RUTHFULLY YOURS

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

I’ll admit it: I toyed with the idea of writing about how pro-Hamas students at MIT harassed Jewish students and barred them from entering classrooms but ultimately decided not to. Why not? Because, sadly, in today’s academic environment, it was a dog bites man story. In the almost six weeks since the October 7 massacre in Israel, we’ve been inundated by reports about wildly antisemitic activity in academia, so one more story didn’t seem to add much to the discussion about the fetid moral rot in America’s institutions of higher learning. However, now that I’ve learned why MIT did not discipline those same dangerous students, I’m sufficiently shocked to share the news with you.

Just to set the stage, MIT is one of America’s most reputable institutions. Indeed, even as leftism swept one campus after another, especially in the Ivy Leagues, people thought, “Well, MIT is a STEM school. Surely those brilliant geeks won’t fall prey to woke madness.” But a little bit here and a little bit there…stories started leaking out. (E.g., climate madness, gender madness, and cancel culture.) Antisemitism was in the mix, and I say this because I knew a family that was deeply damaged by an antisemitic attack. But still, it wasn’t as bad as Harvard, Yale, or other schools.

Still, MIT is an American university, so it’s going to be leftist, and leftists support nasty ideas. That’s why I didn’t report on this story, which seemed too sadly common:

Even after the above tweet went viral and the story started spreading beyond MIT’s walls, and a few social media messages, MIT’s administration did nothing: It didn’t put out the usual meaningless statement praising free speech (something academia praises only when anti-leftist messages offend people) nor did it promise to crack down on the malfeasors.

https://nypost.com/2023/11/11/news/a-brooklyn-parent-advisory-board-promoted-and-organized-a-student-walkout-for-palestine-this-week-a-clear-violation-of-state-regulations-

A Brooklyn parent advisory board promoted and organized a student walkout for Palestinians this week — a clear violation of state regulations, outraged critics told The Post.

The Community Education Council for District 14, which covers ultra-liberal Williamsburg and Greenpoint, used its platform to encourage the 700-student protest involving 100 schools — and even shared resources including antisemitic signs proclaiming, “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.”

Recommended chants included, “Resistance is justified when people are occupied” and “Say it loud, say it clear, we don’t want Zionists here!”

Students protesting on Thursday near Franklin Delano Roosevelt High School in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, were captured on video yelling, “F–k the Jews!”

Jewish students were horrified.

One Fort Hamilton High School mom said her daughter didn’t go to school Friday out of fear.

When the mom called the school, an administrator told her it’s “complicated.”

A toolkit created by parents, teachers, and activist groups provided protest signs with graphics supporting Palestinians.toolkit

“I know firsthand what antisemitism is but I never in my life thought my daughter would have to go through something like this,” the mom said.

https://townhall.com/tipsheet/mattvespa/2023/11/10/all-the-young-kids-want-to-do-is-intimidate-or-kill-jews-n2631079

Jewish people are running for cover, and can you blame them? In America, most Jewish communities probably never thought they’d have to arm themselves—ever. That all changed when Hamas attacked Israel on October 7, butchering 1,400 Israelis and leading to an outpouring of antisemitism not seen since the rise of Nazi Germany. There are no rallies with disciplined men and women wearing swastikas. Still, the disjointed rabble that has gathered on college campuses and in our cities speaks the same language as the National Socialist German Workers’ Party: kill all the Jews.

The phrasing and messaging are different; many will claim they’re anti-Zionist, not antisemitic—all while holding a sign showing the Star of David in a wastebasket with the caption “Keep the world clean.”  That’s a distinction without a difference. And when pressed, it’s an incoherent mess about how they don’t hate Jews but want everyone in Israel to die. 

Some street interviews also exposed an appalling ignorance that causes one to do double-takes. How can kids be unaware that Hamas is a terrorist organization? Some didn’t even know Hams invaded Israel. Of all people, Bill Maher delved into this nonsense, wondering where all this illiberal, illogical, and antisemitic sewage is coming from, and that would be colleges. The kids want to kill Jews. They call for it daily since the Israeli operations against Hamas commenced in earnest after October 7, even going so far as to claim Israel is worse than Nazi Germany. 

It’s not about ideas; you see that with these interactions. It’s about the oppressed/oppressor paradigm that leads to painfully stupid takes from these people, notably the members of the LGBT community who stand with Palestine. Hamas would chuck these people off the roof if they could. Women can’t travel outside the home without a male companion. The sexual liberation that these anti-Israel women also preach would lead to an epic stoning so complete that Gaza City’s streets would be knee-deep with their blood if they ever said one-eighth of the woke nonsense they peddle here. The irony is that Israel’s minorities fare the best in the Middle East for obvious reasons: they’re the only beacon of Western values in that part of the world.

https://nypost.com/2023/11/10/news/jewish-students-at-mit-blocked-from-attending-classes-by-hostile-anti-israel-protesters/

Jewish students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology say they were prevented from attending classes by a “blockade” of hostile anti-Israel students — and fear the school is “not safe for Jews.”

An open letter penned by the MIT Israel Alliance alleges that Jewish and Israeli students were “physically” obstructed from classrooms by a “hostile” pro-Palestinian group called the Coalition Against Apartheid (CAA).

“This is after students from the CAA harassed MIT staff members in their offices for being Jewish and interrupted classes in the past few weeks,” the letter read.

“Many Jewish students fear leaving their dorm rooms and have stated that they feel MIT is not safe for Jews,” the letter continues.

“This message is compounded by the public and private warnings of Hillel [the school’s graduate Jewish community] and many faculty that Jewish students should not enter MIT’s main lobby today.”

Four hours after the CAA protest began, the administration told students to leave the lobby and threatened them with suspension — but only the Jewish students who were there to counterprotest left, according to the group.

“Indeed, the CAA proceeded to invite more students and non-MIT protestors to join them in calling for a violent uprising (“Intifada”) and justifying the terror attacks of Hamas on Israeli civilians,” the alliance said.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/us/comment/2023/11/10/university-college-campus-culture-war-anti-semitism/

The surge of open hatred of Jews on college campuses is unprecedented in modern American life. We saw it outside universities in the 1930s, when it was openly preached by Detroit’s Father Coughlin and published by Henry Ford. We saw it from the KKK during the civil rights revolution of the 1950s and 1960s. The Klan targeted Jews, as a marginal group, as allies of black equality, and as vehicles to build solidarity in their target audience: poor, angry, Christian whites.

At universities we saw a different kind of prejudice. That bigotry was exemplified by quiet restrictions on Jewish students and faculty, referred to as “Gentleman’s Agreements”. Those agreements excluded Jews from fraternities and sororities at most schools. Harvard began the practise and stated their goal openly, while others followed in secret. This practice changed only when it was prohibited by civil rights laws.

These practices were obviously prejudiced, but they were a far cry from the open hatred, intimidation, and speech suppression we now see on campus. Some of that is an old mask stripped away, some is an increase in underlying hatred, and some is a collapse of any restraints on its public expression. The old mask was emblazoned with the coda, “We don’t hate Jews. We don’t hate Israel. We just oppose Israeli policies and support Palestinian rights.”

Well, if recent demonstrations are any guide, it turns out they do hate Israel. They want to see it wiped off the map. That’s the meaning of their constant chant, “From the river to the sea.” A Palestinian state that occupies all that territory between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean would extinguish Israel. That’s their “final solution” for the Jewish state.

Chilling as that goal is, the activists don’t stop there. They extend their hatred to all Jews, and they say so openly in campus meetings and demonstrations. That is led by extremist Muslims, who are part of the dominant coalition on campus. But it is embraced by their political allies. More on that coalition in a moment.

Decent Americans know something has gone badly wrong at our universities. This wider public recognises, quite accurately, that the attacks on Jews are only the latest, most visible examples of a more pervasive problem: the rise of intolerant, illiberal ideology on the far-Left. That has always been a problem on the far-Right, but they were never major players on campus or in elite media. The Left is.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/campus-anti-semitism-in-1970-jew-hatred-anti-israel-academia-college-7c7373d0?mod=opinion_lead_pos10

I was a junior at the University of California, Los Angeles when Israeli Foreign Minister Abba Eban came to town. It was Nov. 12, 1970, and he’d arrived to give a speech on Israel’s conflicts with its neighbors. Alongside thousands of other students eager to hear him, I strolled to Pauley Pavilion, one of the campus’s largest venues.

On the way, my friends and I passed a small, vocal group of anti-Israel protesters, a motley bunch I’d seen on campus over the past year: three Libyan exchange students, a middle-aged German woman and a few members of Students for a Democratic Society, a radical group.

One of the SDSers confronted us, hurling insult after insult. He ended his tirade by screaming that we were Nazis. We walked on and enjoyed an eloquent, well-received speech by Eban. But the encounter remained with me.

Here I was—a second-generation American who had lost several relatives to the gas chambers, the son of a decorated World War II veteran who had fought the Nazis and survived both D-Day and the Battle of the Bulge—being branded as Hitlerian. What could be crueler and crazier?

Anti-Semitism at elite universities isn’t new. Those opposed to Israel planted the seeds of hatred following the Six Day War in 1967. Israel won that military conflict, but its enemies have since dominated the war of words.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/jewish-students-meet-hostility-at-yale-israel-hamas-violence-terrorism-anti-semitism-1d6f81da?mod=opinion_lead_pos10

New Haven, Conn.

When we found out about Monday’s anti-Israel event at Yale, “Gaza Under Siege,” we scrambled to produce fliers offering some context. They detailed Hamas’s atrocities, its anti-Jewish charter, its use of Palestinian civilians as human shields. Our classmates awaiting the event weren’t interested. They yelled, “don’t take the paper!” and tore it up or threw it back at us.

Organizers refused us entry because we weren’t registered but waved others through who also weren’t on the list. The lecture hall was filled, and we resorted to sitting outside and pressing our ears against the door to listen.

What we heard was two hours of denial, lies and incitement. Speakers referred to the atrocities of Oct. 7 in the sanitized language of “civilians killed,” not beheaded, raped or kidnapped. They called the terrorist group “militant,” and one observed that “violent resistance movements often emerge in colonized spaces.”

Nobody mentioned the Hamas charter’s call to “fight Jews and kill them,” but somebody asserted that Israel aims to “inflict as much harm, damage, and death as possible.” One panelist remarked, “The one most important part of our conversation here today is that Israel is still occupying Gaza.” Israel withdrew from Gaza in 2005.

One of the speakers flatly declared: “No matter what the solution is—a two-state solution or a one-state solution—the Israeli state cannot remain the state of the Jewish people.”

This event had broad institutional support from Yale. “Gaza Under Siege” was co-sponsored by the American Studies, Anthropology and Religious Studies departments; the programs in Ethnicity, Race and Migration and Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies; the Center for Middle East Studies; the Black Feminist Collective (co-directed by the head of Pierson College); the Ethnography Hub; the Edward J. and Dorothy Clarke Kempf Memorial Fund; and Yalies4Palestine. The head of Jonathan Edwards College promoted it in a weekly email. The heads of Yale’s colleges had previously been instructed not to advertise a post-Oct. 7 Shabbat dinner invitation. That event was controversial, an administrator told Ms. Tartak.