American Jewry is facing an unprecedented domestic crisis over its support for Israel’s war in Gaza.
The last two pieces of unpopular Jewish-backed legislation rammed through the House, the Antisemitism Awareness Act and a $95 billion dollar foreign aid package to Ukraine and Israel, required Republican Majority leader Mike Johnson to circumvent his own party conference and resort to cobbling together Democrat votes. Israeli political operation AIPAC has vowed to punish the Republican representatives who sided with their constituents against these bills, but these threats only mask the difficulty they are facing in holding full institutional power where they were once safe.
On college campuses, images of militarized police beating and mass arresting peaceful anti-war and anti-Zionist protesters have been broadcast internationally to morally discredit American liberalism. Prominent Democrats and Republicans remain unashamed, and have framed the demonstrators calling attention to Washington’s support for the genocide in Gaza as terrorists. High ranking political figures have issued instructions to the FBI to surveille, infiltrate and destroy the anti-Israel movement before it spreads further.
This crackdown has been accentuated by videos of groups of thugs, believed by some to be members of the Jewish Defense League, launching Antifa-style attacks, this time against protesting left-wing students. At UCLA, a mob of these balaclava-clad Jewish students began attacking students at the local anti-war encampment, in a skirmish seemingly coordinated with the California Highway Patrol cops, who followed up byshooting the students with tear gas and rubber bullets at point blank range, causing serious injuries. An Israeli foreign agent who trains California police officers, Aaron Cohen, was present on the scene working with the cops during the violent assault.
Meanwhile, conservative media has tried to sell these egregious attacks on our First Amendment rights to their viewers as acts of American patriotism. In an attempt to gin up support and incite young Republicans to participate in counter-demonstrations in support of Israel, a photo of fraternity brothers at the University of North Carolina holding Israeli and American flags bringing down a Palestinian banner on their campus flagpole has been circulated by conservative influencers and press as a rallying call.
As revealed in the documentary The Lobby, pro-Israel activism on American college campuses is by and large astroturfed. There is ample evidence to suggest the now famous UNC “frat boys protecting the flag” narrative Fox News and others have been spreading is also an inorganic publicity stunt.
According to the LinkedIn of UNC’s Pi Kappa Phi philanthropy chairman and counter-protest organizer, Guillermo Estrada, he is a Republican party activist who specializes in political marketing and publicity. He has previously served in a number of political roles as a marketing and outreach figure, such as in the office of Republican State Representative John Bell, and lists a future internship at New York City-based advertising firm Vistar Media.
Others involved in the American flag photo op include Jewish members of Pi Kappa Phi, such as Isaac Mahel, who told Laura Ingraham “We were there holding our Israeli flags and trying to stop hate and there’s been a lot of antisemitism around the country. So we were there first and foremost for our country Israel.”
Another one of the frat boy organizers, Brendan Rosenblum, has been working for the Simon Wiesenthal Center since 2022.
So far, over half a million dollars have been raised for the Pi Kappa Phi brothers on Go Fund Me. Journalists have struggled to find any information on the drive’s organizer, listed as John Noonan, but several Zionist billionaires such as Bill Ackman have contributed large sums of money to the effort.
Whether intentional or not, this massive cash infusion serves as a powerful incentive for other frats to try to copy the Israeli UNC fraternity members, regardless of how any individual fraternity or its members feels about the Israel-Palestine conflict.
Recent surveys shows only 8% of white Americans in the 18-29 age group support Israel, compared to 28% who are pro-Palestinian. But since the UNC stunt, fraternity members in places with little to no Jewish presence campus, such as at the University of Mississippi, have emerged to face off with pro-Palestine students.
The frat boys emerging on other Southern campuses, mostly white with the occasional Hillel student holding an Israeli flag, have no noteworthy history of confronting leftist students at their school.
At Ole Miss, there is a rumor that the frat boys who chanted “Lizzo! Lizzo! Lizzo!” and made monkey sounds towards an anti-war obese black leftist belong to Phi Delta Theta, which hosts a pledge to support anti-racist activism on their website. In 2019, Marxist activists supporting Black Lives Matter invaded the Ole Miss campus demanding the removal of Confederate statues and were completely unopposed. Afterwards, student groups voted 47-0 to conform to their demands.
The prospect of a massive payout and temporary pass for besieged young white men to leave the woke-cage seems to be a bigger motivation for the copycats than defending Israel. But the narrative of patriotic “Chad Brohemians” and “Boat-shoed Broletariats” waging war against campus anti-Semites is being proliferated by outlets such as the Zionist online-right adjacent Tablet Magazine, effectively signaling down the memestream that America’s sovereign has declared “White Boy Summer” and a bag of money is waiting on the other side.
But the Go Fund Me for the Ole Miss frat boys has only been able to collect a little over $2,000, while other counter-demonstrators at institutions such as Louisiana State University have hardly generated any coverage.
All that has been accomplished is deflecting away from the intensifying policy debate about America’s role in enabling Israeli murderers and reducing it to an inconsequential culture war circus.