(January 26) On Sunday [Jan. 21] , I watched the movie Remember This, a remarkable tribute to former Georgetown University professor Jan Karski, a messenger for the Polish Underground who was the first man to take an eyewitness account of Nazi labor camps directly to President Franklin Roosevelt.
On Monday, I read a Townhall story about how the Georgetown School of Foreign Service, where Karski taught for 40 years, is now requiring the whole college to “embed Antiracism and [diversity, equity, and inclusion]” ideologies “as core principles of the school.”
Tomorrow, Saturday, Jan. 27, is the International Holocaust Remembrance Day.
The juxtaposition of these three items makes my heart ache. Let me explain.
Georgetown is my alma mater. While I was never fortunate enough to enroll in a class from Karski, he walked the campus as a legend, upright, angular, with a grim-but-courtly look, the visage of hard-won character. My good friend and classmate, columnist Deroy Murdock, who took Karski’s class, told me Karski was “an extremely engaging and often entertaining lecturer” with a “thick Polish accent and Old World charm” who was so inspirational that, at the end of one class where he discussed his war experiences, students “gave him a standing ovation and considered ourselves immeasurably fortunate to learn from such a pillar of sheer courage.”
The movie Remember This, a one-actor tour de force performance by David Strathairn, makes gut-wrenchingly clear the horrors of the Holocaust that Karski, a Catholic on a mission to save Jews, witnessed and reported to the West. As someone treated horribly or outright tortured by both the Soviets and the Nazis, Karski was an apostle of free thought, opposed in all ways to totalitarian groupthink and to the idea that group identity should determine policy or outlook. And he was a direct witness that the Jewish people are the victims of “an unprecedented species of criminality.”
Tomorrow’s Holocaust Memorial Day attests to those atrocities. Yet here the foreign service college at Georgetown (the university consists of five separate “colleges”), for which Karski was the undisputed leading light for 40 years, has for several years been pushing a DEI regime obsessed with racial categorization and with the idea that Jews are “colonizers” and thus not a victimized people but oppressors. As the City Journal has reported, this anti-Israel bias is extraordinarily pervasive at Georgetown’s School of Foreign Service…. [The full column is here.]
