FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Three Years After October 7: A Warning the West Cannot Ignore
Three years after the October 7 massacre, ISGAP remembers the victims, honors the survivors, and stands with the families whose lives were forever changed by the deadliest attack on the Jewish people since the Holocaust.
By October 8, before many victims of this organised pogrom had been identified or buried and while hostages remained in Gaza, anti-Israel demonstrations had already begun. In the weeks that followed, campuses and major cities became arenas for the demonisation of Israel, the justification, and at times glorification of political violence, and openly antisemitic rhetoric.
This phenomenon must be understood as the opening of the eighth front in the war not only against Israel, but against the Jewish people, democratic values and principles, and against democratic nations and their allies, basic stability and security.
The fact that this war is being launched in many cases within some of the best universities, exposes a deeper crisis. Universities must remain places of rigorous inquiry, intellectual integrity and genuine debate. Yet in too many cases they become vehicles for ideological indoctrination in place of real critical scholarship. The consequence is visible, the reactionary movements mobilized around profoundly distorted understandings of Israel, Zionism and Jewish history; and even more threatening, the discarding of democratic values and practice, as the extreme red-green alliance emerges in the classrooms and on our campuses.
ISGAP’s Follow the Money research, which since 2019 has uncovered billions of dollars in Qatari funding to US universities that went unreported to the Department of Education, and has traced its links to Muslim Brotherhood networks and ideology on campus, has documented the need for far greater scrutiny of foreign funding and ideological influence in academia.
At a moment of global ethical and security crisis, too much of the democratic world has suffered from a failure of leadership: an unwillingness to identify extremism clearly, defend democratic values consistently, and confront the ideological forces that exploit institutional weakness. ISGAP’s mission is to expose and disrupt the ideological, financial and institutional networks that sustain antisemitism and anti-democratic social movements; to restore intellectual integrity and accountability where they have been eroded; and to give policymakers the evidence and tools required to confront these threats before they become further entrenched.
By October 8, before many victims of this organised pogrom had been identified or buried and while hostages remained in Gaza, anti-Israel demonstrations had already begun. In the weeks that followed, campuses and major cities became arenas for the demonisation of Israel, the justification, and at times glorification of political violence, and openly antisemitic rhetoric.
This phenomenon must be understood as the opening of the eighth front in the war not only against Israel, but against the Jewish people, democratic values and principles, and against democratic nations and their allies, basic stability and security.
The fact that this war is being launched in many cases within some of the best universities, exposes a deeper crisis. Universities must remain places of rigorous inquiry, intellectual integrity and genuine debate. Yet in too many cases they become vehicles for ideological indoctrination in place of real critical scholarship. The consequence is visible, the reactionary movements mobilized around profoundly distorted understandings of Israel, Zionism and Jewish history; and even more threatening, the discarding of democratic values and practice, as the extreme red-green alliance emerges in the classrooms and on our campuses.
ISGAP’s Follow the Money research, which since 2019 has uncovered billions of dollars in Qatari funding to US universities that went unreported to the Department of Education, and has traced its links to Muslim Brotherhood networks and ideology on campus, has documented the need for far greater scrutiny of foreign funding and ideological influence in academia.
At a moment of global ethical and security crisis, too much of the democratic world has suffered from a failure of leadership: an unwillingness to identify extremism clearly, defend democratic values consistently, and confront the ideological forces that exploit institutional weakness. ISGAP’s mission is to expose and disrupt the ideological, financial and institutional networks that sustain antisemitism and anti-democratic social movements; to restore intellectual integrity and accountability where they have been eroded; and to give policymakers the evidence and tools required to confront these threats before they become further entrenched.