The Free Press
For the last ninety years, New Yorkers have come together for the annual Christmas tree lighting ceremony at Rockefeller Center. But this past December, a thousand anti-Israel protesters showed up, determined to disrupt the celebratory spirit.
“There is only one solution,” organizers shouted into megaphones, “Intifada, revolution.”
Within the hour, punches flew. I saw a cop and a protester tussle on the pavement. One man, his face shrouded in a keffiyeh, lit an NYPD hat on fire. Seven protesters, including one minor, were arrested that night. As for the families who had gathered to celebrate Christmas? Many of them were herded away by the cops to avoid the melee.
That was one of 14 pro-Palestinian rallies I’ve attended since Hamas attacked Israel on October 7. Like the Rockefeller Christmas tree, the activists behind these events consider innocuous institutions to be their enemies: Memorial Sloan Kettering’s Cancer Center, the American Museum of Natural History, and the U.S. Holocaust Museum.
They insist that their aim is to liberate Palestinians, and that they are not antisemitic. But attend enough of these demonstrations and you’ll start to see the swastikas. Some people have looked me in the eyes and said that Israelis are the new Nazis, the prime minister of Israel is the new Hitler, and Palestinians are the new Jews. Out of the scores of people I’ve spoken to, only two demonstrators told me that Israel has a right to exist.
The word Jew is rarely uttered by these protesters. Instead, people hurl terms like Zionist, settler-colonialist, and occupier. They speak of academic theories like decolonization and intersectionality—concepts many told me they learned at elite institutions like Columbia and the University of Pennsylvania.
I decided to go to the source of these ideas: The American campus, where I spoke to scores of anti-Israel activists and dozens of Jewish college students across the country.
I asked: How did an ideology once restricted to the ivory tower come to inspire masses of Americans chanting on behalf of Hamas and Yemeni Houthis? How did Gen Z, the most educated generation in U.S. history, become sympathetic to terrorism? And, most fundamentally, how did our colleges come to abandon the pursuit of truth in pursuit of something far darker?
The result is The Free Press’s first-ever documentary, American Miseducation.
Click below to watch, and please join the conversation in the comments.
And a quick thank you to Jack Miller Center for their partnership in making this film possible. If you care about American education and civic responsibility, you’ll want to check out their work, which focuses on reorienting our institutions of learning around America’s founding principles.
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My daughter goes to Barnard, she hasn't left her dorm since Thursday am. I have received requests from jewish student groups to shelter terrified Jewish students and faculty also afraid to leave their homes and some of whom have been subjected to death threats. My daughter sent a video taken from her dorm (on 116th st), 2 protesters accosted a jewish student then began ripping down hostage posters on a lamp post he just put up. they shouted "they’re never coming home, they’re dead the way they fucking belong, the only good zionist is a dead zionist" and aggressively shoved a Palestinian flag into his face.
The thing missing from this excellent film is the admission that the administration agrees with the "white oppressor" ideology driving anti-semitism and will not enforce obvious violations of the Columbia/Barnard code of conduct. They have clearly adopted an Animal Farm view of the world, some hate crimes are more equal than others.
The violent rhetoric at these rallies is being vastly under reported. Tensions boiling at this level can easily spill over to serious physical violence. At this point I don't think the feckless administration could put the genie back into the bottle if they wanted to. Until this week, the only students suspended for political activity were Jewish!
I'll finish with my anecdotal observation that the leaders of the protests at Columbia are foreign students and they are using intersectional DEI language to snare a huge number of useful idiots. I'm very curious about who is funding these well coordinated rallies, all questions nobody in the administration seems to have much interest answering. Rosenbury and Shafik are cowards.
As the protesters at Columbia are shouting 'I am Hamas', and Hamas is a recognized and codified terrorist group, we should consider the 'students' terrorists. IF so they should be placed on no fly lists, if they are here on VISAs they should be cancelled, if they hold US passports they should be nullified and they should be treated as terrorists [which I presume would be in conflict with be matriculated at Columbia]. Time to link their words with consequences!