WaPo - (archived: https://archive.ph/ZfwpX ) Pro-Hamas messages intensify on college campuses

Pro-Palestinian protests have been less disruptive this fall, but at some schools, the rhetoric is more extreme.

By Laura Meckler and Susan Svrluga
November 10, 2024 at 5:00 a.m. EST

When antiwar protests disrupted campuses nationwide last year, signs and chants demanded “Divest!” and “Cease-fire now!” This fall, much of the protest language has grown darker, celebrating the Oct. 7, 2023, attack, echoing language used by Hamas and declaring, “Glory to the resistance!”

Mass protests and crackdowns that engulfed colleges in the spring have dissipated, and campuses are far calmer and quieter this fall. But at some schools, student groups have struck a strikingly more militant tone.

Earlier messages were not gentle — Israel’s actions were regularly dubbed “genocide” — but until recently few had openly endorsed Hamas and its leaders.

To some, including many in the Jewish community, it’s an alarming shift. But to others, the new rhetoric is the natural evolution of a movement responding to a brutal war now in its second year, with no end in sight.

Groups often escalate rhetoric when they haven’t achieved their goals, with a small faction urging stronger action, said Mitchell Silber, an adjunct associate professor at Columbia University who runs a nonprofit helping provide security for Jewish communities in the New York metropolitan area.

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