Welcome to Breakpoint, a daily look at an ever-changing culture through the lens of unchanging truth.

For the Colson Center, I'm John Stone Street.

One of the seminal You Are Here moments of 2024 was the reaction, especially on so many college campuses,

to the horrific attacks by Hamas against Israel on October the 7th, 20203.

And what seemed like a throwback to some distant barbaric past of human history,

the Islamic terror group on that day targeted civilians with horrific acts,

including beheading children, sexually assaulting women, and kidnapping the elderly.

The attack sparked a regional war in the Middle

East in which the nation of Israel has once again displayed incredible restraint, not to mention

strength and an incredible capacity for efficient yet effective strikes. And yet, in the wake of

this horror, throughout 2024, we saw a new wave of anti-Semitism, often

violent, that was released in this country and around the world. In fact, according to a University

of Massachusetts professor of criminology, Arlie Pirliger, the U.S. is currently experiencing

one of the most significant ways of anti-Semitism it has ever seen.

In quote, much of this happened on college campuses.

Displaying both a profound ignorance of history and a propensity for conspiracy theories,

pro-Hamas protesters claim that Jews are not indigenous to the land or even to the Middle East,

and thus must be colonizers.

Some of them seem to know what the chant from the river to the sea Palestine will be free really

means, but many do not realize that it is a terrorist mantra. And, according to Berkeley professor

Ron Hassner, seemed to lack even basic knowledge about what the

genocidal cry actually means. In other words, despite what they say, they don't know which river or which

...