https://www.spiked-online.com/2024/05/15/biden-cant-be-trusted-to-take-on-anti-semitism/
On 7 May, Joe Biden condemned the ‘anti-Semitic posters’, the ‘slogans calling for the annihilation of Israel’ and the ‘rationalising’ of 7 October on colleges across the US. Such practices ‘must stop’, he said in a speech marking the annual Days of Remembrance ceremony at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Yet where does the US president think that campus anti-Semitism comes from?
Pro-Hamas hysteria is the foreseeable outcome of a belief system dominant not only in academia, but also in Biden’s own administration – a belief system in which the West is damned as ‘systemically racist’, and the world divided between ‘marginalised groups’ and the white, male, heterosexual power structure that oppresses them. Campus anti-Semitism will not stop until the university is transformed and the Democratic Party rejects identity politics.
The stunningly incoherent alliances that have sprung up since the 7 October terror attacks on Israel can only be understood in the context of academic theory. Queers and radical feminists for Palestine would seem to be logical impossibilities but for the dominance of such concepts as anti-whiteness and intersectionality. A sampling of Columbia University’s anti-whiteness offerings includes an ‘uprooting whiteness’ group, ‘deconstructing whiteness’ workshops and an ‘unlearning whiteness’ research award from the dean. Other colleges no doubt provide a similar menu.
According to the university worldview, whites and the West (the two categories are interchangeable) are responsible for everything wrong with the world, from inequality to poverty. ‘Persons of colour’ are the antidote. Heterosexuality and maleness are subcategories of whiteness, against which the intersectional coalition of queers, radical feminists and members of the Global South must mobilise. Israel today is hated as the embodiment of Western civilisation. Its modernity and economic success in a region where both are largely absent mark it out as hegemonic and illegitimate.
Of course, the ‘enemy of my enemy’ logic only works in one direction. Queers may be for Palestine, but despite their common nemesis, it is unlikely that Palestine is for queers.
What is being called anti-Semitism on college campuses today has little to do with traditional anti-Semitism. Had the university not taken its anti-white, anti-Western turn in the 1980s, students who know nothing of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion would not be baying for ‘intifada’. The exception comes from Muslim and black students, whose anti-Semitism has longer and more conventional roots.