One movement wants peace. Another wants hatred, violence and death. Colorado should stand with the former.

In Colorado and across the country, ill-informed students, paid protesters, privileged faculty and others are mounting protests.

The activists support a government that enforces full criminalization of abortion, even if conducted to save the life of a mother. The government criminalizes the LGBTQ+ community, sometimes with the death penalty. They support a regime that wants to kill all Jews.

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At Denver’s Auraria Campus — home to the University of Colorado Denver, Community College of Denver and Metropolitan State University of Denver — activists have destroyed grass, trashed an office, vandalized and marked property with hateful graffiti and tormented Jews trying to peacefully pursue their educations. Other protests are erupting at campuses across Colorado, though many of the activists have no connection to the schools.

Peaceful, liberal-minded students should follow a fledgling movement in Denver organized to resist this.

In supporting Hamas and/or Palestine, protesters embolden openly misogynistic tyrants who treat women as criminals if their husbands cheat on them.

Average Americans should find themselves repulsed by support for the barbaric Hamas government, which codifies and trades in hatred, murder and brutality. To look more ignorant and evil, protesters need only wear white hoods or Swastikas.

The stated goals of Hamas are not in question:

“The Day of Judgement will not come about until Moslems fight the Jews (killing the Jews), when the Jew will hide behind stones and trees. The stones and trees will say O Moslems, O Abdulla, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him,” says the Hamas Covenant of 1988.

It continues: “Our struggle against the Jews is very great and very serious… The movement is but one squadron that should be supported by more and more squadrons from this vast Arab and Islamic world, until the enemy is vanquished, and Allah’s victory is realised.”

All those “river to the sea” chants support this doctrine, which rejects any peaceful, two-state solution to the Middle East conflict. A 2017 revision to the Hamas doctrine says, “Hamas rejects any alternative to the full and complete liberation of Palestine, from the river to the sea.”

These and countless other death-to-Israel slogans tell the world that Hamas plans to wipe Israel off the map. Americans and Israelis should trust these terrorist leaders when they reject any prospect of a compromise that might stop them from killing.

Incredibly, college administrations from coast to coast have such little knowledge of Middle East dynamics and human nature, they act as if pro-Hamas agitators are morally equivalent to Jews — a demographic that respects women, LGBTQ+ individuals and the vision of a just and peaceful world.

At the University of Denver, Jewish students are taking a stand against this open advocacy of hatred, violence and wanton death. Tired of fearing for their lives and missing classes, the students started a “first responder” club to protect themselves from pro-Hamas activists who threaten and taunt them. It’s unfortunate it has come to this.

The students are ensuring no Jewish student walking to or from class, or conducting any business on campus, is involuntarily alone and vulnerable. Students who volunteer will carry flashlights and pepper spray as part of their plan to protect against haters.

Jewish students should form these pacts throughout academia. Joining them should be faculty, non-Jewish students, parents and community leaders who oppose the racist, misogynistic and genocidal agenda of Hamas.

Denver Gazette Editorial Board