Rabbi Shlomo Noginski was stabbed 8 times outside a Jewish day camp in Massachusetts. The attacker, Khaled Awad, an Egyptian immigrant, had threatened him with a knife and a gun, and tried to force him into a van. When Rabbi Noginski fought back, he was stabbed 8 times. He survived and has been released from the hospital.

Awad is under arrest and more information is coming out about the Muslim immigrant.

His former college roommates and friends at the University of Southern Florida, where he studied chemical engineering until very recently, say Awad had showed a propensity for violence.

“He started becoming violent,” said Eric Valiente, a friend of Awad’s.

His roommate Aidan says he and Awad were friends until Awad attacked him in their shared kitchen on day, prompting Aidan to move out and get a restraining order.

“We were friends, to be honest with you. I’m Jewish. And he knew that since I moved in,” said Aidan Anderson, the suspect’s former roommate.

Aidan and Eric say Awad’s beliefs towards certain cultures became evident early on.

“He was very much anti-Semitic. He would say like all types of Jewish jokes. I thought he was joking at first and then I started to see seriousness in his comments,” said Eric.

CBS presumably means the University of South Florida which has a history with campus Jihadists beginning with Sami Al-Arian, a USF professor who was also supporting Islamic Jihad.

Accused terrorist Sayfullo Saipov’s Florida driver license places his home address just a few miles from the sprawling Tampa campus of the University of South Florida, but university leaders insist he has never been a student or faculty member there.

Saipov’s shadowy presence in Tampa is in stark contrast to two controversial figures that caused some critics to label USF “Jihad U” back in the 1990s and even after the World Trade Center attack on September 11, 2001.

That’s because former USF Engineering Professor Sami al-Arian and his brother in law Mazen al-Najjar both taught at USF. Both men were involved in an off-campus think tank known as WISE starting in the 1990s.

They became lightning rods of controversy after a third founder of WISE, Ramadan Abdullah Shallah, left Tampa and later surfaced as the head of the Palestine Islamic Jihad, a mideastern terrorism group.

Both Arian and Najjar professed repeatedly they were not terrorists, nor did they endorse terrorist acts, but the federal government held Najjar in detention for years based on secret evidence and later deported him.

The FBI arrested Arian in 2003 and called him the “financial head of the Islamic Jihad in America.” Years later, after federal prosecutors failed to obtain a terrorism conviction, the federal government deported Arian to Turkey in 2015.

Those weren’t the only cases at Jihad U.

A former University of South Florida student has been sentenced to 15 years in prison for providing material support to terrorists, including making a videotape showing how to assemble and use a remote-controlled bomb, prosecutors said.

Ahmed Abdellatif Sherif Mohamed, 26, was sentenced Thursday in federal court in Tampa, Florida. He pleaded guilty to the charge in June.

After his arrest, Mohamed told authorities that he made the video to teach “martyrdoms” and “suiciders” how to save themselves and fight the invaders — the U.S. military and those fighting with the U.S. in Arab countries, according to prosecutors’ statement Thursday.

“He said that he intended the technology demonstrated in his audio/video recording to be used against those who fight for the United States,” the statement read.

Attorneys have said Mohamed is an Egyptian national who was born in Kuwait. He was a teaching assistant at USF, where he was pursuing a doctorate in civil engineering.

The other USF student arrested in South Carolina, Youssef Megahed, still faces a seven-count indictment filed in September 2007. That case is pending

But that’s the way things go at Jihad U.

On March 2019, SJP USF officers included vice president Abdallah Junio Mansour, who has a history of spreading anti-Semitism on Facebook and secretary Salman Shalan.

Mansour and Shalan have both expressed support for Hamas operatives, as well as other terrorists and idolized terrorist Yasser Arafat.

On October 27, 2017, SJP USF posted an Instagram photo of its activists with one individual placed in the center of the group photo and displaying a jacket bearing a likeness of Leila Khaled.

SJP USF’s comment on the post thanked “everyone for coming to our ‘Festival of Resistance’…”

Khaled was a leading member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) and participated in the hijacking of TWA Flight 840 in 1969 and El Al Flight 219 in 1970.

Is there any way to talk about the stabbing of the latest antisemitic attack without discussing the antisemitic culture at USF?