RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.thefp.com/p/the-roots-of-campus-hatred?utm_campaign=email-post&r=8t06w&utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

Since Hamas’s October 7 massacre, it has been hard to miss the explosion of antisemitic hate that has gripped college campuses across the country. At Cornell, a student posted a call “to follow [Jews] home and slit their throats,” and a professor said the terror attack “energized” and “exhilarated” him. At Harvard, a mob of students besieged an Israeli student, surrounding him as they bellowed “shame, shame, shame.” At dozens of other campuses, students gathered to celebrate Hamas. 

The response from school administrations has been alarming. With few exceptions, in the immediate aftermath of October 7, university presidents issued equivocal statements about the initial attack. Some professors even celebrated it. And the focus on the part of administration bureaucrats has been on protecting the students tearing down posters and being shamed for doing so.

Where did all of this hatred come from is a question worth pondering. As Rachel Fish and others have documented, for several decades a toxic worldview—morally relativist, anti-Israel, and anti-American—has been incubating in “area studies” departments and social theory programs at elite universities. Whole narratives have been constructed to dehumanize Israelis and brand Israel as a “white, colonial project” to be “resisted.” The students you see in the videos circulating online have been marinating in this ideology, which can be defined best by what it’s against: everything Western.

Many are rightly questioning how it got this bad. How did university leaders come to eulogize, rather than put a stop to, campus hate rallies and antisemitic intimidation? Why are campus leaders now papering over antisemitism? How could institutions supposedly committed to liberal values be such hotbeds of antisemitism and anti-Israel activism?

In large part, it is a story of the power of ideas—in this case, terrible ones—and how rapidly they can spread. But it is also a story of an influence campaign by actors far outside of the university campus aimed at pouring fuel on a fire already raging inside.

We’ve known for some time about the links between anti-Israel campus agitators, like Students for Justice in Palestine, and shady off-campus anti-Israel activist networks. 

But thanks to the work of the Network Contagion Research Institute (NCRI), a nonprofit research center, we now have a clearer picture of the financial forces at play at a higher, institutional level.

https://www.jns.org/ivy-league-absent-from-university-presidents-condemnation-of-hamas/

Stung by their colleagues’ half-hearted condemnations of Hamas and by on-campus anti-Israel protests in the immediate aftermath of the terrorist group’s Oct. 7 massacre, more than 100 presidents and chancellors of U.S. colleges and universities appended their names to a full-page ad in The Wall Street Journal (Oct. 28-29) condemning Hamas in no uncertain terms.

However, not a single Ivy League school signed onto the statement.

This, as student chants of “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free”—an eliminationist slogan calling for the destruction of Israel—echo in every Ivy League courtyard.

At Dartmouth and Princeton, students chanted, “Israel is a terror state.” Yalies4Palestine justified Hamas’s massacre in an Instagram post, saying, “Breaking out of a prison requires force.” Thirty Harvard student groups held Israel as “the only one to blame” for the pogrom.

Nor has such sentiment been heard only from students. At Columbia, 144 faculty members signed an open letter justifying Hamas’s rampage as a “military action.” A Cornell professor told students that he found the attacks “exhilarating” and “energizing.” A Columbia professor called the attack “awesome” and “astounding.” A Yale professor said that “Palestinians have every right to resist through armed struggle.”

Meanwhile, Jewish students on these campuses say they don’t feel safe. At Cornell, a student was arrested for threatening to shoot up the school’s kosher dining hall. At Columbia, a student was beaten.

The reaction of Ivy League leadership has been notable for its limpness. Special ire has been directed at the presidents of Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/why-stanfords-leaders-tolerate-anti-semitism-free-speech-academia-professors-249819a5?mod=opinion_lead_pos6

After Hamas massacred some 1,400 Israelis on Oct. 7, many Stanford students marched in support of the terrorist group, chanting “2, 4, 6, 8, smash the Zionist settler state.” University leaders responded with a statement supporting “academic freedom,” including the “expression of controversial and even offensive views.”

This is the same university where administrators last year undertook an Elimination of Harmful Language Initiative, which published a catalog of words and phrases to be removed from the school’s websites. Among the proscribed terms: “American,” “immigrant” and “blind study.”

Stanford’s motto is “let the winds of freedom blow,” but many administrators and faculty want it to blow only from the left. Denouncing anti-Semitic protests wouldn’t chill academic freedom on campus; it would serve as a desperately needed show of moral clarity amid a tempest of false equivalence.

But cowardly university leaders are afraid of provoking leftist professors and staff. Recall what happened to Stanford’s previous president. Marc Tessier-Lavigne, a neuroscientist, announced his resignation in July following a series of reports in the student newspaper, the Stanford Daily, that accused him of research fraud. Much of the reporting turned out to be inaccurate, but that didn’t matter. The die had already been cast against him.

On Nov. 29, 2022, freshman Theo Baker—whose parents, Susan Glasser and Peter Baker, are journalists at the New Yorker and the New York Times—reported that images in some of Mr. Tessier-Lavigne’s papers on Alzheimer’s disease appeared to have been manipulated and that his research was under “investigation for scientific misconduct” by the European Molecular Biology Organization Journal.

Mr. Baker subsequently wrote several stories based on anonymous sources who alleged that Mr. Tessier-Lavigne had tried to conceal fraud in his studies. Mr. Baker focused particularly on a 2009 Alzheimer’s study in the journal Nature that Mr. Tessier-Lavigne led while employed by the drugmaker Genentech.

https://www.city-journal.org/article/the-genocidal-logic-of-academic-ideology

God, the prophet Isaiah taught, established the Jewish people as a “light unto the nations.” The light of the people of Israel—of justice and mercy, sober intelligence and hopeful faith—has always been one of freedom, shining amid the gloom of tyranny.

When the light was first kindled, the nation in deepest darkness was Egypt. Reliefs at Karnak depict the man-god Pharaoh—immense, archetypically impersonal, and stiff—looming menacingly over herds of human beings. The Bible tells us that a Pharoah solidified control of the land during the famine of Joseph’s time. The Israelites were later forced to make bricks under the Egyptian lash, while organized squads of laborers quarried and hauled massive stones for obelisks and pyramids. The pharaonic machine spent enormous material and social capital on monumental constructions and lavish jewelry meant to bedeck the tombs of dead royalty.

Seeing that the Israelites multiplied abundantly and “filled the land,” the Egyptians imposed a death sentence on all their newborn males. But Moses liberated his brethren from physical and spiritual servitude and led them to life in a new land. It’s not just in theory that the people of Israel embrace life and freedom. They have refused history’s offer of enslavement and death more times than anyone can count. 

Like the ancient Egyptians, Islamists cherish death, particularly that of the children of Israel. But the barbarity of Hamas on October 7 would have made the Pharaohs blush. The terrorists murdered the unborn, babies, and children by beheading, aborting, and baking them alive. A civilizational darkness not seen since the Holocaust once again threatens to extinguish the light unto the nations. Shamefully, some of that darkness emanates from the academy, which has embraced an ideology from which it follows, as night follows day, that the Jews must be assimilated—or eliminated. 

https://www.city-journal.org/article/double-standards-at-princeton

On July 4, 2020, a few hundred of my then-colleagues at Princeton University signed an open letter endorsing a number of student demands made in the name of “anti-racism” and proposing such alarming policies as the creation of a faculty committee to police “racist behaviors.” Four days later, I published a lone dissent in which I acknowledged the signatories’ right to express their views. I also suggested—and a month later, Conor Friedersdorf came to a similar conclusion—that most of them probably didn’t believe all the things to which they were putting their name or maybe hadn’t even read the document.

Jump to October 7, 2023. In the days after Hamas invaded Israel and committed unspeakable acts of brutality, I was pleasantly surprised that Princeton faculty didn’t issue another such letter. Perhaps, I thought, they had learned that it was unwise to support groups like Princeton’s chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), which had scheduled a pro-Hamas “teach-in” for the same time as a previously announced vigil for the Israelis whom Hamas had slaughtered and issued a screed blaming Israel for Hamas’s evil.

On October 22, however, the Daily Princetonian published “An open letter from Princeton faculty and students in solidarity with Gaza.” This new letter has so far received 664 signatures from people with Princeton affiliations, 69 of them university employees.

Because this letter was not published in the heat of some traumatic moment, instead appearing more than two weeks after the surprise Hamas attacks on Israel, there is little chance anyone signed it without understanding what’s at stake. The fact that it must have been produced with “care” makes its contents especially horrible: far worse, in my view, than the knee-jerk reaction of a bunch of college kids.

After beginning with a brief expression of “bereave[ment]” for “the tragic loss of Israeli and Palestinian lives,” the signatories make clear where they stand: “The ongoing Israeli assault upon the Gaza Strip must be stopped.” They say nothing about the actions of Palestinian Islamic Jihad and mention Hamas only once. They also amplify misinformation about the Al-Ahli Arab Hospital bombing.

https://victorhanson.com/who-created-the-monsters-among-us/

Students at UCLA and on other campuses, some of them on foreign student visas, and others on some sort of taxpayer-funded support, are now marching with the chant, “Israel, Israel you cannot hide, we charge you with genocide.” So, Hamas gunmen break into Israel, slaughter over 1,000 civilians, mutilate them, behead some, and commit any sort of atrocity, and when the IDF responds our students charge “genocide”?

How would you like any of those graduating college chanters operating on your heart, defending you in court, doing your income taxes, or serving you at the DMV?

Note the irony of our students accusing Israel of genocide often simultaneously chanting, “From the river to the sea”—a euphemism for the mass killing of Jews and the extinction of Israel. Those calling for the mass extinction of Jews following the butchery of more than 1,000 inside Israel now claim victim status when the victim responds. And they of all people now charge Israel with the very crimes that they have been clamoring for in their chanting “From the river to the sea”?

How did we accomplish turning our universities into Nazi-like centers of indoctrination?

Answer: the woke/DEI revolution, and its predecessors of identity politics, were mortal sins of both commission and omission.

Students were taught binaries of victims/victimizers or oppressed/oppressors, based on chauvinist, racist romances about “marginalized peoples” and the demonization of so-called “whites.”

These were collectives, or rather racial stereotypes that gave no room for individual differences: you all are what you are based on skin color.

Much of the hatred was predicated on careerism—we saw that in the “shocked” tears of a few “death to Israel” students who lost their invitations to six-figure corporate incomes.

On campus, the more one stressed his “difference” and “otherness,” whether defined by skin color, sexual orientation, or gender, the more exempt he became in descending down into the dark recesses of pre-civilizational hatred.

Conservatives have recently scored surprise victories against left-wing corporate culture, with successful pressure campaigns against a trio of blue-chip companies—Disney, Target, and Bud Light—that have revealed the potential of a culture-war tactic once considered the Left’s stock-in-trade: the consumer boycott.

The campaigns are notable because they drew blood, figuratively speaking. Disney, which promised to embed radical gender theory in its children’s programming, watched its stock price plummet and signaled a retreat from the culture war. Target, which featured “breast binders” as part of its seasonal “Pride Collection,” saw a decline in sales and promised to “pause, adapt, and learn.” Bud Light featured a transgender “influencer” in an advertising campaign, sending its reputation and sales into freefall.

What lessons can be drawn from these examples? And how can conservatives use boycotts to fight left-wing cultural capture?

To answer these questions, let’s consult the academic literature on consumer boycotts. First, it’s important to understand the genesis—or, in narrative terms, the “inciting incident”—of a potential boycott. Research suggests that in successful boycotts, activists often highlight a firm’s “egregious act,” a transgression of some deeply held value among consumers, and channel the resulting “negative arousal” into a boycott. To expand participation, activists must create a sense that partaking in the boycott provides an opportunity to “make a difference,” change company behavior, and join in a widely shared cause. The research also suggests that boycotts must begin with a sense of optimism, as the “perceived efficacy“ of a campaign significantly determines its likelihood of success. 

Next, the mechanics. Northwestern University professor Brayden King collected data from 133 boycott campaigns conducted between 1990 and 2005 and used statistical analysis to identify which tactics are most correlated with success. King argues that boycott campaigns succeed through “market disruption,” targeting a firm’s stock price, and “mediated disruption,” targeting a firm’s public reputation. These two strategies are mutually reinforcing, as economic damage can lead to greater media coverage, and greater media coverage of a company’s difficulties can lead to economic damage.