student opinion to some degree. However, most students do not identify as Palestinian and Muslim, so their engagement on these bases is not strong. Something else must be at work.

By far, the dominant ideology in universities is the far-leftist conception of “social justice,” generally defined and implemented as “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI). This is not a student invention but a policy imposed from the highest level, the Biden administration in the United States and the Trudeau government in Canada. Universities have had this far-left ideology and its implementation imposed on them by government fiat. But most universities were far from reluctant because almost all academic staff and administration officials were children or grandchildren of the cultural revolution of the 1960s who either self-identified as Marxists or accepted Marxist analyses and policies.

“Social justice” is based on Marxist class-conflict analysis. In this view, society is not many individuals and groups competing and cooperating over space and time, with relationships changing according to circumstances. Rather, the only important relationships in society are based on the conflict between classes, one class being the oppressor and exploiter, the other class being the exploited and oppressed victim. Classical Marxism framed class conflict in terms of economic classes, but that formulation never took hold in North America. The new, revised North American Marxism can be labeled “cultural Marxism,” because it identifies classes as based on sex, race, sexuality, ability, ethnicity, and religion. What is critical is that the classes of oppressors and victims be identified.

In this cultural Marxist view, males made up an exploiter class, “the patriarchy,” while females were deemed to make up an exploited victim class. Likewise, the black, brown, and indigenous races, “BIPOC,” were oppressed and exploited races, and evil “whites,” remarkably including Asians and Jews, made up the oppressor class. Similarly, “cis” heterosexuals were deemed to be oppressors of LGBT. The oppressor classes are charged with systemic prejudice and discrimination against the victim classes.

In this scheme, all individual differences of members within these so-called classes are erased.

The evidence supporting this scheme is stunningly slim. Not only have the laws supporting prejudice and discrimination been eliminated, but new laws forbidding prejudice and discrimination have been passed and implemented and, by now, have long been on the books. The alleged evidence put forward by activists as decisive is disparate results in education, income, and office. If any category is not represented at the level of its percentage of the general population, that is taken as proof of prejudice and discrimination. The many other possible reasons for statistical disparities—differences in preferences and choices, differences in motivation and achievement, differences in capabilities—are ignored or denied in spite of the overwhelming evidence of the impact of these factors. The influence of regional, local, and ethnic culture is totally disregarded.

“Social justice” is put into practice under the labels “diversity, equity, and inclusion,” which do not mean what they seem to at first appearance. For example, “diversity” means only members of oppressed classes, not men, not whites, not “cis” heterosexuals, and so these people are excluded, not “included.” Ads for university positions today specify only BIPOC or LGBT or those with a disability; heterosexual white males without disabilities are excluded from consideration. For example, females dominate universities as the overwhelming majority among students, professors, and administrators. Did you notice that the Ivy League universities in the news, because of student uprisings, all have female presidents?

Also, do not imagine that “diversity” in universities means diversity of opinion and thought; in fact, views other than “social justice” and DEI are forbidden, and expressing such thoughts can result in punishment or banishment. DEI officers and offices, of which most universities have many at every level, act as political commissars suppressing ideological dissent through guidance and imposing penalties.

“Equity” is another matter entirely. It means the same results for everyone. This is the extreme ideal of Marxism: absolute equality. So any situation that produces a disparity of results is ipso facto deemed illegitimate. And here is the justification: All disparities are regarded as the result of prejudice and discrimination.

So the traditional criteria of academic life in particular and public life in the West—achievement and merit—must be disregarded as racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic, and Islamophobic. This explains the puzzling classing of Asians and Jews as “white” for the first time ever.

Asians and Jews are high achieving, even more so than whites, and in the “social justice” view, that must be the result of their imposition of racism, sexism, etcetera, etcetera. The policy result is that programs aimed at high achievement, e.g., advanced courses in math and science, must be terminated, and measures of achievement, such as SAT and GRE tests, must be deemed racist, and so on, and terminated.

What does all of this have to do with Israel? Well, if Jews are white oppressors, then Israel must be also. The “social justice” analysis of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict is that Israelis (but presumably not the many Israeli Arab Muslims and Christians) are white oppressors, and the Palestinian Arabs are BIPOC. Has anyone who has been to Israel and seen the two populations said this? The reality is that there is great racial overlap between

the two populations: Half of Israelis were from Jewish populations in Arab countries where they lived for many centuries before being forcibly expelled, and the genetics of the two populations overlap considerably. This transfer of American race obsession to the Israeli–Palestinian conflict is absurd. And this is not even to consider the Arab slave raiding in Africa and their disdain for their black slaves.

The other Marxist claim, Leninist this time, is that Israeli Jews are imperialists who have colonized the indigenous Arab Palestinians. Canadian professors are big on this alleged colonial oppression of indigenous peoples. One of my McGill colleagues was much loved by students for his championing of indigenous Canadian “First Nations” against the wicked European invaders who built Canada. (The history of slavery practiced by the indigenous “First Nations” is not told as part of this story.)

My colleague was also a great champion of the “indigenous” Palestinians.

When I suggested that the Jews were the indigenous population, he refuted that by saying that “indigenous” means who was there when Westerners arrived! I asked if the Romans counted as “Western,” because when the Romans invaded the Holy Land some decades before Christ, there were only Jews there. The Romans fought the Jews and finally defeated them after a century and a half, exiling many and changing the name of the country to Syria Palestina, so that they did not have to hear Jewish place names, such as Judea and Samaria. No, my colleague said, the Jews just left to find trading opportunities. (Jews seeking money, of course.) In reality, the “indigenous” Arabs first came to the Holy Land in the seventh century as Muslim invaders from Arabia, as the initial step in their conquest of the great Islamic Empire.

Muslim theology and policy has always been Islamic supremacism, with non-Muslims treated as subordinates, slaves, or worse.

The campus uprisings do not concern themselves with historical facts. It is clear (to them) who the good guys are and who the bad guys are, and morality means supporting the good guys and attacking the bad guys. Repeatedly, we have heard, “We are Hamas,” “From the river to the sea, Palestine shall be free,” “Genocide in Gaza,” “Israel go to hell,” “The only solution is intifada revolution,” and “10,000 more October the 7th.” To the demonstrators, Israel is the evil, racist oppressor of innocent Gazans and Palestinians. So, too, with Jews, who are evil oppressors of BIPOC, LGBT, women, the disabled, and Muslims generally. Israel is the Jew of nations, and Jews are the individual manifestations of Israel. That is why we also hear “Zionist pigs,” “get off of campus,” and “go back to Poland.”

Many commentators have lamented that demonstrating students are not in class, and others are not allowed to go to class. But quiet campuses with students learning are not the solution; they are the problem, for what almost all universities teach is cultural Marxism, which is also the official university policy. The students have not failed to learn; they have learned too well the false and destructive lessons of “social justice” and DEI. The students have been corrupted in corrupt universities, which have abandoned the search for truth in favor of the Marxist revolution.

This does not end with Israel, the Palestinians, and the Jews. The United States, Canada, the West, capitalism, democracy, and individual freedom are all in the crosshairs of Marxism and Islamic supremacism. Today, the red–green alliance controls North American universities.

Students are chanting “Death to America.” Be warned.”

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Daniel Henninger’s weekly column, “Wonder Land,” appears in The Wall Street Journal each Thursday. He serves as the deputy editorial page director of The Journal. Mr. Henninger was a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize in editorial writing in 1987 and 1996, and shared in the Journal’s Pulitzer Prize in 2002 for the paper’s coverage of the attacks on September 11. In 2004. He won the Eric Breindel Journalism Award for his weekly column. He has won the Gerald Loeb Award for commentary, the Scripps Howard Foundation’s Walker Stone Award for editorial writing and the American Society of Newspaper Editors’ Distinguished Writing Award for editorial writing. He is a weekly panelist on the “Journal Editorial Report” on Fox News. A native of Cleveland, Mr. Henninger is a graduate of Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service. He writes:

“There must be something in the gene pool of the hard political left in this country. Eventually, the violence arrives. Columbia University administrators wrote in an email that they wouldn’t call in the New York City Police Department to avoid “further inflaming” what was happening on their besieged campus. Columbia President Minouche Shafik, they said, was “focused on de-escalating the rancor on Columbia’s campus.” Naturally, the unrestrained left escalated.

Early Tuesday morning, pro-Palestinian activists wearing masks and all-black antifa- like clothing broke into and took over Hamilton Hall, believe it or not home to Columbia’s still-extant Classics Department. The militants set up barricades, smashed windows, everything we’ve come to expect.

At 9 o’clock that evening, the NYPD arrived in massive numbers, entered Hamilton through a second-floor window, arrested the “students,” and put them on police buses. With luck, they’ll actually be prosecuted by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg and expelled from Columbia. These cops were once called New York’s Finest, and this was one of their finest hours.

So it really is 1968 all over again or, more relevant, 2020 and the George Floyd protests.

The Floyd protests spread almost instantaneously to hundreds of U.S. cities, just as the so-called Gaza solidarity encampments sprouted on many campuses. It isn’t spontaneous. This is modern protest as produced by the cookie cutter of social media.

At 1 a.m. Tuesday, a group called Columbia University Apartheid Divest posted on Instagram a call for an “urgent mobilization” at Hamilton Hall. Earlier, the group said: “We will not move until Columbia meets our demands or we are moved by force.” This was effectively a mini-Hamas strategy—give the authorities no choice but to come after you. It’s the most basic flip-the-script tactic: The perpetrators of mayhem transform themselves into camera-ready victims of “state violence.”

Anarchy like this is an opportunity for the U.S.’s enemies, and one hopes the FBI and Department of Homeland Security have this Palestine justice activity on its radar. Why wait for another domestic act of terror to happen?

The encampments’ defenders will say that is an overreaction, that despite the violence at Columbia and UCLA, their protests are only about conditions in Gaza. The fact remains that Gaza is inseparable from Hamas and Iran, two entities in a network dedicated to attacking the U.S. Add to that the revived terrorism units of Islamic State. All of a sudden, we have pro-Palestinian encampments spread across a country with a porous, overwhelmed southern border. Not to worry?

It is worth addressing the notion that most of the student protesters are peaceful kids moved only by concern for the Gazans. For some, possibly so. Still, we live in an age in which media drives everything, and it is difficult not to see how adeptly the media has been manipulated to shape public impressions of the encampments.

Almost every time a pro-Gaza student gets access to a media microphone, one hears a bland commitment to nothing more than easing the suffering of Palestinian women and children. It sounds rote, almost scripted. What seems to be going on here is a conscious strategy to establish an equivalence of sincerity—a facade of empathy is always mandatory now—between the pro-Palestinian students and the Jewish students resisting antisemitism on these campuses.

The protesters know that their highly theatrical encampments will generate interviews. If they can repeat earnest declarations of humanitarian concern often enough, an equivalence of sincerity between them and Jewish students will come to dominate the media narrative. That equivalence in turn achieves another goal: suppressing the historical context of these campus protests.

The impossible mission of Israeli-Palestinian negotiations is defined by the names of history: Presidents Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama; Israeli prime ministers Yitzhak Rabin, Ehud Barak, Ariel Sharon and Benjamin Netanyahu. Palestinians’ interests for decades were represented by the ever-unreliable PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat and now the 88-yearold, near-irrelevant Mahmoud Abbas. The list of negotiated-and-violated agreements is long: Oslo, Gaza-Jericho, Wye, Sharm El-Sheikh, Camp David, Annapolis.

The students’ naiveté and willful “river to the sea” ignorance about the realities of the Middle East peace process is the benign explanation. More cynical is what has emerged the past week as the activists’ primary interest: forcing university endowments to divest from Israeli companies.

This has little to do with the aftermath of Oct. 7. The anti-Israel BDS movement—boycott, divestment, sanctions— emerged around 2005. Its most pernicious tactic was to ban Israeli scholars from conferences at U.S. universities and elsewhere. When people say antisemitism has been building in universities for years, this is what they are talking about. BDS made Israelis shunned, second-class citizens of the academic community.

Then there’s Joe Biden. Because his re-election team assumes an equivalence between younger Democratic voters and the Gaza encampment occupants, the American president has himself become a hostage to the hardest of the U.S. hard left. He won’t cross them, and they know it.

When Mr. Biden gets to Chicago in August for the Democratic convention, uber-left Mayor Brandon Johnson won’t have the cops’ back the way New York’s Eric Adams did this week. On current course, the Biden candidacy could die this summer in Chicago.”

Next time: The real story of the campus uprisings.