The Federalist Society was scheduled to host an event with the Manhattan Institute’s Ilya Shapiro at New York University on October 7 about Shapiro’s forthcoming book. Shapiro has now revealed that the university asked to reschedule the event because of security concerns and then effectively canceled it. That date is, of course, the second anniversary of the Hamas attacks that began its current war with Israel.
But the school’s message to Shapiro phrases it a bit differently: “For security reasons, and because we anticipate an increased likelihood of demonstrations and protests connected to the anniversary of the October 7, 2023 incidents in Gaza, would it be possible to host Mr. Shapiro on another date?”
That’s no mere awkward phrasing. There’s a reason the law school’s programming director wrote “protests connected to the anniversary of the October 7, 2023 incidents in Gaza.”
On October 7, 2023, the incidents did not take place in Gaza; they took place in Israel. The incidents were carried out by people from Gaza. Those Gazans—many of them members of the terror group governing the enclave, and many of them “civilians” who joined the invasion—were responsible for some of the most monstrous acts of murder and sexual violence the modern world has seen.
But the NYU program director isn’t all wrong: There will likely be protests and demonstrations on that day, and the demonstrators will be quite hostile to Jews like Shapiro.
Ask yourself: If the only events of October 7, 2023 were anti-Jewish violence on a scale that hadn’t been seen since the Holocaust, who will be protesting on that anniversary, and why?
There are two options. Certainly if you are Jewish or Israeli or supportive of Jews or Israelis, you have reason to protest the events of October 7. But those protesters will be pro-Israel, more likely to be engaged in vigils of some kind, and won’t be a security threat to anyone, anywhere on campus whatsoever. Anyone horrified by the events of October 7 would likely welcome Ilya Shapiro to campus. And even if they didn’t, they wouldn’t put a single person in harm’s way.
So if those who stand against the “incidents” of October 7 aren’t the protesters to worry about, the process of elimination gives us the answer: people whose activism is inspired by the events of October 7.
So the NYU programming director is correct that the security threats on Oct. 7, 2025, have much to do with the events of October 7, 2023. And on that day, nothing happened to Gaza or Gazans. Because the campus protest movement isn’t interested in Gaza or Palestinians more generally. They are celebrating a pogrom—just as they did on October 7, 2023, and shortly thereafter, as they took to the streets to denounce the victims of a massacre.
If October 7 is important to you, it is because of what happened on that day. And what happened on that day happened to Jews. That October 7 is important to “anti-Zionist” groups on campus tells you much about the depravity of such people.
A perfect example of this involved the campus of the University of Maryland. Last year, the school’s chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine, one of the most extreme pro-Hamas organizations that can be found anywhere outside Hamas HQ, reserved much of the protesting space around campus for an October 7 celebration of the massacre.
This was evil on three levels. First, celebrating the massacre. Second, attempting to limit space for Jewish public vigils, preventing the victims from also marking the day. Third, co-opting the date itself and trying to turn it into a Palestinian diaspora holiday.
All of this was made undeniably clear in the weeks leading up to the anniversary. The school attempted to cancel the permits for SJP and have the group demonstrate on a different day. A court smacked down the school on First Amendment grounds. In his written decision, the judge in the case noted the importance of that specific day to SJP: “even if pro-Israel groups see October 7 as somehow sacrosanct, it is at least fair argument for pro-Palestine groups to see the date as sacrosanct as well, symbolic of what they believe is Palestine’s longstanding fight for the liberation of Gaza.”
Therefore, the judge wrote, “No other date, as SJP sees it, can make the point of their mission quite as forcefully as October 7.”
Truer words were never spoken.
Where does this idea to hijack Jewish commemoration even come from? One of the innovations the Palestinian cause brought to global anti-Semitism was the strange need to confiscate and repurpose anything important to Jews. It’s why Israel’s independence—and not the end of the war that followed—has become the Palestinian nakba. There are plenty of dates on the calendar to choose from, but if they aren’t important to Jews, they aren’t important to those who hate Jews.
It is important that Jews refuse to rearrange their calendar to satisfy their enemies, because their enemies cannot be satisfied. That, perhaps, is the main lesson of the anti-Semites and October 7.
