Student Terrorism

National Review Online

Tuesday, December 24, 2024

 

Ever since the October 7 massacres in Israel, antisemitism has exploded on college campuses. Universities that had embraced DEI and canceled students and faculty for imaginary microagressions suddenly took an expansive view of free speech when it meant allowing demonstrators to take over campuses, disrupt classes, chant genocidal slogans, harass Jewish students, and target Jewish spaces. No matter how heinous the actions of the protesters, they have been framed as coming from idealistic students expressing genuine humanitarian concern for the people of Gaza, and as mere criticism of Israel.

 

But it turns out that some of the students were going further than just admiring the terrorists.

 

Earlier this month, two student activists at George Mason University in Virginia who were sisters (the current and former leaders of the school’s Students for Justice in Palestine chapter) were banned from campus for four years. A search of their apartment turned up guns, ammo, Hamas and Hezbollah flags, and Arabic patches reading “Death to America,” “Death to Jews,” and “Kill them where they stand.”

 

The ban of the sisters triggered outrage in predicable quarters, with the Council on American–Islamic Relations (which has long attempted to shield radicals by shouting about Islamophobia), claimed the move was “draconian” and “fit a pattern nationwide of attempts to silence or intimidate those who seek to end the Israeli genocide in Gaza and the Biden administration’s complicity with that genocide.”

 

Following these revelations, last week brought the news that Abdullah Ezzeldin Taha Mohamed Hassan, a George Mason University freshman, was charged by federal prosecutors for plotting an attack on the Israeli consulate in New York.

 

As laid out in charging documents filed by the FBI in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia, Hassan, an Egyptian national in the midst of deportation proceedings, had praised ISIS and al-Qaeda on social media, describing Osama Bin Laden as his idol and martyrdom as a path to paradise.

 

When approached by an undercover FBI informant posing as somebody ideologically aligned, Hassan, in a series of messages over a period of several months, provided detailed instructions on how to carry out a mass casualty event targeting Jews. The student sent the informant an ISIS video calling for the killing of Jews, directions on how to record a martyrdom video, a video tutorial on bomb-making, and suggested targeting the Israeli consulate. He also discussed the options of murdering people via mass shooting or with a suicide bomb.

 

He has been charged with “distribution of information relating to explosives, destructive devices, and weapons of mass destruction” with the goal of murdering “internationally protected persons.”

 

While the charges are welcome in this case, unfortunately, President Biden has resisted using the levers available to him through the Department of Education and the Department of Justice’s civil rights division to protect Jewish students and tamp down on anti-American radicalism on campus. President-elect Trump has vowed to take a more aggressive approach, calling for deportations of foreign students who support terrorism, as well as threatening universities with cutoff in funding and loss of accreditation for not protecting Jewish students. The DOJ should prosecute to the full extent of the law anyone who has committed such serious felony offenses as providing material support to terrorists and conspiring against civil rights. Such moves would be long overdue.