Long before the hooded, masked, and dressed-in-black Antifa thugs marauded across campuses such as Berkeley, other supposed progressive campus activists had been raging an ideological war against ideas with which they disagreed. They are, as former Yale President, A. Bartlett Giamatti, once called people intolerant of others’ views, “terrorists of the mind,” individuals whose toxic views and on-campus behavior help to create a disruptive environment and promote incivility and acrimony.
One of those groups is the notorious Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), purportedly a pro-Palestinian campus organization but which actually in practice is strictly an anti-Israel group with the sole purpose of demonizing and libeling Israel, foisting boycott and divestment campaigns targeting the Jewish state on student governments, and doing their best to shut down and silence any pro-Israel voices on campus.
SJP has a long history since its founding in 1993 of bringing vitriolic anti-Israel speakers to their respective campuses (now numbering over 200 with chapters), and for such collateral activities as sponsoring the pernicious Israeli Apartheid Weeks, building mock “apartheid walls,” and sending mock eviction notices to Jewish students in their dorms to demonize Israel and create empathy for the Palestinian Arab cause.
This intellectually-destructive behavior is nothing new for SJP; what is new is that they have made a tactical pivot since the election of Donald Trump, choosing to join the chorus of shrill voices accusing the White House, conservatives, Republicans, and even white people in general of being a new incarnation of fascists, white supremacists, and virtual neo-Nazis emboldened and given influence by the Trump administration’s alleged racist and xenophobic ideology.
This false narrative has shown itself on campus across the country and has galvanized various left-wing student groups, social justice warriors, left-leaning faculty, Muslim student groups, and even the anarchistic, violent Antifa who purport to be fighting fascism by behaving fascistically. In February, in anticipation of a Milo Yiannopoulos speech, Antifa goons lit fires, beat and assaulted Trump supporters, smashed windows, and created havoc and some $150,000 of damage on Berkeley’s campus, all in the name of suppressing white supremacist ideology. Controversial sociologist Charles Murray was driven off the Middlebury College campus and his faculty companion physically assaulted because he was deemed to be a racist; Heather MacDonald, a critic of Black Lives Matter and supporter of law enforcement, had her speech shut down as well.
In August, something named the Campus Antifascist Network (CAF), a collation of leftist activists, faculty, and social justice warriors, was created “to stand united against fascist hatred and white supremacy” and the “genocidal hate that underlies white supremacist ideology,” including “the physical engagement of antifascists towards the neo-Nazis and white supremacists,” meaning using violence as a tool of protest.
The hysteria, and evident delusion, over the perceived sudden resurgence of fascism, white supremacy, anti-minority racism, xenophobia—essentially Nazi-like behavior—and the subsequent demonization of anyone who expresses conservative thought, supports Trump, or who refuses to cave to the thrall of identity politics and political correctness on campuses, has given campus activists a new and potent tool in their campaign against any ideas they do not like—meaning, of course, any ideas that challenge their preconceived and leftist notions.
