Why are these students behaving this way? Because they can. People are letting them. There is no accountability and no cost — either to them or to the people failing to educate them. Bad behavior is rewarded; it is allowed to go on.
Do the universities not have the means to protect their students and, more importantly, their institutions? Why are these hapless administrators not dismissed?
At another well-known university near Washington, D.C., a student said that one of her professors had told her Hamas was not a terrorist organization. One had to wonder if this professor actually knew anything about Hamas — not just its activities and its agenda to destroy Israel — but to kill all the Jews — and how it was striving night and day to achieve those ends. What criteria had the professor — and for that matter, much of Europe — used to determine that Hamas was not a terrorist organization, as opposed to the criteria used by the government of the United States to determine that, in fact, it was?
There is, however, room for hope. There were also many Muslim students who had fled the catastrophes brought about by Islamist radicalism. After one talk, a student named Muhammad said his family had run from Somalia in fear of al-Shabaab. Jihadist ideas, he said, had penetrated the madrasas [religious Islamic schools] of Somalia, which had historically followed Sufi Islam (a spiritual, more peaceful version). He regretted, he said, that the greatest victims of radical Islamist terrorism were the Muslims themselves.
A Syrian student, smiling, said that all humanity had the same enemy.
After another talk in South Florida, in an auditorium packed with both faculty and students, an aging professor from Tunisia spoke up. “At school in Tunis, we had both Jewish and Christian teachers who enriched my intellectual curiosity. But look at what happened to us,” he said. “We got lost.”
An Afghan student told us how his family fled from the Taliban; he said that the wave of extreme Islamic murder had to be stopped.
Local students came over. Universal humanism and common sense were being challenged by ignorance and coercion, they said, and advanced by threats of violence.
One should not have to say that universities should be protected sanctuaries, and not lawless theaters for terrorism-lite.
Administrators faced with authoritarian pressures urgently need to ask what they can do to preserve free speech and free thought.
There is a real danger that idealistic but naïve students — usually oscillating between too much confidence and not enough — are being pounded from all sides: by peer-pressure; by the wish to be popular; by censorship from without and within; by “political correctness” and by radical Islam. These students are coerced into joining any groupthink at the door without ever seeing how manipulated they are.
[1] This is the same Brandeis University that last April disinvited Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a refugee from Somalia who became a member of a the Dutch Parliament, from receiving an honorary doctorate in April 2014. See also: “Brandeis University: School for Scandal”; “Activist Exposes Brandeis University Anti-Israel Faculty Listserv” (uncovered by Daniel Mael).