By : Malik Mukhtar
They could have stood for truth. For decency. For the right of a besieged people to live. But they didn’t.
The liberal institutions we once looked to for moral leadership—the media, elite universities, progressive political circles—did not merely stay silent in the face of Israel’s slow, deliberate annihilation of Gaza. They fed the fire. They handed the executioners their bullets.
In their cowardice, they weaponized antisemitism—not to protect Jews, but to protect Zionist power. They erased the line between being Jewish and being Zionist, between resisting genocide and endorsing hate. And in doing so, they betrayed the very principles they claimed to hold sacred.
Columbia. Harvard. Princeton. The New York Times. The Democratic Party. All have bent the knee to the Zionist lobby, not out of conviction, but out of fear. Fear of losing donors. Fear of being labeled. Fear of losing access, relevance, power.
And so, they purged professors who dared to call apartheid by its name. They arrested peaceful students whose only crime was raising tents and chants. They shut down encampments where Jewish, Muslim, and Christian students stood shoulder to shoulder in solidarity. They suspended the young and fired the wise. They allowed Zionist hysteria to define slogans like “From the river to the sea” and “long live the intifada” as genocidal threats—while ignoring the literal genocide unfolding on livestreams from Rafah to Jabalia.
President Minouche Shafik of Columbia turned her back on her own students and colleagues during a Congressional witch trial. She grovelled before Elise Stefanik and defamed longtime scholars like Katherine Franke and Mohamed Abdou. She invited police onto campus to arrest peaceful protestors. She thought appeasement would save her job. It didn’t.
Harvard followed the same script. Its leaders condemned pro-Palestinian voices, banned protestors from graduating, and increased police surveillance—then watched as Trump’s administration revoked its right to host international students, slashing $3 billion in federal funding. It wasn’t enough to betray justice. They betrayed themselves.
What do you expect when you hand over your spine to a machine that doesn’t want compromise, but obedience? These institutions forgot: cowardice doesn’t buy mercy. It only accelerates your downfall.
Trump calls these same liberals “Marxist lunatics” and “communists.” His allies—white supremacists, Christian fascists, antisemites of the old school—cheer Israel’s genocidal project because they see their own vision of racial domination mirrored in it. Elon Musk, Kristi Noem, and the rest don’t want to protect Jews. They want a world where brown and Black bodies can be exterminated in the name of purity.
And yet the liberal class chose their side—hoping they’d be spared.
Now they’re watching their research grants vanish. Their campuses militarized. Their voices censored. They’re not victims. They’re collaborators. They gave the bullets to their executioners.
The only people standing with any courage are the students, the professors, the grassroots Jews, Muslims, Christians, and atheists who refuse to stay silent. Who know the difference between justice and propaganda. Who will not let "antisemitism" be twisted into a gag order on truth.
Gaza is not a metaphor. It is a graveyard of dreams, of children, of a people who have endured starvation, bombing, forced displacement, and dehumanization for 20 months—with the world watching.
This is not just Israel’s war on Gaza.
It is a war on truth.
And too many so-called liberals chose the side of the lie.
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