You can tell a lot about a person, or a movement, by the friends and allies he, she, or it picks up. The anti-Israel protesters who have made their ignorant, shrill, and self-righteous presence unavoidable on campuses all over America are no different. They have just picked up a few high-profile friends, ones that reveal as much about the movement sweeping university campuses as anything the protesters have said or done.

First, there was Hizballah Deputy Secretary-General Sheikh Naim Qassem, who recently waxed enthusiastic about the protests, saying, “When the American people take a stand in support of Gaza … we salute and applaud them. We appreciate and value this very much. … The [campus protests] are important, especially because they will have an impact on the U.S. elections. They will have an impact on the American position. Even if Biden says that he will not be influenced by this, he will whether he likes it or not. We will see him taking actions because of the protesters’ influence on him.”

Whatever else he may have to worry about as it continues to inch toward full-scale war with Israel, Hizballah doesn’t have to waste time worrying about Old Joe Biden. The Biden regime is clearly deeply worried by the protests, as well as by pressure from leftist and Muslim leaders about getting Muslim votes in November. That’s why the aged corruptocrat has been so energetically betraying Israel. 

Nor will praise from al-Qaeda and Hizballah won’t turn Old Joe and his henchmen from the course of action they have chosen. Hizballah is listed by Old Joe’s State Department as a terrorist group, but by now, they’re used to siding with America’s enemies.

Another terrorist group is likewise pleased with the youthful fellow travelers on campus. Not surprisingly, al-Qaeda also praised Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023 jihad massacre of 1,200 Israelis: “We were happy, and every Muslim was happy, with these revenge attacks and operations carried out by the youth of the Islamic nation, especially the heroes of the revenge action in the land of Canaan.” 

Revenge attacks? When did Israel do anything like what Hamas did on Oct. 7? Never, of course, but al-Qaeda and other jihadis, as well as their leftist sympathizers and enablers, relentlessly claim that Hamas was simply retaliating after decades of oppression.

There has in reality been no oppression. Every single Israeli, civilian as well as military, left Gaza in 2005, and the Gazans were completely free to make their green and pleasant land into a new French Riviera. Instead, they turned it into a jihad base, with a staggeringly complex array of terror tunnels and frequent rocket attacks against the Jewish state. 

Those rocket attacks, as well as the billionaire status of Hamas leaders, also demonstrated the falsehood of the oft-repeated claim that Gaza was an “open-air prison” or even a “concentration camp.” Did the inmates of Buchenwald, Dachau, or Auschwitz fire rockets into National Socialist Germany? Did prominent Jews enrich themselves in the camps to the extent that they became among the richest men in the world?

Al-Qaeda also presents the Oct. 7 massacre as “revenge” because of Islamic theology. In classic Sunni theology and law, only the caliph, the successor of Muhammad as the ruler of all Muslims worldwide, is authorized to declare offensive jihad. Yet there has been no caliph since the secular Turkish government abolished the caliphate in 1924. 

But all the schools of Islamic jurisprudence agree that when a non-Muslim force enters a Muslim land, defensive jihad becomes the individual obligation of every Muslim (fard ‘ayn) rather than a collective obligation of the entire umma, and need not be declared by anyone. So if Hamas was simply exacting “revenge” and defending itself, the implication is that all Muslims have the obligation to join Hamas’ jihad. 

     Related: The Seeds of Biden’s Betrayal of Israel Were Planted A Long Time Ago

Al-Qaeda continues in accord with this idea: “We call on the youth of our nation,” that is, the umma, the global Islamic nation, transcending all national boundaries, “to follow this blessed path… outpace them with the number of operations and the force of strikes and to fill the hearts of the children of Zion with terror in retaliation for the blood of our oppressed people in Gaza.” 

After that comes al-Qaeda’s praise for the student jihad sympathizers and leftist dupes who have come out for Hamas: “While we support the assassination of the infidel Zionists and the beheading of them, we also appreciate and value the movement of Western demonstrators and sit-in students from Western universities, who through their sit-ins and protests expressed their rejection of the genocide taking place in Gaza.” 

Praise from not one, but two murderous jihad terror groups should give the self-righteous pro-Hamas students pause and make them reconsider their fanatical hatred of Israel. But it won’t.