RUTHFULLY YOURS

Joy Karega, an assistant professor who teaches rhetoric and composition at Oberlin College in Ohio, is a passionate, proud, committed Jew-hater. So profound is this hatred, and so deep is Karega’s need to broadcast it to the world, that she has been unable to restrain herself from littering her own Facebook page with all sorts of anti-Semitic scrawlings.

In December 2014, for example, Karega posted a photograph of the Jewish billionaire banker Jacob Rothschild, with accompanying text that read: “We [Jews] own nearly every central bank in the world. We financed both sides of every war since Napoleon. We own your news, the media, your oil and your government.”

The following month, Karega quoted a conspiracy-theory blog that blamed Israel for the July 2014 downing of a Malaysia Airlines passenger jet, an incident that killed 298 people. The text which Karega excerpted from the blog cited “the Rothschild-led banksters” who, having been “exposed and hated and out of economic options to stave off the coming global deflationary depression,” were now “implementing the World War III option.” “It seems obvious,” added Karega, “that the same people behind the massacre in Gaza are behind the shooting down” of the Malaysian plane. Contrary to Karega’s delusions, however, a subsequent investigation concluded that the aircraft had probably been struck by a Russian-made missile.

But hey, Professor Karega still had lots of other things she could blame on the Jews. On January 13, 2015—a mere six days after two masked jihadists armed with AK-47s and shouting “Allahu Akbar” had murdered twelve people in the Paris headquarters of the French magazine Charlie Hebdo—Karega posted an image of an ISIL/ISIS terrorist removing, from his own head, a mask resembling the face of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The terrorist’s forearm bore a tattoo of the Star of David and the words “JSIL Israel”—an acronym for “Jewish State In the Levant,” meant to convey the notion that Israel is the moral equivalent of the bloodthirsty barbarians of ISIL (Islamic State In the Levant). The text superimposed on the image read, “France wants to free Palestine? Time for a false flag …” In other words, the Paris massacre was an Israeli operation designed to turn public opinion against Muslims in the Palestinian Territories. “Folks who turn off the indoctrinated media and do their homework,” Karega wrote, know where Charlie Hebdo receives its support and backing.”

Also in the aftermath of the Charlie Hebdo mass murder, Karega wrote: “This ain’t even hard. They [Israel] unleashed Mossad on France and it’s clear why.” And when Benjamin Netanyahu attended a free-speech rally in Paris, Karega accused him of wanting “to bend [French President] Hollande and French governmental officials over one more time in public just in case the message wasn’t received via Massod [sic] and the ‘attacks’ they orchestrated in Paris.” Karega took up this theme again in a Facebook post last November where she wrote: “It’s troubling that in this day and age, when there is all this access to information, most of the public doesn’t know who and what ISIS really is. I promise you, ISIS is not a jihadist, Islamic terrorist organization. It’s a CIA and Mossad operation, and there’s too much information out here for the general public not to know this.”

In March 2015, Karega lauded the “truth-telling” of Nation Of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan, an inveterate anti-Semite who had recently stated that “it is now becoming apparent that there were many Israeli and Zionist Jews in key roles in the 9/11 attack.”

Notwithstanding Karega’s many idiotic musings, Oberlin College President Marvin Krislov said, last March, that his school “respects the rights of its faculty, students, staff and alumni to express their personal views.” Oberlin’s trustees, however, asked the administration and faculty to “challenge the assertion that there is any justification for [Karega’s] repugnant postings.” In response, the college initiated its faculty governance process “to review Dr. Karega’s professional fitness in light of these postings.” This process is still ongoing, and Karega has been placed on paid leave until a decision can be reached.

Karega, predictably, has reacted with righteous indignation and a sense that she is being persecuted. A statement written on her behalf by a Detroit-based attorney accuses Oberlin of “pandering to the dictates of a handful of vocal and wealthy religious zealots” who are purportedly using the college as a “personal tool of religious extremism.” In other words: blame the Jews.

Perhaps most amazing is that one of the courses Karega has taught at Oberlin is called “Writing for Social Justice,” a class designed to help students “develop, negotiate, and revise their own writing strategies and ethics as they write on social justice issues.” When Oberlin hired Karega to teach this course, it either overlooked—or intentionally dismissed—the fact that she is a vile bigot whose hateful ideology renders her utterly unqualified to help any young person formulate a coherent view of “justice” or “ethics.” But such a fact was undoubtedly easy to overlook or ignore in the hiring process, given that Karega possesses what is often the single most important credential which any candidate for an academic teaching post can have: she is a hard leftist.

As David Horowitz has observed, many rigorous studies have revealed that decades of “exclusionary hiring practices” have “led to a situation where university faculties across the country [are] stacked heavily to the left of the political spectrum.” Hate-filled radicals like Joy Karega are ubiquitous on college campuses nationwide, but they operate mostly below the radar. Karega’s case only became an issue after Oberlin administrators were publicly humiliated by media revelations about her very outspoken Jew-hatred. It is now quite obvious that Karega should never have been hired in the first place. An administration that had any real respect for the role it plays in the education of young minds, would fire her immediately.