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ANTI-SEMITISM

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We Were Taught to Hate Jews ‘It’s like asking me how often I drink water. Antisemitism was everywhere.’ Apostates, former Islamists, and an almost-terrorist on how they changed their minds. By Madeleine Rowley

By on December 17th, 2023

https://www.thefp.com/p/we-were-taught-to-hate-jews?utm_campaign=email-post&r=8t06w&utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

The following five ex-Muslims grew up in Canada, Europe, and the Middle East, but they were all indoctrinated, they say, with the same views on Jews and Israel. They remember a childhood shot through with antisemitic moments ranging from the mundane (one woman recalls her aunt claiming Jews put cancer in her vegetables at the market) to the deadly (a former extremist went as far as to pick a location in London for a terrorist attack he planned to carry out at 17).

These hateful ideas, repeated by their family members, religious leaders, and teachers, are part and parcel of the same animus, they say, that fueled Hamas’s attacks on October 7.

Some of the people you will hear from below have received death threats for speaking out on issues like antisemitism and sexism in the Muslim world. One uses a pen name to protect herself and her daughter from her terrorist ex-husband, who is currently jailed in Egypt. All of them came to reject their loathing for Jewish people and the West, and have rebuilt their lives in the wake of their realizations. Here are their stories, which you can read or click to listen to each author recite in the audio recordings below.

“To enter our classroom, we had to step on a painting of the Israeli flag on the ground.”

When I was born, Iran was still free. You could drink and dance, and women could wear whatever they wanted. I’ll never forget my first day of school after the Islamic Revolution. I was six, and my mother entered my room with a long, dark, and formless manteau and a piece of fabric for my hair and neck.

“My darling,” she said, “this is your uniform.”

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A History of Feminist Antisemitism The story of how activists and academics exchanged the struggle for universal female improvement for a politics of division and hatred. Kara Jesella

By on December 16th, 2023

https://quillette.com/2023/12/15/a-history-of-feminist-antisemitism/

I. It Wasn’t Always Like This

In my academic life, I was fortunate to have my rabbi teach my first Women’s Studies course and Angela Davis teach my second. At Vassar during the multiculti-and-identity-obsessed 1990s, I learned from Rabbi Shirley Idelson about intersectionality and black feminism, and I was taught that if I didn’t understand the Spanish in the now-canonical anthology This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, I had to find someone who did to translate it for me. I also learned that I could be a Jewish feminist, parsing my own complicated personal and communal history for theoretical insights, in the manner of my favorite theorist, Adrienne Rich.

During my 13 years as one of the only Jews in the Catholic schools I attended, the boy I sometimes thought was my boyfriend drew swastikas on my book covers. The boss at my summer job was delighted to learn that I was going to Vassar, “even though there will be a lot of JAPs there” (a JAP, she explained, is a Jewish American Princess). I didn’t write about the panic of coming-of-age at a time—and in a city—where Operation Rescue picketed abortion clinics and screamed at “baby-killers” every weekend. (A 1990 story in the Jewish feminist journal Lilith was headlined, “The Anti-Choice Movement: Bad News For Jews.”) The year after I graduated—I had already fled to New York City—Barnett Slepian, a local Jewish doctor who performed abortions, was assassinated by a member of a Catholic anti-abortion group upon his return from shul.

Nevertheless, in my first paper for Rabbi Idelson’s class, I compared my own experience of racism to that of black Americans and concluded that American blacks had it worse. “I think you mute the terror of the swastika,” Rabbi Idelson remarked as she awarded me an A-/A. Later, in Professor Davis’s class, I learned that the term “women of color” wasn’t about melanin, it was an imaginative political formation. Those two classes informed everything I have done since: my undergraduate degree in Women’s Studies; my years as a feminist journalist and book author; and the doctorate I received two years ago, when I finally completed my dissertation on feminist historiography.

May 2021 was a sad and scary month to be a Jewish feminist, as violence escalated in the Middle East and in New York City, where I still live. Friends from graduate school and the feminist internet posted anti-Zionist infographics on social media and a counterterrorism unit kept watch in front of my daughter’s Jewish nursery school. The morning of my graduation, I awoke to a petition circulating on Twitter titled, “Gender Studies Departments in Solidarity with Palestinian Feminist Collective.” It informed me that Jews are colonizers not indigenous to Israel and rejected the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition of antisemitism. Two days later, I received an email from my department with news of an award, and another professing solidarity with the Palestinian people. It was hard to understand exactly what that meant—who doesn’t want a better life for Palestinians?—but given the department’s politics, I could guess. 

But this was only a prelude of what was to come after the atrocities committed by Hamas against the kibbutzim of southern Israel on October 7th.

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An Antisemitic Occupation of Harvard’s Widener Library Claudine Gay promised to prevent ‘disruptions of the classroom experience.’ How’s that working out? By Dan Sullivan

By on December 16th, 2023

https://www.wsj.com/articles/an-antisemitic-occupation-of-harvards-widener-library-politics-anti-israel-bias-e4cea52a?mod=opinion_lead_pos6

Mr. Sullivan, a Republican, is a U.S. senator from Alaska and a colonel in the Marine Corps Reserve.

I was in Boston last weekend for the Army-Navy game. The day after the game, five days after Harvard President Claudine Gay’s disastrous testimony before Congress, I decided to walk the campus to reminisce about my time at Harvard, where I earned my undergraduate degree in 1987, and reflect about what had gone wrong at this once-great university.

I visited places that held significance to me while I was there: St. Paul’s Catholic Church, my freshman dorm and, of course, Widener Library—a monument to learning, study and contemplation that sits like a temple in the middle of Harvard Yard.

As I did during my undergraduate years, I spent several minutes staring up at the powerful mural by John Singer Sargent, “Death and Victory.” It’s one of two Sargent paintings memorializing the men of Harvard who sacrificed their lives for our country in World War I. I’ve thought about the painting often throughout the years—including when I made the decision to join the Marine Corps.

When I walked upstairs to the famous Widener Reading Room, I couldn’t believe my eyes. Nearly every student in the packed room was wearing a kaffiyeh. Fliers attached to their individual laptops, as well as affixed to some of the lamps in the reading room, read: “No Normalcy During Genocide—Justice for Palestine.” A young woman handed the fliers to all who entered. A large banner spread across one end of the room stated in blazing blood-red letters, “Stop the Genocide in Gaza.”

Curious about what was going on, I was soon in a cordial discussion with two of the organizers of this anti-Israel protest inside of one the world’s great libraries—not outside in Harvard Yard, where such protests belong. They told me they were from Saudi Arabia and the West Bank. I told them I was a U.S. senator who had recently returned from a bipartisan Senate trip to Israel, Egypt and Saudi Arabia. I mentioned the meetings I had. I expressed my condolences when they told me their relatives had been killed by Israeli military action in Gaza.

One then asked whether I supported a cease-fire in Gaza. I said I didn’t, because I strongly believe Israel had the right both to defend itself and to destroy Hamas given the horrendous attacks it perpetrated against Israeli civilians on Oct. 7.

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Niall Ferguson: The Treason of the Intellectuals Anyone who has a naive belief in the power of higher education to instill morality has not studied the history of German universities in the Third Reich.By Niall Ferguson *****

By on December 13th, 2023

https://www.thefp.com/p/niall-ferguson-treason-intellectuals-third-reich?utm_medium=email&_hsmi=286155294&_hsenc=p2ANqtz-

In 1927 the French philosopher Julien Benda published La trahison des clercs—“The Treason of the Intellectuals”—which condemned the descent of European intellectuals into extreme nationalism and racism. By that point, although Benito Mussolini had been in power in Italy for five years, Adolf Hitler was still six years away from power in Germany and 13 years away from victory over France. But already Benda could see the pernicious role that many European academics were playing in politics. 

Those who were meant to pursue the life of the mind, he wrote, had ushered in “the age of the intellectual organization of political hatreds.” And those hatreds were already moving from the realm of the ideas into the realm of violence—with results that would be catastrophic for all of Europe.

A century later, American academia has gone in the opposite political direction—leftward instead of rightward—but has ended up in much the same place. The question is whether we—unlike the Germans—can do something about it.

For nearly ten years, rather like Benda, I have marveled at the treason of my fellow intellectuals. I have also witnessed the willingness of trustees, donors, and alumni to tolerate the politicization of American universities by an illiberal coalition of “woke” progressives, adherents of “critical race theory,” and apologists for Islamist extremism. 

Throughout that period, friends assured me that I was exaggerating. Who could possibly object to more diversity, equity, and inclusion on campus? In any case, weren’t American universities always left-leaning? Were my concerns perhaps just another sign that I was the kind of conservative who had no real future in the academy?

Such arguments fell apart after October 7, as the response of “radical” students and professors to the Hamas atrocities against Israel revealed the realities of contemporary campus life. That hostility to Israeli policy in Gaza regularly slides into antisemitism is now impossible to deny. 

I cannot stop thinking of the son of a Jewish friend of mine, who is a graduate student at one of the Ivy League colleges. Just this week, he went to the desk assigned to him to find, carefully placed under his computer keyboard, a note with the words “ZIONIST KIKE!!!” in red and green letters.

Just as disturbing as such incidents—and there are too many to recount—has been the dismally confused responses of university leaders. 

Testifying before the House Committee on Education and the Workforce last week, Harvard President Claudine Gay, MIT President Sally Kornbluth, and University of Pennsylvania President Elizabeth Magill showed that they had been well-briefed by the lawyers their universities retain for such occasions.

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Crossing the Jordan: The New Antisemitism and How it Will Destroy the West By Janet Levy

By on December 13th, 2023

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2023/12/crossing_the_jordan_the_new_antisemitism_and_how_it_will_destroy_the_west.html

As Israel deals with a multi-pronged Hamas-led invasion from the Gaza Strip amidst unwarranted international pressure, Canadian writer David Solway’s scholarly collection of essays, Crossing the Jordan: On Judaism, Islam and the West, comes as a timely reminder of how multiplicity in self-identification is undermining Jewish unity.  The book, to be released today, December 12, also addresses the idiosyncratic position of Israel among the nations of the world, the threat to liberal Judeo-Christian values posed by Islam, and the Left’s catalysis of the subsuming of Western culture.

Solway is a man of many parts – poet, scholar, teacher, chess enthusiast, education theorist, and literary critic.  Born Jewish but not particularly religious or identity-conscious, he underwent a transformation post 9/11.  He began to question his rejection of Jewish kinship and asked himself difficult questions that rid him of his Leftist inclinations.  Among other things, the book speaks of his epiphanic recognition that the fate of Israel is the fate of every Jew, regardless of nationality or political view.  In the light of the October 7 attack – Israel’s 9/11 (equivalent proportionately to seven 9/11s) – this exploration of personal change along with the impersonal twists of history makes for poignant reading.

Why, Solway asks, is Israel the only nation whose right to exist is questioned and threatened?  Why is it labeled an occupier and a colonizer when Eretz Yisrael and Judah predate any Arab presence in the Holy Land by more than a thousand years?  Why is it the only country that has been pressured to return captured territory after winning wars started by Muslim neighbors who have vowed to eradicate it?  Why are its defeated enemies allowed to dictate terms of peace? 

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Antisemitic Mob Shows Up for Biden Fundraiser, Vandalizes Jewish Neighborhood Stephen Green

By on December 12th, 2023

https://pjmedia.com/vodkapundit/2023/12/11/antisemitic-mob-biden-fundraiser-n4924649

It was like a scene in downtown Tehran orchestrated by Iran’s ruling mullahs, one of those “spontaneous” protests in Ramallah on the West Bank, or from 1938 Germany as the Nazis whipped up antisemitic hate in preparation for Kristallnacht — and worse.

But it was modern-day Los Angeles on Friday night, the second night of Hanukkah, when a mob marched through a largely Jewish neighborhood chanting death threats to Jews.

According to StopAntisemitism, the mob also defaced several buildings, including synagogues. 

Here’s a short clip of the mob in action.

People who still rely on the mainstream media for their news missed scenes like these.

Remember, comrades — no peaceful protest is complete without at least a little property damage.

The mainstream media was largely silent on the mob and its death threats. FoxLA 11 reported it as part of its story on Presidentish Joe Biden’s fundraising sweep through Los Angeles. The Los Angeles Daily News gave it a brief mention way down in the 16th paragraph of a similar report on Biden’s trip.

To be fair, a similar mob of between 1,200 and 1,500 people showed up at Biden’s Holmby Hills fundraiser with chants of “Free Gaza” and “Ceasefire now.” They even accused Biden and his donors of supporting Israeli “genocide” against Gaza Arabs. There were about 1.5 million Muslim Arabs in the Gaza Strip when Israel unilaterally left the region in 2005. There are more than 2 million there today, and Gaza women have one of the highest fertility rates in the world.

Some genocide, eh?

“Literally, I believe, the future of American democracy is at stake,” Biden said during his fundraising speech in reference to Donald Trump. “We will be one of those generations that can say, ‘We saved democracy.”‘

That he said all that while a Nazi-like mob chanted outside is an irony too rich for fiction — it’s an absurdity that could only happen in reality. 

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Merry Christmas! Hanukkah Is Canceled By Gidon Ben-Zvi

By on December 12th, 2023

https://www.newsweek.com/merry-christmas-hanukkah-canceled-opinion-1850487

Anyone still clinging to the belief that there is a difference between hating Jews and wanting Israel to disappear now needs to explain away another inconvenient truth. Scheduled Hanukkah celebrations across the United States, Canada, and elsewhere have been scrapped. The reason cited over and over is that hosting such holiday events would imply support for Israel in its war against the Gaza-based Hamas terrorist organization.

A Hanukkah candle lighting that was due to take place at a music and arts festival in Williamsburg, Virginia, was canceled by the festival’s founder because the lighting of a menorah ‘seemed very inappropriate’ given current events in Israel and Gaza.

Let us conduct a quick thought experiment. Even supposing that holding Jewish people everywhere accountable for Israel’s actions since the Oct. 7 massacre was somehow valid, at what point did a country’s right—obligation—to defend itself against a group that invaded its territory, murdered 1,200 people, kidnapped over 200 men, women, and children, and drove over 200,000 citizens from their homes become ‘inappropriate’?

Moreover, this fear of being seen as siding with Israel over Hamas has not extended to Muslim-themed events and ceremonies in the United States and Canada, which continue to be held. When it comes to Muslim communities residing in these countries, there is a clear line being drawn between Hamas in Gaza and law-abiding citizens in Los Angeles, New York, Virginia, and Toronto exercising their right to worship and assemble as they see fit.

Despite this discrepancy between how two minority groups are being treated, Washington has repeatedly equated the plight of American Jews to that of Muslims living in the United States. Responding to a question about soaring rates of antisemitism and the wave of cancelled Hanukkah celebrations, White House Press Secretary Karine Jean Pierre said this week, “We have seen an uptick in hate, just more broadly, in different communities—obviously, also in the Muslim community. And so, we will do everything that we can to make sure that these communities feel safe.”

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The Ivy League Mask Falls Antisemitism is one example of a much deeper rot on campus.

By on December 11th, 2023

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-ivy-league-mask-falls-antisemitism-higher-education-4592d0c0?mod=opinion_lead_pos3

The furor over antisemitism on campus is a rare and welcome example of accountability at American universities. But it won’t amount to much if the only result is the resignation of a couple of university presidents.

The great benefit of last week’s performance by three elite-school presidents before Congress is that it tore the mask off the intellectual and political corruption of much of the American academy. The world was appalled by the equivocation of the academic leaders when asked if advocating genocide against Jews violated their codes of conduct. But the episode merely revealed the value system that has become endemic at too many prestigious schools.

The presidents of MIT, Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania hid behind concerns about free speech. But as everyone paying attention knows, these schools don’t protect speech they disagree with. They punish it.

Harvard President Claudine Gay has presided over the ouster of professors for speech that violated progressive orthodoxy. As Elise Stefanik wrote on these pages on Friday, Harvard’s Title IX training says using the wrong pronouns qualifies as abuse. Harvard was 248th out of 248, and Penn was 247th, in the annual college ranking by the free-speech Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression.

But because Jews in Israel are seen in the progressive canon as white oppressors and colonizers, it’s not a clear campus violation to call for murdering Jews because it depends on the context.

The three presidents have apologized for or moderated their comments before Congress, but that was only after the political consequences became clear. Believe what they said the first time. That is what their institutions now stand for.

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IVY LEAGUE ANTISEMITISM: WHO DIDN’T KNOW?Stephen Soukup

By on December 9th, 2023

https://wokecapital.org/ivy-league-antisemitism-who-didnt-know/

Over the past couple of days, we have read a great deal about the presidents of the Ivy League schools who went to Washington and embarrassed themselves and their universities.  Much of what we’ve read has reflected justified incredulity, understandable anger and frustration that the presidents of these highly respected universities would believe that the appropriateness of calls for genocide depends on the “context” in which those calls are made.  Some of the commentary has taken the opposite tack, suggesting that the Ivy presidents were justified in defending free speech while lamenting that they did not do so more consistently.  In both cases – theoretically diametrically opposed – the common denominator is callousness and apathy in the face of antisemitism.  Either the universities in question are tolerating antisemitism when they shouldn’t, or they are tolerating antisemitism when they do not tolerate any other discrimination.  In both cases, the antisemites win.

For our money, the most interesting aspect of the entire episode is how completely unsurprising any of it is.  The presidents of Ivy League schools – Harvard and UPenn, in particular – are unconcerned about antisemitism?  Indeed, they clearly and palpably treat Jews and hatred of them differently and less seriously than they do other people and other hatreds?

Honestly, who didn’t know?

The simple fact of the matter is that much of the Ivy League – and again, Harvard and Penn, in particular – are both historical practitioners of traditional antisemitism and the incubators of the newer, ideologically identitarian antisemitism. That their presidents couldn’t or wouldn’t take a stand one way or another against Jew-hatred should come as a surprise to no one.  To do so would be to disavow their institutional heritage and, more to the point, the ideology around which they’ve built their institutional present and future.

Consider, for example, the following passages from a 2006 review of the book The Chosen: The Hidden History of Admission and Exclusion at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton by Jerome Karabel.

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Harvard Bans ‘Cisheterosexism’ but Shrugs at Antisemitism College presidents are directly responsible for the hatred that has flourished on campus since Oct. 7. By Elise Stefanik

By on December 9th, 2023

https://www.wsj.com/articles/harvard-bans-cisheterosexism-but-shrugs-at-antisemitism-95a2c5d7?mod=opinion_trendingnow_article_pos3

What constitutes bullying and harassment at Harvard? A mandatory Title IX training last year warned all undergraduate students that “cisheterosexism,” “fatphobia” and “using the wrong pronouns” qualified as “abuse” and perpetuated “violence” on campus.

But when I asked Harvard President Claudine Gay at a congressional hearing whether calls for the genocide of Jews violated the university’s rules on bullying and harassment, she answered: “It depends on the context.” Pressed further, she said it would qualify “when it crosses into conduct.” I received similar answers from the presidents of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Pennsylvania.

This lack of moral clarity is shocking. If only it were surprising. In the months since Oct. 7, the mainstreaming of anti-Jewish hate has been on full display at the poisoned Ivy League and other so-called elite schools, as has the gutless lack of response from university leaders. When 34 Harvard student groups signed a statement that they “hold the Israeli regime entirely responsible for all unfolding violence,” Ms. Gay and other Harvard leaders were silent for days.

Since then, we have heard reports of Jewish students being spat on, verbally accosted and, in a widely circulated video, physically assaulted. We’ve seen students march chanting “There is only one solution: Intifada revolution,” a call for violence against Israel. They follow that with a chant of “Globalize the Intifada,” implying that the hatred of Israel is a hatred of Jews everywhere, including on campus.

The Penn, Harvard and MIT presidents’ refusal to identify these calls for violence as policy violations is revealing, and their attempt to justify it with feigned concern for free speech is insulting. Just this year, Harvard placed dead last among 248 universities on the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression’s College Free Speech Rankings, receiving the only score of zero out of 100.

Where was Harvard’s concern for free speech when it disinvited feminist philosopher Devin Buckley from a colloquium on campus last year because of her views on transgender issues? Where was its concern for free speech in 2020 when it revoked conservative activist Kyle Kashuv’s acceptance because of social media posts he made as a 16-year-old, or in 2017 when it revoked admission for 10 incoming freshmen who shared offensive memes on Facebook?

Apparently the same outrage doesn’t apply to students sharing antisemitic memes on Slack today, as Bill Ackman noted in his letter to Harvard last month.

While this hypocrisy is being exposed now, it has been festering for years. The failure to call out and punish those demanding the genocide of Jewish people is the consequence of decades of appeasement of radicalism and watering down of principle at our most hallowed institutions of higher education, which were founded as bastions of moral clarity and the pursuit of truth.

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