The American Left has a moral compass, and it’s pointing straight into the sewer. Students at UC Berkeley Law School just hosted a convicted terrorist as a guest speaker — and applauded her. Meanwhile, down the road at UCLA, the student government moved to condemn and ban an event featuring a 23-year-old Israeli man who spent 505 days as a hostage of Hamas.
Clap for the bomber. Silence the hostage. That’s where we are now.
The terrorist in question is Israa Jaabis, who was convicted of attempting to detonate a car bomb in Jerusalem back in 2015. She packed her vehicle with explosives and tried to blow up Israelis. She was released as part of the October 7th hostage exchange with Hamas — because apparently the price of getting our people back included putting convicted bombers back on the street.
So what did Berkeley Law Students for Justice in Palestine do? They invited Jaabis to speak remotely at their “Palestinian Political Prisoners Day” event this month. And the students applauded.
They. Applauded. A woman. Who tried. To blow people up.
(Just making sure everyone caught that.)
Now meet Omer Shem Tov. He’s 23 years old. On October 7th, 2023, he was at the Nova music festival — you know, the one where Hamas terrorists murdered 364 young people who were just there to dance and listen to music. Shem Tov was kidnapped and dragged into Gaza, where he was held captive for 505 days. Over a year and a half in a Hamas tunnel. A kid who went to a concert and didn’t come home for seventeen months.
On April 14th, UCLA’s Y&S Nazarian Center for Israel Studies and Hillel hosted him to share his story. A hostage survivor, speaking about what happened to him. You’d think even the most politically deranged college student could muster enough basic human decency to let a kidnapping victim talk about being kidnapped.
Nope.
One week after the event, UCLA’s Undergraduate Students Association Council passed a resolution condemning it. Their official statement said Shem Tov’s appearance “advanced incomplete and harmful representations of ongoing violence.”
Translation: the hostage’s story made our side look bad, so we’re officially declaring that kidnapping victims are harmful to the discourse.
Think about this for a second. A student government at one of America’s most prestigious universities looked at a 23-year-old who was dragged from a music festival and held underground by terrorists for 505 days and said, “This guy is the problem.”
Meanwhile, the convicted car bomber who tried to murder people in Jerusalem? She gets a Zoom invite and a round of applause.
This is the moral universe of the campus Left in 2026. The terrorist is a “political prisoner” deserving of celebration. The hostage is a “harmful representation” who needs to be silenced. They’ve got the whole thing exactly backwards, and they’re proud of it.
Berkeley and UCLA are both University of California schools, by the way. Same system. Same taxpayer dollars. One campus rolls out the red carpet for a bomber; the other one tells a hostage survivor to sit down and shut up. Your tuition dollars at work, California.
What makes this especially nauseating is the language. “Incomplete and harmful representations of ongoing violence.” That’s not just wrong — it’s cowardly. They can’t say what they actually mean, which is: “We don’t want people sympathizing with Israeli hostages because it complicates our narrative.” So they wrap it in academic jargon and pretend they’re protecting the student body from… what, exactly? The harmful experience of hearing a kidnapping victim describe being kidnapped?
Here’s a thought experiment for the UCLA student council. If a young American college student was kidnapped by terrorists at a music festival, held in a tunnel for 505 days, and then came home and wanted to tell their story — would you condemn that too? Or does your “incomplete and harmful” standard only apply to certain victims?
We already know the answer.
The Berkeley-UCLA one-two punch tells you everything about where the activist Left is headed. They’re not pro-peace. They’re not pro-justice. They’re not even pro-Palestinian in any meaningful way — real solidarity would mean demanding better leadership than Hamas, not applauding terrorists. What they are is anti-reality. They live in a world where bombers are heroes and hostages are villains, and anyone who challenges that framework gets a resolution passed against them.
Omer Shem Tov survived 505 days in a Hamas tunnel. He survived October 7th. He can probably survive a sternly worded resolution from a bunch of 20-year-olds who think terrorism is a valid form of political expression.
But the rest of us shouldn’t have to pretend this is normal. Clapping for terrorists and silencing their victims isn’t “activism.” It’s depravity wearing a student government lanyard.