Here's how America's campuses became hotbeds of students blinded by their hatred of Jews.

Have we been cast back to the late 1960s and early ‘70s when student protests were de rigueur on college campuses?

I feel like it’s so, as hordes of naive, ignorant students cheer on Hamas, the Iran-backed terrorists that slaughtered innocent Israelis. Today’s college scene throws me back to when I had just finished college and faced the military draft.

Streets were crowded with sign-waving adolescents. Traffic blockages. Take-overs of university facilities, including presidents’ offices. All claiming to know better. And you had better agree.

By then the civil rights movement beginning in the 1950s had been overshadowed by protests against the Vietnam War. University professors cancelled their classes to lead “teach-ins” in which students were “educated” about the evil American involvement. Draft-age men who resisted conscription on moral grounds were sanctified. ROTC and all signs of the military were driven off campus.

Protesting in the name of self-righteousness is the nature of young people. It was especially so with college Baby Boomers whose rote back then was “never trust anyone over 30.” (Now old gaffers, they’re getting paid back for that, aren’t they?) Certitude, like today, was their hallmark.

Today’s protesters are the spawn of those anti-war demonstrations. Many hippies and yippies who never outgrew their righteousness gravitated toward the academic life where their pedantry and radicalism were not just tolerated, but encouraged and rewarded.

Today these far-left activists are in charge of much of higher education, having risen to emeritus, department head, president and dean levels. That’s one way—perhaps the best way—to explain the mindless radicalism that now dominates so many campuses,

So protest away. That’s fine. The rights of free speech and assembly apply to even the blindly stupid, like those ignoring the fact that Hamas started the war. Just like anti-Vietnam War protestors ignored the fact that communist North Vietnam had start that war.

Those protests were so bred into the culture that servicemen and women risked derision or worse when wearing their uniform in public. Today the kind of stares I received when in my Navy uniform would be called micro aggressions

Soon enough the protests spawned violence, not just a few people busting down the door of a selective service office to burn draft records. Bank robberies. Bombings. Murders.

Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn, distinguished professors of left-wing violence.

I give you Bernardine Dohrn and Bill Ayers, the summa com laude of the violent, radical left Weather Underground back then. Ayers was involved in a bombing of New York City Police Department headquarters in 1970, the United States Capitol building in 1971, and the Pentagon in 1972.

Dohrn, despite her violent past with Ayers as her lover then her husband, is a template for today’s radical left professors and students. She also participated in those bombings and was the firebrand founder of the radical and dangerous Weather Underground. She thought Charles Manson’s infamous murders were a delight. Of particular interest today was her trip with other “activists” to Gaza to prop up an anti-Israeli, pro-palestinian demonstration

Like today, the two are privileged whites who appointed themselves the primo dispensers of social justice.

So, where did these self-described communists end up? As college faculty, administrators and staff, of course.

The University of Illinois at Chicago hired Ayers to be the Distinguished Professor of Education and Senior University Scholar. Dohrn became a professor of law at Northwestern University and  director of the university’s Legal Clinic’s Children and Family Justice Center.

(By the way. Ayers and Dohrn raised Chesa Boudin, the Soros-funded light-on-crime San Francisco district attorney who lost a recall election. Boudin’s biological parents, Kathy Boudin and David Gilbert, were Weather Underground members who were convicted of murder in the infamous 1981 Brink's robbery in Rockland County, New York.) After prison, she went to work as a professor at Columbia University. Here’s another by-the way: Ayers and Dohrn were early pals of Barack Obama, instructing him on such issues as government health care for all.)

I don’t bring this up just to relive some memories. (As a reporter at the Chicago Daily News, I worked on the story about the flight of four radicals who killed a teacher and three students in a bombing at the University of Wisconsin at Madison.)

I bring it up because of my fear that the knee-jerk protests by college students could turn into something more. Like, the violent “Days of Rage” conducted by the Weather Underground and others. Of course, the anti-war protests were described as mostly peaceful. Until they weren’t.

This is some history that some of today’s Democrats should recall. They accuse the Republican Party of being a a refuge for violent, ultra-right extremists. They might want to take a look at their own party’s sordid history.

Post-script: Here I might be accused of having a blind eye about the injustices Israelis have done to the Palestinians. Not so. As a columnist for the Chicago Sun-Times years ago I wrote extensively about how the Palestinians suffered under the creation of the state of Israel. It prompted in-person complaints about me to my bosses from the Israeli consulate in Chicago. I survived. The local Palestine and Arab conference gave me an award for “bravery.” I didn’t regard it as a big deal.

It’s just that there are at least two sides to every story, something that too many in the media now ignore.