RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://thespectator.com/topic/another-spring-another-round-of-anti-semitism-on-campus/

The weather is growing warm, which means anti-Semitic demonstrations are blooming at elite universities. The hatred of Jews is no longer hidden, as it was in the days when Jewish enrollment was quietly limited by quotas. Now, it is displayed openly by a campus coalition led by hardline American leftists (students, faculty, and administrators) and Muslim students, some from America, some from the Middle East. 

Their hatred is screamed at Jewish students and pro-Israeli speakers—and then at anyone who dares support them or simply demands the basic right to speak or be heard. Any support for Israel is damned as “genocide” and then shouted down, shamed, or worse. The demonstrators have no compunctions about accusing any political adversary of complicity in horrific crimes.

The good news – there is some – is that a few universities are beginning to say “Stop It!” Yale, to its credit, just revoked the official status of Yalies4Palestine for “flagrantly violating the rules” when it set up an encampment and blocked Jewish students from crossing. The group’s violations came after it had met with senior university officials and been warned about its future actions. They disregarded the warnings. The question now is whether Yale will do more than revoke the organization’s “registered student status”? Will it discipline the students? It hasn’t so far, just as it failed in the past when the demonstrations supported other leftist causes. Remember, too, that Columbia did nothing to the students who camped on for weeks and occupied a building on campus. Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg let them go with a pat on the head.

Problems like those at Yale and Columbia are not new, but they have grown worse because of weak-kneed responses from leaders, on campus and off. University administrators almost never suspend or expel students for harassing other students or violating basic rules of campus life. District attorneys in blue states are just as bad. They have done little to punish students and their allies who break the law, all under the false flag of “progressivism.” The Biden Administration and its Department of Justice were just as bad.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/ivory-tower-hypocrite-university-of-california-los-angeles/

#1: University of California-Los Angeles

In the spring of 2024, as pro-Hamas protests roiled college campuses and illegal encampments led by keffiyeh-wearing radicals took over campus quads, the University of California-Los Angeles (UCLA) stood out as an example of supreme hypocrisy on how to handle controversial discourse on campus.

Radical student activists aided by outside agitators took over an enormous swath of campus, denying entry to “Zionists” (meaning virtually all Jews) or anyone who refused to parrot their glorification of Hamas and the beauty of the terrorist organization’s October 7th massacre of over 1200 innocent Israelis. Students who attempted to breach the wooden and metal barricades erected to form the so-called “Palestine Soldiarity Encampment” were explicitly turned away with either words or, when the activists deemed it necessary, physical force.  Instead of ensuring equal access to all students, as is the university’s constitutional obligation, university security forces were instructed to stand by and guard the encampment.

The Amcha Initiative, a watchdog group dedicated to tracking and combatting anti-Semitism on campus, has documented some of these horrific confrontations on the public university campus and the resultant denial of freedom of speech and freedom of association. As Amcha reports:

A Jewish counter demonstrator at the anti-Zionist encampment on campus was beaten. After her 13-year-old sister dropped her Israeli flag, the counter demonstrator bent down to pick it up and at least five kefiyah-clad protestors accosted her, first by stomping on the flag and then by knocking her to the ground, repeatedly kicking her in her head and causing her to lose consciousness and apparently suffer a concussion. When she awoke she was bleeding from her head, disoriented, and unable to recognize her family.
According to the ADL, a Jewish individual was also harassed near the encampment by an individual who stated, “Go back to Poland.”
A pro-Israel counter-protester was attacked by an anti-Zionist encampment protestor who attempted to rip the sign from his hand, grabbed his hat and flashed a taser.
Also, the same day, a moving barrier of protesters was formed to block a Jewish student, who wears a Star of David necklace, from entering campus while as a security officer stood nearby. The Jewish student told protesters, “I’m a UCLA student, I deserve to go here, we pay tuition, this is our school, and they’re not letting me in. My class is over there, I want to use that entrance … will you let me go in?” The protesters simply told him that they’re “not engaging” and blocked the Jewish student every time he attempted to go through the entrance.
Additional incidents occurred with anti-Zionist protesters affiliated with the SJP and JVP encampment blocking Zionist students from walkways and accessing the library, using wristbands to identity anti-Zionists, with many of these incidents documented on video. In one video, protestors have taken over access to an area near the school library, demanding wrist bands and approval to each student passing, with one Jewish student attempting to enter and upon being denied asking, “So you won’t let me in because I’m Jewish?” The anti-Zionist protester responses, “Ummm no… we have a couple Jewish students here… are you a Zionist?” The Jewish student responds, “Yes of course I am” to which the protester retorts, “Well yeah, we’re not gonna let Zionists in.”

https://www.frontpagemag.com/ivory-tower-hypocrite-the-university-of-pennsylvania/

When Former University of Pennsylvania President Liz Magill was grilled by Congress in the spring of 2024 over pro-Hamas demonstrations and calls for the genocide of the Jews on her campus, she insisted that protecting free speech was a top priority. Magill was blatantly lying. Recent events reveal that the University of Pennsylvania has enforced radically different standards on free expression, depending on who is doing the speaking.

Even before Hamas’s October 7th massacre made pro-Hamas rallies a daily feature of campus life across the nation, Penn demonstrated an extreme tolerance for speech promoting Jew hatred. In September of 2023, the campus played host to the Palestine Writes Literature Festival, an event sponsored by numerous university departments and centers including the Middle East Center, the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, the Department of Cinema & Media Studies, and the Wolf Humanities Center.

Featured speakers at the event included Roger Waters, of the band Pink Floyd, a notorious anti-Semite, who has a penchant for dressing in imitation Nazi garb during performances. Another highlighted speaker was former CNN contributor Marc Lamont Hill, whose Jew hatred proved too much even for the legacy media. Lamont Hill was fired by CNN after he endorsed the genocidal statement “Free Palestine, from the River to the Sea” in a speech at the United Nations.

The festival’s co-chair, Susan Abulhawa, is a blatant Hamas sympathizer. Following a terrorist shooting outside a synagogue in Jerusalem, Abulhawa, rather than condemning the violence against civilians, sought to justify it. “Every Israeli, whether in a synagogue, a checkpoint, a settlement, or shopping mall is a colonizer who came from foreign lands and kicked out the native inhabitants,” she wrote. “They all serve in the racist colonial military. The whole country is one big militarized tumor.”

Given the line-up of pro-Hamas speakers and organizers, the festival unsurprisingly devolved into an open forum of Jew hatred. As the American Jewish Committee reported, “The festival’s inaugural event includes a screening of the film Farha, which includes a number of toxic antisemitic tropes, including a modern retelling of the blood libel trope that casts Jews as vicious, bloodthirsty, and cruel. The film is a distortive piece of fiction, yet it is often treated as evidence of extreme, unprovoked Israeli cruelty towards innocent Palestinians during Israel’s War of Independence.”

https://www.city-journal.org/article/trump-columbia-university-anti-semitism-princeton-christopher-eisgruber-due-process

“All process arguments are insincere,” political historian Michael Barone once observed wryly. So it’s no surprise that Princeton president Christopher Eisgruber, in defending the nation’s elite universities, has reached for precisely such arguments. After all, insincerity may be all these institutions have left.

Eisgruber has taken a curious stance in an Atlantic essay and a follow-up interview with the New York Times on the Trump administration’s response to anti-Semitic activity at Columbia University. On one hand, he declares that opposing anti-Semitism is “a fundamental responsibility for any university president,” and concedes that it was “legitimate” for the government to “require the university” to address the problem. On the other, he accuses the Trump administration of disregarding “due process” in cutting off Columbia’s federal funds—an action he claims undermined “academic freedom.”

This argument collapses under even minimal scrutiny.

Consider the process “due” under the Civil Rights Act to universities accused of tolerating discrimination. The Department of Education begins by opening an investigation—as it has at Columbia and Princeton. It must then give the university an opportunity to come into “voluntary compliance” with the conditions set to remedy the discrimination.

https://www.city-journal.org/article/yunseo-chung-columbia-university-hamas-anti-semitic-protest

On March 27, Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced that the State Department had revoked the visas of at least 300 students for participating in violent anti-Israel protests. One of the first to face deportation was Mahmoud Khalil, a former master’s student at Columbia University. Given his background, Khalil quickly became the face of the Trump administration’s crackdown on non-citizen terror supporters. But last month, a new face emerged: Yunseo Chung, a junior at Columbia.

Like Khalil, Chung is a green-card holder—but the similarities end there. She immigrated to the U.S. from South Korea at age seven with her parents and a sibling. She was valedictorian of her high school class, holds a 3.99 GPA at Columbia, and is a member of both the university’s undergraduate law review and its literary magazine.

Why would a straight-A Korean immigrant who has lived in America for most of her life join a violent, pro-Hamas protest? One possible answer lies in a core tenet of modern progressivism: its rejection of the model-minority stereotype. Perhaps Chung—an otherwise exemplary student with no history of lawbreaking or violence prior to college—believed that protest activity would earn her validation from non-Asian peers at Columbia University.

Since at least the 2010s, the social order of highly selective universities has been strongly influenced by the principles of Critical Race Theory, the scholarly idea that racism is embedded in the social, political, and legal institutions of Western civilization. Chief among these is the perpetual victimhood of minority groups—“people of color,” women, the disabled, transgender individuals, and so on.