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?

https://www.frontpagemag.com/uiucs-department-of-latino-studies-endorses-jew-hatred/

In a “Letter to Our Students on Palestine” dated from December 18, 2023, the Department of Latina/Latino Studies sought to whitewash the atrocious actions of the anti-Israel terror group Hamas and demonize and delegitimize the world’s only Jewish state. The date of the letter’s posting is significant in that it came two months after Hamas’s October 7th genocidal attack on Israel, long after the barbaric details had been established and confirmed—women raped and mutilated, children set on fire, and over 1200 civilians butchered for the sole crime of being Jews.

The narrative set out by the Department of Latina/Latino Studies in their letter, which was posted on their official university department webpage and co-signed by the departments of Gender and Women’s Studies and African-American Studies, focused not on Hamas’s brutal attack but exclusively on the “historical context of Israel’s ongoing genocide and occupation of Palestine.” It placed all blame solely on Israel, the victim of this brutal ethnic crime, instead of condemning Hamas. The atrocities committed by Hamas are described merely as an “attack against Israel…which led to the deaths of over one thousand Israelis, both civilians and soldiers.”  The mention of “civilians and soldiers” is an obvious attempt to whitewash Hamas’s genocide. The terrorist organization attacked solely civilian targets—a music festival, a kibbutz—and overwhelming killed and raped civilians. The handful of “soldiers” who met their deaths were only present by happenstance or raced to the defense of the civilians who were attacked.

In that same passage, the letter refers to Israel as “the U.S.-backed nuclear power” which “has intensified its long-running siege on the Gaza Strip”—again, entirely obscuring the history of Gaza which Israel handed over to the Palestinians in 2005, as well as the Palestinians’ unceasing attempts to wipe Israel and its Jews off the world map. The letter goes on to quote Hamas-generated statistics—acknowledged by all independent observers to be highly suspect—that “the Israeli bombing campaign has killed over twenty thousand Palestinian people –the average age of the dead being just five years old.”

https://nypost.com/2024/04/23/opinion/anti-israel-protesters-are-barbaric-causing-mayhem-at-the-gates-of-columbia-university/?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

That Jews were made to feel unsafe to walk the Columbia University campus Passover eve in 2024, fearing risk of assault from unchecked promoters of genocidal jihadism and the destruction of Israel, America and the Judeo-Christian West, is a complete and utter disgrace. 

It is also the logical conclusion of the progressives’ long march through the institutions. 

Absent a massive sea change, not just Jews but all Americans will bear the brunt of the ceding of schools to those who would destroy the very civilization from which they sprang. 

Our elite academic institutions — and shamefully, my alma mater, which at its literal core, its core curriculum, mandates the study of a Western canon that contains the ideas of liberty and justice and emphasizes the pursuit of virtue and excellence, on which America is based — have for decades been petri dishes of left-wing radicalism that reject these noble ideals. 

Jew-hatred has in recent decades increasingly become a central feature of that radicalism, in no small part through the overlapping ideologies and interests of the Western left and Islamic supremacists — the subject of my book that foretold the crises of post-Oct. 7 America, “American Ingrate: Ilhan Omar and the Progressive-Islamist Takeover of the Democratic Party.”

The simple explanation is the Western left, under the banner of diversity, equity, inclusion — rebranded cultural Marxism — divides the world between oppressed and oppressors and has come to cast the tiny and perpetually persecuted Jewish minority as most oppressive of them all.

https://www.spiked-online.com/2024/04/22/a-howl-of-rage-against-civilisation/

Hands down the worst take on the ‘Gaza Solidarity Encampment’ that has taken over Columbia University in New York City for the past week is that students have always done things like this. Students have forever occupied buildings and quads to make a political point. Students have long agitated against war. Students often find themselves in the grip of passionate radical intensity. Look at the Vietnam era, says every columnist in Christendom, as if the Gaza camp were just another explosion of youthful anti-imperialism.

The wilful naivety of this take is unforgivable at this point. To liken Columbia’s strange, seething ‘pro-Palestine’ camp to earlier campus uprisings against militarism is to gloss over what is new here. It is to whitewash the profoundly unsettling nature of this rage of the privileged against the world’s only Jewish nation. Until someone can point me to instances of those Sixties anti-war kids hurling racist invective at minority groups and demanding the wholesale destruction of a small state overseas, I’ll be giving their Gaza camp commentary a wide berth.

The camp might look and sound like student politics as normal, with its juvenile bluster, megaphoned virtue and the occasional appearance of pitiable university officials warning campers of suspension. But scratch the radical surface and you’ll swiftly find an ugly underbelly of reactionary cries and even outright racism. No sooner had the students erected their tent city ‘for Palestine’ last Wednesday than it became a magnet for genocidal dreaming about the erasure of Israel and plain old bigotry against Jews.

Columbia has rang out with cries of ‘We don’t want no two states / We want all of it!’. You don’t need to be an expert in Middle East affairs to decipher this demand. It’s a sick call to seize the entirety of Israel – all of it – and create a new state more in keeping with the Israelophobic yearnings of both privileged Westerners and radical Islamists. Their longing for Israel’s erasure was made even clearer in a follow-up chant: ‘We don’t want no two states / We want ‘48!’ That is, 1948, a time when the modern state of Israel didn’t yet exist. They want a world without Israel. They want to lay waste to the national home of the Jews.