I touched on this earlier this week when Columbia's anti-Israel group, Columbia University Apartheid Divest (CUAD), held a walkout/protest on the anniversary of 10/7, but I think it probably deserves more attention. 

You may remember this guy, Khymani James, one of the student organizers at Columbia who made news earlier this year when a video circulated of him saying, "Zionists, along with all white supremacists, need to not exist." He added, "Be glad, be grateful that I'm not just going out and murdering Zionists."

After this made news in April, James was suspended and CUAD put out a statement, apparently from James himself, apologizing for his comments.

“CUAD and the Gaza Solidarity Encampment have made clear that my words in January, prior to my involvement in CUAD, are not in line with the CUAD community guidelines. I agree with their assessment,” the apology read. “Those words do not represent CUAD. They also do not represent me.”

This week, CUAD reversed course, not only saying it regretted its earlier statement but making it plain that the group supports violence, i.e. it supports Hamas.

The pro-Palestinian group that sparked the student encampment movement at Columbia University in response to the Israel-Hamas war is becoming more hard-line in its rhetoric, openly supporting militant groups fighting Israel and rescinding an apology it made after one of its members said the school was lucky he wasn’t out killing Zionists.

“We support liberation by any means necessary, including armed resistance,” the group, Columbia University Apartheid Divest, said in its statement revoking the apology.

The group marked the anniversary of the Oct. 7 attack on Israel by distributing a newspaper with a headline that used Hamas’s name for it: “One Year Since Al-Aqsa Flood, Revolution Until Victory,” it read, over a picture of Hamas fighters breaching the security fence to Israel. And the group posted an essay calling the attack a “moral, military and political victory” and quoting Ismail Haniyeh, the assassinated former political leader of Hamas.

Hamas' goal is to kill Jews, civilian or otherwise, and drive them from the land. This is what "from the river to the sea" has always meant. Now the group which ran the Columbia protests and inspired similar protests around the country is flat out saying they support the same thing.

The increasingly revolutionary tilt of the student movement reflects an internal push among many pro-Palestinian groups to align their goals with principles known as the Thawabet, crafted by the Palestine Liberation Organization in 1977. They include the right of Palestinians to armed resistance and to self-determination on all the land from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea.

For his part, James thanked his "comrades" and said he never wrote the apology published in April in the first place. "I will not allow anyone to shame me for my politics," he said.

James is currently suing Columbia over his suspension. 

Columbia, which did not initially take action against James, suspended him one day after The Daily Wire reported his comments on April 25. In the lawsuit, James claims the university only suspended him to save face amid national backlash.

“The timing and language of the sanction letter makes it clear that Columbia acted in response to external forces and national media attention,” the suit, filed in the New York State Supreme Court, reads. “The University is allowing external forces, applying pressure to it, to dictate outcomes in individual student disciplinary cases.”...

“James has been a victim of Columbia’s anti-Palestinian bias, severely punished, though not himself Palestinian, as a supporter of the rights of the Palestinian people,” the suit states.

All of this puts Columbia in a pickle. In the past the defense of these groups sounded something like this 'The protesters aren't really extremists, they ae just concerned citizens.' Now it's crystal clear that these groups are seeking to support a terrorist group whose goal is the wholesale murder of Jewish civilians that defense doesn't fly. 

As the Times points out, even if you take a very broad view that the First Amendment protects support for foreign terrorist groups, these schools have already been investigated by the Department of Education and in some cases sued by Jewish students. They are required to create a campus environment where Jews don't have to feel afraid walking to class. How can they do that when there are Hamas supporters carrying on all around them? Will they suspend more student extremists like James or will they just pretend this isn't happening like they did for most of last year?