(July 24) The same halls of academe so eager to denounce racism, both real and imagined, continue to be hotbeds of virulent antisemitism. Moral exemplars they are not.
A report this week from The Focus Project, self-identified as “a broad coalition of U.S. Jewish community organizations,” tells the tale. In the past two months alone, it reports, organizations on 152 college campuses released statements condemning Israel, many of them going well beyond respectful discourse into dangerous antisemitic tropes.
It is one thing, acceptable even if wrongheaded, to take issue with Israel’s response to rocket attacks from Gaza or with Israel’s settlements on the West Bank. It is quite another thing to accuse Israel and the Jewish people of conducting “genocide” or practicing “apartheid” — or, Lord forbid, of pushing “Jewish supremacy,” a neo-Nazi theory that accuses Jews of seeking evil world domination.
More than 200 “scholars,” including dozens of professors at prestigious universities — including Harvard, Cornell, the University of Virginia, Fordham, and Brandeis — used the vile term in an almost rabid statement entirely blaming Israel for the recent flare-ups vis-à-vis the Hamas terrorist organization.
Short of “blood libel,” which libels Jews by claiming they use the blood of Christian children in their religious practices, the term “Jewish supremacy” is among the worst forms of hate speech leveled against people of Hebrew faith or lineage.
Some of the organizations on the 152 campuses are the usual suspects: pro-Palestinian student groups. This is regrettable but not necessarily a sign of university officialdom.
Others, however, are resolutions from faculty senates or student governments. The Yale College Council, for example, blasted “the injustice, ethnic cleansing and genocide occurring in Palestine.”
This is vicious nonsense and a damnable lie. … Meanwhile, campus administrators repeatedly allow the antisemitic hate speech to go not only without the punishment that would attend other disfavored speech on so many campuses but even without any verbal rebuke…. [The full column is at this link.]
