America is teaching kids to hate Jews — and even itself.

From formal education to pop culture, a skyrocketing wave of anti-Jewish sentiment is reshaping young minds and eroding America in the process.

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This is a guest essay by Eric Buesing, a historian and writer.

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When college students tore down posters of kidnapped Israeli children in October 2023, parents asked: Where did this come from?

The answer lies in curriculum materials developed at Brown University. These materials reached approximately one million students annually in roughly 8,000 high schools across America. What teachers didn’t know, and what parents never learned, is that the professor who shaped these materials was funded by a Middle Eastern government. His purpose was to advance one specific narrative: Israel as a settler colonial project. Not to debate it. Not to present multiple perspectives. To establish it as fact.

“This is not a debate,” Professor Beshara Doumani told a Brown University audience in 2016. “And it’s not meant to be a debate.”

This is the root of American antisemitism’s resurgence. But antisemitism is just the visible symptom of something larger. The same infrastructure that taught a generation to hate Jews is now teaching them to hate America. The same foreign funding mechanisms that delegitimized Israel are delegitimizing Western civilization itself. America is being systematically dismantled. One classroom at a time. One algorithm at a time. One generation at a time.

In 2022, 11 Middle East Studies centers at America’s elite universities receive $260,000 each annually from the Department of Education under Title VI. That totals $2.9 million in taxpayer funding.¹ The Cold War-era program was originally designed to develop regional expertise for national security purposes. It became a pipeline for foreign influence when universities discovered they could supplement these federal grants with something far more lucrative.

Since 1981, American universities have accepted $13.1 billion from Qatar, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Kuwait.² Qatar alone contributed nearly $6 billion. Roughly 73 percent of these contributions are worth approximately $10.7 billion. None of these billions have any publicly stated purpose despite federal disclosure requirements.

The scale is staggering. Cornell University received $2.3 billion. Carnegie Mellon University took $1.05 billion. Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. and Texas A&M each accepted over $1 billion. When you look at Georgetown’s records, you find more than $1 billion with no stated purpose. Just blank spaces where explanations should be.

Here’s what we do know: Saudi Arabia gave Georgetown’s Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Center $20 million. The funding was structured to “follow” the center’s director. This gave the Saudi government effective control over who held the position.³ Qatar Foundation International sponsored K-12 teacher training sessions. They covered travel and expenses for American educators attending workshops on Middle East history.⁴

At least one donation explicitly funded a Palestinian Studies professorship at Brown University. The position went to someone who supports boycotting Israel: Beshara Doumani. His position didn’t exist until foreign money created it. His influence shaped the curriculum materials that were used in roughly 8,000 schools. Those materials reached approximately one million students annually. Brown University ended the Choices Program in 2025. The university cited financial pressures and mounting criticism over the program’s Israel-Palestine materials as reasons for shutting it down.

The pattern repeats everywhere. Foreign governments fund academic positions. Universities fill those positions with scholars who share the donors’ worldviews. Those scholars create curriculum materials. The materials reach thousands of schools nationwide. Teachers trust them because they bear prestigious university names. Parents never question them because they don’t know the funding sources. Students absorb frameworks that were designed by foreign governments to advance foreign interests.

And it works. Research examining the years 2015 to 2020 found something striking: Institutions that accepted Middle Eastern funding experienced 300 percent more antisemitic incidents than institutions that didn’t accept such funding.⁵ Separate studies reached the same conclusion. Undocumented money from Middle Eastern authoritarian states predicted increased campus antisemitism. And the funding came first. The money preceded the hatred. The money caused the hatred.

The Middle East Studies Association has over 2,700 members. In March 2022, the association voted 768 to 167 to officially endorse Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) against Israel. The organization had claimed for decades to be non-political. That pretense vanished. For many Middle East Studies Association members, characterizing Israel as settler-colonialist has become “an article of faith.”

This isn’t a fringe view confined to radicals; it’s the consensus position. Panel titles at the Middle East Studies Association’s annual conferences include references to Israel’s “settler-colonial frontier.” These are the scholars who create curriculum for American high schools. These are the academics who train future teachers. These are the professors whom universities hired with foreign money and continue to maintain with federal grants.

George Washington University quietly ended its relationship with the Middle East Studies Association in 2023. This came one year after the BDS endorsement. Even university administrators could see where this was heading. But the damage was already done: The Middle East Studies Association had shaped the entire field for decades. The scholars it trained, the frameworks it promoted, the orthodoxy it enforced are now embedded throughout American academia. They’re training the next generation. It’s a self-perpetuating system that grows more extreme with each cycle.

These scholars don’t stay confined to Middle East Studies departments. They spread to Education departments where they train future K-12 teachers. They move into Schools of Social Work. They populate Ethnic Studies programs where they apply Middle East frameworks to American history. The infection metastasizes. Then it flows downstream to every institution these graduates enter.

Here’s what makes this system permanent: College students who were indoctrinated through foreign-funded curriculum become K-12 teachers. Then they deliver that same curriculum to the next generation.

Consider a typical case: A student learns from Doumani-influenced materials at Brown University. She majors in education at a state university. Her professors were trained in the same ideological tradition. They reinforce the frameworks she already learned. She does her student-teaching under a mentor who uses identical materials. She gets hired by a school district that adopted those materials years ago. The district chose them because they came from Brown University.

Now she’s teaching the next cohort. She genuinely believes what she’s teaching because it’s all she was ever taught. She has no idea that foreign funding shaped her curriculum. She doesn’t know that authoritarian governments designed these frameworks. The cycle completes itself. And it accelerates.

Education is one of the most popular college majors. These graduates disperse to schools nationwide. Within a single decade, foreign-funded curriculum influences far more than just the million students who encounter it directly. It influences the millions more who are taught by teachers who learned from it, believed it, and now perpetuate it.

Each generation of teachers is more indoctrinated than the one before. Each cohort of students emerges more hostile to Israel. More critical of America. More receptive to antisemitic frameworks. The system isn’t breaking down. It’s working exactly as it was designed to work. It has built-in mechanisms for self-replication and intensification.

Students who absorbed these frameworks don’t stop at graduation. They enter corporate America. There they find institutions that reinforce rather than challenge their worldview. Major corporations have embraced DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) bureaucracies. These bureaucracies operate using the identical theoretical frameworks that were taught through foreign-funded curriculum.

photo: Amy Elting/Unsplash

The “settler-colonial” lens isn’t academic abstraction anymore. Neither is the oppressor-oppressed binary. Nor the focus on systemic racism and white supremacy. These are now corporate policy. Google, Microsoft, Disney, Bank of America, and thousands of other major employers have been requiring training. This training teaches employees that America is fundamentally racist, that Western civilization is inherently oppressive, and that different standards must apply to different people based on their identity.

Young employees who learned in school that Israel is a colonial project find corporate environments that validate this exact worldview. Their education taught them the framework. Their employers apply it. The reinforcement is complete.

This shapes public discourse in profound ways. It happens through corporate platforms, advertising, hiring practices, and political advocacy. When Google’s search algorithms reflect these frameworks, it’s not accidental. When Facebook’s content moderation policies reflect them, it’s not coincidental. When Disney’s entertainment products reflect them, it’s not random; it’s institutional. The people making these decisions were educated in a system that was corrupted by foreign funding. Then they entered corporations that reinforced the same worldview they learned in school.

But here’s what makes this truly insidious: The “settler-colonial” framework doesn’t stop with Israel. It’s a universal acid that dissolves legitimacy everywhere it gets applied. If Israel is a “colonial project” because Jews “displaced” Palestinians, then America is also a “colonial project” because settlers “displaced” Native Americans. If Israelis are foreigners with no legitimate claim to the land, then Americans are foreigners with no legitimate claim to the continent. If Hamas resistance is justified against Israel, then any resistance to American power is also justified.

Students who learned to delegitimize Israel simultaneously learned to delegitimize America. Same framework. Same logic. Same conclusion. This wasn’t an accident. This was the entire point.

October 7th revealed something beyond antisemitism. Students didn’t just support Palestinians; they actively opposed America; they burned American flags in the streets; they called for revolution against the American system; they described America as a white supremacist empire that must be dismantled. The antisemitism and the anti-Americanism flowed from the same source. They were taught through the same curriculum. They were funded by the same foreign governments.

No consequence cuts deeper than what’s happening inside American families. Parents who raised their children with traditional American values now watch helplessly. Those children return from college expressing hatred for Israel and contempt for America. Sometimes they show barely concealed disdain for their parents’ entire generation.

Thanksgiving dinners have become battlegrounds. Adult children lecture their parents about colonialism, white privilege, and systemic racism. They use vocabulary their parents don’t recognize. They invoke frameworks their parents never encountered in their own education. The children genuinely believe their parents are racists. Or genocide apologists. Or both. The parents look at these young adults and don’t recognize the people their children have become.

This isn’t normal generational conflict. Previous generations disagreed about politics. But they shared fundamental values and historical understanding. The current divide runs much deeper. Parents and children now operate from completely different factual foundations: They learned different history, absorbed different values, and developed different loyalties to different ideas of what America is and should be.

This serves foreign interests perfectly. A divided America focused on internal conflicts is an America distracted from external threats. Families that can’t agree on basic facts can’t mount unified resistance to anything. The same infrastructure that taught children to hate Israel and America also taught them to view their own parents with suspicion or outright contempt.

Then there’s TikTok. The app has 150 million American users. They’re predominantly young. TikTok is owned by ByteDance. ByteDance is a company that operates under Chinese law. Chinese law requires cooperation with intelligence services. The TikTok algorithm determines what content reaches users. It determines what worldviews become normalized. It determines what ideas trend and what ideas get suppressed.

Following October 7th, TikTok flooded American users with pro-Hamas content. Multiple studies found that pro-Palestinian hashtags received billions more views than pro-Israel content. The algorithm wasn’t neutral; it was weighted astronomically in one direction. Students who had learned in high school that Israel is illegitimate then spent hours daily on an app controlled by China. That app reinforced those exact views through carefully curated content.

The pattern is devastating: Classroom indoctrination establishes the framework initially. Algorithmic manipulation reinforces it constantly. By the time these Americans reach voting age, their worldviews have been shaped by foreign adversaries. Those adversaries have aligned interests: Weaken America by dividing it internally, distract America by focusing it on internal conflicts, and ensure that the next generation views America’s allies as enemies and views America’s enemies as victims.

And the foreign intrusion extends beyond. It reaches the textbook publishing industry that supplies curriculum materials to schools nationwide. Major publishers like Pearson, McGraw-Hill, and Houghton Mifflin have increasingly incorporated the frameworks that were developed in foreign-funded university programs. World history textbooks now routinely describe Israel’s creation through the settler-colonial lens. American history textbooks present the nation’s founding as primarily a story about slavery and genocide. Social studies materials emphasize systemic oppression over individual liberty and rights.

Publishers are responding to market demand. Education schools train future teachers using foreign-funded curriculum. Those teachers graduate and prefer materials that reflect what they learned. School districts hire those teachers and adopt materials that align with what teachers want. Publishers provide those materials. Schools adopt them. The next generation of students learns from them. Those students then become teachers themselves. They demand even more ideologically consistent materials. Each cycle pushes content further away from balanced education. Each cycle moves it closer to explicit indoctrination.

The generation that was shaped by foreign-funded curriculum is now beginning to influence American foreign policy in measurable ways. Congressional staffers in their 20s and 30s were educated through this system. They draft legislation. They brief members of Congress. Their worldview shapes what information reaches policymakers. When a congressman asks for background information on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the staffer provides a memo. That memo reflects what she learned in school. The frameworks that were embedded in her education become the frameworks that shape American policy decisions.

U.S. Department of State officials entering the foreign service went through programs at Georgetown University, which received over $1 billion in Middle Eastern funding. These officials also studied at other elite institutions with similar funding. They bring similar perspectives to their work. Their cables from embassies abroad, their policy recommendations, their negotiating positions all reflect educational experiences that were corrupted by foreign money.

The 2024 elections revealed this dynamic clearly. Younger voters overwhelmingly opposed military aid to Israel. They supported conditioning that assistance on Israeli policy changes. They expressed sympathy for Hamas at rates that would have been completely unthinkable in previous generations. Politicians noticed these trends. Policy positions began to shift in response to this demographic.

photo: حسن/Unsplash

This represents a strategic victory for the foreign governments that funded these outcomes over decades. They didn’t need to lobby Congress directly. They didn’t need to fund think tanks to influence policy. They invested in education over a period of decades. Now that investment is generating returns as the educated generation enters positions of power.

Not coincidentally, antisemitic incidents on college campuses increased by 321 percent in 2023 compared to 2022.⁶ But the trend line was already steep before that. It had been rising steadily since 2015. That timeline correlates almost exactly with the increased foreign funding and the curricular shifts in universities. Between October 7th and the end of 2023 alone, campus antisemitic incidents increased 1,062 percent compared to the same two-month period in 2022.

The same pattern appears on questions about America itself. Patriotism declines with each younger cohort. Trust in American institutions plummets. Belief in American exceptionalism nearly disappears among Americans under 25. Support for capitalism versus socialism/communism flips entirely when you look at younger demographics.

These trends are accelerating rather than moderating. The gap between generations widened more between 2020 and 2024 than it did in the entire previous decade. Each graduating class is more hostile to American values than the class before it. And remember that these students become teachers. They perpetuate and intensify the frameworks they learned.

The intellectual monoculture is nearly complete. A professor who defends Israel now risks their entire career. A student who expresses support for American foreign policy risks social ostracism. The feedback mechanisms that might moderate these trends simply don’t exist anymore. There’s no correction coming from within the system.

Some states attempted to push back against this. Florida banned critical race theory from K-12 curriculum. Texas investigated university partnerships with China. Several states passed laws against BDS. The results reveal why institutional capture is so difficult to reverse.

Universities simply renamed their programs. Critical race theory became “culturally responsive teaching.” The frameworks remained identical while the vocabulary changed. Teachers who had been trained in the original concepts continued teaching them using new language. School districts claimed compliance with state laws while continuing their previous practices unchanged.

Chinese partnerships at universities moved offshore or restructured themselves to avoid disclosure requirements. Confucius Institutes rebranded as other types of cultural exchange programs. The funding continued flowing through different channels. The substance remained completely unchanged.

BDS bans at the state level proved largely unenforceable. Universities claimed academic freedom protections. Faculty members continued openly advocating for boycotts. Student groups promoting BDS operated freely despite state laws prohibiting such activity.

These failures reveal a sobering reality: The capture runs so deep that reform attempted from above faces insurmountable resistance from below. Partial reforms fail because the infrastructure is comprehensive and interconnected. You can’t fix curriculum without simultaneously fixing teacher training. You can’t fix teacher training without fixing universities. You can’t fix universities without confronting foreign funding, administrative bloat, and faculty culture all at the same time. And you can’t do any of this without also addressing social media platforms and corporate culture that reinforce these same frameworks.

The few states that tried to implement reforms discovered they were attempting to drain an ocean with a bucket. The system is too large. Too interconnected. Too self-reinforcing for any incremental reform to work. It requires comprehensive action at the federal level. It requires sustained political will across multiple administrations. Anything less than that will fail.

Hence why Jewish students have faced unprecedented levels of harassment on campuses. Synagogues now require armed security guards more often than not. Antisemitic incidents reached record levels in 2023. Then they exceeded those records in 2024. The perpetrators aren’t neo-Nazis from the Far-Right; more and more they’re young progressives who are convinced they’re fighting against racism and colonialism.

But the consequences extend far beyond antisemitism. Crime increases in cities as policing gets reframed as oppression rather than protection. Major cities that adopted “defund the police” movements saw this firsthand. These movements were driven by young activists who were educated in these frameworks. Homicide rates spiked dramatically. Educational standards collapse because meritocracy gets attacked as a form of discrimination. School districts eliminate advanced courses because they produce “inequitable” outcomes. They abandon standardized tests. They close gifted programs. American students fall further behind their international peers while the education establishment celebrates achieving equity.

Economic mobility declines as capitalism gets portrayed as exploitation rather than opportunity. Young Americans who were educated to view business as oppressive don’t start companies. They don’t pursue careers in productive economic sectors. Instead they gravitate toward activism, non-profit organizations, and government jobs. The entrepreneurial spirit that built American prosperity withers generation by generation.

National unity fractures as shared American identity gets condemned as a form of colonialism. Balkanization accelerates along racial, ethnic, and ideological lines. A population that doesn’t see itself as one unified nation cannot act with unified purpose.

Military recruitment plummets as fewer young Americans view military service as honorable or necessary. The military struggles to meet its recruitment targets while America’s adversaries expand their forces. The most educated young Americans, who in previous generations would have become military officers and strategic thinkers, now view the military as an instrument of imperialism to be avoided or actively opposed.

Innovation suffers as the best minds pursue activism rather than science, technology, engineering, and mathematics fields. American technological dominance erodes as Chinese universities graduate more engineers each year. Meanwhile American universities graduate more “social justice activists.” These aren’t accidents or unintended consequences; these are the designed outcomes. The system was engineered to produce exactly this generation.

The solution requires political will to act comprehensively and immediately. Half-measures will fail. Incremental reforms will be absorbed and neutralized. Only comprehensive action can succeed.

First, enforce disclosure laws with brutal severity. Universities that hide foreign donations must lose all federal funding immediately. Complete cutoff. This includes grants, student loan eligibility, and research contracts. No warnings. No grace periods. No negotiations. Violate disclosure requirements once, lose federal funding permanently.

Second, ban foreign government funding from non-democratic countries to American universities entirely. Qatar sponsors Hamas. Saudi Arabia exports Wahhabi extremism. China runs concentration camps and harvests organs from political prisoners. These are not appropriate funding sources for American education under any circumstances. Universities must choose: foreign money or federal money. Not both.

Third, require explicit disclosure on all K-12 curriculum materials. Every teacher guide, every student handout, every online resource must state clearly and prominently: “Development of these materials was funded by [country/organization].” Let parents and teachers decide whether they trust curriculum that was created with Qatari money.

Fourth, end Title VI funding to any programs that demonstrate ideological uniformity rather than genuine viewpoint diversity. Federal grants should support education, not indoctrination. Programs that fail to meet this standard don’t deserve taxpayer support. Conduct regular audits of curriculum content. Programs that present only single perspectives on contested issues lose their funding.

Fifth, ban TikTok and any other social media platform that are controlled by foreign adversaries. The First Amendment doesn’t require America to allow hostile foreign governments to operate propaganda networks that target American children. TikTok isn’t speech; it’s a weapon of information warfare.

Sixth, dismantle outcome-based education and restore classical liberal education that focuses on critical thinking. Students need to learn how to analyze arguments, evaluate sources, distinguish fact from propaganda, and think independently. This requires reading primary historical sources. It requires writing analytical essays. It requires engaging with challenging material that makes them uncomfortable. Without this intellectual foundation, all other reforms will ultimately fail.

Seventh, eliminate university DEI bureaucracies as a condition of receiving federal funding. These offices exist solely to enforce ideological conformity. They spend hundreds of millions of dollars doing it. They serve no legitimate educational purpose. End federal funding to any university that maintains these structures.

Eighth, prosecute violations aggressively and publicly. Universities that failed to disclose foreign funding broke federal law. Charge the administrators who were responsible. Seek prison sentences, not merely fines. Companies that deceived users about data practices violated federal regulations. Pursue maximum legal penalties for all violations. Deterrence only works when there is consistent, visible enforcement.

Ninth, require viewpoint diversity in faculty hiring as a mandatory condition of receiving federal funding. Universities that claim to value diversity while maintaining complete ideological monocultures are committing fraud against taxpayers. Make intellectual diversity auditable and measurable. Universities must demonstrate that they actively hire faculty members with genuinely different perspectives, not just different skin colors or gender identities.

Tenth, break the teacher pipeline that perpetuates this system. Require Education schools to demonstrate that their graduates can actually teach critical thinking, not just progressive ideology. Conduct rigorous audits of teacher preparation programs. Those programs that function as indoctrination centers rather than professional training must lose their accreditation entirely. Dramatically expand alternative certification paths that bypass captured Education schools.

Rome didn’t fall in a single day or year; it decayed over multiple generations. Civic virtue eroded gradually. Citizens slowly lost the will to defend their civilization. Barbarians were welcomed and accommodated rather than resisted. The parallels to contemporary America are profoundly uncomfortable. But they are also undeniable.

The barbarians aren’t at the gates this time; they’re already inside. They’re in classrooms teaching children to despise their own heritage. They’re embedded in algorithms that shape worldviews. They’re in university administration taking foreign money and corrupting education. They’re in corporate HR departments enforcing ideological conformity. They’re producing generation after generation of Americans who are convinced that their country is evil, their civilization is illegitimate, and their history is purely criminal.

This is what civilizational collapse looks like from the inside. It’s not dramatic invasion or military conquest; it’s internal rot that spreads gradually. It’s not external defeat on battlefields; it’s internal surrender in classrooms. It’s not military failure; it’s spiritual exhaustion and the loss of belief in one’s own civilization.

Every single day that these mechanisms continue to operate, America grows weaker. Every day that foreign funding flows into universities, that ideological indoctrination proceeds in classrooms, that algorithmic manipulation operates on social media, another thousand students absorb frameworks that were specifically designed to make them hostile to their own civilization. Another thousand families fracture along ideological lines they can’t bridge. Another thousand teachers perpetuate what they learned without questioning it. Another thousand corporate employees enforce frameworks that actively undermine American competitiveness.

Foreign adversaries understand something that many Americans still don’t grasp. Nations fall from internal collapse before they fall to external conquest. You don’t need to defeat America militarily if you can convince Americans to defeat themselves ideologically. You don’t need to invade with armies if citizens welcome your cultural and intellectual influence. You don’t need to destroy American institutions through force if you can corrupt them from within through funding and influence.

The choice facing America is completely binary: Confront this crisis now with comprehensive action, or watch it accelerate until recovery becomes permanently impossible. There is no third option available.

Which will America choose?

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1. National Association of Scholars, 2022

2. Bard, 2024

3. Middle East Forum, 2020

4. Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy, March 2025

5. Network Contagion Research Institute, 2024

6. Anti-Defamation League, 2024