Horowitz: How we turned our universities into Hamas cheerleaders

How did nearly every major college campus turn into the Third Reich overnight, with large gatherings of belligerent rally-goers chanting genocidal slogans against Jews? It didn’t happen overnight. Over a generation, we’ve imported the Muslim world to our college campuses. Not surprisingly, we also imported some of the slogans, chants, and values undergirding it.

Is this what we really need for our civilization?

The ubiquitous pro-Hamas rallies we’ve seen on nearly every major college campus over the past week are not the typical “end the occupation” rallies. They began these celebrations immediately after the Hamas slaughter in southern Israel on October 7 and before Israel even announced its intention to attack Gaza. Whether it’s the chants of “intifada” or “from the river to the sea,” there are thousands upon thousands of college students belligerently repeating genocidal slogans and essentially making universities unhospitable to Jews (or any sane person).

Obviously, the solution is not to violate the First Amendment and ban raw speech, especially in public universities. We must understand the source of this problem, however. Over the years, we have turned our universities over to foreign countries, admitting more than 1 million foreign students a year. At least 100,000 come every year from predominantly Muslim countries, including from places like Iran, with which we’ve been in a cold war since 1979.

I compiled data of foreign students studying in the U.S. by country of origin, per the Institute of International Education:

In the 2021-2022 academic year alone, the United States admitted close to 100,000 new students from countries that are almost exclusively Muslim, many of which are infested with terrorist organizations. We also had more than 14,000 students from Nigeria, which is about half Muslim, and nearly 200,000 from India, which is 14% Muslim. Some of these countries send thousands of students every year. Thus, in addition to the unlimited growth under the King Abdullah Scholarship Program for Saudi nationals, we’ve brought in tens of thousands of foreign students from Iran, Turkey, and Kuwait.

It’s not hard to see how aspiring young radical Islamists could come to America on student visas and form cells of terrorists on our soil. Most certainly, the vast majority of them harbor sentiments that are out of sync with American values and beliefs. While there are obviously many people who are coming to learn, it’s also the case that many of these students from Muslim countries bring with them the anti-American and often anti-Semitic culture they grew up with back home. It’s easy to see how their migration back and forth to home as foreign students could make them prime recruiting targets of professional jihadist organizations.

Another sad casualty of mass numbers of foreign students in U.S. universities is the decline of Americanism. Obviously, American liberals did a fine job stripping patriotism from the culture of college campuses long before the massive influx of foreign students. But a huge presence of students who have no stake in this country doesn’t help.

The enormous growth in numbers of foreign students over the past two decades has more to do with the desire of universities to line their pockets with tuition from wealthy international students than any allegiance to multiculturalism, but the result is the same. As historian Wilfred McClay observed in an incisive 2016 essay, the explosion of foreign students has undermined “the formation of young people into fully informed and fully equipped citizens of the United States, knowledgeable about their own history and institutions.”

McClay further opined: “The problem with cosmopolitanism is not with the more expansive world it opens to us, but with the more proximate world it encourages us to neglect.”

This is something our elites fail to understand. America is more than a spreadsheet of potential GDP growth based on population. It is a culture. It is the beacon of freedom and Western civilization. Just as a certain number of immigrants help enrich the country, a certain number of foreign students can enhance our higher institutions of learning (and swell tuition rolls!). But when major universities are composed of foreign nationals from Third World countries and Islamic cultures, our colleges are essentially importing those values instead of exporting our values.

The next president needs to dramatically curtail the foreign student visas. Additionally, it’s time for Congress to prohibit countries such as Qatar, Iran, and Turkey from funding activities on American college campuses.

According to the Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy, between 1986 and 2018, Middle Eastern countries donated more than $6.6 billion to U.S. universities, many of them without proper disclosure. Qatar, which harbors Hamas, is by far the greatest foreign funder of U.S. universities. Most of the funding comes from the Qatar Foundation, a group with strong ties to the Muslim Brotherhood with theologians who believe Muslims must finish the work Adolf Hitler started.

There is no constitutional right for foreign governments to fund American institutions. States can immediately enforce this in their respective public universities. Congress should prevent foreign governments from funding religion and education on our soil. Our college campuses are the canary in the coal mine of what our cities will look like in a few years. They are already at European levels of subversion and hate.

As Florida Governor Ron DeSantis warned last week: “Our immigration system is a joke. If you do not like this country, then stay where you are.”