Anti-Semitism at Brown Univ.

I still retain a special fondness for my alma mater, Brown University. To be fair, though, the place has not been the same since I left, several decades ago.

It is off today’s topic, but we have recently learned that Brown has become a world leader in attracting or producing gender non-binary and LGBTQ students. Does that make it more or less likely you will want to be recruiting executive talent from Brown?

In the meantime, Brown stands tall and proud in the world of indoctrinating students in the correct ideology. Even when that ideology reeks anti-Semitism.

This past November one David Litman took a closer look at the situation at Brown, especially at its Center for Mid-East Studies (CMES). As he explains, the center does not even pretend to offer academic rigor. It is simply an indoctrination mill, fomenting anti-Semitism:

Far from a rigorous, scholarly study of Palestinian history or the region, what one finds at Brown’s CMES is an attempt to indoctrinate students in an all-encompassing ideology in which colonialism is the ultimate evil and the Jewish people and their history are synonymous with ‘colonialism.’ Violence, including terrorism, is justified as a legitimate measure against that evil.

Rather than cast moral aspersions on Hamas-- the potentates at the CMES are too afraid to do that-- they are teaching that, given the occupation, anything that Hamas does is legitimate.

That means, to put a finer point on it, that Hamas is allowed to commit war crimes against children, to rape women with impunity, and use people as human shields. And the denizens of the American political left, staunch opponents of fascism, sexism, and misogyny-- are cheering the atrocities.

Their courses have fried their brains. It is a decidedly ugly picture.

The rationale for these aberrant opinions lies in the simple fact that the Palestinian people have failed to produce anything resembling prosperity and a good life for themselves, while their Israeli neighbors are prospering.

Failing to integrate into the world economy, and especially into the modern world, the pro-Hamas propagandists at the Brown CMES are hard at work diminishing, dismissing and slandering the Jewish people. Do you recognize the worst form of anti-Semitism when you see it?

Litman explains:

The intended point is that Jews aren’t a legitimate people, let alone a nation, and therefore cannot have a right to self-determination. Jewish history is thus also erased. As one invited faculty speaker told students, Jewish history in the Land of Israel is nothing more than a ‘mythology.’

An astonishing eliminationist argument. After all, Jews claim an historical right to inhabit the state of Israel because Moses led the Israelites to Judea well before there were any Palestinians.

Naturally, the Brown professors are promoting the now outmoded and discredited Marxist ideology-- the kind that sees Jews as the ultimate capitalists.

Litman reports:

In one syllabus, Professor Beshara Doumani, who holds the endowed professorship in Palestinian Studies at Brown, told students that Israel’s creation is just ‘another tragic example of a global phenomenon of European capitalist expansion and imperial conquest that has devasted indigenous populations.’ In the words of another Brown University professor, Tony Bogues, rather than a movement for self-determination, Zionism is ‘a business of theft.’ The logic echoes that in Hitler’s Mein Kampf, which proclaimed that Zionists were trying to ‘slyly dupe the dumb Goyim’ to build a ‘central organization for their international world swindle…’ The Jews have duped the world into believing they’re a people so they could steal some land, goes Bogues’s logic.

And, of course, we also find a blood libel, another side of traditional European anti-Semitism:

Consider that the professor who taught a course this year on ‘Anti-Semitism, Racism, Anti-Zionism: Debates, Contexts, Stakes’ and was recorded in 2021 telling students that ‘Jewish mob[s],’ which he also refers to as ‘Kristallnacht mobs,’ were ‘thirsty for Palestinian blood.’ Combining a blood libel with Holocaust inversion is quite a feat of moral depravity. Somehow, that made him the perfect moral authority at Brown University to talk to students about antisemitism and anti-Zionism.

How did the Brown bigots address the events of October 7 and the constant rocket attacks from Gaza on Israel? Where, as Litman says, German Nazis tended to pretend that they did not know what was going on, Hamas supporters celebrated the massacre and the gang rapes. How many feminists rejected gang rape as a tactic?

As Hamas rockets were still raining down on Israeli civilians, Brown professor Adi Ophir glorified the terrorist organisation, proclaiming that ‘Hamas is fighting for the residents of Jerusalem and those who pray in al-Aqsa [mosque]…’ The quote might as well have come from Hamas chief Yahya Sinwar.

After the atrocities of October 7, the CMES co-organized a teach in where students could presumably learn the correct party line. None of the participants denounced the horrors that Hamas had inflicted on innocent Israelis. 

Litman says this. 

At an October 20, 2023 ‘teach-in,’ co-organised by the Brown Center for Middle East Studies, nearly a dozen speakers addressed the ongoing events. Only one of them had anything negative to say about the 10/7 massacre, which she still managed to blame on Israel. One speaker, Noura Erakat, even proclaimed that it is a ‘dehumanising, crude, very racist talking point’ to say ‘that this is about Hamas.’ It’s another common theme one finds in Brown events and syllabi: there is no Palestinian responsibility for the lack of peace or their lack of statehood. Another speaker, University of Chicago professor Lisa Wedeen, similarly claimed, ‘Israel is a machine for the conversion of grief into power; it transmutes grief into violence,’ and ‘we see that grief machine hard at work in the coverage of major newspapers…’

You are obliged to conclude that the CMES and the other forms of anti-Semitic curricula were invented to provide job opportunities for idiots, for people who could not succeed on their merits. Sad to say, other universities are just as bad. The field of colonialist studies especially targets Jews and Israel for opprobrium. Since the origins of the Palestinian cause lie in a visit by the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem with his ally, Adolph Hitler, wherein the mufti asked his friend Adolph to help him to solve the Jewish problems, nothing should be shocking.

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