Expert: Many pro-Palestine students at big protests don't know where Palestine is
WWL's Newell Normand asked a question that's on the minds of many these days: what is the end game for students hosting massive pro-Palestinian protests on their college campuses?
Mike Gonzalez from the Institute for National Security and Foreign Policy of the Heritage Foundation, explained it this way: "Some of them don't know what they're doing. They don't know where Palestine is. They don't know what the conflict is about with the leaders, I believe. Not really interested in Gaza or the Middle East. They're interested in regime change right here in the U.S. They hate Israel because Israel is kind of like a mini me America. It's not coincidental that they see the hideous real because it's a white settler state, is what they call it.
"And they see the US as a white settlers state. So, this is who they and they sometimes very open about it. They say, look, what we want to do. And I've written about this is, is the dismantle us civilization of Western civilization. And Israel is an outpost of it in the Middle East, or so they think. So that's that's their end goal is. If you want to ask me what I think about it."
Normand noted that campuses in different parts of the country are using the same circulars, the same bulletins are being distributed, the same language is being used. "It's almost as if there is a preparatory school for these, protests that are going on across the country."
As strange as it may seem, Gonzalez said there are actually preparatory schools for these types of things. One of them is the Liberal Community Strategy Center in Los Angeles, he said, which was the preparatory school that was one of the architects of Black Lives Matter.
"And don't forget that there's a strong, very, very strong connection between BLM and the Palestinian terrorists," he added. Another connection to the protests is the Progress Unity Fund, which is an A51 C3 that is funded by the foundation that has also funded BLM for a very long time.
The president of Columbia University testified before a congressional committee, saying they need to give everybody a space necessary to do what they want to do. But if they're pro-Hamas and we know that Hamas is a terror organization, why are we negotiating with terrorists, Newell asked.
"And in fact, if foreign students are involved in these actions and they are demonstrating on behalf of Hamas or for Hamas, they're in violation of their visa conditions, the conditions which would grant them a student visa to come to this country, and they should be expelled and deported, immediately," Gonzalez said.
Let's not forget that students at Harvard or NYU or Columbia or wherever -- their parents pay a lot of money for them to be there, up to $90,000 a year. And the Jewish students there deserve to feel safe.
"We cannot have a situation in which, in the year of our Lord 2024, in the United States, no less, Jews are afraid to go to class, or the rabbi at Columbia has to tell, to Jewish students at Columbia and Barnard to go home and stay there. That is despicable. The and that should not be allowed. That is breaking the law," Gonzalez said. "Something must be done. This is happening in the United States, and it should not be allowed to happen."
Newell said the ignorance of a lot of these young adults never ceases to amaze him. "I'm just completely mystified how completely and totally disconnected they are from what's from the facts. I was watching, you know, the kind of the man on the street interviews the other day where they were asking some of the protesters about this, saying from the river to the sea, and they were asking him what it meant. And they couldn't. They couldn't say. And they were. And at one point the guy asked them, he said, well, you know, there is a river and there is a sea. And they're like, what do you mean? And there's an actual river and a sea. Can you tell me the name of the river and tell me the name of the sea? They couldn't."
What is between the Jordan River in the Mediterranean Sea is the entirety of the state of Israel.
You have to laugh to keep from crying, Newell added, that people willing to shut down their campus in a protest involving the Middle East don't even know that.
