The Sickness in American Universities

American college students are cheering for Hamas. Why? One would think everyone could agree that the shockingly barbaric Oct. 7, 2023, attack by this terrorist group that killed more than 1,200 Israelis and people from at least 29 other countries was evil. Not so—not among students of the nation’s most prestigious institutions of higher learning.

On October 8, more than 30 Harvard student groups held “the Israeli regime entirely responsible for all unfolding violence” and said “the apartheid regime is the only one to blame.” This shocking statement was followed on October 18 by a student “die-in” at Harvard Business School to highlight Palestinians’ suffering. Hundreds of students protested for Hamas at Columbia University on October 12 in a set of demonstrations. One physics major said, “Jewish students are afraid.” Similar demonstrations occurred at Arizona State University, California State University, Indiana University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of North Carolina, the University of Pennsylvania and countless other colleges.

Across the nation for months now, large groups of students and teachers have showed defiant support for Hamas killers. They have poured into the streets waving Palestinian flags, gone on television with their talking points, posted their views online, ripped down hostage posters and bullied journalists.

A December Harvard caps-Harris Poll of 2,034 registered voters found that more than half believe Jews are oppressors and should be treated as such, and that university students should be free to demand the extermination of their race. Most of those under 34 said Israel was committing “genocide” in Gaza. For those under 24, 60 percent said the October 7 mass murders could be “justified by the grievance of Palestinians” and 51 percent wanted “Israel to be ended and given to Hamas and the Palestinians.” Why? What principles unite these rival Islamists, race agitators, union members, socialists, Communists, anarchists, sexual deviants, celebrities, politicians and others? Is it diversity? Inclusivity? Tolerance? Equity? Sharia law? Arabic heritage? A belief that “Muslim lives matter”? An idea of individual freedom?

In truth, these students don’t love the same thing—they hate the same thing. They hate Western civilization, and they hate the ethnic group responsible for the biblical virtues on which it was built. They hate Judeo-Christian morality because they are being taught to hate it!

This is only the latest in a deluge of examples of the sickness in today’s higher education. The effects of this catastrophe are graver than most people realize. These universities are educating our future leaders in politics, media, business, law, science and medicine, and they are filling their minds with ideological and moral poison.

Radical Universities

We got a deeper look at this sickness on Dec. 5, 2023, when—because of the swell of pro-Palestinian protests on campuses—the presidents of Harvard, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Pennsylvania testified on Capitol Hill about what they were doing to protect students from anti-Semitism. None of these three women would say that students explicitly calling for the “genocide of Jews” violated their schools’ code of conduct or rules on bullying or harassment. They all insisted that it depends on “context.” Claudine Gay of Harvard, Liz Magill of Penn, and Sally Kornbluth of mit essentially told the world they support genocide.

When these women were pressed by the House Committee on Education and the Workforce, Gay said: “We embrace a commitment to free expression, even of views that are objectionable, offensive, hateful. It’s when that speech crosses into conduct that violates our policies against bullying, harassment and intimidation.” The other two made similar comments. They steadfastly refused to condemn their students’ vile behavior.

America’s First Amendment prohibits the federal government from enacting policies that abridge free speech. It does not prohibit universities from expelling students who call for exterminating particular races. Citing freedom of expression is a flimsy excuse for endorsing and encouraging the anti-Semitism on these campuses.

Beyond this, these schools routinely censor free expression when it is politically conservative, pro-Bible or insufficiently enthusiastic about homosexuality or transgenderism. They silence speech that doesn’t embrace radical-leftist views on race. But when students openly call for the genocide of Jews, these school officials are suddenly “committed to free expression.” In reality, they are committed to a specific strain of radicalism, committed to polluting people’s minds, and committed to authoritarianism when it enforces their agenda.

Gay, Kornbluth and Magill are beneficiaries of and participants in neo-Marxist diversity, equity and inclusion practices that attribute virtually all group differences—from arrest rates to income levels—to systemic discrimination. They view Israelis, Americans and Britons as colonial oppressors who, a lifetime after colonialism ended, still must be defeated by tearing down the Western world’s political system. They recognize the connection of this system to the Jewish people, and they want to see the Jewish state destroyed.

Many Americans were aghast at these women’s testimony. After one donor threatened to pull a $100 million contribution from Penn, the university removed Liz Magill as president—then gave her a cushy tenured post at Penn Carey Law School. mit defended Kornbluth outright, not backing down at all. Harvard reportedly lost more than $1 billion in donations from angry benefactors. The House of Representatives Education Committee opened an investigation into Harvard’s “learning environments, policies and disciplinary procedures.” People were calling for Gay’s dismissal, even more so after dozens of plaigiarism accusations surfaced involving her doctorate dissertation and other works. But after Harvard alumnus Barack Obama reportedly intervened, the university’s highest governing body announced its unanimous decision: It stood behind its pro-Hamas, Jew-hating, faux academic.

These schools are not merely morally perverse—they are intellectually and academically bankrupt. Having banished absolute truth and God from their reasoning, these academics and intellectuals have become untethered from reality. Society must understand this and stop entrusting these people with our children.

Disturbing History

How much damage can misguided and arrogant intellectuals do? As historian Niall Ferguson reminded us in a Dec. 10, 2023, article, intellectuals in Germany and throughout the Western world embraced a certain ideology in the 1930s. German universities were the best in the world, far better than Harvard and Yale, and when this ideology began spreading through the nation, the presidents, department chairs and professors guiding the arts, languages, history, law, religion, anthropology, economics, government, sociology, science, mathematics and engineering found much to praise. Many university-educated lawyers and doctors devoted themselves to this way of thinking to the point of joining the party. Later, this ideology would become infamous: Nazism.

“German academics acted as Hitler’s think tank, putting policy flesh on the bones of his racist ideology,” Ferguson wrote (“The Treason of the Intellectuals,” Free Press). Some of them produced “historical justifications for German territorial claims in Eastern Europe that implied massive population displacement, if not genocide.” These people didn’t merely follow Hitler—they helped him lead Germany and the world into a violent racist dystopia.

“Anyone who has a naive belief in the power of higher education to instill ethical values has not studied the history of German universities in the Third Reich,” Ferguson continued. “A university degree, far from inoculating Germans against Nazism, made them more likely to embrace it.”

Similar indoctrination is happening in our universities today. These students are far likelier than the average person to embrace Marxist, Communist, racist, authoritarian, illiberal, radical and even genocidal ideals. They are also likelier to fill influential roles in society, spreading the contagion.

People like Claudine Gay would say that Harvard’s anti-Zionism is different from Hitler’s because Harvard is left wing while Hitler was allegedly right wing. Yet the man who coined the term anti-Semitic was a German intellectual and self-proclaimed anti-Semite named Wilhelm Marr who expanded medieval attacks on Jewish traders and bankers into a full-scale economic theory. German anti-Semitism soon morphed into a biologically racist ideology, but German academics originally hated Jews for the same reasons Marxist academics do: They were socialist ideologues envious of financial blessings produced by obeying God’s moral and economic laws.

Today, academics, media pundits and politicians refer to Gaza as an open-air prison and blame the Jews for Palestinian poverty. They cannot accept that destitution in Gaza is a natural consequence of Palestinian policies. So they blame and excoriate Israel, from the dorm room all the way up to the United Nations General Assembly. History shows that such hate can quickly metastasize into violence.

What They Truly Hate

The radical left hates biblical precepts that produce the rule of law; individual freedom and accountability; limited government; stable families; freedom of religion, speech and property; and other principles that trace back to the law given to the Jews and the other Israelites at Mount Sinai. So it is unsurprising that they also hate the people God used to introduce these principles to the world.

Peter Wood, president of the National Association of Scholars, wrote in his insightful article “Higher Ed Support for Hamas Exposes Disdain for America”: “American higher education at least since the late 1960s has been disenchanted with Western civilization. … The slow elimination of honor, respect and admiration for those who founded our nation and who in later generations built on those foundations gave way to a new aspiration of liberating ourselves from every stricture of traditional culture and inventing something uninhibited and new—and almost always filled with anger towards what came before and what continued to stand in the way. … This is fertile soil for anti-Semitism, an ideology that is always ready to turn vague dissatisfaction into directed anger, even to the point of murderous rage” (tomklingenstein.com, Oct. 30, 2023).

For well over a generation, Islamist leaders have referred to America as the “Great Satan” and to Israel as the “Little Satan.” Now, many atheists, socialist, feminist American students, professors and other elites agree.

They don’t agree on whether there is a Satan, whether there is a God for Mohammed to be a prophet of, whether church and state should be separated, whether churches should even exist, whether women should belong to men, whether women should wear burkas or participate in “empowering” pornography, whether males and females can change their sexes, whether children should be taught homosexuality, whether you can eat meat, whether you can drill for oil, or any other issue. But they know for sure that America is evil.

Socialists like Claudine Gay and Islamists like Ismail Haniyeh presumably disagree on a thousand things, but they agree that they hate Western civilization, so they hate its source. They hate the Jews, who are descended from the ancient Israelite tribe of Judah. And they hate the Americans, British and related nations, which are descended from the “lost ten tribes” of Israel (to learn more, request your free copy of The United States and Britain in Prophecy, by Herbert W. Armstrong).

This hatred is neither sophisticated nor new. It’s as old as the pogroms of the Nazis, the fascists, the German Confederation, the Russian Empire, Toulon, Strasbourg, Prague, Brussels, Flanders, the Crusades and before.

This hatred is also proof that there is something more going on than just sociology, politics, ideologies and economics. It is something spiritual—and it is evil. Gerald Flurry explains in his book America Under Attack that there is a campaign in the end time to “blot out the name of Israel from under heaven.” This effort is described in Bible scriptures like 2 Kings 14:26-28, which say that God will raise up an end-time type of King Jeroboam ii to save America, Britain and Israel long enough for people to at least consider repenting of the sins that allowed this evil campaign to reemerge with such murderous vengeance.

Watch for this Jeroboam figure to reappear. And ask yourself: Why does Israel need saving in the first place?

God is not a respecter of persons or of nations. The good you can find in Israel, America and the other modern peoples that descended from the Israelites did not come from the goodness of the people or even of their forebears. It traces back only to the true God. And because the modern Israelites have forsaken God, they are losing the good, biblical principles they were given, not to mention the resulting blessings of wealth and security—just as Moses warned our ancestors after Mount Sinai.