Anti-Semitism at Duke University and Elsewhere

What’s going on at Duke? And not just at Duke?

So, what is the Duke Student Government up to? Could it be that these superior students are simply stupid? Could it be that they do not know how to think? Or could it be that they are happy to pay lip service to the concerns of Jewish students while inviting a rabid anti-Semite to speak on campus?

Need we say that if the Duke Student Government had invited a conservative, the speaker would have been shouted down, and, as happened at Yale Law School, the perpetrators would not have been punished.

Anyway, Duke undergraduate Alexandra Ahdoot explained the story in the Duke Chronicle:

Last month, Duke Student Government took a strong stance against antisemitism by unanimously passing a resolution which defined and condemned antisemitism. In the resolution, DSG expressed its support for the use of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) Working Definition of Antisemitism and supporting examples, which are widely used as an educational tool to identify and combat antisemitism worldwide. Given that antisemitic incidents are not by any means a new occurrence at Duke, the passage of this resolution was long overdue. This resolution, along with the mandatory antisemitism training that DSG senators recently attended, gave me hope that DSG was taking steps in the right direction. 

But then, lo and behold, the DSG went all in for Palestinian anti-Semitism:

But last week, that feeling changed. I woke up to read that DSG had just approved an allocation of over $16,000 to fund Students for Justice in Palestine’s (SJP) “Narrating Resistance and Agency: Shifting the Discourse on Palestine” event. SJP plans to host a few guest speakers in their event series, one of whom is Mohammed El-Kurd. 

Needless to say, this is more than disturbing. El-Kurd has happily indulged in blood libels against Jews.

Ahdoot continues:

For instance, in one of his most famous collections of poetry, “Rifqa,” El Kurd writes, “they [Israelis] harvest organs of the martyred [Palestinians], feed their warriors our own.” Similarly, on June 15, 2021, he linked Zionism to “blood thirsty [sic] and violent” actions in a tweet. In another tweet on May 12, 2021, he stated that Zionists have “an unquenchable thirst for Palestinian blood.” Jewish people like me see these words and are all too familiar with El-Kurd’s rhetoric because it is blood libel. Blood libel is a historic form of antisemitism which began during the Roman Empire as a way to demonize Jewish indivduals as inhumanely violent and even cannibalistic. 

Not to belabor the obvious, but El-Kurd’s unhinged rantings were posted on Twitter. You know about Twitter. If you write something satirical about a transgender admiral you will be thrown off of Twitter. If you are the former president of the United States, you will be banished from Twitter. And yet, if you traffic in blood libels against Jews, and if you indulge in genocidal hatred of Jews, it’s not a problem for Twitter.

Actually, now that we are at it, let’s grant full discredit to another major publication for publishing blood libels against Jews. That would be, the New York Times.

When Hamas was celebrating the election of Joe Biden by launching thousands of rockets into Israel, the Israelis naturally defended themselves.

To the bigoted editors of the New York Times, the important story was the number of Palestinian children who had been murdered by Israel. It was, as Abraham Foxman, former head of the Anti-Defamation League, a blood libel against Jews. Foxman canceled his subscription to the Times.

The Cleveland Jewish News reported the story:

The May 28 print edition of the Times featured photos of children who were killed in the recent Israel-Hamas fighting, in the Gaza Strip and Israel. The headline read: “They Were Just Children.” The story itself, which was published online on May 26, highlights the at least 67 dead Gazan children and the two Israeli children who died in the fighting. “Israel blames Hamas for the high civilian death toll in Gaza because the group fires rockets and conducts military operations from civilian areas,” the article stated. “Israel’s critics cite the death toll as evidence that Israel’s strikes were indiscriminate and disproportionate.”

It also notes that a couple of the Gaza children “may have been killed when Palestinian militants fired a rocket at Israel that fell short.”

“I am cancelling my subscription to NYTimes,” Foxman tweeted. 

“I grew up in America on the NYT—I delivered the NYT to my classmates—I learned civics—democracy and all the news ‘fit to print’ for 65 years but no more. Today’s blood libel of Israel and the Jewish people on the front page is enough.”

“Me too,” replied Newsweek Deputy Opinion Editor Batya Ungar-Sargon.

It’s not just Duke University. But clearly some forms of bigotry are fully acceptable in the halls of academia and on the front page of America’s newspaper of record.