At gay-pride events in Chicago, Washington, and New York, participants have been asked not to display Stars of David, or have been either expelled or harassed for doing so. Last summer, Blake Flayton, when planning to attend a similar event in Tel Aviv, was advised by an American friend not to advertise that he had been there—lest he be accused of “pinkwashing.” Flayton sees these and other incidents as evidence that the organized gay-rights movement has been hijacked by the anti-Israel cause, rendering it suspicious of Jews as such:

[M]ore and more LGBTQ organizations are openly supporting boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) resolutions. [One such group], on my campus at George Washington University, . . . published a political platform of its own in 2019 that states: “in recognition of the struggles of LGBTQ+ Palestinians living under occupation, of the fact that settler-colonialism will always hurt our LGBTQ+ siblings, and in recognition [that] the pinkwashing done by the Israeli state to justify occupation requires combating by the LGBTQ+ community, we commit ourselves to the cause of anti-settler colonialism. Additionally, we refuse to endorse or work with organizations that stand in support of settler-colonialism states.”

It’s important to note that nowhere in the platform is there any other condemnation of a foreign power or its government’s policy. The only regional conflict recognized is the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. After I filed a complaint with the university, the platform was amended to remove specific mention of Palestinians and Israel. Regardless, this organization will refrain from partnering with Jewish groups if they have any connection to the Jewish state.

In short, Flayton concludes, Jews are tolerated in these organizations only insofar as they are willing to renounce Israel and Zionism.

While it is commendable that administrators of several universities finally called upon police to crack down on violent and disruptive anti-Israel protests, the actions they have taken may be insufficient. At Columbia, demonstrators reestablished their encampment on the main quad after it had been cleared by the police, and the university seems reluctant to use force again. The school also decided to hold classes remotely until the end of the semester. Such moves, whatever their merits, do nothing to fix the factors that allowed campuses to become hotbeds of pro-Hamas activism in the first place. The editors of National Review examine how things go to this point:

Since the 10/7 massacre, Columbia’s Jewish students have been forced to endure routine calls for their execution. It shouldn’t have taken the slaughter, rape, and brutalization of Israeli Jews to expose chants like “Globalize the intifada” and “Death to the Zionist state” as calls for violence, but the university refused to intervene on behalf of its besieged students. When an Israeli student was beaten with a stick outside Columbia’s library, it occasioned little soul-searching from faculty. Indeed, it served only as the impetus to establish an “Anti-Semitism Task Force,” which subsequently expressed “serious concerns” about the university’s commitment to enforcing its codes of conduct against anti-Semitic violators.

But little was done. Indeed, as late as last month the school served as host to speakers who praised the 10/7 attacks and even “hijacking airplanes” as “important tactics that the Palestinian resistance have engaged in.”

The school’s lackadaisical approach created a permission structure to menace and harass Jewish students, and that’s what happened. . . . Now is the time finally to do something about this kind of harassment and associated acts of trespass and disorder. Yale did the right thing when police cleared out an encampment [on Monday]. But Columbia remains a daily reminder of what happens when freaks and haters are allowed to impose their will on campus.