Anti-Israel students at Emory University bash Biden, avoid outright condemning October 7

Less than a week after the police response to Emory's anti-Israel encampment set off an uproar, things were calm on the elite university's Atlanta campus on Monday. But passions still ran high among students who continued to chant against Israel and demanded the college president's resignation.

Fox News Digital spoke to several students who were present at Monday's gathering, on everything to why they don't view anti-Zionism as antisemitic, to how they feel about the October 7 Hamas terrorist attack on Israel, to whether they can support President Biden in November. Dozens of others declined interview requests and opportunities to elaborate on their views.

Anti-Israel voices are often highly sensitive about what they view as the improper conflation of anti-Zionism and antisemitism, while groups like the Anti-Defamation League view anti-Zionism as antisemitic for invoking anti-Jewish tropes.

"Zionism is the movement of creating a Jewish homeland," Ibrahim, a junior at Emory, said. "It's escalated into a very violent, violent movement."

An Emory senior, Emmitt, said Zionism was at the "root of antisemitism."

"They want the genocide to stop, but they don't want any violence inflicted on Jewish people," he said of the movement.

Campus unrest across the country has been prompted by Israel's current war on Hamas in Gaza, which in turn was in direct response to the Oct. 7 attack on the Jewish state. Hamas terrorists killed nearly 1,200 people, committed sexual assaults and took hundreds of hostages.

Asked whether they condemned the Oct. 7 attack, students at the protest who spoke to Fox News Digital tended to equivocate rather than outright condemn it.

"Any sort of attack on civilians is very horrendous and sad, but I think that the issue of October 7 has become such – It's brought up over and over again," Ibrahim said. "But what about October 8? What about October 9? What about October 6? What about every single day since 1948 where Palestinians have been continuously killed and oppressed? Israel got attacked on that day, and obviously that's very sad for the civilians that were involved, but where's the outcry for the Palestinian civilians that have been attacked every single day?"

"All of a sudden, when this happens to White people, it's an international crisis, and there's international outrage, when it's been happening to Palestinians every single day for 75 years," he added. "So I'm not saying that what happened wasn't terrible, but that's happened to Palestinians every single day, and the double standard is very, very clear."