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ANTI-SEMITISM

Northwestern University’s Gaslighting on Antisemitism Zach Kessel

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/northwestern-universitys-gaslighting-on-antisemitism/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=homepage&utm_campaign=right-rail&utm_content=corner&utm_term=third

Northwestern University will face off against the University of Utah in its NCAA football bowl game on Saturday. During a commercial break, the Jewish advocacy group Alums for Campus Fairness (ACF) will air an advertisement calling out Northwestern University president Michael Schill for his lackadaisical approach to antisemitism on his campus. 

On Wednesday, the university responded to the news of the ad campaign:

Northwestern University is aware of a planned advertising campaign by an outside, unaffiliated advocacy group alleging that the University and President Michael Schill are not taking a strong enough stand against antisemitism on campus.

These are outlandish claims not based on facts, including the claim that “student and faculty groups ‘resoundingly support’ Hamas Terrorism.”

Moreover, President Schill has been outspoken condemning antisemitism and the terrorist attack on Israel and has taken several proactive steps to address antisemitism on campus, including the establishment of the President’s Advisory Committee on Preventing Antisemitism and Hate.

Acts that violate our codes of conduct will continue to be immediately addressed and individuals will be held accountable under University policies and procedures.

Northwestern does not tolerate antisemitism or discriminatory acts against any members of its community. Northwestern will not stand idly by as outside groups push false narratives to harm the University and our community.

Direct Action Campaign Calls Out Pro-Hamas Campus Hate Groups Confronting the radicals and Jew-haters on their own turf. by Sara Dogan

https://www.frontpagemag.com/direct-action-campaign-calls-out-pro-hamas-campus-hate-groups/

The barbaric and atrocious Hamas attacks on Israel on October 7 have brought about a pivotal moment in our nation’s self-awareness. For decades, the David Horowitz Freedom Center has been warning of the growing pro-Hamas, pro-Jihadist, Jew-hating sentiment on American college campuses. Suddenly, the depth and breadth of campus Jew hatred, fueled by Marxist ideology that divides us all into oppressors or their victims, is on display for all to witness.

Genocidal cries of “Globalize the Intifada,” “From the River to the Sea,” and “By any means necessary” have echoed as a constant chorus on America’s most prestigious campuses, fueled by faculty members and DEI officials who actively celebrated Hamas’s horrific crimes against innocent civilians.

Sensing our moment, the Freedom Center stepped willingly into this breach. In a stealth campaign to circumvent campus censors and reach students directly, the David Horowitz Freedom Center conducted a direct action campaign on three prestigious campuses that are home to some of the worst offenders: Georgetown University, Florida State University, and Louisiana State University. On each campus we distributed 2,500 newspapers containing our new report naming the “Top Ten Campus Hate Groups in America,” leaving copies in dining halls, student activities centers, attached to bulletin boards, and in other key locations on each campus.

The report exposes and ranks ten campus organizations that have become vehicles of resentment and hatred directed at our nation, at Jewish students and supporters of Israel, and at the founding principles that are supposed to buttress the universities themselves—open discourse and academic freedom.

The three campuses where we distributed our newspapers contain some of the worst hate groups in the nation. Georgetown University is home to the #1 campus hate group, the Black Law Student Association (BLSA) which has promoted racism, advocated for censorship, and destroyed the careers of faculty members who stand for meritocracy and fail to obey the racist orthodoxy mandated by DEI officials.

In January 2022, law professor Ilya Shapiro, who had just been hired as a senior lecturer and to head Georgetown’s Center for the Constitution, was placed on administrative leave after he tweeted his opposition to Biden’s pledge to select an African-American woman to serve as the next justice on the Supreme Court.

Tevi Troy Why Universities Target Jews Elite schools are increasingly monocultural institutions that reject free thinkers.

https://www.city-journal.org/article/why-universities-target-jews

Many Jewish students, parents, and donors are rethinking their allegiance to America’s elite universities. They think that Jewish students are not welcome there.

That message is being sent in two ways. First, these schools aren’t admitting Jewish students at the rates they once did. Harvard used to be about 20 percent Jewish; today, it’s below 9 percent. At the University of Pennsylvania, long considered one of the friendliest campuses to Jewish students, the number of observant Jews admitted has dropped by about two-thirds, from 200 in the early 2000s to about 70 today, according to Inside Higher Ed. Jewish enrollment is down across much of the Ivy League.

Second, the Jewish kids who are admitted increasingly feel uncomfortable on campus. In a now-infamous congressional hearing, the presidents of Harvard, Penn, and MIT struggled to say definitively whether calls for genocide violated their campus codes of conduct. Schools committed to “safe spaces” are strangely silent about anti-Semitism, and in some cases seem implicitly supportive of acts of intimidation and violent protest.

In response, some top Jewish students are forswearing their dreams of Columbia or Yale and applying elsewhere. Some prominent Jewish donors have publicly condemned the schools’ double standards and begun pulling funding, or they have threatened to do so. The Jewish community had previously been downright devoted to America’s elite educational institutions. These slow, even belated, steps show that the long-honed Jewish knack for sensing danger finally has kicked in.

The current situation facing some Jewish students on college campuses, and the Jewish reaction to these trends, evokes a disturbing historical parallel. Nations that have antagonized Jews, and have seen Jews flee in response, often were experiencing a deeper rot and corruption. History is littered with nations, from Imperial Spain to Czarist and then Soviet Russia to Nazi Germany, whose underlying problems were worsened by government-sponsored scapegoating and driving away of Jews. Persecution of the Jews did not always cause those nations’ decline, but it was a signal that it was coming.

How U.S. Public Schools Teach Antisemitism From pre-K lessons on ‘ethnic noses’ to lectures on Israel as an apartheid state, students are learning that Jews are the enemy. Francesca Block

https://www.thefp.com/p/how-us-public-schools-teach-antisemitism?utm_campaign=email-post&r=8t06w&utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

Last fall, Siriana Abboud put a new poster on the wall of her pre-K class at a public school in Midtown Manhattan that, she claimed, would teach her four- and five-year-old students about the human body.

The poster showed four sketches of differently shaped noses—two small, one hooked, and another with a nose ring.

“Why do people have different noses?” a headline above the drawings asked.

Underneath, kids posted their answers:

“I think it’s because of your ancestors,” one wrote.

“Where you are from,” scribbled another, with a smiley face and a heart.

Next to these replies Abboud penned her own answer:

“I think it’s based on your ethnic identity. In art, we can often tell ethnicity from the bridge of your nose.”

One senior educator in the district, who is Jewish, told The Free Press she was “appalled” by the poster. “It’s clearly connected to the ethnic tropes of Jews having big noses. Quite frankly, it reminded me of Nazi comics. I had a visceral reaction to it. It was antisemitic.”

The poster Siriana Abboud put up in her pre-K class last year.
But Abboud, a twentysomething who teaches pre-K at PS 59, Beekman Hill International School, wasn’t punished or disciplined by the Department of Education for the poster, a source who knows Abboud told The Free Press. In fact, last December, she won the Big Apple Award, the highest distinction for a city teacher, for being a “liberation-inspired educator” who “raises societal expectations of the critical work of young children.”

Crossing the Line: Justifications for Terror Brendan Craig

https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2023/12/crossing-the-line-justifications-for-terror/

“As a historical scholar once put it: first, they said, You have no right to live among us as Jews; then they said, You have no right to live as Jews; the Nazi regime simply reduced the historical anti-Semitism to its logical endgame: You have no right to live. Once a nation and its citizens cross that line, once they can see the “other” as less human, or simply not human at all, then no atrocity is unthinkable.”

There are no innocent British: I struggled, as a ten-year-old in 1975, to understand the news reports on our television; why my parents were so upset, particularly my English mother. “Disgusting,” they would murmur. “What kind of people could do this?” Every other week, it seemed back then, a new IRA bombing would make headlines. In September 1975 an IRA bomb exploded in the lobby of London’s Hilton Hotel. Two people were killed and sixty-three injured, many suffering limbs blown off and other horrific injuries.

There is an excellent book by a former IRA member, Eamon Collins, called Killing Rage, in which he explains the cold rationale behind the IRA’s terror tactics. The fact was, while there were some attempts to target British soldiers and military targets, the IRA hard-liners argued that all Brits were complicit in the long-running abuse of Irish nationals, and no tears should be wasted on collateral victims. The cause was all. And any means was justified by the end goals.

There are no innocent Chinese: It is unfortunate that the West has learnt almost nothing about Japanese atrocities of the 1930s. Unlike the Holocaust, Japan’s shameful past has been effectively papered over, in part because of the tremendously successful efforts of the US since the war to rebuild Japan as a modern Western ally.

WHO is None Too Keen on Jews Stephen Buetow & Kira Baccal

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/israel/2023/12/who-is-none-too-keen-on-jews/

The World Health Organization (WHO) is a United Nations agency whose primary focus is to improve global public health. It claims to be politically impartial and to use its technical expertise to bring scientific evidence to bear on international issues whose politics impact health. However, the WHO r over-reaches this scope of practice and fails to uphold its founding principles, including egalitarianism and neutrality in global health governance. The 2023 Israel‑Hamas war is the latest reminder that the WHO, in its 75th anniversary year, perpetuates anti‑Israel bias and anti-Semitism.

Like any form of racism, anti-Semitism is an intolerable moral evil of concern to all people who value human dignity and justice. By anti‑Semitism, we mean Jew-hatred, as codified in the 2016 International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s working definition, and not a reasoned debate about or legitimate criticism of Israeli government policy.

Indeed, political divisions are evident in Israel itself. They accommodate calls to increase respect for Palestinians’ right to health without delegitimizing Israel’s right to exist and dehumanizing Jews and Israelis, including the 20 per cent of Israeli citizens who are Arabs. Contemporary expressions of Jew-hatred include anti-Zionism. Amid increased anti-Westernism, it weaponizes the anti‑Semitism  that is surging worldwide.

Anti-Zionism is the new anti-Semitism because, as British commentator Melanie Phillips explained in 2019, to treat Israel “as a Jew among nations to be uniquely vilified, slandered, and exterminated” is anti-Semitic. This article demonstrates how the WHO exemplifies such bias, acts against the sovereign equality of states, and promotes Israel’s disengagement rather than cooperation in confronting health emergencies in crises like the Israel‑Gaza war. We will discuss how WHO’s treatment of, and communications about Israel, differ from its diplomatic response to other states and conflicts. WHO’s condemnation of Israel’s military campaign in Gaza and international pressure for a ceasefire serve as a case study.

Differential treatment of Israel

Columbia University’s top antisemite – In a recent webinar, Joseph Massad spewed lies, Oct. 7 revisionism, antisemitic conspiracy theories, pro-Hamas propaganda and more. Andrew Harrod

https://www.jns.org/columbia-universitys-top-antisemite/

The “Oct. 7 Hamas offensive” from Gaza into Israel was part of a “war between the Palestinian resistance” and an “Israeli colonial settler and apartheid regime,” declared Joseph Massad in a Dec. 4 webinar. The tenured Columbia University professor of modern Arab politics and intellectual history, already facing a massive petition drive calling for him to be fired after he celebrated Hamas’s atrocities, had once again proudly displayed his despicable and murderous antisemitism.

In the webinar, held by the ironically named Rutgers University Law School Center for Security, Race and Rights (CSRR), Massad discussed what was titled “The West, Israel and Settler Colonization of Palestine.” His comments drew largely on two articles published on the Muslim Brotherhood- and Qatar-linked Middle East Eye website (here and here). CSRR’s director, the factually challenged Rutgers law professor Sahar Aziz, moderated.

As usual, Aziz introduced Rutgers as the “people’s electric law school” with a “proud history of defending the rights and the lives of the underprivileged, the oppressed and the censored” before launching an anti-Israel tirade. She falsely asserted that, in its ongoing offensive to destroy Hamas in Gaza, Israel is “carpet bombing residential neighborhoods, schools, hospitals, churches and mosques.” In fact, Israel has succeeded in limiting civilian casualties in a difficult urban combat environment to a remarkable degree.

Aziz claimed without evidence that “Israel’s war crimes include systemic starvation, dehydration and destruction of the health care system,” calling these “medieval” practices. She failed to mention that Hamas steals humanitarian aid while the IDF tries to guide civilians to safe zones. Aziz continued with her blood libels nonetheless, falsely claiming that Israel implements a “plan to maximize Palestinian deaths.” She omitted the fact that Hamas has extensively embedded its terrorist infrastructure among civilians in order to use them as human shields. This is undoubtedly a systemic “plan to maximize Palestinian deaths.”

For his part, Massad sought to portray the recent American deployment of warships to the eastern Mediterranean in support of Israel as old-fashioned Western gunboat diplomacy.

How Do You Spell ‘College Antisemitism’? D.E.I.

https://issuesinsights.com/2023/12/19/how-do-you-spell-college-antisemitism-d-e-i/

In a rare show of bipartisanship, 84 Democrats joined 219 Republicans on a resolution condemning antisemitism on college campuses and calling for the presidents of Harvard and MIT to resign after they refused to condemn student calls for genocide of Jews at a House hearing. The University of Pennsylvania’s president, who was also at that hearing, has already stepped down.

But even if all three them were gone, so what?

The problem is far wider and much deeper than antisemitism at three elite schools. And if you want to stamp out intellectual and moral rot driving it, start by firing the army of “diversity, equity, and inclusion” staffers at colleges across the country.

Two years ago, Jay Greene, a senior research fellow at the Heritage Foundation and former head of the Department of Education Reform at the University of Arkansas, did groundbreaking work on the DEI bloat at 65 universities that are members of the five “power” athletic conferences: the Atlantic Coast Conference, the Big 10, the Big 12, the PAC 12, and the Southeastern Conference.

What he found was that these schools averaged 45 DEI staffers, which was 1.4 times larger than the number of history professors. More recently, he looked at three public colleges in Virginia and found they had 6.5 DEI staffers for every 100 faculty members, which is higher than any single public university outside Virginia.

Later, Greene studied their posts on Twitter (now called X), and found that the ranks of DEI staff were full of antisemites. He found that 96% of their tweets about Israel were critical of the Jewish state, while 62% of the tweets about communist China were favorable.

“Frequently accusing Israel of engaging in genocide, apartheid, settler colonialism, ethnic cleansing, and other extreme crimes while rarely leveling similar criticisms toward China indicates an irrational hatred that is particularly directed toward Jews and not merely a concern for human rights,” he wrote.

Anti-Semitism’s Signature Moment Tony Thomas

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/the-universities/2023/12/anti-semitisms-signature-moment/

Australian pro-Hamas petitions are swelling to a torrent. For example, “Historians for Palestine” signed by 120 academics, on top of one from 720 academics nationally. That loopy one begins:

As scholars, academics and students in Australia, a settler colony built on the dispossession of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, we stand in solidarity with Palestinians in their struggle for liberation and against Israeli settler colonialism.

There’s old petitions like the journos’ multiple efforts since 2021, the most recent garnering 320 names and continuing to amass new activist signatures. Then there’s is the arty crowd of nearly 4,000 arts “creatives” signing their own effusion.

There is even a ceasefire petition under way from “Current and Former Elected Representatives” at local, state and federal level. It says, “We stand with Palestine, the Palestinian people, including Palestinian Australians and for truth and justice.” This petition blasts Israel for rights “violations” dating to 1948 and “occupation” of Gaza since 1967 via blockades. It has just one weak phrase about “the acts of Hamas on 7 October 2023″ requiring investigation. For the real thing on October 7, see here (warning – extremely graphic).

Most sinister of all is the pro-Palestine open letter from 700 Victorian school teachers and staff, as reported today (December 18) in The Australian. The letter says that it is within teachers’ “professional and ethical duty to model an anti-violence position”. They are pressuring federal and state education ministers to advise principals that Palestinian advocacy is in line with the public sector code of conduct. (It isn’t). They claim this is required to “protect children’s and young people’s wellbeing” in regards to Palestine:

Our own students are also witnessing the catastrophic devastation unfold, which will have short and long-term effects on their social, emotional and cultural wellbeing, impeding their capacity to live and learn well,” it says. “In response to the indefensible actions causing catastrophic harm, it is essential for people and governments to take an ethical stand, including those who remain accountable to the responsibility of caring for children and young people.

The Australian quoted Teachers Professional Association of Australia secretary Edward Schuller that the group “vehemently oppose any attempt to push political agendas onto children”.

But the daddy of all rows is convulsing Australia’s top-rated Melbourne University, with 2,050 pro-Hamas staff, students and alumni slugging it out with embattled Vice-Chancellor Duncan Maskell. His offence was to issue a statement on October 25 correctly blaming the war on the Hamas terrorism of October 7. He called for civilised behaviour at the university “as a diverse, multi-cultural and multi-faith community”. He urged for no anti-Semitism, no Islamophobia and no racism.[1]

Huge Majority Of Voters Say U.S. Has ‘Serious’ Antisemitism Problem: I&I/TIPP Poll Terry Jones

https://issuesinsights.com/2023/12/18/large-majority-of-voters-say-u-s-has-a-serious-problem-with-antisemitism-ii-tipp-poll/

While the big media might not be worried about the wave of antisemitism that emerged after Israel was attacked by Hamas on Oct. 7, average Americans are. A hefty majority now call antisemitism in the U.S. a “serious” problem, the latest I&I/TIPP Poll shows.

Following the recent disturbing outbreak of antisemitism across the country, ranging from an upsurge of antisemitic demonstrations on college campuses to a spate of ugly harassment incidents against individual Jewish Americans, a majority of Americans agree there’s a big problem.

In our latest national online poll, taken Nov. 29-Dec. 1 from among 1,464 registered voters, we asked the following question: “Generally speaking, how serious is the problem of anti-Semitism, or prejudice against Jewish people, in the U.S. today?”

The overwhelming response was not comforting for those who might have hoped that antisemitism was a relic of the past. Some 76% of all Americans called the problem either “very serious” (43%) or “somewhat serious” (33%). A mere 14% said it was either “not very serious” (10%) or “not serious at all” (4%).

Another 10% said they were “not sure.” The poll has a margin of error of +/-2.6 percentage points.

Differences among the three major political groupings in America – Democrats, Republicans and independents – were not great. The share of Democrats (83%) and Republicans (77%) responding that antisemitism was a “serious” problem in the U.S. were, statistically speaking, basically even.

Independents, at 67%, were the lowest of the 36 demographic groups regularly tracked by I&I/TIPP, but even that was still a strong majority. Plainly, average Americans are worried.

But this raises a question: Who do Americans think are the groups most afflicted with antisemitic ideas?

I&I/TIPP asked a follow-on question: “Generally speaking, how serious is the problem of anti-Semitism, or prejudice against Jewish people, among the following groups, in the U.S. today?” The choices were liberals, conservatives, young adults and universities.

Recall that, overall, 76% in the poll thought America overall suffered from antisemitism. None of the individual groups listed in the preceding paragraph get close to that level, though all are above 50%. They range from conservatives (51%) and liberals (54%) to young adults (61%) and universities (61%).