When the New York Police Department cleared protesters out of Butler Library to end the May 7 protest, it arrested 61 female protesters and only 19 male participants.
Jasmyn Jordan, 20, national chairwoman of Young Americans for Freedom, tells AFN the female protesters are being manipulated by pro-Hamas propaganda that is replacing emotions with facts.
“What I've noticed is the pro-Hamas side always tries to downplay anything that Israel does and makes them look like the oppressor,” Jordan says. “And [Hamas] makes anything related to Gaza look like the oppressed.”
Separating people as either oppressors or the oppressed is a standard strategy of Communism and Marxism, which urge the poor to organize and overthrow the rich.
Rather than simply call for an end to bloodshed, many protests at Columbia and other campuses have taken that similar viewpoint. Even after Hamas attacked and kidnapped mostly Israeli civilians in its Oct. 7 surprise attack 1 ½ years ago, the attackers have been praised by U.S. college students as freedom fighters trying to defeat a stronger enemy, Israel.
Hamas codenamed its planned Oct. 7 attack "Operation Al-Aqsa Flood" and leaflets about the attack (pictured below) have been distributed at campus protests.
During the Columbia protest, the majority-female protesters renamed Butler Library after a Palestinian terrorist, Basel al-Araj. He was killed in 2017 in a shootout with the IDF who had come to arrest him for plotting attacks against Israeli targets.
In honor of him, the Columbia students renamed the library “Basel al-Araj Popular University.”
Another factor that is attracting female university students, Jordan says, is the need to be accepted and to be popular among their classmates on a campus dominated by liberals.
“They want to be part of the trends," she says, "and it's a big trend on college campuses to be associated with these movements.”
In the case of Jordan herself, who is a University of Iowa student, she tells AFN she has been threatened, stalked, and doxxed for being an outspoken conservative activist.
Other young women, she says, have told her they share her political views but don’t want to be singled out, and possibly lose friends, for holding those views.
“So I think it's really a big social aspect," she observes, "for why women are getting involved in these protests."
