U.S. foreign policy is being shaped by people, educated at elite universities, who have been steeped in a worldview deeply hostile to Israel and the West. While headlines since Oct. 7, 2023, might suggest that this is a new phenomenon, it’s actually been going on for decades.

That such institutions have become beholden to outrageous ideas — that Zionism is racist, that Israel is an apartheid state committing genocide against the Palestinians, that Israelis are settler-colonialists with no connection to that part of the world — is bad enough.

But even worse is that, due to the very fact that they are elite, they are training grounds for policymakers, intelligence analysts, diplomats, professors, and journalists. In those roles, these people not only shape world events, but also how those events are perceived. 

When faculty at and alumni of such universities propound antisemitic and anti-Western theories, they are lending those theories a prestigious imprimatur. They are creating and upholding a permissive structure for vicious ideas with deadly consequences, both here and abroad.

Let’s take Columbia University as an example, whose Task Force on Antisemitism released its fourth and final report earlier this month.

Much of the problem at Columbia stems from the intellectual legacy of Edward Said, who was a professor of literature there. Said’s work is foundational to the modern-day anti-Israel movement, whose ideas bleed so easily into outright antisemitism.

In Orientalism, Said denied that knowledge and scholarship can exist for their own sake —........

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