Anti-Semitism Comes to American Campuses

Protests against a rising tide of anti-Semitism in American universities seem largely to be coming from the conservative media. One suspects that stories about the harassment and intimidation of Jewish students have not been reported prominently in the New York Times.

John Hinderaker reports on the PowerLine blog about the BDS-- Boycott, Divest, Sanction-- movement that has been sweeping American universities. It aims at boycotting Israeli academics, as a step toward disinvesting from Israeli companies and sanctioning that nation for violating human rights.

The notion that Israel, among Middle Eastern countries, is the most serious violator of human rights must be a joke. It is such a lame rationalization for anti-Semitism that one finds it hard to believe that anything but a mental defect would lead anyone to accept it.

As has been well documented, BDS is not a principled version of adolescent idealism. It is raw anti-Semitism. Hinkeraker explains:

The critic who singles out Israel in an obsessive or irrational way; who endlessly yammers about the Palestinians while not caring in the least about 150,000 murdered Syrians; who tries to destroy Israel while being indifferent to Russia; who sheds tears over Arabs ostensibly discriminated against in Israel while never mentioning the Christians who are murdered in Egypt; who plainly perceives Israel to be the principal center of evil in a world that includes North Korea, Iran, Russia, Cuba, Venezuela, Congo and other states where appalling conduct is the norm; that critic, by his rank double standard, tells us what it is that he doesn’t like about Israel: the Jews live there.

Of course, BDS supporters have been using use threats and intimidation against Jewish students on American campuses.

Hinderaker, like Caroline Glick, is right to compare them to the brown shirted Storm Troopers who ushered in Nazi genocide:

 Those who yell “dirty Jew” and “kike,” who physically assault campus Jews, who place eviction notices on the doors of Jewish students, who chant “Hitler didn’t finish the job,” are not expressing sane, measured criticisms of Israel (or any criticisms of Israel). They are engaging in brownshirt anti-Semitism, a sickening form of malevolence with the World has become all too familiar over the course of centuries. And today, it’s not just in Berlin and Munich, or Pinsk and Lviv. It is in San Francisco, Berkeley, Irvine, Ann Arbor, Brooklyn, Boston and Poughkeepsie, among many other places.

Hinderaker joins Glick in recommending resistance against this aggression. He wants especially to hold cowardly university administrators to account for not punishing the bigots:

It is time to name the anti-Semites, the brownshirts, for what they are, and to resist them aggressively. It is also time to push back against cowardly or, in some cases, anti-Semitic university administrators and other public officials. Freedom not defended slips away. Let’s not let it happen here.

For her part, Glick explained:

The only instances where university administrators have taken action against anti-Semites on their campuses have been when outside forces compelled them to do so. And in all cases where action has been taken, administrators have done as little as possible.

You should also ask how well the mainstream media has been covering these stories. You need to ask how strongly American Jews have protested the arrival of brown shirts on their shores. And you must ask how many alumni of the offending universities have pulled donations after administrators caved in to terrorist tactics.

For now, some progress is being made. Glick reports on the results of a confrontation at Brooklyn College:

Last February, Brooklyn College held a BDS event that was co-sponsored by the college and Students for Justice in Palestine. Four Jewish students who attended the event were forcibly removed by campus police acting on orders from the event organizers, who identified the four as potential sources of pointed questions that the BDS advocates could not answer well.

Rather than defend the students, Brooklyn College’s administrators attacked them and endorsed SJP’s [Students for Justice in Palestine] transparently false claim that the four — who had been sitting quietly — had been “disruptive.”

Three of the students turned to the Zionist Organization of America (ZOA) and the Brandeis Center for Human Rights for legal assistance. And as a result of legal pressure, City University of New York, of which Brooklyn College is a part, conducted an investigation that found the students had been persecuted for their viewpoints, in violation of their civil rights. On March 10, Brooklyn College’s president issued a public apology to the four Jewish students. She also promised to institute new procedures to ensure that students’ civil rights are respected.

While no serious disciplinary action appears to have been taken against the SJP, the university police, or university administrators who violated the students’ civil rights, civil litigation against Brooklyn College is still pending.

Of course, this will not stop until “serious disciplinary action” is taken against the thugs who disrupt campus meetings and single out Jewish students for attack.

Universities will not take such action until there is a louder outcry from the general public, and especially from the liberal media. It is time for the media to get over its habit of selective outrage.