By HENRY SREBRNIK When protests disrupted campuses nationwide in the United States last year celebrating the Oct. 7, 2023 attack on Israel, signs and chants demanded “Divest!” and “Cease-fire now!” This fall, much of the protest language has grown darker, echoing language used by Hamas, and declaring “Glory to the resistance!”
Some protesters now refer to them as the “al-Aqsa flood,” the name Hamas uses. “Oct. 7 IS FOREVER” has been spray-painted on walls at colleges. The shift is very apparent at Columbia University in New York, one of the main centres of the protests.
This new messaging has been noticed by Hillel chapters across the country, observed Adam Lehman, president and CEO of Hillel International. “The overall picture on campus,” he said, “has moved from a mass protest movement that embodied a diverse set of goals and rhetoric to this more concentrated and therefore more extreme and radical set of goals, tactics and rhetoric.”
President-elect Donald Trump has promised to crack down on these campus protests, and his allies expect the Department of Education to more aggressively investigate university responses to pro-Palestinian movements.
“If you get me re-elected, we’re going to set that movement back 25 or 30 years,” he told donors last May. Trump called the demonstrators part of a “radical revolution” that he vowed to defeat. He praised the New York Police Department for clearing the campus at Columbia University and said other cities needed to follow suit, saying “it has to be stopped now.”
In an Agenda47 policy video released last July, he asserted that “the time has come to reclaim our once great educational institutions from the radical Left, and we will do that.” Trump promised to axe federal support and accreditation for universities that fail to put an end to “antisemitic propaganda” and deport international students that are involved in violent anti-Israel campus protests. “As soon as they hear that, they’re going to behave.”
At a recent antisemitism event in Washington DC, he pledged to protect Jewish students on American campuses. “Here is what I will do to defeat antisemitism and defend our Jewish citizens in America,” he declared. “My first week back in the Oval Office my Administration will inform every College president that if you do not end antisemitic propaganda they will lose their accreditation and federal support.”
He announced that he “will inform every educational institution in our land that if they permit violence, harassment or threats against Jewish students the schools will be held accountable for violations of the civil rights law.
“It’s very important Jewish Americans must have equal protection under the law and they’re going to get it. At the same time, my Administration will move swiftly to restore safety for Jewish students and Jewish people on American streets.”
When back in the White House, Trump announced that he would direct the Department of Justice to pursue federal civil rights cases against schools that continue to engage in racial discrimination “under the guise of equity” and will advance a measure to have schools that continue these illegal and unjust policies fined up to the entire amount of their endowment.
Citing Trump’s campaign pledge to push for significant reforms, the Stand Columbia Society, which is dedicated to restoring the university’s “excellence,” has identified a handful of ways in which the federal government could pull financial support from Columbia, or any other university. They estimate Columbia could lose out on $3.5 billion in federal funding should they face government retaliation. 
The most likely action, according to the group, would be for the government to slow down on issuing new research grants to the university, a move that would require no justification at all. The government could also squeeze the enrollment of international students by curbing issuance of student visas.
Columbia boasts upwards of 13,800 international students. Losing out on the cohort could cost them up to $800 million in tuition money. Neither one of these scenarios requires the administration to take legal action.
Moreover, the government could, additionally, push to withhold all federal funding should it determine that a university had violated Title VI of the Civil Rights Act. That statute bars recipients of federal funding from discriminating based on race, colour, or national origin. It was later clarified in 2004 by the then-assistant secretary for the Department of Education, Kenneth Marcus, that Title VI also protected the rights of ethnic groups that shared a religious faith, such as Jews. 
Given the explosion of antisemitism that erupted on college campuses in the wake of Hamas’s attack, it doesn’t appear it would take much to make the case that Columbia, and a whole host of other universities, violated Title VI. 
Columbia, for its part, already faces at least three Title VI lawsuits over campus antisemitism. (Among other major universities, Harvard faces two, and the University of California Los Angeles, University of Pennsylvania, New York University, and Massachusetts Institute of Technology are also on the list.) 
“These problems have existed for some time,” a contributing member of Stand Columbia, Alexandra Zubko, who is a Columbia graduate, contends. “This might be the moment that administrators look in the mirror and decide that they can’t let them continue.” 
 
 “All we need to do is listen to what President Trump has said during his campaign to understand that this administration will be serious about enforcing anti discrimination laws in ways that could be problematic to those institutions that have been getting a free pass for too long,” Marcus has said. 
With Trump promising to make higher education “great again” once he returns to office this coming January, American universities will face increasing pressure to comply with his administration, if they don’t want to lose billions in federal support.  

Henry Srebrnik is a professor of political science at the University of Prince Edward Island.

On October 15 the Government of Canada officially listed an organization known as Samidoun as a terrorist organization.

Here is part of the statement released by Public Safety Minister Dominic LeBlanc on October 15 :
“Violent extremism, acts of terrorism or terrorist financing have no place in Canadian society or abroad.”
“The listing of Samidoun as a terrorist entity under the Criminal Code sends a strong message that Canada will not tolerate this type of activity, and will do everything in its power to counter the ongoing threat to Canada’s national security and all people in Canada.”
Leblance also noted that the listing was made alongside the U.S. Treasury Department’s own decision to list the group as a specially designated global terrorist entity.

Samidoun is an organization founded by someone by the name of Charlotte Kates.
According to the National Post, Kates has a long history of supporting violent terrorist organizations.
Born in New Jersey, Kates, now 44, attended Rutgers University. Kates, who is Caucasian, describes herself as “not religious.”
According to the National Post. Kates began Samidoun in 2011.
This past spring, according to the Post, “she made headlines after Vancouver police arrested her for praising the Oct. 7 attacks by Hamas against southern Israel as ‘heroic and brave.’ At the same rally on the steps of the Vancouver Art Gallery, she led the crowd in a chant of ‘Long live October 7.’ She has yet to be charged, but national Jewish advocacy groups say she ought to be for hate speech.”

Here is what the Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs posted on October 15: “Samidoun (Palestinian Prisoner Solidarity Network) is a registered Canadian not-for-profit with direct affiliation and clear ties to the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) – an organization that has been placed on the list of terrorist entities under Canada’s Criminal Code since 2003.  
“There is ample open-source information that ties Samidoun to the PFLP. In 2021, Israel designated Samidoun a terror group based on the organization’s direct affiliation with and ties to the PFLP. In 2023, Germany outlawed Samidoun due to their activities that promoted terrorism. Samidoun’s leadership was deported from Germany in 2019 and denied entry to the EU in 2022, both times being returned to Canada. 
“Most disturbing to Canada’s Jewish community, Samidoun has a significant and active presence in Canada where it holds events, raises funds, runs advocacy campaigns, and organizes activities on university campuses. Regularly, Samidoun officials call for violence and glorify terrorist organizations at these events.”   
Now, by being listed as a terrorist organization by the Government of Canada, it becomes a crime to provide Samidoun with “material support.”

Hamas pleaded with Iran to join its Oct. 7, 2023 attack months in advance, the New York Times reported on Saturday, citing documents seized by the Israel Defense Forces in Gaza back in January.

According to the report, the deputy head of Hamas’s political bureau, Khalil al-Hayya, informed senior Iranian commander Mohammed Said Izadi of the plot in July 2023, in Lebanon.

Although the Iranians denied any involvement in the Oct. 7 attack, Hamas leadership meetings, obtained in transcribed form and verified by the Times, reveal that al-Hayya asked Izadi to strike sensitive sites in Israel in “the first hour” of the attack.

The documents further reveal that Hamas also intended to convene with Hezbollah’s late leader Hassan Nasrallah, but that the meeting was postponed. It was not clear whether a later meeting was held in person.

According to the recordings, Izadi said that Iran and Hezbollah sanctioned the attack in principle, but that more time was needed “to prepare the environment.”

Hamas was encouraged that its allies would not leave it “exposed,” but concluded that it might launch the attack on its own, the Times reported.

Three factors propelled Hamas’s decision to act alone, based on the recordings:

• Concern over Israel’s development of a new laser defense system.

• Israel’s election of a right-wing government with growing Israeli presence on the Temple Mount, which “can’t make us be patient.”

• The expanding divisions within Israeli society over issues such as the government’s judicial reform push.

• The desire to quash normalization talks between Jerusalem and Riyadh.

The documents moreover showed that Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar held secret meetings with a small syndicate of the terror group’s political and military seniors for a period of more than two years. They named the plot “the big project” and deliberately schemed to deceive Israel, conveying the impression that Gaza was focused on “life and economic growth.” The Hamas leaders further stated that they “must keep the enemy convinced that Hamas in Gaza wants calm.”

The Hamas leadership expressed its relief that several instances of rising Israeli-Palestinian tensions had not developed into confrontations.

Sinwar conveyed his hope that the attack, alongside a broader regional war, would bring about Israel’s “collapse.”

The Times also reported that Hamas initially planned to execute the attack in the fall of 2022, but was delayed, perhaps due to efforts to persuade Iran and Hezbollah to join in.

According to the Times, the recordings were discovered on a computer found by Israeli troops in an underground Hamas command center in Khan Younis, in southern Gaza.

On Oct. 7, thousands of Hamas terrorists, as well as Gazan civilians, invaded Israeli communities in the western Negev, massacring 1,200 individuals, wounding thousands and kidnapping 251 more into the Palestinian enclave. The attack instigated a war that has expanded into multiple fronts, with Hezbollah, Yemen’s Houthis, Iraqi paramilitary groups and Iran directly attacking the Jewish state.