In early December, a bipartisan Congressional bill, H.R. 6421/S. 10, the “Antisemitism Awareness Act,” took on a long-overdue task, namely, increasing “understanding of the parameters of contemporary anti-Jewish conduct and will assist the Department of Education in determining whether an investigation of anti-Semitism under title VI is warranted.”
“Jewish students,” the bill accurately noted, “are being threatened, harassed, or intimidated in their schools . . . including through harassing conduct that creates a hostile environment so severe, pervasive, or persistent so as to interfere with or limit some students’ ability to participate in or benefit from the services, activities, or opportunities offered by schools.”
The Department of Education had been alerted before to the distressing situation of resurgent anti-Semitism on university campuses, but previous evaluations of Title VI violations were imprecise and “did not provide guidance on current manifestation of anti-Semitism, including discriminatory anti-Semitic conduct that is couched as anti-Israel or anti-Zionist.”
This was all too much for critics, including the morally tendentious, malignant group Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP), who immediately condemned the intent of the bill, attaching to a December 8th press release two letters with signatures from 60 Jewish Studies “scholars” and some 300 “concerned” Jewish student activists, respectively.
Clearly oblivious to the current scourge of anti-Israel, anti-Semitic campus activism (in which they have, not coincidentally, been active and complicit), JVP and these faculty and students derided the Anti-Semitism Awareness Act as misguided and dangerous, not because it provides a tool for finally being able to identify instances where anti-Semitic speech and behavior has infected campus communities, but because they believe, seemingly irrationally, that Jewish students are actual and potential victims, not of Leftist and Muslim student groups (as they clearly and demonstrably are), but of Right-wing extremist groups, emboldened, they contend, by the election of Donald Trump in November.
The campus war against Israel, promoted relentlessly and virulently for some 15 years now, has been fueled and given life, not by the occasional Nazi-loving skinhead living in his mother’s basement and living on the fringes of society without a substantial base of like-minded fellow travelers, but by student-funded, highly visible, and vocal on-campus groups such as Students for Justice in Palestine (with 220 chapters nationwide) and the Muslim Student Association (with over 600 chapters). Jewish Voice for Peace, along with Open Hillel, J Street U, and other pro-Palestinian, anti-Israel groups, frequently join forces with these virulent groups on campuses to stage Israel Apartheid Weeks, construct mock apartheid walls, and sponsor hate-Israel events, seminars, courses, speeches, and boycott and divestment resolutions—all of which appear promiscuously on campuses around the country, and which are, significant to the Antisemitism Awareness Act, the primary source of the hostile environment Jewish students experience, especially, as often happens, when anti-Israel, anti-Zionist radicalism morphs into anti-Semitism.
These perpetrators of anti-Israel agitation have been leading a virulent campaign to demonize and delegitimize Israel for years now, and it is astonishing that JVP and these meretricious scholars and students ignore all the factual and shameful chronology (of which they have been central fomenters and cheerleaders in the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) campaign), and instead are trying to perpetuate the fantasy that the true threat to Jewish students and other Israel supporters is from the Left’s perennial boogeymen, the lunatic fringe of white power extremists who these willfully-blind activists believe, and want others to believe, are the chief perpetrators of anti-Jewish bigotry.
