Order Michael Finch’s new book, A Time to Stand: HERE. Prof. Jason Hill calls it “an aesthetic and political tour de force.”

In footage that gave Jewish students and parents flashbacks to October 7, two Virgina-area high school chapters of the Muslim Students Association created and posted theatrical recruitment videos which show students who refuse an invitation to attend a meeting of the MSA club being violently assaulted and kidnapped.

The MSA club at Langley High School in McLean, Virginia posted the first of the videos to Instagram in September. In the amateur production, a young woman clad in a pink hijab approaches a male student in a parking lot and asks him, “Are you coming to the MSA meeting this Wednesday?”  When the boy responds, “Heck, no!” two other male students rush in, throw a black cloth bag over his head, and stuff him in the trunk of a nearby car that takes off with the trunk still ajar. Ethnic sounding music plays throughout the scene.

The same hijabed young woman is then shown repeating her question about attending the MSA meeting to three young women standing nearby. They respond hesitantly in the affirmative, clearly meant to be cowed by the abduction they just witnessed. The woman in the pink hijab then announces the time and location for the upcoming meeting before the camera cuts away.

The following month, students from nearby Thomas Jefferson High School in Alexandria, Virginia posted a similar but even more disturbing performance. Shot inside a classroom in their high school, the video depicts a young woman with a black hijab and a Palestinian keffiyeh around her neck. The keffiyeh is a symbol widely associated with anti-Israel terrorism and the pro-Palestinian cause.

The young woman asks two male students, “Are you guys going to the MSA meeting tomorrow?”  The boys respond cavalierly, “No, no, what is that? What is MSA, bruh?” Following this refusal, two more male students enter the scene. One carries another large keffiyeh which he throws over the head of one of the refusing students, and drags him away behind a black screen. The second confederate lifts the other refusing student and deposits him in a plastic bin, covers him in a third keffiyeh, and drags him away.

The young woman then approaches two more students, one of whom is clad in a black sweatshirt that depicts the entire nation of Israel in the red, white and green of the Palestinian flag. “Are you guys coming the MSA meeting tomorrow?,” she again asks.  “Yes, of course!” they respond.

The two videos quickly spread online, horrifying Jewish students and their parents who interpreted them as mocking Hamas’s barbaric October 7 massacre and kidnapping of Israeli civilians.

“This particular video so clearly referenced and implicated events in the Middle East, it’s impossible to dismiss it as just a random manifestation of some online trend,” commented Guila Franklin Siegel, chief operating officer of the Jewish Community Relations Council of Greater Washington, said of the Thomas Jefferson video that included multiple keffiyehs and a shirt depicting the entirety of Israel as Palestine. “And if we throw our hands up and say, ‘Well, that’s just something the kids are doing online,’ we’re failing them.”

“It’s almost chilling to see teenagers so lively acting out something that is so horrific,” added Franklin Siegel. “Parents are beyond outraged.”

To their credit, school district administrators did condemn the videos and promised to take action. “Acting out this type of violence is traumatizing for many of us to watch and, given world events, especially traumatizing to our Jewish students, staff, and community,” wrote Thomas Jefferson Principal Michael Mukai in a communication to parents.

“These videos depict violence, including kidnappings, with victims being hooded and placed in the trunk of a car, among other things,” said a representative from the Fairfax County School District, which promised that the students would face disciplinary consequences for violating school rules. CombatAntisemitism.org reported that several Thomas Jefferson students received school suspensions for their actions.

Both high schools are part of the Fairfax County Public Schools (FCPS). In late November, the U.S. House Committee on Education and Workforce announced that it would be investigating the Fairfax school district, as well as districts in Philadelphia, and Berkeley, California for failing to protect Jewish students from anti-Semitic harassment and discrimination which violates Title VI of the Civil Rights Act.

In a letter to Fairfax Schools Superintendent Dr. Michelle Reid, the Committee described some of the incidents which led them to target the district in its investigation:

Jewish students allegedly faced repeated antisemitic bullying, including other students making the “Heil Hitler” salute and throwing coins at them. Another school for years allegedly refused to remove a hallway display that included painted tiles, 40 percent of which featured swastikas and Nazi flags. Just prior to the October 7th attacks, one high school’s Muslim Students’ Association (MSA) hosted a speaker who had made grotesque antisemitic statements. For example, he had tweeted, “I’m not racist I love everyone. Except the yahood [Jews],” and “Never met a Jew who didn’t have a huge nose.” In addition, one of FCPS’ own school board members repeatedly posted antisemitic messages online—using accounts that identified her as a member of the school board—including statements such as “Israel doesn’t exist.”

Predictably, the Hamas-linked Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) defended the MSA students, claiming that the decision to discipline them for their conduct resulted from “racist tropes and stereotypes about Muslims and Arabs.”

“The video mirrors a popular trend of students promoting their events on campuses across the country,” CAIR claimed.

While the MSA recruitment videos were clearly intended as a tasteless joke, they point to an uncomfortable truth about Islam and its adherents. Dissent is not tolerated and is punishable by violence and death.

JihadWatch.org director Robert Spencer has described how these attitudes are intrinsic to Islam. “Islam is the only religion in the world that has a developed doctrine, theology and legal system that mandates violence against unbelievers and mandates that Muslims must wage war in order to establish the hegemony of the Islamic social order all over the world,” Spencer explained.

The irony of the MSA videos is that the violence they depict is not really a joke. In the world of radical Islam, the threat is all too real.