Is Campus Antisemitism So Pervasive It's Now Normal?

Today I was reminded just how intense the campus wars against Israel and Jewish people have become.

Photo by Giammarco on Unsplash

This post is the ninth in an ongoing series on antisemitism and culture. See the previous installments here:

1. What It Means When the Leader of the Republican Party Dines With THREE Antisemites

2. What Causes Someone to Be an Antisemite?

3. When & Why Conspiracy Theorists Sometimes Stumble Onto the Truth

4. The JFK Conspiracy Theory Which Makes the Most Sense & Why It Matters Today

5. An Open Letter to Elon Musk Thanking Him for the Correct Decision Shutting Down Neo-Nazi Kanye West

6. Why Morally Decent People Can't Buy Bitcoin

7. 4 Stupid Reasons People Don't Take Antisemitism as Seriously as They Should

8. Obsessing Over 'the Left' Sabotages the Fight Against Antisemitism

These writings are part of my ongoing effort to overcome my PTSD by forcing myself to try to write and publish something every day commenting on and analyzing current cultural affairs and their impacts on politics, faith, and, well, everything. “Politics is downstream from culture,” the late Andrew Breitbart popularized among conservative bloggers while he was alive. I’d go a step further: Everything is downstream from culture. The cultures you embrace determine who you are and who you become. You become what you worship.

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The PTSD was rather rough yesterday and this morning - hence no new installment in this series - but I managed to bounce back as today went on and churn out the first draft of a freelance article on, of course, antisemitism. This time it was a sub-species I’ve grown very familiar with over the last decade: campus antisemitism.

Throughout my years as a Zionist activist, time and time again some of the most virulent antisemitism and vicious anti-Israel sentiment could be found on campuses across North America and frequently around the world. So pervasive is the problem that Jewish non-profits and Zionist organizations will frequently have full-time employees specifically devoted to the subject because there’s just so much to cover.

Why is this? How did numbers like this come into being:

Shared with The Algemeiner on Tuesday, its data shows that only nine percent of 500 responding experts from the Middle East Studies Association (MESA) and the American Political Science Association (APSA) would “oppose all boycotts of Israel.” 91 percent, Telhami and Lynch noted on Tuesday in an op-ed for The Washington Post, “support at least some boycotts.” 36 percent also favor “some boycotts” but not against Israeli universities.

The results were drawn from a question asking scholars if they supported MESA’s decision to endorse the boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) movement after 93% of its members voted in March to approve a resolution proposing the action.

There are many factors contributing to the wide anti-Israel sentiment on campus but I’ll emphasize two here, both coincidentally starting with I: intersectionality and Islamist infiltration.

“Intersectionality” is an ideological doctrine which has grown trendy in academia over the last few decades, contributing to so-called “woke” progressivism. It essentially argues that there are multiple dimensions of oppression which a person can fall under - being both a woman and being black, being both LGBTQ and disabled, and so on. And thus the differing oppressed groups by race, sex, and gender identity should all band together as one, supporting each other. This is how one gets the odd phenomenon of “Queers for Palestine” - LGBTQ people supporting the creation of a state where they would be executed - and feminist group Code Pink appearing alongside radical Islamists who are deeply misogynist, defending polygamy and wife-beating. Here’s a photo I took of this latter phenomenon at a protest I attended at the Saudi consulate in Los Angeles a few years ago, in 2019:

Nowadays in the realm of intersectional academic ideology and campus “social justice” activism, Israel is seen as the “white” and “colonialist” country whereas the Palestinians are regarded as people of color being oppressed by a racist, “apartheid” state. So if you’re a good progressive who cares about fighting racism and supporting the oppressed then that means you should oppose the Jewish state the same as one would oppose South Africa when it was a white supremacist state. To be a Zionist is in many people’s eyes the same as being an outright racist.

Second, in my research into the Muslim Brotherhood and its story, it became clear early on that the most influential Islamist organization in history had implanted itself in American universities very early.

Here’s what the Investigative Project on Terrorism has to say about the Muslim Students Association:

The Brotherhood has been spreading its propaganda in American academia since the early 1960s. And what do many of those students do after they graduate? Go to graduate school, get their Ph.D. and become professors. This has been going on for over 50 years now, of course the American college is going to change over the course of half a century.

What do you think? Has anti-Israel sentiment and hostility against Jewish students grown so bad on college campuses that now it’s just accepted as normal? With little hope of ever being fixed? I fear so at this point, and in my experience working with Jewish organizations, suspect that many Jews and Zionists feel this way too.

“Oh, there’s some anti-Israel protests and violence against Jewish students going on down at the college? What else is new?”

I’m not sure yet how to systematically, seriously counter this, apart from activist lawyers engaging in lawfare on behalf of victimized Jewish students and Jewish faculty by filing lawsuits. Colleges need to learn the hard way that in respecting minorities and helping them overcome oppression they need to include Jewish people too or face embarrassing and expensive legal consequences.