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ANTI-SEMITISM

In Support of Kanye West by David Horowitz

https://www.frontpagemag.com/in-support-of-kanye-west/

Kanye West is one of the most important voices in the black community and a leading force in the battle to save our country from the onslaught of the Biden administration and the fascist Left. Despite the mountain of slanders directed at him in the last week, Kanye West is not an anti-Semite any more than Donald Trump is a white supremacist. Both are targets of the largest and most vicious witch-hunt in American history, directed by the Biden administration and its kept media.

This character-assassinating cabal will distort any statement and invent any lie to destroy its opposition and advance its campaign to create a one-party state. Nor is any hypocrisy too brazen or disgusting to advance their cause.

Thus, while they defame West with the charge of “anti-Semitism,” the vast mass of politicians, media attack dogs and empty-headed celebrities defaming Kanye are supporters of the Biden administration’s support for the Iranian Nazis and the Hamas terrorists who overtly and openly seek the destruction of the Jews.

‘From Hezbollah’: Bill Maher Calls Out Omar, Tlaib Over Antisemitic Comments: Harold Hutchison

https://dailycaller.com/2022/10/15/maher-omar-tlaib-squad-hbo/

HBO host Bill Maher called out Democratic Reps. Ilhan Omar of Minnesota and Rashida Tlaib of Michigan Friday night over antisemitic comments they posted on social media.

“I just want to read a few quotes from American congressmen, just to — congresspeople, rather, just to show that Kanye West’s comment is not really out of order with some things that are said by people in more official positions,” Maher said to former Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, referring to the rapper and fashion mogul who received criticism over social media posts that some claimed were anti-Semitic.

Maher then read tweets from the two representatives. Both Omar and Tlaib are considered members of “The Squad,” a term used to describe several left-wing members of the House of Representatives.

Campus Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) Excludes and Targets Jews In an age of skyrocketing antisemitism, university programs meant to combat prejudice and hate have become the latest Jew-free zone by Armin Rosen

https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/campus-diversity-equity-inclusion-dei-excludes-targets-jews

Making the world safe for Jews in an age of skyrocketing antisemitism isn’t something American universities tend to believe they need to stand for. In a review of 24 major college and university diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives, the advocacy group Stop Antisemitism found that only two of them had any specific programming or materials related to antisemitism. “DEI departments have not made fighting antisemitism a priority,” the group concludes in its 2022 “report card” of American campuses.

DEI itself is definitely a priority on campuses, though. Among the 65 large universities that comprise the “power-five” athletic conferences there are nearly 3,000 employees dedicated to DEI, according to a July 2021 analysis by the Heritage Foundation. Collectively, these institutions had 1.4 DEI officers for every history professor, and 3.4 DEI officials for every 100 tenured or tenure-track scholars in their employ.

As the report notes, these institutions have no legal obligation whatsoever to hire thousands of diversity bureaucrats—which is not the case, for example, with staff dedicated to providing federally required aid to disabled students. Even so, of the 65 universities surveyed, only Baylor University and the University of Minnesota employed more Americans with Disabilities Act compliance officers than DEI personnel. A pricey, often-invasive DEI regime is something these universities chose to expand in the wake of the nationwide racial justice protests in 2020, at the expense of providing adequate support for adjunct faculty, limiting class size, and other lesser budgetary priorities. Mistaken or not, DEI is an expression of academia’s deepest sense of its mission during a time of rapid social dislocation

The reason that taxpayers should care about how American higher ed chooses to deploy its resources is that we are paying for it. On top of the enormous cost of America’s publicly funded higher education system, President Joe Biden’s executive decree of limited debt relief for certain student loan borrowers will cost the government upwards of an additional $400 billion, according to a late September analysis from the Congressional Budget Office. In practice, this is an eye-watering taxpayer subsidy for a system that has transformed itself over the past three decades into a vast federally funded cartel that has shunted aside traditional academic occupations of teaching and research in favor of bureaucratic thought-policing and ideological indoctrination. It is a mark of the failure of this system to provide the educational goods that taxpayers think they’re paying for that its graduates now require emergency federal assistance years or even decades after graduating.

Berkeley, Free Speech and Banning Jews Welcome to the space where Jews are no longer welcome. by Cal Thomas

https://www.frontpagemag.com/berkeley-free-speech-and-banning-jews/

The University of California, Berkeley is known for many things, some good and some very bad, even outrageous.

In 1964, a ban on campus political and religious activities launched what was called the free speech and academic freedom movement that quickly spread to other campuses. To many of an older generation, it quickly got out of hand. During his run for governor in 1966, Ronald Reagan promised to “clean up the mess at Berkeley,” and end what had evolved from free speech, to strikes related to the draft, civil rights, discrimination and women’s liberation.

Whatever one’s view of the unrest at the time – liberals loved it and conservatives like Reagan vowed to stop it – what is happening now at Berkeley ought to shame especially those who believe in free speech and oppose discrimination.

Nine law student groups at the law school have managed to amend the university’s bylaws to ban any speakers who support Israel or Zionism.

These are not groups that “represent only a small percentage of the student population,” according to the Jewish Journal. They include Women of Berkeley Law, Asian Pacific American Law Students Association, Middle Eastern and North African Law Students Association, Law Students of African Descent and the Queer Caucus.

Berkeley Law’s dean, Erwin Chemerinsky, a progressive Zionist, has observed that he would be banned under this standard, as would 90 percent of his Jewish students.

Writing in the Jewish Journal, Kenneth L. Marcus, a former assistant U.S. secretary of Education for Civil Rights and an alumnus of U-C Berkeley Law School, notes: ” Berkeley law students are not the first to exclude Zionists. At the State University of New York at New Paltz, activists drove two sexual assault victims out of a survivor group for being Zionists. At the University of Southern California, they drove Jewish student government vice president Rose Ritch out of office, threatening to ‘impeach [her] … At Tufts, they tried to oust student judiciary committee member Max Price from the student government judiciary committee because of his support for Israel.”

UC Berkeley Law School’s ‘Jew Free Zones’: the Latest Progressive Trend Laura Rosen Cohen

https://www.newsweek.com/uc-berkeley-law-schools-jew-free-zones-latest-progressive-trend-opinion-1748218

For several decades, Jewish college students have been sounding the alarm about rising antisemitism on college campuses. From “mild” episodes of graffiti to BDS activism, Torah desecrations and egging Jewish frat houses, university campuses have become hotbeds of anti-Jewish and anti-Zionist activism both in North America and throughout the world.

Rightly recognizing campus antisemitism as a blight on higher education and on America, former President Trump signed an Executive Order in 2019 on combatting antisemitism. Unfortunately, since then, not only has the campus situation for Jewish students not improved, it has taken a dramatic turn for the worse.

This can be seen most acutely in a move made recently by law school students at one of America’s most progressive university networks, in one of America’s most progressive states. At the beginning of the current academic year, nine law school student groups at the University of California at Berkeley’s School of Law amended their bylaws to ensure that nobody who supports Israel or Zionism is invited to speak. Given that the vast majority of Jews worldwide support the state of Israel, these student groups have in essence created a Jew-free zone in the hallowed halls of Berkeley Law.

The ruling would bar the law school’s own dean, Erwin Chemerinsky, who identifies as a progressive Zionist—increasingly an oxymoron, if the progressives have their way.

The new loyalty oath imposed on Jews by Melissa Langsam Braunstein

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/politics/the-new-loyalty-oath-imposed-on-jews

On college campuses, in progressive organizing spaces, in some professional contexts, and even among friends, Americans are increasingly being told their Zionism is disqualifying. For many Jews, that means an aspect of their own identity makes them persona non grata in spaces where left-wing views are paramount. For non-Jews, maintaining until-recently mainstream, pro-Israel opinions means risking social stigmatization and professional harm. Although this problem has begun to gain some visibility, it’s time Americans understood the extent of the social pressure to self-censor or else face the mob.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Jews keeping their Zionism hush-hush weren’t eager to be interviewed. However, 32 Jewish and non-Jewish students and young alumni, academics, communal and advocacy group figures, governmental leaders, activists, and creatives contributed to this article. Taken together, what follows is a portrait of profound societal changes.

These changes, it must be noted, affect all Jews in these spaces because they are greeted with suspicions and assumptions about their support for Israel that they must either dispel or confirm. And this manifests in various ways.

In 2015, University of California, Los Angeles, student Rachel Beyda was expecting to be confirmed without incident to the student council’s judicial board but was met with a bizarre question from a member of the council: “Given that you are a Jewish student and very active in the Jewish community,” Beyda was asked, “how do you see yourself being able to maintain an unbiased view?” After a lengthy discussion of Beyda’s Jewish identity, from which Beyda was excluded, her nomination was voted down. (This was only reversed when a faculty adviser to the council stepped in.)

The incidents that make national headlines give the public a rare window into the discrimination regularly wielded in left-of-center institutions. For example, there was an explosive controversy about whether one can be both a feminist and a Zionist, which the Women’s March’s then-leader Linda Sarsour answered firmly in the negative. Jewish lesbians were ejected from Chicago’s Dyke March for carrying a Pride flag emblazoned with a Jewish star because some attendees were uncomfortable with the symbol’s association with the Israeli flag. Rep. Ritchie Torres (D-NY) was “demonized by extremists as a white supremacist, as a supporter of apartheid, ethnic cleansing, [and] genocide” for condemning Hamas’s terrorism. The Washington, D.C., chapter of the environmental group Sunrise Movement refused “to participate in a voting rights rally” alongside three Jewish groups. An undergraduate at the State University of New York, New Paltz, was expelled from a “sexual assault awareness group” she co-founded over an Instagram post describing Jews as indigenous to Israel. And the list goes on.

The Berkeley “No Free Speech for Jews” Movement by Daniel Greenfield

https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-berkeley-no-free-speech-for-jews-movement/

Kenneth Marcus, who under Trump all too briefly served as Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights at the Department of Ed, calls the move by nine student affinity groups and organizations at Berkeley’s School of Law to ban Jewish speakers to be “Jewish-Free Zones”.

Nine different law student groups at the University of California at Berkeley’s School of Law, my own alma mater, have begun this new academic year by amending bylaws to ensure that they will never invite any speakers that support Israel or Zionism. And these are not groups that represent only a small percentage of the student population. They include Women of Berkeley Law, Asian Pacific American Law Students Association, Middle Eastern and North African Law Students Association, Law Students of African Descent and the Queer Caucus. Berkeley Law’s Dean Erwin Chemerinsky, a progressive Zionist, has observed that he himself would be banned under this standard, as would 90% of his Jewish students.

Tellingly, the rationale for this was the familiar one of safe spaces.

“In the interest of protecting the safety and welfare of Palestinian students on campus,” allies of the anti-Israel accepting its antisemitic rationale, “will not invite speakers that have expressed and continued to hold views or host/sponsor/promote events in support of Zionism, the apartheid state of Israel, and the occupation of Palestine.”

Maligning Israel in Print Campus newspapers and the cognitive war against Israel. by Richard L. Cravatts

https://www.frontpagemag.com/maligning-israel-in-print/

For at least two decades university campuses have been roiled with anti-Israel activism, manifested by Israeli Apartheid Weeks, BDS resolutions pushed through student governments, and the radical activism of groups such as Students for Justice in Palestine who were often responsible for promoting this toxic campaign against Jewish students and other supporters of Israel. Incidents of anti-Semitism have been surging worldwide and universities have not been immune from unfortunate trends, even though much of the animus towards Jews on campuses is masked as mere criticism of Israel. And this cognitive war against Israel, which frequently morphs into anti-Semitism, has increasingly resulted in a campus climate that is oppressive to Jewish students who are often vilified as racist Zionists in their support of an alleged apartheid regime that oppresses the ever-aggrieved Palestinian Arabs.

Now, a new report from the anti-Semitism group Alums for Campus Fairness (ACF) has revealed that university student newspapers, in skewing their coverage of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict against the Jewish state, have contributed to Israel’s battered reputation among many college students. The report, entitled  “Institutional Bias: Campus Newspapers and Israel,” reviewed nearly 2000 articles discussing Israel that were published since 2017 in the primary student newspapers of 75 selected campuses.

Sneaking anti-Semitism into school curricula By Pandra Selivanov

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2022/09/sneaking_antisemitism_into_school_curricula.html

Critical race theory has been gaining momentum since 1996 when Johnnie Cochran used it to free O.J. Simpson. The corrosive idea that American culture and institutions are systemically racist and oppressive has invaded universities and workplaces and even public schools. There was a brief respite when President Donald Trump stopped companies from holding training on “white privilege.” States began to ban critical race theory. Parents fought it in their local schools.

The proponents of critical race theory, however, are determined to indoctrinate America’s youth in their ideology. In California, critical race theory has been rechristened “ethnic studies” and has broadened its line of attack. In addition to white people, ethnic studies have added Jewish people and the Jewish homeland of Israel to the list of racist and oppressive entities. The anti-Israel and anti-Jewish curriculum includes strong support for Palestinians, including classroom decorations such as a Palestinian flag and a drive to honor “Palestinian mothers with children in Israeli jails.”

The most rudimentary research on “Palestine” uncovers the fact that there never was a country of Palestine. It was a designation Romans used for Judea. Then, after World War II, British Christians drew a map based on their perceptions of the Bible and set borders for the state of Palestine. Now, Islamists demand all Jews depart from the land that they consider a trust that Allah gave to the Muslim people.

Seeking a compromise, Israel has proposed two-state solutions to the Palestinians. The Palestinians have always rejected the very idea of sharing the land with the Jews, the people who have been in that land for over 5,000 years and whose Bible—the oldest religious text still in use and the basis for the Koran—identifies as the people to whom God decreed the land of Israel rightfully belongs.

Under California’s mandated ethnic studies, in addition to learning reading, writing, and arithmetic, schools will instruct children to pity Palestinians and hate Jews. The greatest irony of this misbegotten ideology is how it avoids the basic truth that, if Palestinians wanted peace with Israel, there would be peace, and if Israel really didn’t want to share the land with the Palestinians, they could have wiped out all the Palestinians long ago.

What About Anti-Semitism in our High Schools? Students increasingly engage in harassment and bullying toward their Jewish peers – while administrators turn a blind eye. by Adam Milstein

https://www.frontpagemag.com/what-about-anti-semitism-in-our-high-schools/

In recent years, while much of the Jewish community has been keenly focused on antisemitism on college campuses, we have largely overlooked another growing danger. Activist teachers and administrators have increasingly injected antisemitism into American public and private high schools through expanded Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) departments and policies and by promoting radical curricula steeped in Critical Race Theory (CRT), such as the Liberated Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum (LESMC). Through this ideology, American Jews are implicitly and sometimes, explicitly, portrayed as privileged white oppressors. By extension, the Jewish State, Israel, is described as an oppressive ethno-state engaged in apartheid, colonialism, and ethnic cleansing.

We are starting to see the consequences of this campaign. Highschool students, both in public and private schools around the nation are engaging in antisemitic bullying and harassment toward their Jewish peers. Amplified through social media and group chats, the phenomenon has become increasingly frequent in high schools. Antisemitism also rears its head in high school sports and a there’s a spike in antisemitic graffiti, like swastikas. Physical violence rooted in antisemitism has become increasingly common in the U.S. and worldwide, from Los Angeles to Atlanta, Palm Beach, New York, and even in Australia.

Last month, a federal investigation found that during the 2018 and 2019 school years, a Tempe, Arizona, based Kyrene School District violated the civil rights of a middle schooler when she was forced to endure repeated antisemitic harassment in class. Nine students harassed and called her antisemitic names, in addition to making frequent jokes about the Holocaust.