I try to avoid the “imagine this was a white supremacist” counterfactual, but what happened at George Mason University recently is too perfect a case study to pass up.

Here are the details as reported by the Washington Post. In apparent connection with a campus vandalism investigation, the president of George Mason University’s chapter of the extremist group Students for Justice in Palestine was barred from campus along with her sister, a past president of SJP. The student group has also been temporarily suspended. A day earlier, university and local police searched the students’ family home and found four unsecured guns, “more than 20 magazines with 30 bullets each,” terrorist-organization flags, and arm patches calling for the death of Jews and stating “kill them where they stand” in Arabic. The guns and ammunition are owned by the students’ brother and father.

Given the wider SJP network’s history of support for violence and anti-Semitic incitement, this sounds like a story about a volatile and possibly dangerous situation that the campus police are trying to prevent from ending in tragedy.

The Post, however, frames it in an entirely different manner, as do other media outlets supportive of the accused. To them, this is a story about racial profiling, speech suppression, and academic injustice. The Post story is built around the following lede:

“A coalition of organizations representing faculty, staff, students and other advocacy groups at George Mason University and beyond is alleging that university police acted inappropriately in banning two pro-Palestinian student activists from campus and searching their family’s home for reasons authorities have yet to describe publicly.”

The next sentence describes the letter signed by faculty and activist organizations alleging the girls were targeted “for their advocacy for Palestinian human rights.”

The credence given to that rather insane and obviously false spin is dispiriting, to say the least. But a moment of levity comes when we hear the suspects’ lawyer give his excuse for the seemingly murder-y arm bands: In the Post’s phrasing, these were “cherry-picked out of a collection of hundreds.”

You see, they had tons of arm bands that didn’t implore people to kill the Jews.

Imagine a police search of the suspects’ home turned up white supremacist literature, Nazi flags, multiple guns, and loads of ammunition. How convincing would the press and public find arguments like “they were targeted for being white and advocating for human rights”? Or “look at all the armbands here that don’t have swastikas on them”?

The Free Beacon helps fill out the reporting on this—as outlets like the Beacon so often must—by noting that the graffiti incident in question was one of specifically anti-Jewish incitement to violence and that signs that said “death to Jews” were found in the home, according to court papers and sources familiar with the investigation.

The students, by the way, haven’t been charged.

One takeaway here is that, judging by campus anti-Zionist groups’ behavior, America has a fairly concerning domestic extremism problem. National SJP organized a “Day of Resistance” in the wake of the Oct. 7, 2023 attacks glorifying Hamas’s actions. Several of the individual chapters have been suspended or banned. Pro-Palestinian activists at a Minnesota university were recently disciplined for their role in a building occupation in which they, according to school officials, smashed property and held employees hostage. Before the students can be reinstated they must perform community service and write an essay on the “difference between vandalism and protest.”

That strikes me as a splendid idea but far too limited. America has yet to encounter pro-Hamas activists who knows the difference between vandalism and protest. Very few mainstream news reporters seem to know, either. Certainly big-city district attorneys could use a refresher, as could basically every employee at every Ivy League university and many more besides. It wouldn’t be the worst idea, considering the Democratic representatives who attended tentifada encampments, to offer that briefing to Congress too.

In fact, watching the increasing “anti-Zionist” violence, one can be forgiven for wondering why “pro-Palestinian” advocates are so worried about speech when that seems to be a relatively uncommon expression of their message.