Double the Anti-Semitism

Many of us, myself included, were encouraged when the president of Columbia University, one Minouche Shafik, had the police arrest several dozen of the anti-Semitic pro-Hamas protesters who had invaded and occupied parts of her campus.

Alas. it was not to be. The protesters came roaring back and took back the territory they had lost. They started attacking Jewish students and made life so unsafe for Jews that one campus rabbi recommended that Jewish students decamp from campus and go home.

And, naturally, numerous faculty members have now sided with the protesters. Several alumni, however, are now saying that they will stop contributing to the university. We will see how loudly money talks.

Now, president Shafik has caved to the demonstrators. She admitted that her campus security detail and the New York Police Department could not or would not suppress the growing anti-Semitic anarchy. So, Shafik advised all students to leave campus and to take their classes remotely.

Hard as it is to grasp, these students were inspired by the events of October 7. As were more than a few faculty members. One student protester at Columbia was promising thousands of more pogroms, just like what happened on October 7. 

They had learned that Western civilization was bad and that Islam was good. Therefore, they concluded that they needed to be on the side of Hamas, as opposed to Israel. Nothing shows intelligence better than taking the losing side in a clash of civilizations.

Given the season, one naturally recalls the book of Exodus regarding how Moses led his people out of multicultural Egypt into the promised land of Israel. He left a culture based on multiple cults to multiple deities and replaced it with one that was based on one God. 

Thus, the protesters and demonstrators are going back to pagan idolatry and to human sacrifice. Does it sound familiar?

If you are going to return to multicultural Egypt, you can rationalize any violence committed against Jews, because they rejected pagan deities. 

Dare we notice that Islam, as an Abrahamic religion, is involved in its own culture war. What the terrorists see as Islam is not what countries like Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates see as Islam. Surely, one knows that the October 7 attack was not merely directed against Israel. It was directed against Saudi Arabia and its modernization program. The Saudi leadership has no sympathy for terrorists or for the Muslim Brotherhood.

Need we mention, yet again, that the students who had been trained to be social justice warriors were also trained to be profoundly stupid.

These young people, favoring women’s rights, gay rights and trans rights are protesting in favor of groups that have no use for women’s rights, gay rights and trans rights. Don’t they understand that radical Islam considers homosexuality a capital crime? Apparently, not.

As for how we got to where we got to, the analysis offers a multiplicity of factors. Among them, as Roger Kimball mentions, is the simple fact that many of America’s greatest universities are led by women, and that strong empowered women appear weak, not in control. Witness the failure of the president of Columbia University.

He writes:

I might frame the second question as an observation. Harvard, UPenn, MIT, Columbia, Dartmouth, Williams: there is an epidemic of distaff leadership in the elite precincts of higher education. It’s almost as if the mentality of the Human Resources establishment had rolled into the leadership of American higher education. This fact raises a host of questions. I won’t try to answer or even fully articulate them now, but I urge you to bear them in mind and ponder their significance. 

Second, I point out that, beginning in the late 1960s, American academics became infatuated with a new way to read texts. It was called deconstruction. It came to us from France, from a philosopher named Jacques Derrida and also from Germany, from a philosopher named Martin Heidegger.

Of course, Heidegger was a Nazi, and strongly supported the Brown Shirted Nazi terrorists. 

So, American graduate students were learning to think like Nazis, only they did not know it. Many of them figured it out when a Venezuelan academic named Victor Farias wrote a book about Heidegger and Nazism in 1987. It should have sufficed. It did not. New York professor Richard Wolin has written many works showing that Heidegger’s Nazi leanings were consonant with his philosophical practice.

After all, deconstruction is merely a fancy term for pogrom.

Those who signed up for deconstruction shielded themselves from the truth of their ideology by declaring war against Nazis, that is, against Republicans and white supremacists. They had to do something to cover up their dereliction. 

It gets worse. Have you noticed that the current wave of campus anti-Semitism fulfills most of the predicates laid down by Trump haters. 

Those opposing Trump have taught large segments of the population to hate. They have taught that it is good to hate certain people. They have even taught that you must hate Donald Trump with sufficient fervor, or else you will be ostracized and canceled from polite society.

If you consider, as I and some others have imagined, that Donald Trump was America’s first Jewish president, the Trump hatred takes on another valence. 

If Bill Clinton was America’s first black president, as Toni Morrison wrote, why would Donald Trump not be America’s first Jewish president?

As you might recall, Trump was a great friend of Israel. He advanced the cause of peace in the Middle East without making concessions to Palestinian terrorism. He moved the American embassy to Jerusalem and recognized Israel’s rights to the Golan Heights. His Abraham Accords were the best thing that happened to Israel since the declaration of statehood.

And he did it by ignoring the so-called Palestinian cause. And the Muslim countries that signed the Abraham Accords also ignored said cause. They did not want their reputations to be tarnished by deranged maniacs.

So, consider the contrast. In Northern Manhattan bands of students are demonstrating in favor of Hamas. They are promising more violence against Jews. 

In Southern Manhattan, the Biden administration and the New York City District Attorney are subjecting Donald Trump to judicial harassment and persecution. Is this happening because Trump’s policies rejected Palestinian terrorism, did not allow the terrorists a seat at the negotiating table?

Keep in mind, Democratic party luminaries like John Kerry insisted that the Abraham Accords were not a good thing because they did not address the Palestinian issue. They failed to notice that the Palestinian leadership had disqualified itself from any and all negotiations by its support for terrorism and for its virulent Jew hatred. 

It was only yesterday that Joe Biden, who has scrupulously tried to balance his support for Israel with criticism for Israeli leadership declared that while anti-Semitism was bad, we needed also to consider the plight of the Palestinian people. You know, the terrorists who massacred and mutilated Jews in Southern Israel.

Not once did it cross Biden’s pea brain that perhaps the Palestinian people could assert their readiness to join the world’s civilized nations by renouncing terrorism and making peace with Israel.

Better to think that it was right and proper to harass and persecute America’s first Jewish president.

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