Student Jew-Hatred at the City College of New York Worms in the Big Apple. by Bruce Bawer
https://www.frontpagemag.com/student-jew-hatred-at-the-city-college-of-new-york/
Of the number of Western anti-Semitic groups that pretend to be motivated not by the glorious vision of Jews in endless torment, but by a deep sensitivity to the supposedly unprecedented suffering of the Palestinians, there can seem to be no end. In many cases, their online self-descriptions are so deceptive as to rise nearly to the level of high art: Al-Awda, The Palestine Right to Return Coalition, which equates Israelis to Nazis, calls itself “a broad-based, non-partisan, democratic, and charitable organization of grassroots activists and students committed to comprehensive public education on the rights of all Palestinian refugees.” Under the slogan “Justice, Equality, Dignity,” Jewish Voice for Peace, which loves Hamas, represents itself as “a national organization dedicated to a U.S. foreign policy based on peace, human rights, and respect for international law.”
And then there’s Students for Justice in Palestine, which in the constellation of Jew-hatred is a galaxy all its own. Established thirty years ago at the University of California at Berkeley, it was the brainchild of Hatem Bazian, who then, as now, was a lecturer in the Departments of Eastern and Asian American and Asian Diaspora Studies at that storied institution. His website further identifies him as “a co-founder and Professor of Islamic Law and Theology at Zaytuna College, the 1st Accredited Muslim Liberal Arts College in the United States.” In addition to these activities, Bazian founded both the Islamophobia Research and Documentation Project and the Islamophobia Studies Journal. (Beginning to notice a pattern?) Some time back, the respected watchdog group Canary Mission bestowed upon Bazian a title that, while perhaps not highly coveted in some circles, is surely, these days, mightily competitive – namely that of “most dangerous professor in America.” Justifying this designation is a predictable list of offenses – a repeated failure to condemn even the most barbaric acts of terrorism, a readiness to gush with praise for the Intifada, and, needless to say, a long record of utterly virulent Jew-hatred.
From Berkeley, Students for Justice in Palestine spread like kudzu, or wildfire, or a terribly invasive cancer – pick your simile. It now boasts branches at over 200 college campuses in North America. It even has a couple of outposts in New Zealand, which, given recent developments on those islands, probably shouldn’t be terribly surprising. All this makes for, shall we say, a great deal of global mischief-making. How many ignorant college students, one wonders, have been indoctrinated into ardent Jew-hatred because they happened to fall under the insidious spell of some SJP evangelist? Fortunately Canary Mission, whose chief purpose is to document hatred toward Jews, Israel, and America on the part of individuals and organizations on both sides of the political spectrum, has done a splendid job over the years of monitoring SJP’s malevolence. In 2017, for example, a Canary Mission report cited social-media comments by a couple of dozen SJP members at the University of Texas – Arlington comparing Benjamin Netanyahu to Hitler and joking about stuffing Jews in ovens. “How many Jews died in the Holocaust?” tweeted one proud SJP activist. “Not enough, HAHAHAHA.” Pretty horrible, but then again, this is the level of humor you can expect to end up with when you don’t hire Jewish comedy writers.
Now Canary Mission has published a fresh exposé about the SJP chapter at the City College of New York. It turns out that the SJP lads and lassies at CCNY have decided that the best thing for Palestinians would be to stop busying themselves with elaborate attempts to murder innocent Jews and to start using the massive sums of money that they receive every year from naïve fools all over the world not to buy guns, bullets, rocket launchers, and assorted explosives but to improve their infrastructure, start well-run businesses, manufacture products with export potential, and give their children proper educations (i.e. no Koran or Protocols of the Elders of Zion). No, just kidding. Alas, at CCNY it’s more of the same: hate, hate, hate.
Needless to say, what’s going on at the New York City chapter of this vile organization is of particular interest given that CCNY is a public university, funded by the taxpayers of New York City; and given that there’s no other city on the planet with a larger number of Jews – the Big Apple’s Jewish population is three times that of Jerusalem, and four times that of Tel Aviv – a significant number of the people paying to provide these toxic anti-Semites with impressive educational credentials are, in fact, Jews.
Anyway, some highlights. In July 2020, CCNY SJP held a “DAY OF RAGE” the purpose of which, according to its own all-caps rhetoric, was to say “NO TO ANNEXATION” and to “DEFEND PALESTINE.” One speaker at the event stated as follows: “The European Jews, who occupy, slaughter and continue to force millions of Palestinians on to their killing fields, called refugee and concentration camps, are the relatives of the Europeans…who kidnapped, slaughtered and forced millions of African and indigenous on to slave ships, plantations, reservations, prison death camps on this Turtle Island [North America].” Where to start with this? Well, by “European Jews,” the speaker apparently meant Israelis – this formulation being a means of denying the legitimacy of Israeli Jews’ presence in their own ancient homeland. Of course, there’s much to be said about the plight of real European Jews, i.e., the Jews currently living in Europe, many of whose lives have been made increasingly miserable and dangerous by the growing presence in their midst of Muslims who’ve been taught from infancy to hate them and harm them. As for the speaker’s mention of slavery, it’s unsurprising that he or she made no mention of the Muslims of North Africa who, between four and two centuries ago, kidnapped and enslaved up to a million Europeans – and no mention, either, of the Muslims’ own slave trade in sub-Saharan Africans, which, although one is rarely allowed to mention it in mainstream Western publications, continues to this day on a remarkably large scale.
In June 2021, CCNY SJP held a rally calling for CUNY to divest from Israel. Protesters chanted: “Brick by brick, wall by wall, Israeli apartheid has to fall.” Fall, that is, like a building. An interesting image to ponder. Consider this: CCNY, as it happens, is located in upper Manhattan, a few miles northeast of the site where the Twin Towers once stood. Presumably, the average undergraduate member of CCNY SJP is, let’s say, somewhere in the vicinity of twenty years old – which means that the typical participant at that 2021 rally was a fetus, or an infant, on that unforgettable September morning when a group of jihadists, in the most colossal act of terrorism that ever took place on American soil, brought down the Twin Towers, taking the lives of more than 2700 innocent people in the sacred name of Allah. What have these young anti-Semites, these America-haters, these enemies of Western liberty, been taught about the events of that day? How do they feel about them? Whatever the case, the fact that students at a college in Manhattan, two decades after 9/11, can evoke such an image with such an obvious sense of impunity says something terribly dispiriting about the irresponsible way in which Americans in positions of authority – from parents to educators to journalists to immigration officials – have dealt, over the last twenty years, with the legacy and the lessons of that day. Which is another way of saying that if our leaders, both Democrat and Republican, had reacted responsibly to 9/11, the punks who make up the membership of CCNY SJP wouldn’t even be living in the United States.
There’s been other mischief along the way – other events at which members of CCNY SJP have spewed the ugliest kind of anti-Semitic bile. It should be mentioned that these troublemakers do not seem to be looked down upon by their fellow collegians, or treated with grudging tolerance; instead, they’re apparently accorded respect, and their vile views are listened to seriously. Henh Jamal, a former CCNY SJP member quoted in the Canary Mission report as having written “Zionism out of CUNY now!” on Instagram in 2021, was celebrated in a glowing 2017 profile in Teen Vogue entitled “Muslim Teen Hebh Jamal’s Activism Rarely Sleeps: She’s working to change the world.” Two years later, Jamal was invited to give a 2019 TEDxCUNY talk in which she depicted herself as a lifelong victim of American Islamophobia. Similarly, her SJP colleague Shza Zaki was elected president of CCNY’s undergraduate student government and is now pursuing an MS in Global Affairs at NYU’s School of Professional Studies, where she’s especially interested in the United Nations. Don’t be surprised to see her one day serving as a U.S. representative to that organization.
There are some things that most readers of this article surely know, but that I feel obliged to underscore. I’ve mentioned the number of Jews who live in New York. Many of their ancestors came to America, and settled in its largest city, after fleeing evil in the form of Russian pogroms, the Nazi Holocaust, the Communist oppression of Jews, or, most recently, the ever-intensifying threat of Muslim anti-Semitism in Western Europe. In New York, Jews didn’t always find a warm welcome. Unlike Muslims today, they were closed out of many schools and businesses. But instead of reacting with rage, they started their own firms. They didn’t tear down; they built up. They contributed to society, becoming model citizens.
And the scale of their contributions is well-nigh immeasurable. In New York City, William S. Paley and David Sarnoff invented the television business. Jewish moguls established the movie industry (before moving it out to L.A.). Jewish designers and tailors in the Garment District put clothes on Americans’ backsThe Ochs and Sulzberger families built up the New York Times into the international newspaper of record (before it, alas, became America’s Pravda); Philip Rahv, Lionel Trilling, and other Jewish writers in the Partisan Review circle turned New York into an intellectual hub; artists like Mark Rothko and Barnett Newman moved the center of the art world from Paris to New York; and Jews like Irving Berlin and Rodgers & Hammerstein created the modern stage musical.
Meanwhile, what’s the main contribution of Islam to New York City? The destruction of the Twin Towers.
Venomous Jew-hatred of the kind exhibited by the members of CCNY SJP is disgusting anywhere, of course. But it’s especially twisted to encounter it in a metropolis built and refined and enriched largely by Jews – a metropolis, moreover, that was the main target of the worst act of Islamic terrorism ever. Add to all this the ultimate irony that CCNY itself attained national fame as an institution that, year after year, graduated brilliant Jewish graduates in a time when admission of Jews to the Ivy League and other top private colleges was severely restricted. Yes, Muslims are a minority in New York, and in the U.S. But while there are only about fifteen million Jews on earth, Muslims number about two billion – making for a Muslim advantage of approximately 133:1. Whatever small slights Muslims in the West may experience at the hands of non-believers who resent having to live in an era of bloodthirsty jihadist slaughter pale alongside the oppression suffered by the relatively small number of Jews, Christians, Hindus, Buddhists, and others who continue to live in the formerly infidel but since brutally conquered lands that now make up the Muslim world. Yet the Muslims of CCNY SJP, like so many of their coreligionists around the world, do a remarkable job of making it look as if they’re the planet’s most cruelly oppressed minority. Kudos to Canary Mission for keeping an eye on these malignant enemies within.
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