Nazism at Columbia University

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Image: paul_houle via Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0.

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The protesters at Columbia wouldn't dare sport Nazi regalia. But they might as well.

Columbia university activist Mahmoud Khalil is calling for more pro-Palestinian, anti-Israel protests this fall.  Perhaps he has been buoyed by the success he enjoyed as lead negotiator for campus protesters last April.  Maybe he has been further encouraged by the administration’s apparent revocation of his suspension.

In any case, Khalil vows to continue agitation against Israel.

The Times of Israel reports that he has stated, “As long as Columbia continues to invest and to benefit from Israeli apartheid, the students will continue to resist.  Not only protests and encampments, the limit is the sky.”  (Italics mine.)

Recently, Hamas leader Khaled Mashal also made it clear that there are to be no limits.  He has issued calls to renew “martyrdom” operations, a phrase that indicates that suicide bombings and surprise attacks on civilians such as the one that happened on October 7, 2023 are to continue.  No tactic is off limits, as Hamas’s recent execution of six innocent hostages proves.

Doubtless neither Mr. Khalil nor Columbia University’s anti-Israel protesters would dare to display a flag with a swastika on it.  Nor would they carry a banner with the word “Judenrein,” a term meaning a given territory is to be “clean of Jews.”

But there is no hesitancy on their part to employ terms and phrases that are the equivalent.  The board of Meta has debated the legitimacy of allowing the phrase “from the river to the sea” on the social media platform.  There has been a lot of hemming and hawing, with some saying the phrase can be used many ways.  But when said by Hamas and other terrorist groups, it unequivocally has but one meaning: the elimination of the state of Israel and the Jews who live there.

In other words, there is a reason Hamas and like-minded groups, including anti-Israel protesters, display maps of the Middle East that eliminate Israel entirely — “from the river to the sea.”

As a number of historians have pointed out, the Third Reich had plans for the extermination of the Jews in Palestine, a plan taken over by Islamists.

The anti-Jew hatred the characterized Nazi ideology remained influential and have been appropriated by Islamist terrorist groups since the 1930s.  German and American universities have been targeted by and influenced by that ideology for decades.  As Jeffrey Herf point out in his meticulously researched article “Nazi Antisemitism and Islamist Hate” in Tablet Magazine,

Nazism, which ended as a major political factor in Europe with defeat in 1945, had enjoyed a robust afterlife in the Muslim Brotherhood and its offshoots, such as Hamas and al-Qaida…their campaigns have had a continuing impact in Western universities, where they serve as the ideological foundation of academic anti-Zionism and the resulting BDS campaigns of recent decades, which have aligned the Western left with the afterlife of Hitler’s Nazi Party and its larger designs for the Middle East.

Herf adds that Hitler always intended the Final Solution “to be a global policy, implemented wherever his armies met with success and working through local allies like [Grand Mufti] Husseini, with whom the Nazi leadership had cultivated intimate political relations based on a shared passion for Jew-hatred.”

Administrators at America’s top universities may want to consider the Nazi origins of Hamas’s ideology.  Critical proof of the absorption of Nazi ideology by Hamas is the Hamas Covenant of 1988, which calls for the total rejection of the Jewish state and a religious war to destroy that state completely.

There is a reason academia has been and is being targeted by agitators influenced by Nazi ideology centered on Jew-hatred.  Academia is the seedbed of ideas that filter down to other institutions, including government.  In fact, it was academia’s support for Nazism that helped Hitler to effectuate his anti-Semitic agenda.

The capture of nearly all of Germany’s institutions began with the capture of academia, according to Paul Johnson.  As he noted in A History of the Jews, “the Nazis effectively controlled the campuses two or three years before they took over the country.”

Johnson added, “It was not that the professors were pro-Nazi.  But they were anti-Weimar and anti-democratic and, above all, they were cowardly in standing up to student acts which they knew to be wrong — an adumbration of the more general cowardice of the nation later.”

As pointed out in “University Student Groups in Nazi Germany,” Jewish and other “undesirable” faculty were dismissed as “political opponents” of the regime, partly because of the effectiveness of student radicals:

The passage of the “Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service” on April 7, 1933, propelled the Student League to the forefront of university politics. … The law … authorized the release of Jewish and “politically undesirable” faculty members from service.

The National Socialist German Student League directly targeted Jewish students and the remaining Jewish faculty members, interrupting lectures and physically attacking Jewish students.  Anti-Jew protesters targeted Germany’s Frankfurt University, which was a leading academic institution of the West, much as today’s protesters are targeting Ivy League universities and other top-tier institutions of learning such as Columbia.

It is useful to consider the testimony of Peter Drucker, an economist who was a lecturer at Frankfurt University during the 1930s.  It was a Nazi-led faculty “restructuring” meeting that persuaded Drucker to leave.  Columbia and other universities might want to take notes from his experience:

Frankfurt was the first university the Nazis tackled, precisely because it was the most self-confidently liberal of major German universities, with a faculty that prided itself on its allegiance to scholarship, freedom of conscience, and democracy. The Nazis knew that control of Frankfurt University would mean control of German academia. And so did everyone at the university.

Drucker continued:

The new Nazi commissar wasted no time on the amenities. He immediately announced that Jews would be forbidden to enter university premises and would be dismissed without salary on March 15; this was something that no one had thought possible despite the Nazis’ loud antisemitism. Then he launched into a tirade of abuse, filth, and four-letter words such as had been heard rarely even in the barracks and never before in academia. … [He] pointed his finger at one department chairman after another and said, “You either do what I tell you or we’ll put you into a concentration camp.”

The results of “restructuring” were soon evident.  It was not long before Jewish professors and students were no longer teaching or learning in German academia.

As CBN Israel notes, what was happening at Frankfurt University was reflected in American campuses during the 1930s and is being reflected in today’s protests at places such as Princeton, Harvard, and Columbia:

Examples of pre-World War II anti-Semitism on elite campuses such as Columbia and Harvard are easy to find. Administrators welcomed Nazi leaders to campus, enrolled Nazi-trained German exchange students, and promoted the idea of American students studying in Germany under Nazi oversight. Some returned to the United States mesmerized into supporting Hitler’s “New Germany.”

The protesters who are calling themselves pro-Palestinian are modern examples of students who favor terrorist organizations committed to the eradication of Israel and Jewry worldwide.

As Johnson wrote, there is justifiable reason for the existence of the state of Israel:

The Jews had grasped that the civilized world, however defined, could not be trusted.  The overwhelming lesson the Jews learned from the Holocaust was the imperative need to secure for themselves a permanent, self-contained and above all sovereign refuge where if necessary the whole of world Jewry could find safety from its enemies. … Jews [knew] that such a state had to be created and made secure whatever the cost, to themselves or to anyone else.

Jews in America may not think Nazism restructured as Islamism would establish itself in America in any significant way.  But it has.  And if not stopped, it will be as dangerous to Jews as were the events that happened during the Weimar Republic and the Third Reich.

The radicalization of America’s universities must not continue.  Terrorist organizations must not have a cadre of young radical sympathizers who tacitly or directly support genocide and the eradications of nations.

Terrorist groups and sympathizers committed to genocide and terrorist tactics, be it directly or indirectly, must be banned from American’s campuses.

“Never again.”

Fay Voshell holds a M.Div. from Princeton Seminary, which awarded her the prize for excellence in systematic theology.  Her thoughts have appeared in many online magazines, including American Thinker.  She may be reached at [email protected].

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