The Replacement of Education with Violent Indoctrination

By Seth Mandel

Wednesday, August 12, 2026

 

The Anti-Defamation League has produced one of the more valuable reports on anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism since October 7, and it’s about campus bias in the classroom. Its value lies in mostly eschewing more subjective claims of students’ feelings of safety (though some are in the report) in favor of documenting clear examples of faculty subverting education to spread anti-Jewish conspiracy theories.

 

Campus anti-Semitism is coming from the institutions themselves.

 

Many examples arise in required courses as well, where students are indoctrinated in violent bigotry with no relief.

 

A fair portion of these courses are outside the disciplines of political science. According to the report, for example, a professor at Illinois Urbana-Champaign opened his engineering class with a monologue on the Big Lie that Israel committed “genocide” in Gaza. Presumably he eventually got around to teaching the actual subject material.

 

At Columbia’s public-health school, the core curriculum includes one professor who apparently refers to the Jewish state as “so-called Israel,” echoing violent eliminationist fantasies. The required health class reportedly also included discussion of Jewish “blood money”—in this case to describe Jews who donate to the school.

 

A National Cinema course at Northwestern echoed the ahistorical myth that Jews are “settler colonialists” in their land, ensuring that the students knew what kind of “art” was to be produced. Since the “colonialist” smear is not criticism of, say, Israeli policy but rather a bizarre lie intended to incite against Jews, such content can’t be dismissed as someone’s mere biased opinion. It is the instruction of ethnic cleansing.

 

Similarly, a literature course at the University of California, Berkeley, described Israel as the “Israeli Occupation Force,” a delegitimizing and violence-justifying moniker, while describing the terrorist group Hamas as admirable “resistance forces.”

 

The proliferation of pro-terrorism lessons is one of the more disturbing patterns in American higher education. Another Berkeley class was assigned a lesson on Leila Khaled, a Palestinian hijacker and member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, a designated terrorist organization. The students were reportedly offered extra credit to attend anti-Zionist events outside of class.

 

The Center for Palestine Studies at Columbia reportedly did the same, promoting a course at the People’s Forum—a pro-Chinese Communist Party propaganda outfit—that required readings from PFLP documents.

 

Or imagine being in class with the University of California, Irvine professor who, the report states, called the events of October 7 and after “a gift from Allah to the world” and extolled such divine intervention, “whether it was 9/11 or the Second Intifada, or some other issue that is waking the Muslims’ spirit.”

 

The ADL notes the obvious problem in all this: “The impact of these dynamics is shaped in part by the authority faculty hold within the classroom. Students may feel constrained in their ability to challenge or question such content, particularly where participation, grading or academic relationships are at stake. This can be especially acute for Jewish students, who may experience such rhetoric not as abstract political discourse but as directly threatening, particularly when it relates to violence against Israelis or Jewish communities.”

 

Indeed, structuring academic incentives to promote anti-Jewish terrorists outside the classroom is not exactly subtle. It also raises the temperature on campus, moving the Overton Window regarding violence and violent rhetoric against students—especially when that rhetoric is coming from a student’s own professor.

 

The report documents other such cases: students being given extra credit to join an anti-Israel walkout, teachers canceling classes in support of a pro-Gaza walkout, and numerous similar incidents. Canceling multiple classes, as some teachers did, to have students attend anti-Israel indoctrination events is an obvious perversion of responsibilities—not to mention lazy in the extreme.

 

Then there’s the singling out of Israeli students, accused in class of being an “occupier,” a “murderer,” a “settler” and other such epithets directly.

 

When anti-Jewish activists on campus and in the media seek to dismiss such concerns, they pretend that bias in the classroom amounts to no more than teaching lessons in which Israel isn’t the good guy. But in truth, what’s been happening is nothing of the sort. It’s the dismantling of academic inquiry entirely in place of violent indoctrination.