Thursday, August 25, 2022
Calling for the Death of Jews on Campus
In their zeal to create "safe" campus environments, universities have instead created educational environments where students from approved victim groups are coddled, nurtured and shielded from criticism and intellectual or emotional challenges.
Hate speech has long been understood as any speech that expresses prejudice or is abusive toward someone based on their race, ethnicity, religion or sexual orientation. But the definition of hate speech has now been broadened to include any expression that contradicts the prevailing progressive orthodoxy on campuses, and such speech is seen as harmful, even violent, by proponents of these ideas. In other words, even questioning whether it is reasonable to view all white or light-skinned people as racists or oppressors, for example, is akin to an act of violence.
Fighting racism is a worthy endeavor. But on many college campuses students and faculty are often forced to offer explicit admissions of their own racism simply because they are light-skinned. Sessions and courses that discuss implicit bias, invisible racism, "white privilege," and microaggressions, together with a consequential battery of programs and initiatives to protect minority students from this alleged bigotry are in abundance. Mandatory sensitivity training for all faculty and students, school-wide solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement, and campus-wide initiatives to increase the recruitment of minority students and faculty are the norm. Anyone who questions or challenges these sweeping, unproved allegations of systemic racism can be accused of white supremacy and the promotion of injurious hate speech, which further marginalizes and harms a victim group.
There is, however, one victim group that is rarely protected from vilification and ideological assault, namely, Jewish students who are supporters of Israel. Progressive students have decided, from within their own moral self-righteousness that the Palestinian campaign for self-determination is such a sacred cause that anyone who defends Israel is a moral retrograde. To support Israel is to risk being deemed a racist, an imperialist, a tacit supporter of apartheid or even a white supremacist now that Jews are considered to enjoy "white privilege."
Groups such as Students for Justice in Palestinian (SJP) have waged an unrelenting cognitive war against Israel and its campus supporters and Jewish students are confronted with activism, rhetoric, and condemnation that, were it aimed at any other minority group, would be immediately and forcefully denounced, not only by fellow students but by university officials as well—just as they do when a racist, homophobic, or other incident against a victim group takes place. At the University of Chicago, for example, the school's SJP chapter even used a repulsive Instagram post to urge their fellow students not to enroll in any "sh*tty Zionist classes."
In 2020-2021, 17 BDS resolutions are were pushed through student governments in which Israel is maligned as a racist, apartheid regime, existing on stolen Arab land, and chronically oppressing the human and civil rights of Palestinians. Yearly Israeli Apartheid Weeks reinforce this false narrative with mock apartheid walls constructed in university quads and guest speakers who parrot calumnies against the Jewish state while accusing its supporters of racism, ethnic cleansing, and genocide.
Often heard at these campus anti-Israel hate-fests is the grotesque chant, "Intifada, intifada, long live intifada," referring to an uprising in which Israeli civilians, not soldiers, are murdered randomly by psychopathic Arabs. Anti-Israel activists regularly support "resistance" on behalf of the ever-aggrieved Palestinians, resistance being a comfortable euphemism for terrorism against Jews.
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