Did you ever imagine a day when otherwise good-hearted twenty-somethings in short shorts and tank tops, or college freshman waving LGBQT rainbow flags, would simultaneously don terror group headbands, shout terror-group-created slogans and take the side of Iran and its proxies Hezbollah and Hamas on college campuses?
Now that college is back in session, it’s a good time to revisit these issues.
Iran, in case you haven’t logged off of Instagram to read a book or actual articles, has encouraged and in some cases even funded many of the campus protests taking place.
Katie Bo Lillis
It’s the same Iran that imprisons women who don’t cover themselves (forget shorts!), murders gay people, and harasses families suspected of not supporting the extremist dictators who run the country.
Political dissenters in Iran are regularly tortured and kept from their families, sometimes held in solitary confinement for months at a time. Iran publicly hanged some of the leaders of protestors against Iran’s policies on women in 2022. Executions in 2023 hit a near two-decade record.
If that weren’t enough to understand that Iran doesn’t align with progressive values, they also are the largest supporter of terrorism worldwide.
Iran’s Revolutionary Guard is listed as a terror organization by most of the West, as well as by and African and Arab countries alike. Iran has funded terror groups in Bahrain, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Syria, Iraq, Gaza, Lebanon and West, North and Central Africa.
They’ve infiltrated Lebanon by arming Hezbollah and inserting them into every aspect of Lebanese affairs. They essentially occupy Lebanon since the country can no longer make any moves unless Hezbollah signs off.
All while Hezbollah rains rockets down on Israeli towns and villages, displacing about 100,000 Israelis from their homes. And then our American college kids express anger over Israel’s not tolerating it.
Among Hezbollah’s vast arsenal of weapons are over 150,000–200,000 rockets, drones and missiles that can hit any target with precision, all the way to Israel’s southernmost port of Eilat. So we’re clear, though, Israel wasn’t even at war with Lebanon.
Hezbollah is also involved in other conflicts as well. It took an active role in Syria’s civil war and has bombed civilians as far aways as Bulgaria.
Hezbollah remains one of the world’s largest drug dealers to help fund their terror projects, and has engaged in sex trafficking.
Hamas is another one of Iran’s proxies, which spent billions provided by Iran and Qatar on weapons and terror tunnels instead of development and education. Hamas used its resources and training to murder 1,200 Israelis on October 7. To rape and kidnap. And Hamas promised to do it again.
Every million-dollar missile Hamas fires at Israel is a million dollars they could’ve used to turn Gaza into the Singapore of the Middle East after Israel left Gaza nearly 20 years ago.
But Hamas wants one thing, and it isn’t a peaceful solution. They want Israel’s destruction. And the West is next.
But to make sure naive American college students take up their cause, Iran’s, Hamas’s and other terrorists’ strategy is to prey on college students’ cheer-the-underdog paradigm of life.
They take offensive advantage of America’s severe trauma with how America treats its people of color and frame the dispute over Israel as white versus Black, despite the fact that 60% of Israelis aren’t even white and the conflict has zero to do with skin color.
If it did, I’m sure college students would have been outraged that Hamas has held a mentally disturbed Black Ethiopian Israeli as hostage for years.
If the Middle East conflict were about race, there would’ve been student indignation that Hamas murdered a Tanzanian college student in Israel on October 7, one of many Africans who come to Israel to learn so they can improve their countries.
Or people would’ve asked why Hamas still has a neighborhood called “slaves,” where the minority Black Palestinians (who descend from the Arab slave trade) live.
To further their manipulation, Hamas makes sure to control what we see, and our media outlets are all too eager to oblige.
Because Israel has a free press and allows most foreign press to operate as well, we all see the images when Israel attacks. The tanks. IDF soldiers. When there’s a bombing. When there’s destruction. We see it over and over.
But Hamas doesn’t allow a free press. Only a few times in nearly 20 years have we seen Hamas shooting missiles from schools or mosques, despite knowing they always operate that way. They would never let a reporter film that.
Only a few times in those almost two decades have we been exposed to Hamas children’s television programming teaching kids that their goal in life should be to murder Jews. You have to go to a Middle East translation service to watch it since ABC, NBC and the like won’t show it.
Hamas literally launches rockets at Israelis from civilian neighborhoods, schools and mosques and then gleefully waits to see if Israel responds so they can then tell the world, “Look, Israel bombs schools!”
Add on top of that there’s few of us who have been exposed by our media to Hamas’s own words, where they state their goal is to kill Jews and destroy Israel. That they don’t care how many Palestinians die so long as they inflict harm on Israel. Their words, not mine.
It’s not that Hamas or Iran or any other terrorists actually believe they can wipe out Israel. Or that their attacks would just convince Jews to leave their ancestral homeland.
But what they know, at great sacrifice to Palestinians, is that they could rape, pillage, murder, behead (yes, I saw the videos myself) and kidnap, and then control the media narrative in Gaza so that nearly everything reported looks like Israel is just willy- nilly going after kids and pregnant women.
They’ve become geniuses at manipulating social media.
They created the “All Eyes on Rafah” meme, devoid of people, showing a vast endless desert of what looks to be cars and trucks lined up for infinity. The implication that Israel wiped out everyone there.
It was created two days after Israel launched a very targeted strike on Hamas terrorist fighters, which then accidentally sparked additional explosions from ammunition and weapons facilities of Hamas nearby, which then killed dozens of others.
Within minutes, millions were sharing the meme, as if Israel had just intentionally murdered kids without any regard for humankind and, therefore, we should have all eyes on this place. No mention of Hamas’s ammunition facility. No mention that Hamas terrorist monsters were the target of the attack.
There was nothing about the fact that Hamas terrorists were operating there right next to civilians. And when hostages, including an American, were later found in Rafah a month later, no more eyes were on Rafah.
Suddenly, we couldn’t see.
The manipulated message was clear:
Do what you want, Hamas. Fire as many rockets as you want Hezbollah. But we’re watching you, Israel.
Even people I had respected jumped on the bandwagon, none of whom knew anything about the situation. None who had ever heard of Rafah. None who of whom knew how many terrorists were stationed in Rafah. None of whom knew that Egypt itself destroyed 3,000 buildings in Rafah in the past to create a buffer between Egypt and Hamas terrorists.
Then to add insult to injury, our press reports that the Gaza Health Ministry says x or y. The Gaza Health Ministry is Hamas. Not some independent health organization.
Hamas has succeeded in manipulating so many well-intentioned people.
The net effect of all of this is that Israel is accused of committing genocide, which is the intentional destruction and eradication of an entire people.
It’s a lie that gets told over and over again until we start to believe it.
Let’s never mistake any of this.
The point isn’t that Palestinians aren’t worthy of our protection and compassion. People who defend Israel and can’t hold space for Palestinian dignity aren’t any better than the college students who unwittingly support terror.
War is devastating. Innocent civilians, whether the real number is 15,000 or 25,000 or 40,000, don’t deserve to die or be displaced or be traumatized. Children don’t deserve to grow up this way. The devastation in Gaza is real.
And individual Israeli soldiers have multiple times crossed the inhumanity line. Shooting people who raised a white flag (turns out they were hostages), pushing dead Palestinians off buildings, shooting people regardless of whether they knew whether they were fighters. It’s disgusting, and many get prosecuted in Israel and additional ones should be.
It’s fair game to criticize and protest Israeli expansionism in the West Bank. Or extremist settler violence against Palestinians.
We wouldn’t be human if we didn’t want all that to stop, regardless of how we got there. I’m not remotely suggesting that Netanyahu’s war-for-infinity approach is a good one. We know his days are numbered once the war is over.
But our young people, who may be among the most accepting generations of all time, need to start thinking and reading.
TikTok, Instagram and AI memes aren’t learning.
Let’s recap the college protest narrative right now:
Hamas: “We will repeat October 7 until Israel is destroyed.”
Hezbollah: “Our fight will end only when Israel is obliterated.”
Houthis: “Death to Israel. Curse the Jews.”
College protestors: “We’ll have peace when Israel stops fighting.”
If you all truly are peace-loving liberals, you should be asking for Iran’s Hamas and other terrorists to stop their evil. You should be outraged when Iran’s Hezbollah or Iran’s Houthis fire missiles at homes. You should stop wearing their headbands and waving their flags.
You are essentially supporting more war.
If you really want to support peace and not just war with different winners, then you ought to be demanding that Israelis and Palestinians support a two-state solution to the conflict. One that demands dignity and security for everyone.
If it’s all about humanity, where on earth are your Sudan protests, where Iran-backed armed forces have forced displacement of 9 million people. And murdered tens of thousands.
It’s human to want war to stop and to protest it. But check your liberal values along the way.
Otherwise, Iran, Hezbollah, ISIS or Hamas will be in an American city near you one day. Just ask the Twin Towers.
This post originally appeared on Medium and is edited and republished with author's permission. Read more of Jeffrey Kass' work on Medium.