RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://pjmedia.com/catherinesalgado/2023/11/24/72-columbia-student-groups-issue-anti-israel-terrorist-empathizing-manifesto-n4924201

One disturbing outcome of the current Israel-Hamas conflict is the exposure of radical anti-Semitism at American universities. Over 70 student groups at Columbia University just issued a manifesto against Israel that would have made the Nazis proud.

Two student groups at Columbia were suspended recently for repeatedly threatening and intimidating Jewish students, as PJ Media’s Rick Moran reported. Dozens of Israel-hating, terrorist-empathizing Columbia student groups want them reinstated. Perhaps it’s not surprising at a school funded by globalist anti-Israel billionaire George Soros…

The heinous Oct. 7 Hamas terrorist attack left hundreds of Israelis dead and forced Israeli authorities to come to grips with the reality that Arabs, who have no right at all to Israeli land, have been refusing peace in favor of trying to destroy Israel for decades, and they’re not going to change their minds now. The majority of Gazans support jihad against Israel, and the Gaza Strip is controlled by the terrorist group Hamas and the terrorist-funding Palestinian Authority (PA), which use civilians as human shields. Yet Columbia student groups issued a perverted Nov. 14 manifesto based entirely off anti-Semitic terrorist propaganda!

The manifesto even had the audacity to accuse Columbia of anti-Semitism for shutting down Jewish Voice for Peace, which openly intimidated other Jews! While explicitly spreading Hamas propaganda and vilifying Israel with hideous lies, these woke student groups saw no hypocrisy in mentioning anti-Semitism. “We know that antisemitism, Islamophobia, and racism—in particular racism against Arabs and Palestinians—are all cut from the same cloth: Western colonization, imperialism, white supremacy, and anti-Blackness,” the manifesto screeched. Jews are always framed as white colonialist oppressors in academia, and the students are apparently unaware that Arabs have a long history of racism against black people.

Ironically, the manifesto signers included Columbia Queer and Asian, Columbia Queer Alliance, Proud Colors, and GSAS Queer Graduate Collective. Yet if these LGBTQ radicals went to Palestinian-controlled areas, because the Palestinians are Muslim, these Columbia activists  would “risk summary execution” and face harsh persecution. Ultimately, Hamas would be happy to kill every single one of these woke Columbia students, except possibly some of the Muslims, but the students probably couldn’t be brought to realize that until and unless they were actually being killed. This is the level of willful ignorance and self-delusion at Columbia:

We are committed to creating a multi-generational, intersectional, and accessible space dedicated to fighting for abolition, transnational feminism, anticapitalism, and decolonization, and also to combating anti-Blackness, queerphobia, Islamophobia, and antisemitism.

https://www.newenglishreview.org/georgetown-teams-with-islamist-magazine-to-whitewash-hamas-deride-israeli-deaths/

Israel’s current military campaign to destroy Hamas in the Gaza Strip exhibits “blood lust,” stated Mouin Rabbani, coeditor of the Arab Studies Institute’s (ASI) Islamist webzine Jadaliyya, during a recent Georgetown University presentation. Sponsored by Georgetown’s Saudi-established Prince Alwaleed bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding (ACMCU), “Israel-Gaza War: A Conversation with Mouin Rabbani” presented Rabbani’s Gaza ravings as fact.

As was visible in the event video, Rabbani addressed an audience in the conference room of Georgetown’s Center for Contemporary Arab Studies (CCAS), another event sponsor with faculty that share his anti-Israel views. ACMCU’s new director, Rabbani’s fellow Israel-conspiracy-monger Nader Hashemi, moderated. The Qatari-affiliated Democracy in the Arab World Now (DAWN) think tank, where Hashemi is listed as an expert, also sponsored Rabbani’s talk.

Rabbani described as pure revenge killings Israel’s rooting out of Hamas jihadists from their urban, largely underground hideouts following Hamas’s October 7 atrocities in Israel. “Israeli public opinion was so outraged” that “Israeli leadership is kind of trying to make good on this by ensuring that many more Palestinians are killed than Israelis were killed on October 7,” he stated. “Flattening entire neighborhoods” is not “in any way significantly degrading actual military capabilities,” he added, as if Israel could avoid harming civilians whom Hamas deliberately exploits as human shields. Israel, he said, is committing “systematic war crimes and crimes against humanity.”

Palestinians suffering under Israel’s self-defense actions, not the Jewish and other Israeli citizens butchered by Hamas’s October 7 onslaught, were to Rabbani as the real victims. He bemoaned the “demonization and delegitimization and dehumanization and outright repression of pro-Palestinian sentiment.” He complained of “selective outrage” when comparing Palestinian civilian deaths in combat, which Israel strives hard to avoid, with the Israelis mercilessly targeted by Hamas terror.

“When Palestinians are killed, we take an analytical approach; when Israelis are killed, the criteria is morality,” Rabbani stated. Pentagon spokesman John Kirby “broke down on TV like a baby” after having examined images of Hamas’s ravaged victims, Rabbani callously noted, “a blubbering baby, for God’s sake.” Yet when Kirby later answered questions about civilian casualties from Israeli military operations, “all of a sudden he’s a tough guy, war is hell, civilians die, get over it. Ok, are you Jekyll or Hyde?” Rabbani sneered.

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One need look no further than my hometown of Chappaqua, New York and its public school district (CCSD) to better understand why there has been a spike of antisemitism on our college campuses and in communities across the country following Hamas’s October 7 terrorist attack against Israel.  As CCSD’s Superintendent of Schools, Christine Ackerman has made clear, when it comes to teaching Middle East history and confronting the unprecedented spike of antisemitism, CCSD is a “safe space” for antisemitism, moral equivalence, and fact free history. 

Recently, 450 residents of Chappaqua whose children either attend or have attended the town’s public schools, sent a letter to the CCSD asking it to address the alarming rise of antisemitic incidents in the Chappaqua schools and the scourge of anti-Jewish hatred in the community in the wake of “the horrific massacre in Israel on October 7” (attached, although the names of the signatories are redacted for confidentiality).  In response, CCSD put together a Webinar it claimed was designed to address the parents’ concerns. 

Following the Webinar, Ackerman sent a letter to the CCSD community “to share the feedback…that we’ve received from the recent Middle East webinar and BOE meeting public comment period, along with our proposed plan to address the concerns and questions raised by parents.” (The full text of Ackerman’s letter follows this essay below).  The letter reads like a dystopian litany of Orwellian Newspeak. 

It is difficult to know if Ackerman is obtuse, ignorant, or malevolent.  Whichever it is, she must resign or be fired immediately.  She is not qualified to have any role in educating our children and her salary is waste of my tax dollars. 

Not once does she mention the word “antisemitism” or the date October 7 in text of her letter.  It is not until she itemizes the “Middle East Webinar & Community Feedback” that the word  “antisemitism” is mentioned.  By relegating “antisemitism” to the feedback and not raising it as a concern in the body of her letter, she makes clear that the rise in antisemitism is a concern she does not share.  For her, this is merely an exercise in quieting some unhappy taxpayers. 

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2023/11/more_antisemitism_from_columbia_u.html

Columbia University Apartheid Divest has issued a statement that reads:

“Columbia University Apartheid Divest is a coalition of student organizations that see Palestine as the vanguard for our collective liberation.” Good, please have your female and LGBT members go over to Gaza and see just how “liberated” they are in that environment.
“Israel is bombing hospitals, schools, and homes while cutting off food, water, medicine, and electricity to the more than two million Palestinians in Gaza, half of whom are children.” Hospitals, schools, and homes lose their protected status under the Geneva and Hague Conventions when used for military purposes. This means that Apartheid Divest is intentionally trying to obfuscate Hamas’ war crimes.
“We have previously refused to focus on concerns pertaining to free speech, academic freedom, and student safety on campus, as they distract from Israel’s actively committing genocide and ethnic cleansing.” This is an application of Joseph Goebbels’ advice to accuse the other side of that which your own side is guilty, as the only genocide was the one attempted by Hamas on October 7.

Here is the list of student organizations that signed this material. Although the names of the student officers are not available, those of the faculty advisors are. If those advisors are not comfortable with the content of this letter, they are free to distance themselves from the organizations in question.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/my-school-doesnt-tolerate-anti-semitism-hamas-ivy-league-jewish-students-protest-1a5b4d97?mod=opinion_lead_pos10

America’s elite colleges and universities are soft on terrorism and strong on anti-Semitism. Who knew?

Weak-kneed responses by academic leaders to Hamas’s attack on Israel, coupled with soaring anti-Semitism on campuses, have created a crisis. Jewish students are increasingly unsafe, while major donors are alarmed by the harmful ideas promoted by the institutions they support.

The implicit bargain in higher education is that donors support schools as an expression of good citizenship, and it’s up to the schools to produce good citizens. This bargain has frayed in recent years as schools aren’t holding up their end of the deal.

Many campuses have become echo chambers that lack intellectual diversity and promote a climate of intolerance. To avoid being “canceled” by progressives, moderate and conservative students and faculty practice self-censorship rather than discuss controversial ideas.

The response to the Oct. 7 attack exposed how schools have become incubators of radicalism. Protests, vandalism, intimidation, and assaults—mostly targeting Jewish students—are the fruits of the critical-theory educational model that stigmatizes Jews as “white oppressors” and Israelis as “Zionist colonizers.” In response to anti-Semitism, university administrators have either done nothing or issued anodyne statements deploring violence in general terms, until some were badgered into reacting more explicitly.

Many donors saw the jarring response from the academy as a betrayal of their generosity and deeply held values. Now they are voting with their feet and wallets: withdrawing or canceling donations, resigning from boards, and encouraging alumni to boycott their alma maters.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2023/11/the_plight_of_jews_on_college_campuses.html

This is not the best of times for many — perhaps most — Jews on college campuses.  Pro-Hamas, anti-Israel demonstrations and occasional vandalism have become commonplace, with more than a few explicitly calling for the extermination of Jews.  Harvard’s graduate student union, backed by a majority of its members, issued a statement that demanded “the end of “occupation and colonization of all Arab lands.”  A group of MIT students, the Coalition Against Apartheid (CAA), meanwhile, physically blocked Jewish students from attending class.  The CAA “support[s] the liberation of all peoples, with a focus on the Israeli occupation of Palestine.”  Faculty similarly celebrate Islamic terrorism while condemning Israel for genocide and war crimes.  This is not just from a nutty fringe.  According to one study, one in five college students sympathizes with Hamas.

Jewish students can do little to turn the tide.  Jewish billionaires can threaten to cease donations unless the school administration “does something,” but the campus apparatchiks are powerless.  Ditto for firing professors who glorify Hamas brutality, nor can schools pull the plug on campus groups falsely condemning Israel for war crimes.  Also forget about the federal government defunding of higher education unless universities crack down on hate speech.

What Jewish students and their sympathizers fail to grasp is that this antisemitic outpouring is not an aberration triggered by recent events in Gaza.  Rather, it reflects the long and nearly invisible transformation of the academy, beginning in the late 1960s with the anti–Vietnam war protests and reaching maturity when the black civil right movement successfully advanced its racial justice agenda.  Campus antisemitism is just the latest installment of a long story and will not be vanquished when the university’s president offers up a limp pro-Israel speech or Washington taxing school endowments.

Fundamental is how physical violence or its threat has become an integral part of campus life.  

https://newcriterion.com/issues/2023/12/tenured-barbarians

It’s been many years since we have had occasion to mention Rashid Khalidi—enthusiast for the Palestinian cause, bosom buddy of Barack Obama, and the Edward Said (!) Professor of Modern Arab Studies at Columbia University—in this space. Back in June 2005, in a column called “Faculty follies,” we quoted Khalidi’s thundering dismissal of what he called “the utterly spurious assumption that universities are strongholds of radical and liberal beliefs.”

As if to underscore the malign fatuousness of that declaration, Professor Khalidi has just put his name to an open letter, signed by more than a hundred of his Columbia colleagues, calling on the university to defend those students who publicly support Hamas, the terrorist organization that controls the Gaza Strip and that, without warning, slaughtered more than 1,400 people, mostly civilians, in southern Israel on October 7. That massacre, which also left some five thousand injured and saw more than two hundred people—including infants, toddlers, and the elderly—kidnapped and dragged back to the Gaza Strip, killed more Jews than any event since the Holocaust. Khalidi and his colleagues are incensed that the names and likenesses of some of these pro-Palestinian student protestors have been posted under the rubric “Columbia’s Leading Anti-Semites.” “As scholars,” the professors write, apparently without irony,who are committed to robust inquiry about the most challenging matters of our time, we feel compelled to respond to those who label our students anti-Semitic if they express empathy for the lives and dignity of Palestinians, and/or if they signed on to a student-written statement that situated the military action begun on October 7th within the larger context of the occupation of Palestine by Israel.

Where does one start? We’re tempted to begin with the question of whether anyone anywhere has objected to people expressing “empathy for the lives and dignity of Palestinians.” But let’s leave that trope, along with the needling “as scholars” gambit, to one side for a moment and concentrate on two phrases: “military action begun on October 7th” and “the larger context of the occupation of Palestine by Israel.”

In the modern world, a “military action” is understood to be an action undertaken to achieve a specific military objective and employing only those means that are in accordance with the recognized rules of combat. High up on the list of those rules is concern for noncombatants. It is an unfortunate fact that civilians are often killed in a military action. But they must not be explicitly targeted.