RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.city-journal.org/article/abolish-anti-semitic-student-groups

The heart of anti-Semitism in America lies among the nation’s most educated. Elite university campuses hosted calls for the annihilation of Israel even before the IDF entered Gaza last October.

As investor Bill Ackman observed the day that Harvard president Claudine Gay resigned, anti-Semitism is the “canary in the coal mine,” a warning about larger issues. This “oldest hatred” is always a leading indicator of assorted underlying pathologies, from cancel culture and ideological indoctrination to intellectual corruption and moral decay. The core mission of universities—to seek truth—has been subverted, as classical liberal values like free speech, due process, and equality under the law fall by the wayside.

One aspect of that illiberal takeover of higher education is the prevalence of anti-Semitic student groups. For example, nine groups at Berkeley Law began the 2022–23 school year by amending their bylaws to ensure that they’ll never invite speakers who support Israel or Zionism. Dean Erwin Chemerinsky, a progressive Zionist, noted that he himself would be banned, as would 90 percent of Jewish students.

“Hate speech” is, and should be, constitutionally protected. And student groups shouldn’t be forced to express any particular messages. But discriminatory conduct isn’t kosher. Like many universities, Berkeley requires student groups to accept “all comers,” regardless of “status or beliefs.” More importantly, the school has adopted rules, aligned with federal and state law, banning discrimination based on such classifications as race, ethnicity, heritage, or religion.

Excluding Zionists is thus unlike excluding Republicans, objectionable as the latter may be. As former assistant secretary of education for civil rights Ken Marcus has observed, using “Zionist” as a euphemism for “Jewish” is a confidence trick. It wouldn’t be acceptable for student groups to adopt bylaws banning black or Chinese speakers, even if they made exceptions for speakers who criticize their own communities. That’s why the Education Department launched an investigation of Berkeley Law in December 2022 for failing to remedy a hostile environment for Jewish students, faculty, and staff.

https://www.jns.org/shai-davidais-war-on-campus-antisemitism/

Due to his battle for the past six months against campus antisemitism—unleashed in the aftermath of the Oct. 7 massacre in southern Israel—Columbia University business school assistant professor Shai Davidai has become an Internet sensation.

His impassioned, unscripted speeches on the premises of the Ivy League institution in upper Manhattan have gone viral since they first emerged, less than a week after Hamas terrorists perpetrated the worst atrocities against Jews since the Holocaust. The latest example is a clip of his confrontation on Monday morning with Columbia Chief Operating Officer Cas Holloway, who denied him access to the main campus.

When Davidai arrived to hold a peaceful sit-in and discovered that his ID card had been deactivated, he berated Holloway for preventing Jews from entering an area where pro-Hamas demonstrators were welcome to hold a protest. He then addressed the COO on X.

“Cas, you’re a really great guy,” he wrote. “[But] I am still trying to understand how you could … keep a straight face when you capitulated to the pro-Hamas mob … I think I know how. You were just doing your job. … Look, I get it. You’re scared. You are worried about how the pro-Hamas extremists (and the brainwashed cult they’ve amassed) will react if you try to disperse them. … The problem is that you are not alone. There are thousands of administrators like you all over U.S. campuses who are also scared. … Like you, they are just doing their jobs. And there were millions of Germans like you in the 1930s. Good Germans, upstanding Germans, who were just doing their jobs. Who do you think ran the universities of Berlin and Munich and Heidelberg and Frankfurt in the 1930s? Who helped the Hitler Youth check out books by Jewish authors to burn outside of campus? Administrators. Just like you…”

It takes guts these days for an academic to entertain an independent thought, let alone shout it from the rooftops when his tenure isn’t yet secured. But this is only part of the reason that Davidai’s courage is worthy of note.

https://www.spiked-online.com/author/joanna-williams/

First it was Columbia, now anti-Israel protests have spread across America. Over the past week, students have set up camps at elite universities, including Harvard, the University of Michigan and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Yesterday, dozens of student occupiers were arrested at the University of Southern California on trespassing charges. The ‘rage of the privileged against the world’s only Jewish nation’, as Brendan O’Neill described the Columbia protests on spiked earlier this week, now rings out on leafy campuses from California to Boston.

In these ostensibly ‘anti-war’ protests, students have demanded the total destruction of Israel, while waving placards in support of Hamas and singling out Jewish professors and students for abuse. The terrifying orgy of anti-Semitism that has been unleashed in America’s top universities should disturb everyone. There is an urgent need to condemn the actions of these students. Yes, we should defend their right to protest. At the same time, it is vital that we engage in an honest reckoning with how the anti-Semitism they demonstrate has been allowed to fester unchallenged.

Unfortunately, so far, the response to the campus protests has been far from level-headed. Students have been flattered and appeased in one instance, and then subjected to violent police crackdowns the next. Yesterday, police sought to squash protests at the University of Texas in Austin. Students were manhandled and a journalist was thrown to the ground in a disproportionate response to what was a seemingly peaceful protest. This display of police force risks turning student protesters into martyrs and lending moral weight to their cause.

Meanwhile, far from condemning the bigoted outbursts of student protesters, professors are coming out in their defence. At Columbia this week, hundreds of faculty members demonstrated in solidarity with the students. Staff held a mass walkout after police were allowed on campus to arrest previously suspended students. A law professor said he was defending the student protesters because: ‘It’s not any different from everyday life on campus.’ When anti-Semitism is trivialised in this way by academics, students are emboldened in their beliefs. It should be possible to defend the right to protest while, at the same time, strongly criticising the students’ statements and behaviour.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2024/04/tom-cotton-is-right-again/

There’s something about Senator Tom Cotton that drives his critics to madness. That condition becomes particularly acute when he’s obviously correct. Indeed, Cotton’s correctness maintains a directly proportional relationship with the degree to which he compels his detractors to abandon their good sense.

The latest example of this phenomenon comes to us via Mediaite’s Michael Luciano, who accused the senator of indulging in “hysteria” in his recent comments about the ongoing convulsion of nominally anti-Israel but functionally pro-terrorist demonstrations on some of America’s most elite college campuses.

“Whatever scant coverage these abominations were receiving in the U.S. press has been supplanted by abject hysteria about anti-Semitism supposedly running amok on college campuses – particularly Columbia University,” Luciano wrote. He accuses the press of promulgating lurid tales of protesters shrieking xenophobic attacks at their Jewish classmates, some of which “did not actually occur on campus.”

True enough. When, for example, Jewish students were attacked at Tulane University last year for objecting to the burning of an Israeli flag, leaving one traumatized student to reflect on the “Jewish blood on my hands,” defenders of the current campus culture were quick to note the event occurred just outside the campus’s property line. Presumably, those who raise this objection believe it to be indisputably dispositive of . . . something.

But this was not Cotton’s sole offense. In what became an indictment of the Israeli government and the “war crimes” he believes it has committed — the lack of evidence notwithstanding — Luciano attacked the senator for indulging in hyperbole.

“I do agree that if Eric Adams won’t send the NYPD to protect these Jewish students, if Kathy Hochul won’t send the National Guard, Joe Biden has a duty to protect these Jewish students from what is a nascent pogrom on these campuses,” Cotton told Fox News this week. “These are scenes like you’ve seen out of the 1930s in Germany. They should never be witnessed or tolerated here in America in 2024.”

https://amgreatness.com/2024/04/26/anti-semitism-should-not-be-part-of-the-american-college-experience/

Most Americans have been shocked by recent images of violent anti-Israel and anti-Semitic protests on college campuses. Jewish students at America’s top universities, including Columbia, NYU, and MIT, are being physically attacked and intimidated. Jewish students are fleeing Columbia University because campus police cannot guarantee their safety.

How can this happen in America in 2024? Why are we seeing the return of the vile prejudices and hatreds of the 1930s at our leading universities? Who is responsible for this?

The leadership of America’s colleges and universities bears most of the blame.

Many of these student protesters are not high-minded crusaders for justice but lazy, ill-informed morons who know little about Israel, Palestine, and the Middle East. They are also cowards who are hiding behind masks because they don’t want their anti-Semitic and anti-Israel radicalism to prevent them from getting high-paid jobs in corporations and law firms. These student protesters are afraid that heroic organizations like Canary Mission will put their names and faces on mobile billboards and list them in databases to hold them accountable for their hateful extremism.

Anti-Israel/anti-Semitic professors are the source of much of the violent protests and are egging them on. On Monday, hundreds of Columbia University faculty members staged a walkout to protest the school’s decision to have police arrest student protesters. Also in New York City, police blamed faculty and professional agitators for causing heated standoffs after university officials asked the police to remove a protest encampment and arrest 120 protesters, according to the New York Daily News.

One has to ask: if these student protesters are actually demonstrating for justice and peace, why didn’t they begin their protests on October 7, 2023, after Hamas terrorists waged the deadliest attack on Jews since the Holocaust—slaughtering babies, raping women, burning whole families alive, and taking hundreds of innocent Israelis hostage? More than 1,200 Israelis were killed. The Hamas terrorists also took about 240 hostages and imprisoned them in tunnels in Gaza. Israel believes about 100 of these hostages are still alive.

Where’s the outrage on college campuses over the rapes, murder, and brutality committed against innocent civilians in Israel on October 7? Where are the demands that Hamas immediately free its hostages?