Antisemitism poses a challenge for Trump

Posted on November 9, 2024 by Joe Weber

How will the administration deal witH IT?

When Arab-Israeli journalist Yoseph Haddad spoke at a downtown Chicago synagogue a day after the presidential election, dozens of pro-Hamas demonstrators showed up. Masked or wearing kaffiyehs, most screamed outside the Loop shul, but a couple got inside under false names, disrupting the event and vandalizing property. Shouted down by the audience, they were hauled out by police.

This followed an attack by a pair of masked men earlier that day on two Jewish students at DePaul University, about five miles away. And it came after an attempted murder of a Jewish man, shot on Oct. 26 on his way to synagogue West Rogers Park, about 11 miles away.

Meanwhile, on Election Day, a neo-Nazi endorsed Donald J. Trump for president. As Rolling Stone reported, Chris Hood, the founder of the neo-Nazi group NSC-131 called on fellow fascists in the swing states to vote for Trump.

So, might we expect to see stepped up antisemitic incidents over the coming four years? Recall that Trump flirted with white extremism two years ago by dining with the rapper Ye and prominent white supremacist and Holocaust denier Nick Fuentes at his Florida club, Mar-a-Lago, as Vox noted.

And remember that during the Jan. 6, 2021 insurrection, protesters carried a Confederate flag into the US Capitol, erected a gallows and noose on the lawn, and that at least one rioter sported a “Camp Auschwitz” hoodie. Proud Boys brandished “6 Million Wasn’t Enough” T-shirts and an Israeli reporter was singled out and harassed by protestors, according to AP News. White nationalists recorded a live stream and offered a “Shoutout to Germany” for their 10,000 viewers.

Of course, Trump has long done a weird dance with such supremacists. He repeatedly denounced antisemitism and he has a Jewish daughter and grandchildren. But he also has praised Hitler and criticized American Jews for not showing enough gratitude for his support of Israel.

It’s likely that Trump’s stances on immigrants and others hated by supremacists emboldened them. Antisemitic incidents and hate crimes rose 12% from 1,879 in 2018 to 2,107 in 2019, where the highest previous number was in 1994, according to Reuters. These included fatal shootings at a California Synagogue and a New Jersey kosher grocery store, as well as the stabbing of a rabbi in his New York home.

To be sure, antisemitism exploded during the Joe Biden term, mainly as a reaction to the aftermath of the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack and Israel. Hillel recorded 1,834 antisemitic incidents on campuses in the 2023-24 school year, up from 180 in 2019-20 and 254 the following year. A study by Brandeis academics found that antisemitism was “far more prevalent” on campuses last year than in 2016, when they first examined the phenomenon. “The ongoing Israel-Hamas war is clearly a major driver of the sharp increase in antisemitic hostility on campus,” they reported.

And the Anti-Defamation League counted 8,873 incidents nationwide last year. This was sharply up from the roughly 2,000 recorded each year during Trump’s first term. Such incidents have continued.

As the ADL reported, on Oct. 13, a speaker named Tarek Bazzi at an anti-Israel rally in Dearborn, Michigan, said: “We’re not here to condemn the killing of innocent civilians on both sides. We’re not here to chant empty slogans, because when we say ‘Free Palestine,’ and when we say ‘From the river to the sea,’ we understand what that means….The only hope that Palestine has is its armed resistance…If you’re pro-Palestine, then you’re pro-armed resistance.”

Four days before, at a rally in New York City, the crowd cheered after a speaker mentioned that 5,000 rockets had been fired at Israel. An attendee displayed his phone to onlookers with an image of a swastika on it, and another held a sign celebrating the attack as a “Zionist nightmare.”

But can we expect things to get worse in coming years? As long as the Gaza War continues, this may be the case. But much will turn on how the White House and campus administrators respond.

“Trump and extremists’ unabated use of xenophobic antisemitic tropes without an immediate and unequivocal condemnation from a bipartisan group of leaders across the U.S. will likely lead to more violence and hatred toward the American Jewish community,” former ambassador Norman Eisen and former USAID administrator Jonathan Katz warned in a September piece in Newsweek in which they said Trump was fueling antisemitism in his campaign. “A 2024 American Jewish Committee survey found that 93 percent of Jews think that antisemitism is a problem, with 56 percent calling it a ‘serious’ problem.”

They pointed to efforts in Washington to combat the problem. They praised the Biden-Harris National Strategy to Counter Antisemitism, and pressed for the bipartisan Countering Antisemitism Act. But they said such national efforts must be coupled with state and local action, including by governors and mayors, across the U.S., who should adopt policies in line with the White House led strategy to counter antisemitism.

While collegiate bans on encampments protesting the Gaza War have limited the more vocal antisemitic events on campuses, incidents have continued, as recorded by the AMCHA Initiative:

At Harvard the Palestine Solidarity Committee and Harvard Out of Occupied Palestine held a silent protest inside a library in October, during which students sat with signs that demonized Israel with such phrases as, “No normalcy during genocide,” “Harvard divest from death,” and “Israel bombed a hospital, again.” Meanwhile, the university restored the PSC as an official student group after a five-month suspension.

At Drexel in Philadelphia, a helicopter dropped leaflets that demonized Israel, stating, “This is how Israel gives evacuation orders. Imagine this paper telling you to pack up your family and leave your life behind. This is what terrorist Israel does when you stay at the hospital where you are being treated.” At Columbia, a faculty and staff group called for a boycott of local businesses with ties to Israel on Instagram, including a map of businesses to boycott indicated with red inverted triangles, a symbol of Hamas’s targets.

For Halloween, a student at Binghamton University dressed up as Yahya Sinwar, the dead leader of Hamas. The student and posted a picture on Instagram alongside the caption, “this was my costume last night.”

Some academics have stood out for their viciousness against Israel. At an Oct. 15 rally in New York, CUNY professor Danny Shaw shouted, “Zionism is a trap. Go back to your true history. Go back to Yiddish land …. This is not Israel versus Hamas. This is a Zionist extermination campaign that began in 1948.”

Republicans in recent months criticized campuses that they said didn’t act against antisemitism, often angering free-speech advocates. Whether legislative efforts will continue or grow remains to be seen.

If incidents multiply, it’s likely that the Trump Administration will face demands to act anew against antisemitism. Given Trump’s dalliances with supremacists, can or will it do so?

When doing the right thing goes tragically awry

Posted on October 17, 2024 by Joe Weber

Sinwar’s survival led to much death. Will his death do the opposite?

Yuval Bitton holds a poster of his deceased nephew; source: allisraelnews

Dr. Yuval Bitton, an Israeli dentist, was working in the Nafcha Prison in 2004 when an inmate complained to him about neck pain and balance issues. Bitton thought the prisoner was suffering from a stroke, so he and a colleague took him to an Israeli hospital, where the man was diagnosed with a brain abscess and quickly operated on.

The prisoner, Yahya Sinwar, was serving four life sentences for murder after killing at least four Palestinians he believed were collaborators. But, after 22 years in prison, he and more than 1,000 others were released in 2011 in a deal for Hamas to free an Israeli soldier, Gilad Shalit, after five years as a captive. Sinwar promised to repay Bitton for saving his life.

Sinwar, a psychopath who killed some of his victims with his own hands and was known among Palestinians as the Butcher of Khan Younis, found a perverse way to thank Bitton and Israel. He masterminded the terrorist attacks that killed some 1,200 in southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, including Bitton’s 38-year-old nephew, Tamir Adar, and the capture of more than 240 hostages.

Of course, Sinwar now is dead, killed by Israeli soldiers in a gun battle in Rafah in southern Gaza. Does this mark the beginning of the end in at least one of Israel’s battlegrounds?

“To the Hamas terrorists I say: your leaders are fleeing, and they will be eliminated,” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said in a televised address. Speaking to Palestinians in Gaza, he added: “Hamas will no longer rule Gaza. This is the beginning of the day after Hamas, and this is an opportunity for you, the residents of Gaza, to finally break free from its tyranny.”

But will Gazans take heed? Will they now turn on the rudderless remnant of Hamas hiding among them? Will Palestinian mothers beg their sons to desert? After tens of thousands have been killed, will the nearly 2 million remaining Gazans find ways to seek peace?

As Israeli soldiers comb through the wreckage that is Gaza, will residents disgusted by Hamas tyranny guide them to the many miles of tunnels where, perhaps, thousands of remaining Hamas terrorists hide? Will Gazans guide Israelis to the places where, perhaps, some hostages from the Oct. 7^th attacks still survive? Some 97 remain unaccounted for.

Some Gazans have at least turned gunmen away from schools and other shelter areas, according to The New York Times. “We will quickly kick anyone who has a gun or a rifle out of this school,” said Saleh al-Kafarneh, 62, who lives at another government school in Deir al Balah and said he locked the gates at night. “We don’t allow anyone to ruin life here, or cause any strike against those civilians and families.”

As the newspaper reported, Israel has increased the rate of its airstrikes on schools turned shelters to target what it calls Hamas command-and-control centers. It says militants have “cynically exploited” these sensitive sites, including UN areas, as locations for planning operations.

Source: The Washington Institute for Near East Policy

Embedding its fighters in such areas – and thus spawning killings of civilians in scenes broadcast around the world — fits Sinwar’s sadomasochistic and sociopathic vision. As The Wall Street Journal reported, the terrorist leader infamously pointed to civilian losses as “necessary sacrifices,” mentioning national-liberation conflicts in places such as Algeria, where hundreds of thousands of people died fighting for independence from France.

In an April 11 letter to the now-dead Hamas political leader Ismail Haniyeh after three of Haniyeh’s adult sons were killed by an Israeli airstrike, Sinwar wrote that their deaths and those of other Palestinians would “infuse life into the veins of this nation, prompting it to rise to its glory and honor.”

One has only to watch cable news coverage – and read much of global print coverage – to see how Sinwar’s views of turning his people into martyrs has turned Israel into a pariah in many quarters. No doubt, the carnage that has taken so many Gazan lives has cost Israel much of the world’s sympathy, with at least 14 condemnatory votes in the UN last year alone. And demonstrators on lots of college campuses, like useful idiots, have fallen in line behind Sinwar’s lead.

In addition to isolating Israel in much of the world, Sinwar triggered a seven-front war with his invasion of the country. Months ago, Netanyahu listed the battlegrounds as Iran, Hamas in Gaza, Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Houthis in Yemen, Shia militants in Iraq, militant groups in Syria as well as Palestinian fighters in the West Bank.

This monstrous figure’s legacy is astonishing. But the bloodshed surely will not end with his death alone. Indeed, Netanyahu made this clear in his address:

“The mass murderer who murdered thousands of Israelis and kidnapped hundreds of our citizens was eliminated today by our heroic soldiers,” he said. “And today, as we promised to do, we came to account with him. Today, evil has suffered a heavy blow, but the task before us is not yet complete.” Netanyahu added that the war “is not over yet.”

Certainly, beheading the snake marks a major turn. It could hasten an end to some of the worst fighting — or so some optimists are arguing.

“This moment gives us an opportunity to finally end the war in Gaza, and it must end such that Israel is secure, the hostages are released, the suffering in Gaza ends, and the Palestinian people can realize their right to dignity, security, freedom, and self-determination,” Vice President Kamala Harris said. “And it is time for the day after to begin without Hamas in power.”

Just how long this “opportunity” will take to realize, however, is fraught. Much turns now on how Israel and its neighbors react.

“Sinwar’s elimination could provide the Israeli government with several off-ramps and openings to start to end the war in Gaza,” argues Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib, a resident senior fellow with the Scowcroft Middle East Security Initiative at the Atlantic Council’s Middle East Programs. “The chaos within Hamas following Sinwar’s death may provide a chance to exploit uncertainties and divisions to expedite the release of the remaining Israeli hostages and the implementation of a general stand-down and demobilization within Hamas.”

Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib, source: The Times of Israel

Alkhatib, who grew up in Gaza City and advocates coexistence, offers a few suggestions:

“Israel, Arab nations, and the United States should now offer mass amnesty for remaining Hamas members who lay down their arms and stop fighting. They should also offer financial rewards to those who either turn in Israeli hostages or provide information leading to the whereabouts of remaining abductees,” he contends. “Israel should make clear its intention to pull out of Gaza and avoid the reoccupation of the Strip in the immediate future. And Gaza should be opened up for Arab, international, and Palestinian Authority figures and professionals to come in and begin stabilizing the war-torn Strip to initiate the ‘day after.’”

But he also raises troubling questions, such as: Who can Israel and Arab nations negotiate with when it comes to Gaza and Hamas’s future role (should there be one)? Who within Hamas in Gaza will control the issue of Israeli hostages, and who could command enough authority to make the group’s rank-and-file members release the hostages? Will Hamas splinter into small, disconnected cells inside Gaza, or can an interim leader emerge to keep the organization together?

For now, Sinwar’s death prompted some scattered celebrations in Israel. “Beachgoers in Tel Aviv erupted in cheers,” The Washington Post reported. “Families of soldiers killed in Gaza posted videos of themselves dancing with pictures of their lost relatives. Flag-waving celebrants filled a traffic circle in Carmel.”

But no real celebration can emerge until surviving hostages come home and the fighting ends. Most Israelis crave nothing more than peace and the lengths they go to to save lives are extraordinary at times — both of their countrymen (see Shalit) and of others.

Bitton, the dentist most responsible for saving Sinwar, has said he doesn’t regret saving the former prisoner, even if his death years ago may have spared Israel of so much agony since. Part of that has to do with the obligations every doctor has to save lives, he said.

“Second, these are our values both as Jews and Israelis. We aren’t taught to hate our enemies,” Bitton said. “We don’t desire vengeance. We know the righteousness of our path, why we are here and what we need to do in order to survive.”

He harked back to a visit to Israel by Egyptian President Anwar Sadat in 1979.

“I was a 13-year-old boy,” Bitton said. “I stood by the side of the road waving the Israeli and Egyptian flags together with my entire school. We cheered the person who up until then had been our greatest enemy. This was the man who had said that he was ready to sacrifice a million Egyptian soldiers to destroy Israel. But when he spoke to us in the language of peace, we responded in kind.”

Over several years, Bitton spent hundreds of hours talking with Sinwar. The terrorist used his time in prison to study Israel in depth, often taking courses in areas such as history through an open-studies program. The conversations gave Bitton exceptional insights into the thinking in terrorist groups.

In 2007, Bitton joined the prison service’s intelligence branch.

“I became the intelligence officer of Ketziot Prison, where 3,000 terrorists were being held. The entirety of the Hamas leadership in Yehudah and Shomron was in Ketziot at the time,” Bitton said. “After that, I had a number of other positions including as head of the terror department. I was responsible for the intelligence that was collected from the 12,000 security prisoners in the system. “

In 2015, he was promoted to head the entire intelligence division, a position he held for four and a half years. He left the service in 2022.

“So, although we don’t hate our enemies, we also know who they are and what they are capable of,” Bitton said.

Sinwar, of course, was capable of astonishing savagery as well as indifference to the sufferings of his own people. He was part of a culture of martydom that has long hobbled Palestinian efforts toward coexistence.

Tragically, Sinwar’s life made an enormous and awful difference. Surely, his death will have a substantial impact. But until and unless his culture’s glorification of death is shattered, his horrific legacy will live on.

Marketing can move from silly to dangerous

Posted on October 1, 2024 by Joe Weber

Trump’s badly timed opportunism is anything but PresidentiaL

On a recent Southwest flight, the attendant gave out little bags of pretzels bearing some peculiar language. “My mom and I created Stellar Snacks in 2019 with a dream of crafting pretzels infused with passion,” the writing on the bag said. “It’s not just a pretzel … it’s a labor of love.”

Oh, really now.

Yes, marketing is important. And yes, it’s normal for marketers to stretch the truth just a bit to sell their wares.

But there are times when we must call BS for what it is. That’s kinda the way it is in our presidential election race now, too.

There’s an extraordinary amount of BS out there as we get closer to Nov. 5. Today, for instance, Donald J. Trump offered this reaction to the missile attack by Iran on Israel:

“Under ‘President Trump,’ we had NO WAR in the Middle East, NO WAR in Europe, and Harmony in Asia, No Inflation, No Afghanistan Catastrophe,” Trump posted on his Truth Social outlet. “Instead, we had PEACE. Now, War or the threat of War, is raging everywhere, and the two Incompetents running this Country are leading us to the brink of World War III. You wouldn’t trust Joe or Kamala to run a lemonade stand, let alone lead the Free World.”

Never mind that in 2018 Trump pulled the U.S. out of a U.S.-Iran nuclear deal, ratcheting up hostilities between the countries. Ignore the fact that an Iran-backed group then, in December 2019, launched rockets at an Iraqi military base, killing a U.S. contractor and wounding our soldiers and others, and provoking retaliatory strikes in Iraq and Syria by the U.S. Never mind that in the following month, the U.S. killed the head of Iran’s elite Quds Force, triggering missile attacks on U.S. forces and killing some of them.

This was peace?

The truth – as opposed to the marketing – is that tensions between Israel and Iran, as well as between Iran and the U.S. have been a constant for many years. They are erupting now, all in the wake of the October 7, 2023,invasion in Israel by Iran-backed Hamas. That triggered Israel’s Gaza invasion and led to increasing rocket attacks on Israel by Hezbollah. And that, in turn, set off the Israeli reaction in Lebanon that has led us to today’s missile attacks by Iran.

But none of those historical facts deter Trump from arguing that these eruptions — and others — would never have happened had he been in the White House again.

“If I was in charge, October 7th never happens, Russia/Ukraine never happens, Afghanistan Botched Withdrawal never happens, and Inflation never happens,” Trump claimed. “If I win, we will have peace in the World again. If Kamala gets 4 more years, the World goes up in smoke.”

His claims sound wonderful. They are also ahistorical nonsense.

How would Trump have halted Hamas, whose members built extraordinary tunnel networks in Gaza for years, including during his term? What could he have done to deter the group that he hadn’t done before, as it burrowed beneath Gaza? The terrorist group’s timing likely had more to do with it seeing a chance to take advantage of tumult in Israel over Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s domestic problems. Indeed, Hamas’s war-triggering actions likely had even more to do with the threat it saw in then-growing Saudi-Israel rapprochement and diminishing support in Gaza for the group.

As for Russia and Ukraine, the latest war’s roots go back at least to 2014, a couple years before Trump’s ascension to power. Back then, Russian paramilitaries took over Ukraine’s Donetsk and Luhansk areas and Russia then invaded Crimea, taking control of the region. Thousands of Russian soldiers flooded in over the next several years and fierce fighting raged between 2017 and 2019, during Trump’s term. Did Trump do anything to toss Russia out? Despite a peace agreement, Russia then began its fullscale invasion in early 2022. It was all of a piece.

And, as for Afghanistan, one can only wonder why Trump maintained U.S. troops there during his entire term. It was clear for many years that the U.S. had won nothing enduring in the country since 2001. So why did Trump leave the withdrawal from one of America’s longest and least successful wars to his successor? Why were American soldiers still dying there on his watch?

Trying to rewrite history in the self-serving way Trump is doing may fool some of his backers. After all, they likely see him as a strongman who can set the world aright and cure domestic and foreign ills. In his rhetoric, Trump offers strength, harmony and peace.

But was there really harmony and peace during his tenure – at home or overseas? Recall that George Floyd, a Black man, was killed by police in May 2020, in Minnesota, during Trump’s last year in office. The event triggered protests nationwide, with disturbances in well over 100 cities. As for peaceful relations overseas, recall the coronavirus tensions with China in 2020 and Beijing’s clampdown on Hong Kong, as tensions between the U.S. and China grew. Were these times of tranquility?

For all of his business failures – which include six bankruptcies – Trump is a clever marketer. “The Apprentice” turned him from a struggling developer with a bad rep in New York into a national emblem of tough-minded leadership, never mind that the show was a venue in which facts never mattered.

Now, Trump’s efforts to rewrite history will likely con some of his devotees just as the “reality” show did. Perhaps they are the sort of folks who can believe that pretzels can be “infused with passion.”

But will he fool anyone with a passing acquaintance with facts? Anyone who has some understanding of history?

What is happening now in the Middle East is extraordinarily dangerous. Keeping full scale war at bay will require delicate diplomacy, and even with that a far greater explosion may well be unavoidable. If Trump were a decent leader, he would keep his mouth shut about that and, maybe, even support President Biden’s efforts.

But then, this is a man who sells sneakers, Bibles and even a picture book bearing a cover with the image of him raising his fist after being grazed by a bullet. You can get Trump’s signature on the book for $499. This is a man who brought public a social media company, Trump Media & Technology Group, through a shady offering, only to have it fall from its March 2022 high of $97.54 a share to the current $16 (no doubt, with many of his followers taking the hit).

The would-be president’s marketing is shameless. Now, at a time of global peril, it’s also dangerous.

When is cancellation warranted?

Posted on September 27, 2024 by Joe Weber

A Connecticut teacher faces heat over refusing to share a stage with a Jewish autho

When I attended an all-boys prep school in New Jersey many decades ago, one of my history teachers was a chapter leader in the John Birch Society. He routinely spouted bizarre Communist-infiltration theories, had us read conspiracy-oriented books and tried to recruit students to sell for Amway.

He lost his job at the school.

Should that happen now to Aisha Abdel Gawad at the prestigious all-girls Greenwich Academy in Connecticut? Should parents at the K-12 school think twice about sending their daughters there, as an alum of the school suggests in The Wall Street Journal?

Gawad is the writer who refused last weekend to appear on a literary panel discussion at an Albany book festival with a Jewish writer, Elisa Albert, who supports Israel. The festival director cancelled the session, saying Gawad and another writer didn’t want to share the stage with a Zionist.

Never mind that the panel had nothing to do with Zionism or Judaism. It was about “Girls, Coming of Age.”

And never mind that, to Gawad, Albert’s unpardonable sin was to write a piece lambasting those who defended Hamas after it murdered some 1,200 people and carried off a couple hundred hostages nearly a year ago.

Never mind that Albert’s piece, “An Open Letter to Hamas’ Defenders” in Tablet magazine expressed sympathy for Palestinians, even as it condemned their terrorist oppressors. “We weep for the plight of the Palestinian people and for the ignorance and naïveté of so many who believe that anyone but Hamas is responsible for their current suffering,” Albert wrote.

To Gawad, Albert’s criticism of Hamas and its supporters “mocked anyone who expressed grief over Palestinian life.” To be sure, Albert used sarcasm to make her point, as she began with “Hi terror apologist!” That was enough for Gawad to say that sharing the dais with such an outspoken Jew “did not feel like a safe forum.”

What would Albert have done, one wonders? Would she have pulled out an Uzi? Would she have strapped on a suicide vest? Would she have kidnapped Gawad and taken her off to a tunnel for 11 months?

More likely, Albert would have discussed her latest book of essays, “The Snarling Girl.” Her collection of 16 essays deal with feminism, childbirth, medicine, life in Los Angeles and Albany and, yes, her Judaism. The last includes things such as the stress of being a “perfect hostess, perfect Jewess” at a Passover seder, the legacy of Philip Roth, a visit to a mikvah, and antisemitic comments she’d received.

Still more likely, Albert would have sought to bridge the gulf between her and Gawad.

In fact, in a new Tablet post, Albert invites Gawad to her Shabbos table, offering to break bread and talk to one another. Albert writes “… the last thing on earth anyone needs is more anger, more resentment, more fighting, more hatred, more blood, more violence, heads to roll. Haven’t we had enough, yet, of anger, fear, suspicion, hatred, fighting, bloodshed?”

In that same piece, Albert defends Zionism. To her, it “is the belief that the State of Israel has the right to exist. Zionism is the belief that the Jewish people (literally aka ‘Israel’) has the right to self-determination, peace, and safety in our ancestral homeland.”

And, as a proponent of a two-state solution, she adds: “Zionism precludes no other peaceful nationalist ambitions or aspirations.”

Would that sort of conciliation be enough for Gawad? Would she join Albert in sharing challah so they could civilly air their disagreements?

Probably not.

Gawad’s refusal to share a platform with Albert is a new wrinkle on the longstanding Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions effort. That’s the 18-year-old drive that blacklists Jews, especially Israelis in academic institutions and others. The aim is to pressure Israel to accept, among other things, a right for Palestinians who fled in 1948 to return to their homes. That, of course, would destroy Israel. It would make it impossible demographically for the Jewish state to exist.

Indeed, BDS co-founder Omar Barghouti has said “we oppose a Jewish state in any part of Palestine. No Palestinian, rational Palestinian, not a sell-out Palestinian, will ever accept a Jewish state in Palestine.”

Gawad’s decision to boycott a panel that would include Albert is of a piece with some of the more bizarre BDS efforts. Backers sought to boycott McDonald’s because a franchise in Israel offered free meals to Israeli soldiers. And BDS called for a boycott of an upcoming Disney movie that that features an Israeli superhero, Sabra, a fictional member of spy-agency Mossad. And some have called on supporters to shun Disney altogether.

Over the last few years, BDS backers have risen to the fore in several academic organizations. They won a vote for a resolution last May in the American Sociological Association, by a 58.8 percent margin, condemning Israel’s actions in Gaza and criticizing “Zionist occupation.” For all of its fury over the deaths in Gaza, however, there was no condemnation of Hamas in the resolution — its murderousness, apparently, wasn’t worth noting.

More recently, in August, BDS backers succeeded in getting the American Association of University Professors to support academic boycotts, rescinding its longstanding opposition to them. In a case of Orwellian logic, the AAUP argued that “when faculty members choose to support academic boycotts, they can legitimately seek to protect and advance academic freedom.”

So, should Gawad continue to teach at the Greenwich Academy? Should she be shunned for her refusal to sit next to a Zionist? Should her boycott of Albert lead to the school, in effect, boycotting her?

Well, Emma Osman, an editor at The Wall Street Journal and a graduate of the academy, puts the matter in terms of how some of Gawad’s students may be affected. She wonders what things might be like for some of them now.

“I imagine myself back in school, seated around Ms. Gawad’s table,” she writes. “Would I feel my voice was ‘heard and valued’? Would I feel comfortable raising a view that I knew Ms. Gawad disagreed with? Could she grade my essay objectively knowing it was written by someone she might label a ‘Zionist’?”

The head of the school, Margaret Hazlett, defended Gawad initially. But, as pressures have grown, she more recently said that the teacher’s actions “showed a lack of judgment” and “reflected poorly on GA.”

Indeed, Gawad has already lost another prestigious gig as a result of her action. The Wilton Library terminated her as its first writer in residence, a $30,000 position. In explaining the move, officials there write: “We continue to be passionate about the free exchange of ideas. We remain dedicated to our mission to ‘inform, enrich, connect, and inspire our community,’ and to maintain an environment where everyone is made to feel safe and welcome.”

So, should she be fired from Greenwich Academy, as well, because it’s entirely possible some students will now feel unsafe and unwelcome in her classroom? Under intense fire now, Gawad claims that she, in fact, opposes all forms of discrimination and hatred.

“I oppose anti-Semitism and have dedicated my professional and personal life to not only fighting anti-Semitism, but also racism, Islamophobia, and hatred of all kinds,” Gawad wrote in a response to press inquiries. “I find it deeply hurtful and saddening that the festival chose to make public my private choice.”

But does she oppose the venomous hatred that led a terrorist group to murder hundreds of innocents? To rape and kill wantonly? There’s been no word from her on that, at least not publicly. Not a hint of criticism from her of Hamas and its ilk.

My former history teacher’s wrong-headed, at-times vicious and certainly ill-informed views made many of us in the classroom pretty uncomfortable. His attacks on some of us over our opposition to the Vietnam War at times got quite personal. And, in the end, his intellectual and emotional shortcomings and attitudes did him in.

Ultimately, that teacher’s position was untenable, his views were just too noxious. Gawad’s antisemitic act — whether she sees it as that or not — may in the end have the same effect.

Taking his marbles and going home

Posted on September 9, 2024 by Joe Weber

A Brown trustee’s resignation doesn’t help the fight against antisemitism

Brown students discuss divestment; source: Brown Daily Herald

Hedge fund manager Joseph Edelman has made a lot of good decisions in his career. Forbes pegs his net worth at $2.5 billion.

But this week he made a bad choice with respect to Brown University, where he served as a trustee from 2019 until now. He quit the board, angry that it will hold a vote on whether the school should divest itself of securities related to Israel.

Brown President Christina H. Paxson agreed last April 30 to consider divestment after anti-Israel protests erupted at the school, as they did on many campuses.

“I find it morally reprehensible that holding a divestment vote was even considered, much less that it will be held—especially in the wake of the deadliest assault on the Jewish people since the Holocaust,” Edelman wrote in a Sept. 8 Wall Street Journal op-ed. “The university leadership has for some reason chosen to reward, rather than punish, the activists for disrupting campus life, breaking school rules, and promoting violence and antisemitism at Brown.”

He added: “I consider the willingness to hold this vote a stunning failure of moral leadership at Brown University. I am unwilling to lend my name or give my time to a body that lacks basic moral judgment.”

Edelman’s stance, in my view, is principled, understandable and wrong.

There should be a trustee vote, as is expected on Oct. 17-18; fittingly, that is within two weeks of the anniversary of Hamas’s animalistic savagery in Israel. And that vote should be preceded by a full-throated, campus-wide discussion of the issues involved. After all, isn’t education all about discussing the big things?

And aren’t the 120 or so Brown students who set up an encampment to protest the war in Gaza last spring sorely in need of education, in dire need of learning some big things? Shouldn’t those who are pressing anew for divestment be taught why the idea is so damn wrong?

That discussion, if it occurs, needs to be based on facts. It should begin, for instance, with some history about Israel and Jews:

For starters, the discussion should explore how long Jews have been in the land. The oldest Hebrew text ever found was discovered at the ancient Israelite settlement, near modern-day Beit Shemesh, that dates to between 1050 and 970 BCE. The academic consensus, based on archeological and other evidence, is that a United Kingdom of Israel existed in the 10th and 9th centuries BCE.

Of course, Jews moved in and out of what is now Israel over many centuries since then. Exiles followed the two destructions of the Temple in Jerusalem, in 586 BCE by the Babylonians and in 70 CE, when the Romans sacked the place. But, even through those events, Jews remained, keeping a consistent presence, as scholars have long noted.

As Cornell University Prof. Barry Strauss has written, for instance, in a piece detailing that continuous presence: “To sum up, the Jews have an ancient history in Palestine going back three thousand years. Their yearning for Zion goes back well more than two thousand years. Jews are indigenous to Palestine.”

So, in other words, the oft-shouted argument that Israel is a colonial project is hogwash. Brown students and many others need to learn that.

Second, the discussion should deal with the number of times Arabs have refused deals that could have settled the century-long fighting between them and Jews in the region. Palestinian rejectionism dates back at least to 1937, when the Jerusalem Mufti Hajj Amin Husseini suggested to the British that Jews should be deported. He went so far as to make his case against the Jews with a soulmate, Adolf Hitler, in 1941:

The Grand Mufti and Hitler in 1941; source: Bundesarchiv, Bild 146-1987-004-09A / Heinrich Hoffmann, CC BY-SA

A few years later, the Jerusalem Arab leader rejected a UN partition plan to create two states. A long string of Palestinian leaders has echoed that rejection of various deals since. Their intransigence gave rise to the often-noted comment by Israeli diplomat Abba Eban in 1973: “The Arabs never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity.”

Hamas, of course, has squandered many opportunities. Among others, in its effort to build tunnels and its war machine, it blew the chance to turn Gaza into something like a Singapore on the Mediterranean over the last couple decades. Instead of using millions of global aid dollars to develop an economy, it created a subterranean fortress, and it repeated its rejectionism of coexistence publicly as recently as 2017:

“Palestine, which extends from the River Jordan in the east to the Mediterranean in the west and from Ras al-Naqurah in the north to Umm al-Rashrash in the south, is an integral territorial unit,” Hamas asserted. “It is the land and the home of the Palestinian people. The expulsion and banishment of the Palestinian people from their land and the establishment of the Zionist entity therein do not annul the right of the Palestinian people to their entire land and do not entrench any rights therein for the usurping Zionist entity.”

Hamas at that point declared null and void the Balfour Declaration, the British Mandate Document, the UN Palestine Partition Resolution “and whatever resolutions and measures that derive from them or are similar to them.” It rejected the Oslo Accords, signed by the PLO in 1993 and 1995.

Third, turning to current issues, the discussion should detail how rape and savagery were the means that Hamas used on Oct. 7^th to kill some 1,200 Jews, as verified by the United Nations, among others. The discussion should include video evidence of those crimes that students should be required to watch. They should appreciate the monstrousness of the group some of them are championing, should understand what the popular “by any means necessary” placards really mean.

The discussion should include details about the more than 240 hostages the group took, many of whom are now dead. Some, of course, were wantonly slaughtered recently, within days of rescue. It should address how Hamas released videos of the murdered afterward in bids to torment their families and pressure Israel into a bad deal that would assure Hamas’s rearmament and continued existence.

Fourth, it should include information about how in Israel Muslims are free to pray on the Temple Mount, how Arabs in the country have the right to vote and have elected representatives, and about how the charge of “apartheid” falls apart in the face of such rights and the peaceful coexistence of Israelis of many colors and religions in the land.

Yes, the discussion should also explore the areas where Israel has fallen short. Its treatment of Palestinians in the West Bank and other areas needs to be examined, as does the country’s right-wing settler policies. Many of those are opposed by Israelis, though Palestinians in the territories hardly help their cause by allying with Hamas. The state isn’t perfect and its problems need to be fully aired, as well.

But there’s no excuse for the ignorance that gives prominence to those problems and not to other more compelling realities. For instance, the discussion should elaborate on the meaning of the oft-chanted phrase “from the river to the sea.” The slogan refers, of course, to purging the land between the Jordan and the Mediterranean of Jews and replacing them with Muslims, as described in the Hamas documents; that would be a real genocide.

Once that sort of discussion takes place at Brown, there should be a vote on divestment. The trustees, of course, should oppose it unanimously.

If most of Brown’s 38 trustees vote otherwise, Edelman might then have been morally obligated to quit – as other dissenting trustees might then be, as well. But they would have had the chance to make their case based on the points above. And they could then feel assured that the antisemites simply outnumber sensible people at the school — a sign that, maybe, sensible folks of any persuasion or creed should avoid Brown for good.

Taking one’s marbles and going home before the game is done, however, doesn’t solve the problems of antisemitism, nor does it remedy the historical and political ignorance that plague many American campuses, especially the elite ones. Academics at schools such as Brown should know better than to propagate the ahistorical anti-Zionist nonsense that too many students appear to be swallowing.

And, if they don’t, trustees and administrators need to install academics who do.

Universities exist to educate. As proven in last year’s national turmoil, they need to do a far better job of that. In their ignorance, students last year broke university rules at Brown, albeit for a relatively short time (less than a week). One idea is that during this term, those students should be required to take and pass coursework that explores the matters raised above, taught by professors who do know their stuff.

As for trustees and administrators, their job is fix the problems. Unless Edelman was pretty sure the problems are irreparable at Brown, he should have stuck around and cast his vote. It would have helped.

The Philadelphi Corridor

Posted on September 6, 2024 by Joe Weber

Can we ever have peace if Hamas can rearm?

From top left: Hersh Goldberg-Polin, Ori Danino, Eden Yerushalmi; from bottom left, Almog Sarusi, Alexander Lobanov, and Carmel Gat. Source: The Hostages Families Forum via AP/Times of Israel

We know them by a few bare facts. We know them by photos, snapshots that reflected their warmth, their enthusiasm for life. We know them by headlines that flew across the world. We know them by the grief that engulfed anyone with simple human feelings, Jews and non-Jews alike.

They were: Carmel Gat, 40, a yoga instructor who helped other hostages cope with nearly 11 months of imprisonment by practicing her craft with them; Alex Lobanov, 32, who left behind two children, one born while he was held captive; Ori Danino, 25, who escaped the Nova music festival, but returned to help save others and was captured.

Also, Almog Sarusi, 27, who attended the festival with his girlfriend whom terrorists murdered there; Eden Yerushalmi, 24, who attended the festival with friends; and Hersh Goldberg-Polin, 23, an American-Israeli citizen who lost part of an arm in the assault, and whose parents spoke at the Democratic National Convention and met with the president and the pope.

These six hostages were among more than 240 taken by Hamas and its allies nearly a year ago, on Oct. 7th. They were kept in tunnels by terrorists committed to killing Jews like them. And those terrorists did just that with these six, shooting them multiple times at close range between only days before their likely rescue by Israeli soldiers.

Part of “the Gaza metro;” source: The New York Times

Then, of course, the murderers slunk off like cowards, no doubt hoping to kill again. Recall that their job, as Hamas fighters, is not to respect life, but to take it, brutally, if possible. Their job — and their hope, if they’ve imbibed all the pabulum that their perverse grasp of Islam tells them — is to be martyrs, though not when it would require actually facing their armed enemies.

They are much better at killing unarmed innocents, much like those who commit suicide bombings.

Hamas’s leaders have taught their legions that Jews must be eliminated from the land, that is their religious duty to purge them. As Hamas declared in its “Covenant” of 1988, “Resisting and quelling the enemy become the individual duty of every Muslim, male or female.” It also declared: “Israel will exist and will continue to exist until Islam will obliterate it, just as it obliterated others before it.”

In 2017, Hamas restated and reaffirmed its principles. Among them: “Resisting the occupation with all means and methods is a legitimate right guaranteed by divine laws and by international norms and laws. At the heart of these lies armed resistance, which is regarded as the strategic choice for protecting the principles and the rights of the Palestinian people.”

The documents pound home four themes, as explained by Georgetown University Prof. Bruce Hoffman:

— The complete destruction of Israel as an essential condition for the liberation of Palestine and the establishment of a theocratic state based on Islamic law (Sharia),

— The need for both unrestrained and unceasing holy war (jihad) to attain the above objective,

— The deliberate disdain for, and dismissal of, any negotiated resolution or political settlement of Jewish and Muslim claims to the Holy Land, and

— The reinforcement of historical anti-Semitic tropes and calumnies married to sinister conspiracy theories.

For years leading up to Oct. 7th, moreover, the leaders of Hamas have steeped their devotees — and their families for that matter — in hatred. They have idealized “the virtue of death-for-Allah,” as counterterrorism expert Matthew Levitt put it in a talk 17 years ago.

Levitt told of a suicide bomber’s mother who instilled in her son the desire for martyrdom and “brought them [her sons] up to become martyrs, to be martyrs for the name of Allah.” Her “martyred” son Muhammad’s old bedroom was adorned with posters of “martyred” Palestinians. The mother, the late Miriam Farhat, was elected to the Palestinian Legislative Council on the Hamas ticket in January 2006. She claimed to be proud that three of her sons were killed in attacks on Israelis.

And yet many say Israel must seek a deal with such leaders. The country must agree to a ceasefire or other hostages — perhaps more than 60 still alive — will be murdered, as the six were. Israelis by the thousands have marched in protest of their government’s refusal — or inability — to make a deal for their release. Nonetheless, nearly three-quarters of Jewish Israelis think a deal is unlikely, according to an August survey by the Israel Democracy Institute.

But can or should Israelis deal with the terrorists? Can they deal with people who refuse even after 76 years to recognize the “Zionist entity,” who insist that “no part of the land of Palestine shall be compromised or conceded, irrespective of the causes, the circumstances and the pressures and no matter how long the occupation lasts,” who reject “any alternative to the full and complete liberation of Palestine, from the river to the sea.”?

Yes, Hamas has traded some of the more than 240 hostages it took for Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails. About 109 were released as of the end of last November, as The Wall Street Journal reported. But another 70 died that day or since (in addition to the 1,200 killed in Israel), and Israeli officials believe 34 or more are dead. This leaves about 60 who may be alive in captivity.

In theory, Israel could trade more prisoners for the remaining hostages and the bodies of those being kept. But, so far, neither side has accepted terms that have been floated for such a trade — and it’s hard to see how the gulf can be bridged.

As suggested by the United States, the terms include a permanent end to hostilities and removal of Israeli troops from in or near Gaza. Hamas, for its part, has rejected any Israeli presence in the so-called Philadelphi corridor, an 8.7-mile strip of land on the Gaza-Egypt border, while Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has insisted that Israel will not leave the corridor free for Hamas. To him, the tunnel-pocked corridor is a transit point for Hamas to rearm.

For his part, Netanyahu has been unmovable on the point that Hamas must be eliminated. In a recent speech, the prime minister repeated that Israel’s war goals are “to destroy Hamas, to bring back all of our hostages, to ensure that Gaza will no longer present a threat to Israel, and to safely return the residents of the northern border.” He also said “three of those war goals go through one place: the Philadelphi Corridor. That is Hamas’s pipeline for oxygen and rearmament.”

Is it unreasonable for Israel to insist that Hamas, an implacable foe that will never accept coexistence, must be destroyed? Can the group ever be trusted to not resume its fight, should a ceasefire be reached? Can a group that wantonly executes six innocents in cold blood — not to mention 1,200 earlier — really be trusted to live up to any commitments?

Hamas’s network of tunnels, some hundreds of miles long, allows terrorists such as the murderers of the six to escape and hide. Israel in mid-August destroyed some 50 such tunnels in a single week, some in the Philadelphi Corridor. Won’t the Hamas fighters just hold out in that network until they can emerge anew and threaten Israel? Will the group ever accept its own demise in a negotiated deal?

In theory, Israel could get back at least some of the hostages by agreeing to those terms and then, after a time, it could return to fight anew with Hamas. That would, of course, spare the lives of however many hostages could be released. But as Hamas trickled out those captives — and, no doubt, it would do so over months, if not years — it would rearm and Israel would be back in Gaza, fighting anew again. Moreover, little could prevent Hamas from trying to capture more hostages.

As New York Times columnist Bret Stephens put it in a piece headlined “A Hostage Deal is a Poison Pill for Israel”: “Whatever one thinks of Netanyahu, the weight of outrage should fall not on him but on Hamas. It released a video of a hostage it later murdered — 24-year-old Eden Yerushalmi, telling her family how much she loved them — on Monday, the day after her funeral. It’s another act of cynical, grotesque and unadulterated sadism by the group that pretends to speak in the name of all Palestinians. It does not deserve a cease-fire so that it can regain its strength. It deserves the same ash heap of history on which, in our better moments, we deposited the Nazis, Al Qaeda and the Islamic State.”

Israel faces a classic Hobson’s Choice. There really is only one way to proceed, and that is to render Hamas incapable of ever attacking again.

The larger question, though, is what vanquishing Hamas would look like. Certainly, it would involve the death of the murderous leader, Yahya Sinwar, and his top ranks — with or without trial. But would it also involve thousands of fighters parading out of tunnels with white flags, renouncing the group they dedicated their lives to? Would that really happen, given their passion for martyrdom?

We may lack adequate models here. For Hamas to be defeated, its soldiers must be permanently disarmed or killed, but more that than, its ideals must be shattered. Gazans and Palestinians in general would have to renounce its aims and methods, much as Germans did with Nazism after World War II.

As many as 8.8 million Germans died in that war, including perhaps 3.27 million civilians, in a total population of 80 million. The population was subsequently impoverished, the German economy crushed. Will proportionately similar numbers of Gazans have to die for Hamas’s philosophy to be eradicated?

It seems like a monstrous idea. Some 2.3 million people live in Gaza, and 10% of them equals 230,000 people, men, women and children. Must that ghastly number be reached? As decent human beings, we must hope not.

And would it really change hearts and minds, much as German attitudes changed after the war? Would the economic rebuilding envisioned by the U.S. plan, in conjunction with Gaza’s Arab neighbors, give people hope, much as the Marshall Plan famously did for Germans? Can we root out the pernicious ideals that people like Farhat espoused, and how can we do so?

Tragically for the Palestinian people, thousands have died already in Gaza. They are also victims of Hamas. How long will it take for those who survive to realize that, even if the weapons that wreaked those horrors were Israeli? How many more must die for the survivors to put the blame where it belongs? Will we see the day when Palestinians disgusted by Hamas lead Israeli soldiers to the group’s redoubts, turning them in in hopes of achieving peace?

There are straws in the wind that suggest progress. A Palestinian on the West Bank, for instance, wrote a letter published by The Free Press.

“ For me, all lives are sacred,” he wrote. “I cried for Hersh and the other hostages just as deeply as I do for innocent Palestinians whose lives have been destroyed by this war. That some people react to the deaths of hostages with celebration or satisfaction is simply beyond my comprehension. It’s something I can’t digest or accept. But I also know how it happens: Kids here are taught from an early age to hate Israelis, to view them as enemies, as occupiers who shouldn’t be anywhere in this land. They live their entire lives with this hate and do not know anything else. I was lucky to have experiences in my life with Jews and Israelis that gave me a radically different understanding.

“I can’t speak for my people any more than a single Israeli can speak for all of you, but still I feel compelled to say: I’m sorry. Please accept my sincere apologies. I regret that we have failed you. I regret that my people have failed you. I may be just one voice but it’s important for me to say as a Palestinian, I mourn with you and stand by your side.”

Soon, the Jewish holidays will be upon us. People will pray for peace. For my part, I will pray for the destruction of Hamas, Islamic Jihad and their ilk, as well as for peace. Can one have the latter without the former? The morally repulsive killings of the six hostages — and so many others — argues for nothing less.

Why is Israel an American obsession?

Posted on August 28, 2024 by Joe Weber

College students could have plenty of other places to worry about

In his cleverly titled book, “The Arc of a Covenant,” Wall Street Journal columnist Walter Russell Mead wrote of a special concern Americans have with Israel. As he put it: “The state of Israel is a speck on the map of the world; it occupies a continent in the American mind.”

Likewise, over a decade ago, in a Foreign Policy piece headlined “America’s Israel Obsession: Why are Americans so preoccupied with my country?,” Tel Aviv-based writer and editor Shmuel Rosner wrote : “The overrepresentation of Israel in the American public square is at times a headache and at times a cause for celebration.”

And, as so distressingly demonstrated by the anti-Israel demonstrations on campuses last spring, this “overrepresentation” is particularly acute at universities. “The State of Israel is an obsession of today’s university, a linchpin around which an extraordinary volume of discourse, pedagogy, and politics revolves,” scholar Rachel Fish wrote presciently in 2022 in a piece for Sapir headlined “Can the Academy be Saved from Anti-Zionism?”

So, as Kamala Harris and Donald Trump prepare for a debate likely to at least touch on the Israel-Gaza war, and as students gather on campuses anew – with some surely planning to mount a new round of disruption – it’s worth speculating on why so many conflicts generate far less of a storm in the U.S. Some have been far bloodier.

New York Times columnist Bret Stephens was helpful on the point in “Can We Be a Little Less Selective in Our Moral Outrage?”

Consider Sudan, Stephens writes. “In Sudan’s case, the humanitarian group Operation Broken Silence estimates that at least 65,000 people have died of violence or starvation since fighting broke out last year, and nearly 11 million people have been turned into refugees.”

And Ethiopia, he adds. “In Ethiopia, Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed — possibly history’s least deserving recipient of a Nobel Peace Prize — first turned his guns on ethnic Tigrayans in one of the world’s bloodiest recent wars, with a death toll estimated as high as 600,000. Now the government is waging war against former allies in the Amhara region, even as the Biden administration last year lifted restrictions on aid owing to its abuse of human rights. How many college protests has this elicited?”

Moreover, what of the suffering of various peoples in other places? “There are also Rohingya in Myanmar, Uyghurs in China, Christians in Nigeria and ethnic minorities in Russia, to name a few,” Stephens notes.

In the face of such horrors, why should a war in a distant nation just a bit larger than New Jersey bring students and others out to march, pitch tents, occupy buildings and otherwise protest? Yes, the numbers of people killed in Gaza are high, even if the Hamas-reported total of 40,500 is inflated — with maybe 17,000 of the dead being combatants who were pledged to the destruction of Israel. But aren’t such figures dwarfed by those in other wars raging about the globe?

Where is the outrage for the other 109 or so wars the Geneva Academy says are now sullying the world? Why are there no demonstrations about the tens of thousands killed in the Russia-Ukraine war? Perhaps more than 150,000 have died so far in that grinding war, which is the result of an unjustified invasion. By contrast, of course, Israel’s actions in Gaza came in response to an invasion of its territory last Oct. 7 and the ensuing massacre and hostage-taking by Hamas and allied groups.

Deaths in war are awful. Civilian deaths, in particular, are horrific. And it’s especially repugnant in Gaza that Hamas treats the deaths of fellow Palestinians — innocents — as “necessary sacrifices.” The great moral tragedy for Israelis is that they’ve been drawn into pulling the triggers in Hamas’s murderous efforts against its own people.

Of course, the moral tragedy on U.S. campuses is that protestors aren’t massing to condemn Hamas. Really, is it not the instigator and true perpetrator here?

On or off campuses, Americans have a host of reasons for their intense focus on Israel. Experts cite the special relationship between the countries ever since Harry S. Truman became the first world leader to recognize Israel as a Jewish state in 1948, only 11 minutes after its creation. Many Christians in the U.S., moreover, have long been preoccupied with Israel, both with the Biblical nation and the modern one. And going back, at least, to President Jimmy Carter in the 1970s, American leaders have tried to broker peace between Israel and its neighbors. Also, the U.S. remains the leading foreign supplier of weapons to the country.

But there is something different about the attention Israel gets on campuses, especially regarding the Gaza bloodshed. First, Palestinians and Arabs generally have been building their presence on many campuses for decades, both among students and faculty.

At my graduate alma mater, Columbia, for instance, the Middle East Institute dates back to 1954. It has set itself apart with such centers as one for the Study of Muslim Societies and another for Palestine Studies. At best, a handful of faculty members associated with the MEI specialize in Israel studies, which is not surprising since the MEI has been funded well by Arab countries and interests. Indeed, Arab interests have been funding some schools quite well:

The Institute for Israel and Jewish Studies on Columbia’s campus is far smaller. But, to its credit, the university does also maintain a dual-degree program with Tel Aviv University. Protestors, of course, want to do away with that five-year-old effort as they try to crush Israel’s relationships with U.S. institutions.

While it’s not clear how many Arab Americans are enrolled in U.S. universities, their numbers are substantial enough to merit attention by researchers. In all, there are believed to be about 3.7 million Arab Americans in the U.S., compared with 7.5 million Jews. Moreover, there are substantial numbers of foreign students from the Middle East studying in U.S. schools.

Given such numbers, anti-Zionist and antisemitic groups such as Students for Justice in Palestine have found ready markets for supporters on some campuses. Elite schools such as Columbia, Harvard and Penn – which have notable Arab student populations – have dominated headlines. But activists set up encampments at more than 100 institutions last spring, as tallied by The Chronicle of Higher Education.

Outside Columbia University last spring; Source: Getty Images/NBC News

And let’s not discount antisemitism, which has been rising sharply in the U.S. College students swim in the same sea as all Americans, so some are sure to share the ugly sentiments of those around them.

Still, the campus activism against Israel may be louder and more visible than the real level of concern among students — the hostility may be more wide than deep. A survey last May found that only 8% of some 1,250 students polled took part in demonstrations. Moreover, those surveyed ranked the war as ninth among issues that concern them in a list headed by healthcare reform and educational funding and access.

In all, three surveys by Intelligent.com, Generation Lab/Axios, and Newsweek/College Pulse last spring found that roughly three in five students were on campuses where pro-Palestinian protests occurred. But the vast majority stayed away from the occupations.

Less encouragingly, a significant portion of students not participating were supportive of the protests, as reported by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression. According to the Intelligent.com survey, support among students for the protests ran as high as 65%.

The dawning academic year will test many things. How prepared are administrators to handle protests? Perhaps more important, how prepared are they to see to it that their students are more knowledgeable than many proved to be last year? Ignorance of the issues involved was astonishing among students, with many protestors unable to even identify which bodies of water they referred to in chanting “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.”

In her insightful work for Sapir, Fish offered some compelling optimism:

“Is it possible to change anti-Zionist ways of thinking in at least those institutions of higher education that claim to welcome critical thinking and value a true liberal arts approach?,” Fish wrote. “I believe so. But it will require faculty who have the moral courage to question the received wisdom, and senior administrators who believe that the university ought to be a marketplace of ideas rather than a place where students imbibe the ‘truths’ of an anti-Western, anti-Zionist monoculture. The greatest challenge of all will be to cultivate within students not only the critical thinking skills that will allow them to arrive at their own conclusions, but also the courage to risk the implication of those conclusions — the willingness not to fit in with the conventional wisdom, which is unsubtly backed up by a small but powerful cadre of students and faculty whose beliefs dominate university discourse today.”

Of course, she wrote that in 2022, well before the year of discontent that was the last academic year. Now, efforts to build a solid education, to provide true and complete information, seem more essential than ever.

A tempest looms

Posted on August 17, 2024 by Joe Weber

The coming school year will test leaders and try many

Trinculo, as portrayed by Russell Brand; Source: Fandom

In Shakespeare’s ingenious play, “The Tempest,” a man takes shelter next to a sleeping sea monster. “Misery acquaints a man with strange bedfellows,” the jester Trinculo tells the audience.

Such is the case with the Philadelphia-based Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), antisemites and Republican politicians. Peculiarly, all seem allied now in celebrating the departure of Nemat “Minouche” Shafik as president of Columbia University.

“Marked by chaos and cowardice, Minouche Shafik’s tenure was a disaster for freedom of expression,” a FIRE official tweeted on X. “Columbia University now has an opportunity to select a leader who will recommit the institution to protecting free speech and academic freedom. Students, faculty, trustees, and alumni should demand no less.”

Troublingly, the bold-faced message echoed that of Columbia’s suspended chapter of the Students for Justice in Palestine. “The student intifada outlasted Minouche Shafik and will outlast every corrupt administrator until divestment, liberation, and return,” the antisemitic group posted.

Speaker Mike Johnson at Columbia, source: AFP/Getty Images via Politico

And, for different reasons, FIRE’s reaction also reflected that of GOP politicians, including House Speaker Mike Johnson and Reps. Elise Stefanik and Virginia Foxx. The congress members’ hearings led to resignations by the leaders of the University of Pennsylvania and Harvard. And Johnson last April grandstanded on the campus, where he was booed.

“Jewish students at Columbia beginning this school year should breathe a sigh of relief,” Johnson (R-La.) wrote on X. “We hope that President Shafik’s resignation serves as an example to university administrators across the country that tolerating or protecting antisemites is unacceptable and will have consequences.”

Just why Jewish students should feel relieved is hardly clear, though.

NYPD at Columbia; source: AFP/Getty Images

By asking police on the campus twice last April, Shafik was responding in part to the complaints of such students, even as that angered FIRE and the antisemites. The first time it was to clear an encampment that, in part, was blocking Jewish students from going to class. The second was to clear a campus building that students and outsiders had occupied.

But she infuriated the GOP officials by not moving more quickly against the camping protestors.

FIRE’s motives differ, of course, from those of its strange bedfellows. The group is committed to free speech and academic freedom, which few would argue with (aside perhaps from some GOP politicians, particularly in Indiana and Florida). FIRE would even tolerate much “hate speech,” though it draws the line at illegal threats, harassment, incitement and hate crimes.

So, why didn’t it defend Shafik, instead of being jubilant at her departure? Was she not acting against threats and harassment, against hate? FIRE’s intellectual inconsistency is certainly troubling.

Despite its condemnation of the former Columbia president, FIRE appears to adhere to the maxim that one’s right to swing his fist ends where another’s nose begins. It doesn’t support students being threatened or blocked from class, for instance.

“Hopefully policies are in place and discussions are happening with students and faculty surrounding how to respond in case encampments go up or students are being threatened or denied access to different portions of campus,” Nico Perrino, FIRE’s executive vice president, said, as quoted by VOX.

FIRE’s problem, of course, that it can’t tolerate any moves that would inhibit free expression — even if it is ignorant expression.

But, for educators, the real question isn’t a matter of free speech – it’s a matter of schooling versus ignorance. To most academics, student protestors have every right to speak their minds; the larger problem is that the demonstrations showed that there’s little real information in those young minds.

For starters, there’s the ignorance many showed by chanting “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” without even knowing that the Jordan and the Mediterranean were being referred to. In a survey cited by The Wall Street Journal, only 47% of the chanters could name the bodies of water. Less than a quarter of the students could even identify Yasser Arafat. And they were blind to the fact that the slogan they shouted meant removal of Jews from Israel, by murder if needed (Hamas’s preferred tactic).

Would they protest if they knew more about the history of Israel, a history in which Jews long lived in the land that they reclaimed in the early 20^th Century? If they knew more about the state’s right to exist and its repeated targeting by Arabs, would they be in their encampments? Would their sympathies differ if they knew of the repeated instances of efforts to achieve peace that were rebuffed by Arabs?

Understandably, students are infuriated by the deaths of thousands of innocents in Gaza, as Israelis try to destroy terrorists who hide among them. Who could not be aggrieved by that? Such deaths, as those lost in all wars, are monstrous.

Site of Hamas attack on Oct. 7, 2023; Source: AFP/Getty Images via CNN

But do the protestors know that Hamas deliberately incited those deaths with its Oct. 7 assault on innocents in Israel? Are they aware that this murderous and suicidal group — lionized by some Palestinians — eagerly welcomes more such deaths for the propaganda it gets for its cause? That Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar calls such losses “necessary sacrifices”? That some Gazans deride Hamas for bringing on their misery and loathe the group that has ruled, tyranically, for decades?

As campuses ready themselves for what could be stepped up protests in the coming academic year, educating students on these issues could be a useful approach. Most schools have mandatory curricula. So why couldn’t that include education on issues in the Mideast (so long as the profs are committed to peaceful coexistence between Jews and Arabs there)?

Columbia’s vaunted core curriculum could include such teaching (though perhaps not by its propagandistic Middle East Institute, which is heavy on Arab studies and not so much on Israel-related ones). Perhaps students who got in hot water over their actions last spring could be required to take and pass balanced, fair and accurate coursework as a condition of being reinstated on campus.

The outlook, however, isn’t bright for knowledge to prevail in the coming year. Instead, escalation seems to be on the agenda.

“Shafik’s resignation is not the end,” Columbia’s chapter of the SJP posted, for instance. “It is not yet time to celebrate.”

That group and a related one, Columbia University Apartheid Divest, are sticking by their demand that the university divest itself of all securities that “profit from Israeli apartheid, genocide and occupation in Palestine.” Encouraging its own sort of apartheid, CUAD also demands that Columbia “sever academic ties with Israeli universities, including the Global Center in Tel Aviv, the Dual Degree Program with Tel Aviv University, and all study-abroad programs, fellowships, and research collaborations with Israeli academic institutions.”

Such demands are hardly a formula for coexistence, hardly a prescription for peace.

But what is worrisome is whether such demands – which such organizations are free to express, of course – will be accompanied by stepped up harassment or even violence. The outlook is troubling.

Already, some groups, such as the Young Democratic Socialists of America, are calling for a national student strike. What happens when some students, particularly Jews, try to get through the picket lines?

And at New York University a group, the Palestine Solidarity Coalition, endorsed “armed struggle” and resistance “by any means necessary,” though it sought to softpedal that when called on it. A group at the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee, meanwhile, is threatening Hillel, the Jewish Federation and any organization supporting Israel, saying they are unwelcome on campus and will be treated “as extremist criminals.”

Certainly, many Jewish students last year were made to feel unwelcome on many campuses. “When the encampment started, I thought it was great that people were standing up for what they believe in, speaking their minds and all that,” Ellie Rapoport, a 20-year-old senior at Metropolitan State University of Denver, told The New York Times. “But once people started carrying around antisemitic signs and saying antisemitic things, it got a little out of hand, and it got a little scary to be on campus.”

Now those demonstrators plan to exercise their discontent, as one put it, at the Democratic National Convention. Surely, they won’t stop there.

For many campuses, the coming semester will be challenging. Will the misery that Shakespeare wrote of in “The Tempest” pale beside the experiences some students will endure?

Some administrators, such as Shafik and her colleagues at Harvard and Penn, were set back on their heels by the experiences of last spring — knocked hard enough that they left the jobs to successors. Will the new leaders protect students, as well as free speech? Will they push their institutions to remove the cant and strip away the blinders that shroud the eyes of so many students?

The costs of waffling

Posted on July 30, 2024 by Joe Weber

A look at how some campuses are preparing for another round of Gaza War demonstrations

For most college students, the fall semester is still a few weeks away, but some antisemites eager for another year of tumult are already making their plans. So, too, are some schools that are keen to avoid a repeat of the anti-Israel encampments that plagued so many campuses in the spring.

Five schools may be representative of what is on tap — or what isn’t. Their action or, in some cases, their inaction may shape what students and faculty will face.

First, there’s my graduate alma mater, Columbia University. Protestors there set the tone for the rest of the country last spring with encampments and then the occupation of a building, a move that was smashed by police. Threats of expulsion and worse abounded.

So where is the university now in its planning? Many of us recently got a note from the university “in the spirit of keeping alumni informed” that has a fair number of words – some with several syllables. But, remarkably, the statement says nothing.

Columbia protest encampment, source NY Daily News, April 24

The university senate is “reviewing the rules” that govern conduct in protests, we were told. President Minouche Shafik, we read, wants everyone on campus to understand the unspecified expectations and consequences if rules are broken (though none were detailed).

Boldly dithering, the school is also “facilitating a process with affected students to hear their views and work toward mediated outcomes,” the note says. And there will be unspecified “new components” in student orientation programs.

Vague? For clarification, check out the president’s July 24 “Update for Our Community.” There, Shafik says the university has “been working hard to put in place more mechanisms for community consultation, more clarity about our rules going forward, more training on discrimination issues for everyone (staff, faculty, and students), better capacity to handle incidents and complaints, and stronger internal engagement and communications.”

Regarding issues raised by the student protests, she says, two faculty members from the Negotiation and Conflict Resolution Program at the School of Professional Studies were asked to facilitate a process with affected students to hear their views and work toward mediated outcomes. The two have met with a lot of people so far, she adds.

“We use the word ‘mediation’ rather than ‘negotiation’ because we believe it more accurately reflects our goals: to engage in a facilitated process of productive dialogue with students to identify paths forward that can support our community’s shared educational mission,” she thunders.

Much more is under way, Shafik assures us all.

As for those expulsions and disciplinary actions? We haven’t heard much beyond a report that some students who occupied Hamilton Hall are having their cases moved from one oversight body, the rehabilitation-oriented Center for Student Success and Intervention, to another, the more legalistic University Judicial Board in the university.

But Columbia did drop trespassing charges against its campers, who had been swept out in a police action on April 18 when more than 100 people were arrested. Recall that protestors then moved their tents to a different lawn on campus, where some remained until April 30. Then, after protestors occupied Hamilton Hall, police moved in and arrested 109 more people.

In a recent deal with the Manhattan District Attorney, criminal charges brought against 13 of the occupiers, including some Columbia alumni and outsiders, will be dismissed after a six-month probationary period and completion of an in-person class on what constitutes “peaceful and legal protesting,” as the Columbia Spectator reported. The class will also cover how such protests affect both the campus and Morningside Heights community.

Now, contrast that with the University of South Florida. After it was unsettled by demonstrations, USF expelled the leader of the local chapter of the Students for a Democratic Society (remember those folks?) and recently upheld that move. The student, a sociology and women’s studies major, was a senior, so her degree is in limbo. It also suspended another student, a junior, for a year.

And consider the recent move at Indiana University. As reported by Inside Higher Ed, the IU trustees on July 29 adopted a policy with real teeth. It bans camping that’s not part of a university event; prohibits “expressive activity” outside of 6 a.m. to 11 p.m.; limits water-soluble chalk to sidewalks; forbids affixing “signs and symbols” to the ground, university buildings, flagpoles and other structures; bans “light projections” without university approval; and forbids temporary “structures and/or mass physical objects” without university approval, which must be requested at least 10 days in advance.

As the news outlet reported, students who violate the rules could face punishments up to expulsion. Employees could face ramifications up to firing, depending on the seriousness of the violation.

Not a lot of dithering or vagueness in those spots.

University of Pennsylvania; source: AP, via NY Post

And take a look at the University of Pennsylvania, where a couple top administrators lost their jobs in a dustup about antisemitism on campus last December. After anti-Israel protests in the spring, the school in early June put in place temporary rules – which likely will endure – banning encampments.

“To ensure the safety of the Penn community and to protect the health and property of individuals, encampments and overnight demonstrations are not permitted in any University location, regardless of space (indoor or outdoor),” the new guidelines state. “Unauthorized overnight activities will be considered trespassing and addressed.”

As IHE reported, the rules also prohibit light projections on building without permission. Some protestors were fond of lighting up spaces with slogans on building walls.

Break the rules, the Penn folks added, and disciplinary action will follow. Students and faculty alike face actions up to suspensions.

The get-tough campuses mark a bright, bold contrast with those that have taken a softer touch.

Perhaps the best example of coddling — and its costs — is the University of Wisconsin Milwaukee. In May, Chancellor Mark A. Mone and several top administrators met for three days with camping protestors from the “UWM Popular University for Palestine Coalition.” The administrators then put out a statement giving the students much of what they wanted, calling for a ceasefire in Gaza and citing the International Criminal Court’s term of “plausible genocide.”

In a feeble attempt at evenhandedness, Mone et al. added: “We also condemn the attack by Hamas on October 7, 2023, resulting in the killing of 1,200 innocent Israeli civilians, military personnel and police.”

“Innocent civilians, especially children, must not be the targets of war,” they diplomatically said. “This is why we also call for the release of the remaining Israeli and international hostages held by Hamas and the release of Palestinian men, women and children held as hostages in military detention in Israel. We condemn all violence and call for it to end.”

But Mone and his colleagues went further. They condemned the destruction of universities in Gaza, calling it “scholasticide,” and said they would review their study-abroad programs.

They noted that Hillel sponsors visits to Israel but, drawing a line, contended that the Jewish campus organization is separate from the university and helpfully noted that the trips are not advertised on UWM.edu. And they added that a Milwaukee-based global water nonprofit, The Water Council, at Mone’s urging, severed ties with a pair of Israeli water companies accused of denying water to Gazans.

So, what did the Milwaukee diplomats get for all their concessions? Well, the encampment came down in the spring.

But now, a new year looms. So now the pro-Palestinian coalition, in a post on Instagram, took aim at “Hillel, the Jewish Federation, etc.,” calling them “local extremist groups” and saying “ANY organization or entity that supports Israel is not welcome at UWM.”

To underscore that, the coalition added: “Any organization that has not separated themselves from Israel will be treated accordingly as extremist criminals. Stay tuned.”

Vague as that threat was, it was clear enough to spur someone at the campus to show a bit more spine. In an unsigned release under the “Office of the Chancellor” logo, the school blasted the “intimidating language aimed at Jewish community members and organizations on campus that support Israel.”

“UWM strongly denounces these statements and denounces any form of antisemitism, and we will be actively monitoring campus as a result,” the statement said. “Every student, employee and community member must be safe on our campus.”

“UWM takes this post seriously and recognizes that the language in it, if acted upon, would undermine the safety of the UWM community, especially Jewish individuals and organizations,” it said. “Where speech is not protected by the First Amendment, UWM will address it through appropriate processes, which could include student and student organization disciplinary processes. While hateful or intimidating speech is often legally protected, it conflicts with the respect and conduct we ask of each member of our community.”

So, did Mone et al. get a respectful response? The initial post has disappeared from the Instagram site, but in answer, the pro-Palestinian group doubled down on its threats. It accused the administration of “extreme bias,” while insisting its threats were not against Jews or Judaism, but rather against supporters of Zionism and Israel. Some might think that’s a distinction without a difference, but not the coalition folks.

“Groups that fail to distance themselves from this rogue regime will not be normalized or welcomed on our campus,” the coalition said. Further, it said “any support of Israel is considered an extremist position, only held by extremists, and we refuse to normalize extremism on our campus.”

While they were at it, the group whined that Palestinian students “are forced” every day to walk past the Golda Meir Library, calling the late Israel prime minister “a terrorist.” Meir, whose family fled Russian pogroms to settle in Milwaukee, in 1917 attended a teacher-training school that was a predecessor of UWM. The university named its library for her in 1979, less than a year after her death.

Since at least last December, Palestinian supporters have demanded the library’s name be changed. The campus chapter of the Students for a Democratic Society demanded a new name to “honor the martyrs of Palestine.” In March, someone broke a window in the library and spray-painted “Free Palestine” on the building.

The university’s ringing response: a statement saying “Neither antisemitism or Islamophobia has any place on our campus or in our community.”

Perhaps it’s time for the folks at UWM and Columbia to demand a bit more of themselves and of the students they teach. They could take a page from IU, Penn and USF.

Hamas and Columbia — Part 5

Posted on May 1, 2024 by Joe Weber

Rooting out the rot in the faculty

Mohamed Abdou; source: Middle East Institute

Soon after the Oct. 7 atrocities by Hamas, a visiting scholar at Columbia University declared, “Yes, I’m with Hamas and Hezbollah and Islamic Jihad.” The man, Mohamed Abdou, was brought onto campus for the spring 2024 semester and teaches a weekly class on “Decolonial-Queerness & Abolition.” A website at UC Berkeley, where he recently spoke, describes him as “a North African-Egyptian Muslim anarchist interdisciplinary activist-scholar of Indigenous, Black, critical race, and Islamic studies, as well as gender, sexuality, abolition, and decolonization.”

Another faculty member, Iranian studies and comparative literature Prof. Hamid Dabashi, in 2018 wrote on Facebook that “Every dirty treacherous ugly and pernicious happening in the world just wait for a few days and the ugly name ‘Israel’ will pop up in the atrocities.” As reported by the New York Post, in a separate post “Dabashi also allegedly bashed Zionists as ‘hyenas’ – sparking calls from a pro-Israel student group for the professor to be rebuked.” Critics circulated a petition calling for his firing.

A third Columbia figure, Joseph Andoni Massad, last October described the Hamas attack of Oct. 7 as a “resistance offensive,” according to The New York Times. Massad, who teaches modern Arab politics and intellectual history at Columbia, where he also received his doctorate in political science, has long been known for his anti-Israel positions, the paper reported. A day after the Hamas horrors, he published an article in The Electronic Intifada replete with adjectives such as “shocking success” and “astonishing.” “No less astonishing was the Palestinian resistance’s takeover of several Israeli settler-colonies near the Gaza boundary and even as far away as 22 kms, as in the case of Ofakim,” he wrote. “Perhaps the major achievement of the resistance in the temporary takeover of these settler-colonies is the death blow to any confidence that Israeli colonists had in their military and its ability to protect them.”

Is it any wonder, then, that otherwise intelligent students at the Ivy League school demonstrated against Israeli actions in Gaza? With such propagandists lecturing in classrooms otherwise known for careful and respectful scholarship, should we expect nothing else from students presumably ignorant of the long history of Hamas terrorism and the group’s origins and aims? What can we expect when professors recast the Oct. 7 monstrosity as “just one salvo in an ongoing war between an occupying state and the people it occupies” in a statement signed by more than 100 Columbia professors? When they say the massacre could be regarded “as an occupied people exercising a right to resist violent and illegal occupation,” as they did?

Nemat “Minouche” Shafik, source: Columbia Spectator

Belatedly, Nemat “Minouche” Shafik is taking aim at least at a few such toxic academics. At her April 17 hearing in Congress, the Columbia president said that Massad and a questionable law school professor, Katherine M. Franke (who is associated with the university’s Center for Palestine Studies) — were under investigation for making “discriminatory remarks,” the Times reported. She also said that Abdou “will never work at Columbia again.”

Of course, Shafik also took aim on April 30 at demonstrators who damaged and occupied Hamilton Hall on the campus. Her action in bringing in the NYPD to arrest the 40-50 occupiers was necessary, in my view, because they had gone well beyond setting up tents and chanting. They were, instead, disrupting the work of administrators whose offices were in the building, were damaging property and, in the case of outsiders, were criminally trespassing on university grounds. Far beyond merely exercising legitimate free speech, they posed a real danger on the campus.

Some number of them – and possibly some encampment demonstrators – were not even associated with Columbia, but were “professional outside agitators,” according to New York officials and university officials. Mayor Eric Adams blamed such outsiders for radicalizing students. For their part, Columbia officials said of the Hamilton occupiers: “We believe that the group that broke into and occupied the building is led by individuals who are not affiliated with the University. Sadly, this dangerous decision followed more than a week of what had been productive discussions with representatives of the West Lawn encampment.”

Columbia arrests, source: Financial Times

Indeed, it appears the occupiers were not even associated with Columbia University Apartheid Divest, the group that had been in talks with university officials. In a statement, CUAD identified the protesters occupying Hamilton as an “autonomous group.” In other words, these outsiders co-opted the students, using them as fodder.

Still, at best, the protesting Columbia students and probably many at other schools around the country are distressingly ignorant. I’m sure that many are responding to the ugliness of the Gaza war, an horrific affair that, in my view, is a necessary assault on a murderous and suicidal group that cannot be permitted within rocket range of Israel. It appears that the students, as they react to the ugly news of the day without any historical context, are responding to the propaganda spewed by some of their teachers.

It’s also possible that the students, both at Columbia and outside, are responding to what one researcher called “the ovation model.” Prof. Omar Wasow of the University of California, Berkeley, compares this effect to the response of a theater audience, saying “if some people in the front stand up, then other people start to stand up, and it’s a cascade through the auditorium.” By that theory, protestors in the media capital of New York City are mimicked by others who read and see about the action and are keen to join in.

Anti-Israel protest at UNL, source: The Daily Nebraskan

Even the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, where I taught for 14 years, is apparently subject to this effect. A so-far small group of protestors gathered today on campus for a daylong series of “trainings and teach-ins.” The group, which includes outsiders from Nebraskans for Peace, does not appear to include in any of its “teach-ins” views from anti-Hamas groups or pro-Israel groups. No one, so far as I can tell, will be calling on Hamas to lay down its arms and seek peaceful coexistence. So, one must wonder what sort of education the Nebraskans will get on these matters?

Prof. Ari Kohen, source: Lincoln Journal Star

Will any of them be invited to take a course taught by a friend, Prof. Ari Kohen, that looks at the issues from other than a one-sided view? In that class, which he has taught for several years, Kohen acknowledges that “there is unlikely to be a single, simple solution to the many interrelated problems that we will identify…. But in recognizing the depth and complexity of those problems, we will undoubtedly learn a great deal about what any solution must include.”

Universities in the past have risen to the occasion when demagogues spewed hate. At UNL, for instance, Nazi appeared on campus a few years ago. “When one of these students was ‘outed’ by groups like Unicorn Riot and the Nebraska Antifascists, many students called for removing him from campus for his speech,” Kohen wrote last fall. “University leaders considered the demands and rejected them. Instead, the university threw itself behind more speech, namely rallies against hate and a campaign about the inclusivity we want to promote on campus. A “Hate Will Never Win” rally drew 1,500 people to the school’s basketball stadium, and the school helped distribute T-shirts with that message to anyone who wanted one. The message could be seen all over our campus.”

Alex Chapman leads the Hate Will Never Win rally at the Coliseum. February 14, 2018. Photo by Craig Chandler / University Communication

“Jews are being asked to deal with a level of hostility that feels like targeted harassment due to its repetition, intensity and pervasiveness,” Kohen wrote. “And, rather than people telling us they’ve got our back, we’re being told, especially on social media and especially from people on the left, that perhaps we’re being overly dramatic about our feelings. The university presidents should have been able to explain that people can say odious things but that all of the rest of us must respond by calling out those things for being odious. They should also have been able to explain that calling for genocide almost certainly would amount to harassment and an unsafe environment but that we have to work together to be clear about what is and what isn’t targeted harassment.”

Should Columbia distribute pro-Israel T-shirts? Would large-scale rallies denouncing Hamas as murderous and suicidal be effective? So long as there are faculty members at the school who espouse noxious views, such measures would be fruitless, except for those from on or off campus who think otherwise. Indeed, Jews on campuses including Columbia initially protested for Israel last fall, but they’ve largely been driven into fearful silence, sad spectators in the latest uproars. “I think people make uneducated assumptions,” a young Jewish leader at Columbia told The Washington Post. “They look at Jewish students and assume what they believe. They assume [the Jewish students] want a certain group of people dead, which isn’t true at all, whatsoever. What everyone wants is peace.”

A friend has suggested that the pro-Hamas demonstrations are clarifying and that they have served to reveal the underlying anti-Semitism at some of the nation’s leading universities. Indeed, the growth of such anti-Semitism around the country may be simply on display now at schools, bubbling up from the thugs to the academy, where people should know better. He pointed to a piece by Tablet editor at large Liel Liebovitz, an Israeli who earned his doctorate at Columbia, that argued: “Maybe it’s time to let Columbia, Yale, and other elite schools become what they already basically are: finishing schools for the children of Chinese, Qatari, and other global elites.” Referring to “four years in an airless, ideological gulag,” he argued that such schools are “national security threats that we must address forcefully” and complained that the Columbia faculty “long ago lost its decency, its courage, and its reason.”

Clearly, some of the faculty have lost their ability to reason and to teach students to do so, based on facts. But I’m not ready to toss them all. If this moment gives universities the opportunity to replace the pro-Hamas zealots with real scholars, it will serve us all well. That will take time.

The academic ranks have been infiltrated for years by anti-Israel colleagues who have masterfully driven the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions effort to the forefront on campuses. It is not accidental that the protestors on many campuses are pressing their schools to divest themselves of securities in companies tied to Israel and to boycott Israeli academic institutions. The idea is to isolate the Jewish state and ultimately destroy it.

Undoing the work of the BDS-supporting faculty will take time. Perhaps driving out the likes of Abdou will be a start.

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