RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.frontpagemag.com/u-minnesota-dept-of-gender-women-and-sexuality-studies-a-vile-font-of-jew-hatred/

Editor’s note: Since the barbaric Hamas attacks against Israel on October 7th, American universities have become an undeniable locus of Jew hatred within our nation. Much attention has deservedly been paid to the radical campus groups like Students for Justice in Palestine who call for the genocide of the Jews and cheer the terrorists of Hamas. What has received less attention—but should in fact rank as the universities’ worst offense—is the Jew hatred promoted by official departments and institutes of the universities themselves. In the case of our campuses, Jew hatred is “the call coming from inside the house.”

Just a glance at the website for the University of Minnesota Department of Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies reveals it to be a highly politicized unit of the wider university, dedicated to progressive activism. The site declares that “As a place where research, education, and social change go hand in hand, GWSS identifies, analyzes, and challenges structural inequalities, while imagining and creating just and transformative futures for all.” Instead of searching for truth and knowledge, the Department openly acknowledges that its vision includes “social change,” “challeng[ing] structural inequalities,” and “creating just and transformative futures for all.”

So it should come as no surprise, that like much of the progressive left, the Department of Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies (DGWSS) is a vile font of Jew hatred on the University of Minnesota campus.

Just six days after the brutal and barbaric Hamas attack on Israel, in which innocent civilians were brutalized and raped, parents killed in front of children, children killed in front of parents, bodies gleefully mutilated by terrorists on camera, DGWSS released a “Faculty Statement on Palestine” in which they described the massacre as “Hamas fighters” (not terrorists) who “brought down border fences.” The statement went on to demonize Israel and its defensive response to the worst attack in its history as “not self-defense but the continuation of a genocidal war against Gaza and against Palestinian freedom, self-determination, and life.”  The statement declared “We stand in solidarity with the Palestinian people and with Palestinian scholars and organizers.” DGWSS might as well have said, “We stand with Hamas.”

https://spectator.org/its-beginning-to-look-a-lot-like-1938/

If Jews do not feel safe on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, in New York City, in the United States of America, where can they feel safe?

NYC is home to some 1.3 million Jews, the most outside of Israel. Jewish men and women have thrived in The Big Apple for hundreds of years, enjoying religious freedom, prosperity, political power, and the affection and goodwill of millions of their gentile neighbors, colleagues, and loved ones.

Jewish culture is NYC culture. New Yorkers of all stripes schlep packages to the Post Office, kvetch when things go awry, and mock their friends when they act like putzes. Those of us who call NYC home need not be Jewish to speak and act this way. We live in New York. We pick it up.

However, things lately have been far from dancing the Horah.

Protests began after Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, massacre against Israel. The Iranian-sponsored terrorist group butchered some 1,200 Israelis and kidnapped 240 hostages from Israel, America, and other nations. These demonstrations have devolved from opposition to Israel’s self-defense against these killers from the Gaza Strip, into support for Hamas, and now open hatred of Jews, per se.

At Columbia University, many pro-Hamas protesters are dressed in the black and white keffiyeh headdresses that are the Brownshirts of the Palestinazis. In recent days, they have waved Hamas flags, yelled Hamas slogans, and intimidated, threatened, and assaulted Jewish students, particularly those who wear yarmulkes and otherwise visually identify themselves as Jews.

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.”