RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2023/11/02/virulent_antisemitism_and_the_rot_at_our_universities_149995.html

It is time for blunt talk. Jewish students at universities are being harassed and threatened in unprecedented numbers, with disturbing vitriol. That’s more than a danger for those students. It is a profound danger for a liberal, tolerant democracy. It is time to call it out and oppose it. It’s time to end it.

The attacks and violent demonstrations shine a particularly harsh light on the sorry state of higher education. The public has watched mass demonstrations against Israel on campus after campus. The demonstrators never mention the victims of the Hamas massacres, never condemn the terrorists, and often go beyond their support for innocent Palestinians to cheer Hamas.

University leaders, who postured on every fashionable issue, have responded with bland, spineless statements. It’s no surprise that parents are rethinking which universities their children should attend, and major donors are doubting whether universities are worthy of their support.

For Jewish students, these threats are real. They face harassment, intimidation, and bullying. The situation has been deteriorating for years, but the scale and ferocity of the harassment rose dramatically after Hamas launched its terror attack.

When some brave students have spoken out in Israel’s defense, they have faced the jackboots of campus bullies. Instead of protecting those students, universities have abandoned their fundamental duty to ensure a safe environment and promote open discourse about serious issues. The situation is most toxic at elite universities and schools in major cities, where anti-Israeli students are reinforced by angry local activists.

It is too mild to say, “This is the gravest, most antisemitic environment Jewish students have faced in recent years.” It’s worse than that. This is the most hostile environment Jewish students have ever faced in America.

Never before have Jewish students been subjected to this kind of venom simply for their heritage. True, their admission was limited by quotas until the mid-1960s. True, they were denied membership in fraternities and sororities and routinely excluded from the faculty. But they were never subjected to this kind of raw hatred. As the dean of Berkeley’s law school, Erwin Chemerinsky, a man of the left, put it, “Nothing has prepared me for the antisemitism I see on college campuses now.”

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

The global banner of anti-Semitism is once again being unfurled in a rage of rhetorical madness unleashed by the flailing Iranian theocracy. The growing success of the Abraham Accords that is slowly and steadily undermining the pathological consensus among Arab nations that there is something politically legitimate about denying the existence of the one Jewish state: Israel — threatens the smaller axis of anti-Semitism anchored by Iran. As more nations join the logical global dialogue of nations that is inevitable, the fringe extremism of Iran and its surrogates of Hezb’allah and Hamas are prominently exposed. This is why they launched the deadliest attack on Jews since the Holocaust on October 7 and now are appealing for the aid of traditional American academic allies to rally global forces for deadly anti-Semitism. Jewish intellectuals understandably lift their voices against this pathology, but it is a moral duty now — especially with regard to American academic life — to stand up alongside our Jewish brothers and sisters against this deadly rhetoric.

“There is one battle — in Darfur, Iraq, in Gaza, in Somalia, in Afghanistan — against the Jews and we are fighting one enemy.” These are the words of former genocidaire and sovereign leader of Sudan, Omar Bashir, spoken at a political rally in Khartoum in 2009. The rhetoric is emblematic of a global 21st-century concert to promote injustice and genocide by pointing to the recurring global scapegoat — the Jews. Bashir was a huge proponent and practitioner of the new tool for rationalizing anti-Semitism: colonialism. Monday, October 9, was indigenous persons day, a holiday created largely by American and European academics to attack the historical holiday of Columbus Day. In this 21st-century mythology, human beings fall into one of two binary categories: indigenous and colonizer. It is not a coincident that on the Monday after the attack, that intellectuals celebrated their holiday with hardly any homage to the idea that Jews are the indigenous people of Israel. Though the Jewish community has better historical, anthropological, rhetorical, archeological, and sociological evidence for its origins in Israel than almost any other human community, it is excluded largely by academics from this community of preferred “indigenous.” This is an essential part of the new rhetorical mask for anti-Semitism: the colonialism critique. The idea that any human being is not indigenous is plainly absurd. The effort to create a moral binary of indigenous/colonizer is an arbitrary rhetorical act mediated by the power of academics wielding this rhetorical sword.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/black-lives-matter-and-the-worlds-oldest-hatred-anti-semitism-0e0c324e?mod=opinion_lead_pos8

Many who rushed to support Black Lives Matter following the death of George Floyd—professional sports leagues, Fortune 500 companies, placard-waving suburbanites—now seem shocked at how BLM reacted to the Oct. 7 terror attack in Israel. Yet nothing could have been more predictable.

During the previous round of major violence between Israel and Hamas, in May 2021, BLM made its position clear. “Black Lives Matter stands in solidarity with Palestinians,” it tweeted. “We are a movement committed to ending settler colonialism in all forms and will continue to advocate for Palestinian liberation.”

After Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack on Israeli civilians, the same activists were just as unambiguous about which side they were taking and why. While the body count was still being tallied, BLM groups in Los Angeles, Chicago and Washington issued statements supporting Hamas’s tactics. “Their resistance must not be condemned but understood as a desperate act of self-defense,” BLM Grassroots in Los Angeles wrote on Instagram. “As a radical black organization,” the post continued, it sees “clear parallels between black and Palestinian people.” BLM Chicago tweeted an image of a Hamas paraglider with a Palestinian flag attached to his parachute and the caption “I stand with Palestine.”

Anyone surprised by this response either hasn’t been paying attention or refuses to take the activists at their word. Organizations such as BLM have done nothing to hide or sugarcoat their animosity toward Israel. In 2016, four years before Floyd was killed by police, BLM released an official platform that referred to Israel as an “apartheid state” and declared that America is “complicit in the genocide taking place against the Palestinian people.”

https://www.wsj.com/articles/anti-semitism-poisons-america-israel-jews-domestic-politics-violence-6a83136b?mod=opinion_featst_pos2

As students and, worse, professors, at elite universities across the U.S. exulted at the news of mass murder and torture of Israeli Jews by Hamas terrorists, Jewish students were warned to take precautions on campus. Across the U.S., anti-Semitic incidents including vandalism, harassment and assault are up roughly 400% since the Hamas attacks on Oct. 7.

That is a problem, and not only for American Jews. The beliefs that have made the U.S. a uniquely hospitable home for Jewish citizens are essential to national cohesion and strength. If we lose faith in what was once proudly called the American Way, there is little chance that society can summon the energy and unity to withstand attacks from our enemies abroad.

While doing research for my recent book, “The Arc of a Covenant: The United States, Israel and the Fate of the Jewish People,” I was struck by the deep connection between America’s relative (and I stress relative) immunity to the most virulent forms of anti-Semitism and American faith in democracy and pluralism.

From the Middle Ages to the present day, violent anti-Semitism has flourished best among those who reject liberal ideas. Medieval Christian zealots trying to build a seamlessly Christian Europe, nationalists striving for “pure” societies in which a particular ethnic group establishes its own culture and institutions without the “alien” influences of ethnic and religious minorities, Islamists who want a pure Islamic state—none of these projected utopias have room for proud and free Jews.

The U.S. stands on a different foundation. For America to work, many different religious and ethnic identities must coexist under a common commitment to constitutional politics and the rule of law. That happens to be the kind of society in which Jews can flourish, and the America we live in today owes much to the energy, creativity and patriotism of its Jewish citizens.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/israel-hamas-jews-pogroms-russia-u-s-europe-germany-anti-semitism-1a74109c?mod=opinion_lead_pos1

The disturbing fact of the past month is that Jews are under attack not only in Israel and not only by Hamas. The weeks since the barbaric Oct. 7 Hamas invasion of Israel have witnessed physical assaults on Jews the world over, including in the U.S. and Europe. This most modern of pogroms—global, televised, politicized—demonstrates exactly what is at stake as Israel ramps up its defensive war against Hamas in Gaza.

The Islamist group and its Western enablers are pursuing or justifying a genocidal war against Jews, not merely a territorial dispute with Israel. And since Western governments too often seem unable to protect the Jewish minorities in their midst, Israel must defend itself as the only safe home for the Jewish people.

This weekend hundreds of rioters in Dagestan, Russia, stormed an airport in search of Jewish travelers. Mobs raided hotels in other parts of the North Caucasus looking for Jews, and a Jewish community center under construction in the city of Nalchik was the target of an apparent attack.

Germany has witnessed a spate of anti-Semitic incidents, including an attack with Molotov cocktails against a synagogue in Berlin on Oct. 18. Some Jews found Stars of David painted on their homes, an echo of the Nazi persecution. German politicians have been forceful in their denunciations, but apparently not forceful enough in their policing.

Two Jewish schools in London closed for a period over safety concerns, and some British Jews no longer feel safe wearing visible symbols of their faith. They’re probably right to worry the state can’t protect them. Tens of thousands of protesters in London over three successive weekends called for “jihad” and chanted “from the river to the sea,” a demand for the erasure of Israel and by extension its citizens. A crowd in Sydney, Australia, chanted “gas the Jews” after the Hamas attack.

Americans like to believe such things couldn’t happen in the U.S. They have. The Anti-Defamation League last week reported a 388% increase in anti-Semitic incidents from Oct. 7-23 compared with the same period a year ago. The 312 incidents the ADL recorded include a car carrying individuals with Palestinian flags allegedly swerving toward a Jewish family and several alleged assaults by pro-Palestinian protesters. The ADL tally counts 109 anti-Israel rallies that featured support for Hamas or violence against Jews in Israel.

https://www.breitbart.com/entertainment/2023/10/29/david-mamet-jews-should-stop-supporting-democrats-sending-children-to-antisemitic-colleges/

Renowned playwright David Mamet appeared this week on the Fox News Channel and urged fellow Jews to cease their support of Democrat lawmakers and reconsider sending their children to what he described as “antisemitic” colleges in response to rising anti-Israel sentiments on American campuses following Hamas’s shocking terror attack on the Jewish state.

BILL HEMMER: You spend a lot of time in New York and you’ve written a lot about the Jewish experience in New York is so unique. You recently wrote a piece titled “How the Democrats Betrayed the Jews.” What do you mean by that?

DAVID MAMET: I’m a conservative. I used to have a lot of liberal friends, but I don’t know where they are. Maybe they lost my number. I have a lot of conservative friends who are not Jewish, and at certain points, they all get this look on there face and I know what’s going to come next. They ask the question: I thought Jews were smart, why do they go with the liberals?

And the answer is that we Jews aren’t smart, we’re actually stupid. We’re great at self-reliance because we never had anyone to rely on. But when it comes to getting into a group, with the exception of the state of Israel, we say, “I don’t want to be identified. Leave me alone.”

[…]

What I suggested in the article is, Thanksgiving’s coming up, when your kids come home from college, don’t send them back. Stop funding antisemitic hatred and calling it, “Oh, it’s a good place to meet people.” Because for a Jew to send his or her son or daughter to these elite institutions because they’re going to make connections is the same thing as putting their daughter in a brothel because they’re going to meet powerful men there. It doesn’t make sense and we’re going to have to assert ourselves.

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/it-can-happen-here/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=homepage&utm_campaign=river&utm_content=featured-content-trending&utm_term=second

Earlier today, Charlie Cooke wrote eloquently about how Jews have been horrifyingly (and yet, alas, to us conservatives, entirely predictably) abandoned by their woke former brethren on the left even as they are now being directly persecuted on college campuses across America. In that piece, he centered the singular and wildly alarming protest/public-intimidation session that took place yesterday at Cooper Union, a college in New York City. Zach Kessel has now provided a fuller account of the latest reporting on the disgrace. Read both pieces, for I fear this story — and the school’s craven and wickedly bloodless response — represents a real escalation of danger for Jewish students nationwide. The radicals are getting bolder, and they are getting away with it. It is right to worry about where this all ends — or begins, for that matter.

The short version is that a pro-Palestinian demonstration (one composed primarily of students and instructors, though Lord knows who might be capable of worming their way into the inattentive heart of such a crowd) supposed to take place outside the urban campus of Cooper Union “somehow” veered onto campus. The chanting protesters then marched farther onward into the main building and proceeded to barricade the library once word spread that there were Jews — honest-to-goodness, in-the-flesh, kippah-wearing Jews! — available conveniently right there on the premises to bully, threaten, and terrify.