Radical U – Part 1: How Professors Became Architects of the Academic Palestinian Resistance
14th August 2025
Tje Investigative Project on Terrorism
In the span of a few years, American academics have escalated their support for the Palestinian “resistance” from rhetorical to material.
For decades, academics have fostered friendly territory for radical groups and fertile ground for anti-Israel propagandists, but few have endorsed terrorism. It’s safer to massage the language, twist a metaphor or two, and figure out a way to excuse violence without actually endorsing it, or at least use language, often abstruse or cryptic language, to provide a degree of deniability. But that has changed.
October 7 triggered something in many academics who suddenly no longer felt constrained. Rather than stopping just short of applauding terrorism against Israel, they adopted Hamas’s slogans and defended its attacks. Today, colleges and universities have effectively taken the place of the Palestinian terrorist organizations as the primary disseminators of anti-Israel propaganda to Americans. Middle East studies departments and programs in particular have transformed academia into the vanguard of anti-Zionism in a sick perversion of John Stuart Mill’s vision for higher education – turning students into “capable and cultivated human beings.”