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The new academic year has scarcely begun, and Hamas supporters on campus are already signaling that they haven’t lost a bit of their fanaticism. If anything, they’re even more menacing. An incident at the University of Pittsburgh Friday evening shows that American college and university campuses are becoming increasingly dangerous places for Jewish students and other supporters of Israel, who are being threatened and brutalized all in the name of the “liberation” of “Palestine.”

The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reported recently that a man named Jarrett Buba, who at 52 years old is unlikely to be a student at the university, “attacked two Jewish University of Pittsburgh students with a glass bottle as they walked through campus Friday evening near the Cathedral of Learning.” Buba “had been sitting at a table across Forbes Avenue from where the students were walking when he ran across the street and attacked them about 6 p.m.” The attack was as bloody as it was gratuitous: “One of the students had cuts on his face and the other was bleeding from cuts on his neck.” This was no random incident; the headgear that each party was wearing indicates what was really going on.

Buba’s victims were wearing yarmulkes; Buba himself, however, was sporting a keffiyeh, the checkered scarf that is closely associated with the Palestinian Arab jihad against Israel. The simple fact that he was wearing this scarf indicated that he was fanatically committed to the Palestinian cause, even to the point of thinking himself righteous when attacking random Jewish students.

Yet like everything that is “Palestinian,” the keffiyeh comes from somewhere else. It originated among the Bedouins as a protection from the sun, and not just Palestinians, or Arabs in general, wear it; Kurds and Yazidis sometimes sport it as a non-political statement. Nevertheless, the close identification of this headdress with the Palestinian jihad against Israel has made it unmistakable: the keffiyeh is today what the broken cross of National Socialism was in the 1930s and 1940s. It is a symbol of an irrational and violent hatred of Jews, and a determination to destroy them.

The close association of the keffiyeh with this genocidal cause began about ninety years ago. Initially, some Jews who moved to British Mandatory Palestine donned the keffiyeh, as they saw doing so as part of trying to fit in with their neighbors. However, during the 1936-9 Arab Revolt against British rule, Arab commanders ordered Arab men to wear the keffiyeh as a symbol of their “resistance.”

Harold MacMichael, the British Mandatory High Commissioner in Palestine, told the British Foreign Office that “this ‘order’ has been obeyed with surprising docility and it is not an exaggeration to say that in a month eight out of every ten tarbushes in the country had been replaced.” Keffiyeh-wearing jihadis murdered around 500 Jews, and the Jews of the region, as they were the targets of those who were wearing the keffiyeh, stopped wearing it themselves.

Yasir Arafat, who played an influential role in the invention of the Palestinian nationality in the 1960s, cemented the link between the keffiyeh and the Palestinian jihad by making a black-and-white keffiyeh with a fishnet pattern his personal trademark. Wearing the keffiyeh became a symbol of “solidarity” with the struggle of this new and yet supposedly indigenous people, and so it has remained to this day.

Today, the association of the keffiyeh with the Palestinian Arab jihad has become so universally accepted that it is now commonplace to see leftists who are not “Palestinians” or Arabs wearing it to demonstrate their loyalty to the left’s cause du jour. The available news reports don’t say much about him, but Jarrett Buba may be one of those leftists.

It is fitting that the symbol of this fake nationality would be a headdress that has been appropriated from elsewhere, and which Palestinian Arabs themselves did not wear for the most part until less than a hundred years ago. Nonetheless, the association is now unbreakable. The person who puts on a keffiyeh now is endorsing Jew-hatred, ethnic cleansing, and genocide. The keffiyeh is this century’s National Socialist symbol. What Jarrett Buba did at the University of Pittsburgh is an ugly recrudescence of National Socialist-type violence against Jews simply because they are Jews. Given today’s political and social climate, this is unlikely to be a singular incident.