Bari Weiss
The Free Press, Nov. 7, 2023
“Overall, authors of the report write, “a massive influx of foreign, concealed donations to American institutions of higher learning, much of it from authoritarian regimes with notable support from Middle Eastern sources, reflects or supports heightened levels of intolerance towards Jews, open inquiry and free expression.”
Since Hamas’s October 7 massacre, it has been hard to miss the explosion of antisemitic hate that has gripped college campuses across the country. At Cornell, a student posted a call “to follow [Jews] home and slit their throats,” and a professor said the terror attack “energized” and “exhilarated” him. At Harvard, a mob of students besieged an Israeli student, surrounding him as they bellowed “shame, shame, shame.” At dozens of other campuses, students gathered to celebrate Hamas.
The response from school administrations has been alarming. With few exceptions, in the immediate aftermath of October 7, university presidents issued equivocal statements about the initial attack. Some professors even celebrated it. And the focus on the part of administration bureaucrats has been on protecting the students tearing down posters and being shamed for doing so.
Where did all of this hatred come from is a question worth pondering. As Rachel Fish and others have documented, for several decades a toxic worldview—morally relativist, anti-Israel, and anti-American—has been incubating in “area studies” departments and social theory programs at elite universities. Whole narratives have been constructed to dehumanize Israelis and brand Israel as a “white, colonial project” to be “resisted.” The students you see in the videos circulating online have been marinating in this ideology, which can be defined best by what it’s against: everything Western.
… [To read the full article, click here]
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Anti-Israel Demonstrators Hate the West
Rich Lowry
National Review, Oct. 27, 2023
“If Gaza were equally Westernized, it would be worrying about whether it’s overbuilding seaside real estate rather than having to get water and electricity from the neighboring country its governing authority — a savage terror group — is trying to destroy.”
The cataract of anti-Israel sentiment on college campuses has been shocking, but it shouldn’t be surprising.
It is the poisoned fruit of teaching a generation of college students to despise their own civilization. Jesse Jackson famously led a chant at Stanford University in 1987, “Hey, hey, ho, ho, Western Civ has got to go.” He was talking about the college course, but he might as well have been talking about the thing itself.
Jackson and his allies had extraordinary success in extinguishing the teaching of Western Civ. Not only have we largely stopped transmitting the story of our own civilization, we have substituted an alternative narrative that the West is reducible to racism, imperialism, and colonialism.
It is in this context that the current outburst of anti-Zionism has to be understood. Yes, it has been fed by anti-Israel agitation on campus over the decades, and yes, students are susceptible to witless radicalism in the best of circumstances. Yet the loathing of Israel is particularly intense because it is viewed as an outpost of Western civilization and all its alleged ills.
The hatred of Israel is tainted by, and in some cases driven by, antisemitism. Another way to look at it, though, is that it’s not so much about hatred of “the other,” as progressives put it, as hatred of ourselves and all our works.
It is, on one level, incorrect to consider Israel exclusively an artifact of the West. The Jews are indigenous to the region going back to Abraham, with their story caught up in the story of the land. A large proportion of the current population traces its origins from the Middle East and North Africa rather than Europe.
But there is no doubt that Israel is a Western society — in its political system, in its respect for rights, in its innovative economy, in its mores. Someone sitting in a coffee shop in Tel Aviv could easily think they were in any thriving coastal society in the West. … [To read the full article, click here]
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Harvard’s Double Standard on Free Speech
John Tierney
City Journal, Oct. 29, 2023
“At Harvard, three-quarters of students didn’t feel comfortable publicly disagreeing with their professor on a controversial topic. Seventy percent said that it was acceptable to shout down a speaker, and 30 percent said that using violence to stop a speech was acceptable.”
After Harvard student groups blamed Israel for Hamas’s atrocities, the global backlash was so fierce that the university’s president, Claudine Gay, released a video statement that in some ways proved even more puzzling. “Our university rejects the harassment or intimidation of individuals based on their beliefs,” she said. “And our university embraces a commitment to free expression. That commitment extends even to views that many of us find objectionable, even outrageous.”
Really?
This was news to the scholars with unpopular views at Harvard who have been sanctioned by administrators, boycotted by students, and slandered by the Crimson student newspaper. And it was certainly news to anyone who follows the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression’s annual analyses of threats to free speech on campus.
In this year’s FIRE report, Harvard’s speech climate didn’t merely rank dead last among those of the 248 participating colleges. It was also the first school that FIRE has given an “Abysmal” rating for its speech climate, scoring it zero on the 100-point scale (even that was a generous upgrade, as its actual composite score was -10).
That dismal distinction made headlines last month across the United States, Europe, the Middle East, and Asia—but not on the Harvard campus. The Crimson didn’t even publish an article in its news section, much less an editorial; Gay didn’t make a statement, either.
Once upon a time, journalists and scholars on both the left and right were staunchly devoted to free speech and academic freedom, if only out of self-interest. Liberals like Nat Hentoff of the Village Voice defended the rights of Klansmen and Nazis because they knew the First Amendment was their profession’s paramount principle. But in the past decade, that bipartisan devotion has been disappearing, particularly at elite colleges. Harvard’s journalists and scholars adopted the principles that Hentoff criticized in the title of one of his books: free speech for me, but not for thee.
Leftists are free to stir controversy without fear of punishment from Gay and other administrators, and they can count on the Crimson to defend them. Jewish groups on campus were outraged last year when the Palestine Solidarity Committee’s annual spring event, Israeli Apartheid Week, featured lurid murals accusing “Zionists” of being “racists” and “white supremacists.” … [To read the full article, click here]
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Who Now Still Believes in Our Universities?
Philip Carl Salzman
Epoch Times, Oct. 18, 2023
“McGill didn’t stop with a righteous sentiment. It disenfranchised the group in question.”
For the past decade, universities in North America and in the English-speaking world have declared partisan and ideological positions that negated the traditional academic principle of institutional neutrality.
As a result of the unintentional death of George Floyd, almost all Canadian and American universities declared that they were aligned with Black Lives Matter, in spite of the Marxist and anti-Semitic views of the movement’s sponsoring organizations. But in response to the recent Hamas atrocities in Israel—the murder of more than 1,200 unarmed civilians, the burning alive of children, the murder of infants, the raping and murder of girls and women, and the violation of elderly people—no university has managed to say “Jewish Lives Matter.”
We have seen across a multitude of Canadian and American universities student groups declaring their solidarity with the Palestinians and celebrating the Hamas “victory.” They fly Palestinian flags and display posters of the hang gliders used by Hamas. They chant “From the river to the sea,” the Palestinian slogan meaning the total destruction of Israel. While the Hamas founding charter directs it to destroy Israel, it also commits it to kill all Jews in Israel and beyond. Not all student groups make this explicit, but calls to “gas the Jews” have reportedly been heard.
Official university responses to student enthusiasm for atrocities against Jews have been mild at best, expressing reservations about violence; none to my knowledge have condemned Hamas.
The only robust response that I know of is McGill University’s official statement about the student celebration of Hamas atrocities:
“It is particularly distressing to see recent social media posts by an association known as ‘Solidarity for Palestinian Human Rights’ [SPHR], which publicly associates itself with McGill University. The University denounces these abhorrent posts, which celebrate recent acts of terror and violence that have resulted in widespread loss of human life.” … [To read the full article, click here]
