RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.wsj.com/articles/dont-hire-my-anti-semitic-law-students-protests-colleges-universities-jews-palestine-6ad86ad5?mod=opinion_lead_pos9

I teach corporate law at the University of California, Berkeley, and I’m an adviser to the Jewish law students association. My students are largely engaged and well-prepared, and I regularly recommend them to legal employers.

But if you don’t want to hire people who advocate hate and practice discrimination, don’t hire some of my students. Anti-Semitic conduct is nothing new on university campuses, including here at Berkeley.

Last year, Berkeley’s Law Students for Justice in Palestine asked other student groups to adopt a bylaw that banned supporters of Israel from speaking at events. It excluded any speaker who “expressed and continued to hold views or host/sponsor/promote events in support of Zionism, the apartheid state of Israel, and the occupation of Palestine.” Nine student groups adopted the bylaw. Signers included the Middle Eastern and North African Law Students Association, the Queer Caucus and the Women of Berkeley Law.

The bylaw caused an uproar. It was rightly criticized for creating “Jew-free” zones. Our dean—a diehard liberal—admirably condemned it but said free-speech principles tied his hands. The campus groups had the legal right to pick or exclude speakers based on their views. The bylaw remains, and 11 other groups subsequently adopted it.

You don’t need an advanced degree to see why this bylaw is wrong. For millennia, Jews have prayed, “next year in Jerusalem,” capturing how central the idea of a homeland is to Jewish identity. By excluding Jews from their homeland—after Jews have already endured thousands of years of persecution—these organizations are engaging in anti-Semitism and dehumanizing Jews. They didn’t include Jewish law students in the conversation when circulating the bylaw. They also singled out Jews for wanting what we all should have—a homeland and haven from persecution.

The student conduct at Berkeley is part of the broader attitude against Jews on university campuses that made last week’s massacre possible. It is shameful and has been tolerated for too long.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-marxian-roots-of-campus-anti-semitism-eeae25d0?mod=Searchresults_pos1&page=1

If you thought claims of anti-Semitism on university campuses were exaggerated, you can’t think it after the past week. The spectacle was appalling: university presidents responding to the murder of hundreds of Jews by pretending that the fault lies partially with Israel and that reasonable people can differ over whether Hamas’s atrocities are justified; student groups issuing letters proclaiming solidarity with Hamas; campus protesters brandishing signs bearing such slogans as “resistance is justified” and “from the river to the sea”—the latter signifying the goal of extirpating all Jews from Israel.

How is it possible hundreds of Jewish civilians—including children and the elderly—were gunned down, bombed in their homes, raped, abducted and beheaded, and some of America’s elite students, academics and college administrators commiserated with the perpetrators? Again and again you hear otherwise intelligent people expressing vacuous phrases—“state-sanctioned violence,” “Zionist apartheid”—solely to excuse the butchery of Jews.

They will hotly deny that they hate Jews, but their denials don’t bear scrutiny. Even if all they say about Israel were true—in fact, it’s filled with distortions and lies—you’d still be left wondering why they’re unbothered by brutality when carried out by Hamas or anyone else other than Israel.

Where are the campus protests against Chinese concentration camps in Xinjiang? Governments brutalize citizens in Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Russia, Syria and many other places, but this week’s campus demonstrators bring their placards to the quadrangle only against the Jewish state.

That anti-Israel protests erupted on elite campuses this week—not after the accidental killing of a Palestinian demonstrator but after the systematic murder of at least 1,300 people in Israel—signifies an egregious failure at the heart of American higher education.

https://www.jns.org/israel-bashers-headline-jewish-centers-speaker-series-at-temple-university/

While attention has been focused on the anti-Israel literary festival at the University of Pennsylvania, harsh critics of Israel are also being featured just across town—at Temple University’s American Jewish Studies Center, also in Philadelphia.

The line-up of speakers during the 2023-24 academic year at Temple University’s Feinstein Center for American Jewish History features one critic of Israel after another. It seems that you have to be angry at the Jewish state in order to qualify to be part of the series.

One of the speakers who already delivered their talk was Eric Alterman, whose latest book, We Are Not One, depicts Israel as an oppressor and derides American Jews for supporting it.

Speaking at Tel Aviv University last year, Alterman announced his personal break with Israel. “I’m sorry; I’m abandoning you and your colleagues,” he declared. “I’m going to devote my attention to rejuvenating American Judaism. Those are my people. I used to have in my will Israeli peace groups, I’m changing my will and I’m funding American Jewish scholarly and charitable institutions.”

In a recent issue of the Jewish Review of Books, a prominent Jewish scholar questioned some of the distortions in Alterman’s book. Alterman responded by denouncing the reviewer as “chief of [the magazine’s] pro-Israel thought police.” That kind of slur gives you a sense of his temperament.

To discuss the current judicial reform debate in Israel, the Feinstein Center chose Gilat Bachar. She’s one of the leaders of a legal initiative to reclassify Israeli anti-terror actions as “policing” (rather than combat) so that more Palestinian Arabs can sue the Israeli government.

It’s interesting to note that nine years ago, Bachar chose to serve as an intern at the extremist HaMoked center, which defends Palestinian Arab terrorists. Does that disqualify her from speaking about Israeli affairs at the Feinstein Center? No. But it does give you a sense of her orientation when she talks about Israeli legal controversies.

Another Feinstein speaker is Talia Lavin. She was forced to resign from the staff of The New Yorker after she falsely accused an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent of having a Nazi tattoo. It was actually the symbol of his platoon in Afghanistan, where he risked his life to keep terrorists from coming to the United States to maim and kill innocent people like Lavin.

WWW.DeborahProject.Org

Palestine Writes at UPenn is funded in part by Pennsylvania taxpayers through a grant issued by the
Pennsylvania Council for the Arts in violation of Pennsylvania Human Rights law which bars discrimination on
the basis of religion, nationality, and ethnicity.

Billed as a literary event, Palestine Writes is in fact devoted entirely to promoting the destruction of the Jewish
State, denial of the Jews’ connection to the land of Israel and denunciation of Zionism which is the Jewish
commitment to sovereignty in the land of Israel. It also promotes and celebrates the murder of Jewish civilians
and calls for the liberation of terrorists whose murders are hailed as a legitimate form of resistance.

An incomplete but representative list of the speakers at this hate fest include convicted terrorists, supporters
of convicted terrorists, enablers of convicted terrorists and terrorism supporters.
• Mays a/k/a Mayss Abu Ghosh, a convicted terrorist, works with the terrorist groups Hezbollah and the
PFLP and explicitly supports violence as the “only road to Palestine.”

• Antisemitic musician Roger Waters, a prominent BDS activist who regularly employs antisemitic tropes
and imagery – including a pig-shaped balloon emblazoned with a Star of David – that denigrate Jewish
people, including equating Israel with Nazi Germany

• Huwaida Arraf, co-founder of the International Solidarity Movement which cooperates with the terrorist
organizations Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad and the PFLP. She and other ISM activists served as
human shields for the siege of the Church of the Nativity during which 200 civilian hostages were held
amongst bombs and booby traps