Tag Archives: Israel

Taking his marbles and going home

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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.”

Joseph Edelman, source: Spiking

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. 7th 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.

At the Temple Mount; source: Reuters

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

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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.

Source: The Times of Israel

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.

Source: National Geographic

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?

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College students could have plenty of other places to worry about

Source: Tourist Israel

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.

Source: Center for Israel Education

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.” 

Rachel Fish, source: rachelfish.com

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

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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 20th 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?

Source: Washington Square News, NYU

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

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

Source: Wisconsin Right Now

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.

Columbia, source: Business Insider

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.

Hillel at Milwaukee

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.”

Source: Fight Back! News

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

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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.” 

Hamid Dabashi, Source: X

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.

Joseph Andoni Massad, Source: X

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.

Hamas and Columbia — Part 2

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Some of my fellow alums are troubled by the events on campus

Columbia encampment, source: New York Times

Journalists, especially those educated at such superb institutions as the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, care about truth, thoroughness, accuracy and free speech. This is evident in the alumni site for the school, which lately has carried some complaints about flaws alums see in major media coverage of campus protests.

For instance, Lizzie Bibb (class of ’83) said her daughter visited the Columbia campus recently “and reported that the tent encampment was peaceful, Jewish students were present and welcomed, and a Passover seder was held yesterday.” She asked: “What is a college education if not an opportunity to learn critical thinking skills, as well as a ‘safe’ place in which to exercise self-expression and engage in thoughtful debate?”

Another alum, Steven Manning, asked whether the J School students are covering the events. “They’ll never cover a bigger story of the blatant violation of student and free speech rights,” he suggested.

And two alums – digital communications consultant Bessie King, 39, and film director Norman Green, 67 – jousted off the alum site, in the Daily Beast. Green blasted the protestors as “nihilistic pro-terror wack jobs,” adding: “At some point, murderous crackpots attacking Jews need to be held accountable. Our students deserve to be protected from them.” For her part, King called his views “hateful” and “delusional,” and chastised Green for “immediately jumping to the conclusion that a pro-Palestine peaceful protest equals: ‘Kill all Jews.’”

Indeed, as the administration negotiates with the students about removing their encampment, I hope that students at the J School are covering the events. The college paper, the Columbia Spectator, has been doing so pretty well, it seems to me. As students with IDs, its young journalists have access to the private campus, while major media don’t. But it and radio station WKCR are usually staffed by undergrads not affiliated with the graduate J School.

While the students camping on the grounds don’t appear to be violent, some of the reporting has very much been at odds with what Bibb’s daughter observed, nonetheless. As pro-Israel counter-protestors stood on the Sundial on Saturday evening waving Israeli and U.S. flags, for instance, “an individual held a sign reading ‘Al-Qasam’s Next Targets’ with an arrow pointing at the protesters. Al-Qassam is the military wing of Hamas,” the paper reported.

Some Jewish students – perhaps those agreeing with the protests — found little hostility, bit others reported a fair bit of it.

 “What’s funny about Hamas killing Jews? What’s funny about it?” Rachel Freilich, CC ’27, asked a student who was laughing and taking pictures or recording on his phone, the paper reported. “It had me wondering if someone on my campus not only is just going to glorify and justify Hamas’ terror attacks, call on them to come and kill me next, and then laugh about it, like why should I stay here, at a place that seems to be failing to protect me and calling on terrorists to come into the University and kill me?”

In a video the paper mentioned, people at the Sundial shouted at the pro-Israel protesters, “Go back to Europe” and “All you do is colonize.”

And official student groups have found much to worry about. “We have recently received reports of death threats, antisemitic rhetoric, and stalking targeted against our Jewish students,” a statement by the Columbia College Student Council, General Studies Student Council, and Barnard’s Student Government Board said. CCSC. “While we support every student’s right to engage in legitimate and peaceful political discourse, violence and speech that incites violence against minority groups in our very own community is unacceptable.”

Good journalism, of course, should flesh out such reports of harassment – and do more, detailing both the concerns and depth of knowledge among the protestors. Were I teaching undergrads or grad students at Columbia, I’d suggest some key questions they should pose to the demonstrators:

— How much do you know about Hamas? Are you aware that killing and evicting Jews from Israel is a key objective of the group? Are you aware of statements by leader Ismail Haniyeh like this one from 2020: “We cannot, in exchange for money or projects, give up Palestine and our weapons. We will not give up the resistance… We will not recognize Israel, Palestine must stretch from the [Jordan] River to the [Mediterranean] Sea.” 

— Do you know that the chant dealing with the river and the sea alludes to that vision, a vision of a Jew-free zone through the whole area?

— Do you believe that rape, murder and kidnapping of innocent concertgoers and families in their homes, as happened on Oct. 7, are legitimate military tactics? Do you believe that Hamas, which last held an election in Gaza in 2006, is a legitimate representative of the Palestinians there, not just a force that holds power through killing and intimidation?

— Do you agree with comments by Hamas official Hamad Al-Regeb in an April 2023 sermon in which he prayed for “annihilation” and “paralysis” of the Jews whom he described as filthy animals? “[Allah] transformed them into filthy, ugly animals like apes and pigs because of the injustice and evil they had brought about,” he said. Al-Regeb also prayed for the ability to “get to the necks of the Jews.” 

— The student demonstrators might also be asked whether they believe their actions are playing into the propaganda aims of Hamas and allied groups, such as the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. As they unsettle life on campus for Jews and others who are there to learn, do they feel they may just be serving useful idiots for such groups?

Source: Israeli Mission to the UN

As The Wall Street Journal reported: “On March 25, the Columbia University Apartheid Divest student group hosted an event called ‘Resistance 101’ on campus. It featured leaders of the PFLP-affiliated Samidoun, Within Our Lifetime and other extremist organizations.” Former PFLP official Khaled Barakat, at the session, referred to his “friends and brothers in Hamas, Islamic Jihad [and] the PFLP in Gaza,” saying that particularly after Oct. 7, “when they see students organizing outside Palestine, they really feel that they are being backed as a resistance and they’re being supported.”

On March 30 on Hezbollah’s Al-Manar TV, Barakat said “the vast majority” of young Americans and Canadians now “support armed resistance” because of “the introduction of colonialism, racism, and slavery studies into history curricula,” the Journal reported.

I’m sure the main motivating factor for many of the students is the horrific killing and wounding of thousands of Gazans, as the Israelis seek to root out Hamas. Though the numbers reported by the Hamas-controlled health authority are dubious (something else worth asking the students about), there’s no doubt that many innocents have died. Indeed, I know of few Jews who would not grieve for those deaths.

But do the students lay the blame for those deaths where it should be laid? Do they see that Hamas invited the Israeli response with its Oct. 7th savagery, that the “martyrdom” of Palestinians is central to its suicidal war strategy?

 On this point, I would suggest that student journalists ask about comments from Palestinians, such as this piece by John Aziz, a British Palestinian writer and musician, who writes: “Hamas’ approach, in other words, has been a disaster for Palestinians in Gaza, not to mention the Israelis and people of other nationalities — including Americans and Britons — murdered, raped, and kidnapped on October 7 itself. Those who wish to style themselves as pro-Palestinian should recognise the failure of Hamas as leaders for Palestinians.”

I don’t dispute that the protestors should be free to speak their minds, and indeed attempts to suppress the demonstration at Columbia have backfired. In response, students on other campuses are mimicking the Columbia encampment approach.

But I also believe hate speech and advocacy of violence crosses a line. I suggest that students who engage in that should be compelled to take sensible courses dealing with Israel and Palestine.

The troublesome thing is: what exactly is in the minds of the protestors? What misinformation drives them? How much do they really know? That is the sort of thing that student journalists need to get at it if they are to report fully on the protests. That is the sort of thing that my fellow alums might reasonably concern themselves with, as well.

About those city resolutions and university administrator statements …

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Should mayors, city councils and school chancellors take stances on the war in Gaza?

We are lucky to live high in the mountains of Colorado, a bit over an hour’s drive to Denver, just over three hours flight time to Washington, D.C., and about 14 and a half hours to Jerusalem by plane. Despite the distance, serious issues in these places – matters such as the Israel-Hamas war that trouble people in those cities — trouble us. We care a lot.

But should our local officials take a stand on that war, casting votes that suggest that their views represent the views of most of us? And, beyond sending a message – one way or another– to Washington, D.C., do resolutions at their meetings do anything beyond making proponents feel good? Are they anything more than empty gestures?

In many places around the country, pro-Palestinian organizations have called on local government leaders to back their demand for a ceasefire in Gaza, winning support in at least 48 cities, including Chicago, Detroit, Atlanta and Seattle. By contrast, leaders in at least 20 communities have passed resolutions condemning the Hamas atrocities of Oct. 7th, with a handful more calling more broadly for peace.

Recently, the Denver City Council hosted a heated debate about a proposal to issue a proclamation calling for a ceasefire. Hours of public testimony were logged as citizens loudly made their voices heard. The mid-February proposal failed by an 8-4 vote.

A few days later, the council in Boulder shot down a similar proposal, with only two of the nine members urging it to be put forward. Both councils parted company on the matter with folks in Glenwood Springs, whose council members some days earlier unanimously endorsed a call for a ceasefire, becoming the first city in Colorado to do so.

Now, in today’s local paper, the Summit Daily News, a letter-writer called on officials in our neighborhood to press for a ceasefire. “Ending the killing should be a no-brainer,” writer Birrion Sondahl argued. “The least we can do in Summit County is call for an end to the killing.”

But is international policy and the conduct of other nations – even the actions of officials in Washington, D.C. — really within the purview of people elected to deal with issues such as local development, homelessness, municipal finances and even the proverbial potholes?

Source: Rocky Mountain Peace and Justice Center

As Aaron Brockett, mayor of most-progressive Boulder, argued, don’t councils have enough on their plates already?

“We have so many huge problems right here in our town of Boulder, Colorado, dozens of people living out on our streets, people dying in traffic violence on a regular basis,” Brockett said, as reported by the Boulder Reporting Lab. There are “any number of major local problems and issues where the nine of us can have a very direct and immediate impact. And I feel that that is what we need to focus on as a council.”

Another council member, Matt Benjamin, concurred. “As Mayor Brockett pointed out, we have people dying right now in this community,” Benjamin said. “A lot of them,” he added, before referencing the homeless and formerly homeless people who died in Boulder County last year.

In their stances, the Boulderites agreed with editorialists at The Denver Post, who lambasted the failed local proclamation and others like it. They argued: “All of these resolutions and proclamations are misguided wastes of precious time that would be better spent on the business these legislative bodies can actually change.”Further, the Post writers noted that the war in Gaza has split local residents, saying debating such a proclamation “only deepened those divisions.” They added: “All of this would be worth the public pain and the precious time of our elected officials if it were going to do more good than harm, but this drop in the bucket will neither convince Hamas to release the remaining hostages nor soften Israel’s stance on bombings that have killed thousands of Palestinians.”

Chicagoans demand a ceasefire, source: Scott Olson/Getty Images via Prism

Just how divided are we? In Chicago, the city council vote in January on a resolution calling for a ceasefire was split 23-23 when Mayor Brandon Johnson cast the tie-breaking vote in favor of what Politico oddly called a “nonbinding resolution.” Indeed, who could be bound by it? The status of the resolution shows how impotent and pointless it is.

Such resolutions are reminiscent of the stances leaders of many universities took in the fall, with many condemning Hamas for its atrocities. As The Washington Post reported, Rabbi Ari Berman, president of Yeshiva University in New York, argued that college presidents have a moral obligation to speak out. He circulated a statement about the war, headlined “We stand together with Israel against Hamas.” The statement also expressed solidarity “with the Palestinians who suffer under Hamas’ cruel rule in Gaza and with all people of moral conscience.”

I quite agree with the rabbi’s view of Hamas, a loathsome and murderous organization that needs to be stamped out, and it’s entirely reasonable for the leader of a Jewish university to take such a stance. I applaud him for doing so and I echo his views. Indeed, condemning terrorism is truly a no-brainer (though the Summit Daily News letter-writer pointedly didn’t do so).

But do leaders of public universities or private schools with no religious or community affiliation have such an obligation to offer condemnations (much as they may rightly feel the need to speak out against wanton murder)? Do their comments – one way or the other – do anything beyond alienating some members of their faculty and some students?

It’s one thing for faculty members to write open letters, perhaps differing with other faculty members. Indeed, as teachers and opinion-shapers on their campuses, faculty members should take stances. But it’s another thing for administrators to jump into the fray, pretending to speak for all their university constituents.

New York Times opinion writer Pamela Paul recently cited comments that Diego Zambrano, a professor at Stanford Law School, made at a conference on civil discourse at the California school. “What, he asked, are the benefits of a university taking a position? If it’s to make the students feel good, he said, those feelings are fleeting, and perhaps not even the university’s job. If it’s to change the outcome of political events, even the most self-regarding institutions don’t imagine they will have any impact on a war halfway across the planet. The benefits, he argued, were nonexistent.”

All that such statements do is “fuel the most intemperate speech while chilling moderate and dissenting voices,” Paul wrote in paraphrasing Zambrano. Moreover, “In a world constantly riled up over politics, the task of formally opining on issues would be endless.”

Such statements, she noted “ask university administrators, who are not hired for their moral compasses, to address in a single email thorny subjects that scholars at their own institutions spend years studying. (Some university presidents, such as Michael Schill of Northwestern, have rightly balked.) Inevitably, staking any position weakens the public’s perception of the university as independent.”

Northwestern University President Michael Schill, source: The Daily Northwestern

In October, Schill actually condemned the “abhorrent and horrific actions of Hamas,” saying they were “clearly antithetical to Northwestern’s values — as well as my own,” according to The Daily Northwestern. “Whatever we might feel about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, our shared humanity should lead us all to condemn these barbaric acts.” But he also maintained that in attending a vigil organized by Jewish students to mourn lives lost in the war, he did so as an individual, not on behalf of the University.

In public universities, administrators who take stances on polarizing matters – whether dealing with politics or social issues – could jeopardize their jobs and school funding.

To be sure, it sometimes is necessary and relevant for them to take stances and it takes courage to do so: at the university where I taught for 14 years, the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, former Gov. Pete Ricketts and few legislators drove out a superb chancellor, Ronnie D. Green, because of his support of diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives. Even so, budget cuts followed, as conservative legislators sought to punish academics there whom they see as too liberal.

As budgets were slashed, Rodney Bennett, who succeeded Green, bowed to the will of his political overseers, moving to cut $800,000 from the school’s Office of Diversity and Inclusion and Office of Academic Success and Intercultural Services, against the will of many on the faculty. Conservative politicians in many states have similarly pressured school officials to quash efforts at expanding diversity, equity and inclusion, a bête noire of the right.

We’re all entitled to our views on such campus affairs, as well as local, national and international matters – and those views will differ. So can the Summit County Board of Commissioners reflect my views on Gaza along with those of the county’s other 31,000 or so residents? And should it try to? I suspect it would fail miserably, and we are awash in plenty of issues it would be better off attending to. Leave global policy issues to those who can make a difference on them and let us each have our own takes on such matters.

Is the war on Hamas a hijacking of the Holocaust?

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Israel’s battle for survival is no Hollywood production

Jonathan Glazer, source: Getty Images via Vox

No one doubts that the warfare in Gaza is horrific. The deaths of innocents are monstrous. But did a speech at the Academy Awards by Jonathan Glazer, the Jewish and English director of the Holocaust film “The Zone of Interest,” serve in any way to bring that awful bloodshed to a reasonable and enduring end?

In tortured and confusing language, Glazer lambasted Israel for “an occupation which has led to conflict for so many innocent people, whether the victims of October the 7th in Israel or the ongoing attack on Gaza. All the victims of this dehumanization. How do we resist?”

Noting that his German-language film showed where dehumanization leads at its worst, he suggested that Judaism and the Holocaust were being “hijacked” by that occupation, saying he and his fellow filmmakers “refute” such an expropriation.

But is the battle against Hamas really such a “hijacking?” Is it, in fact, rather a battle for the survival of the state of Israel against a group that would kill far more Jews than the 1,200 murdered on Oct. 7th, given the chance? In that sense, isn’t the fight against a repeat of the Holocaust?

For that matter, is the fight against Hamas really a fight, as well, for Palestinian innocents who would rather not have this ISIS-like group running their lives? For Palestinians in Gaza who have lived under the group’s thumb for nearly two decades?

Depending on his meaning, Glazer may have been correct in one respect: it is not within the psychology, the religion and the tradition of Judaism to dehumanize people, much less to kill noncombatants. Every human life is invaluable, Jews are taught, and the shedding of innocent blood is forbidden.

However, the monstrousness of Hamas – as demonstrated on October 7th, in the group’s ongoing imprisonment of hostages, and in its perverse and suicidal interpretation of Islam – has made it all but impossible for Israeli soldiers to avoid killing innocents. Israel faces a terrible choice: it either vanquishes Hamas or it will see the end of Israel, if not now then in time.

And the problem is that Hamas so immersed itself in Gazan society, since it was elected in 2006, that rooting it out has led to the deaths of thousands of innocents. The group burrowed into the social fabric in much the way it tunneled into the geography of the land, controlling all aspects of life in Gaza, from the medical establishment to all governing entities. Its grip has been reminiscent of the Nazi hold on Germany – a grip that took in even innocent Germans and that gave us WWII.

In the face of that burrowing, Israel’s military has done what it could to avoid civilian casualties, telling people to evacuate from areas that were to be attacked. Hamas stopped many from doing so, no doubt driving up the death toll.

In this, Israel has behaved far differently than some of its neighbors. For instance, the leader of Syria in 1982, Hafez al-Assad, killed tens of thousands of fellow Arabs in besieging the rebellious city of Hama as he sought to exterminate the Muslim Brotherhood (ironically, the philosophical parent of Hamas). The bloodletting led New York Times journalist Tom Friedman to coin the term “Hama rules” to describe the Syrian regime’s savagery.

It is possible that the death toll in Gaza will top the 25,000 believed to have been killed in Hama and may already have. But we may never know the true cost. The reported numbers of Palestinian deaths – more than 31,000 at this point – are suspect, as a Wharton statistics professor has argued.

Deaths reported in Gaza, source: Tablet

Wharton Prof. Abraham Wyner, in a piece in Tablet, contends that the amount of regularity in the figures the Hamas-controlled ministry reports shows that the “numbers are not real.” By plotting out recent reported tallies, he shows that a “graph of total deaths by date is increasing with almost metronomical linearity.”

Rather than the steady ascent of figures that we’ve seen, there should be daily variations and the lack of them suggests that Gaza authorities are fabricating their numbers, Wyner maintains. Moreover, he contends that the numbers of women and children killed – based on an estimate of 70% of the overall tally –are overestimated.

“Most likely, the Hamas ministry settled on a daily total arbitrarily. We know this because the daily totals increase too consistently to be real,” Wyner writes. “Then they assigned about 70% of the total to be women and children, splitting that amount randomly from day to day. Then they in-filled the number of men as set by the predetermined total. This explains all the data observed.”

In all wars, it’s been long observed, truth is the first casualty – a military maxim attributed to ancient Greek playwright Aeschylus. And in the Israel-Hamas war, Hamas weaponizes reported “facts” to build sympathy around the world — including in Hollywood. As many commentators have observed, the climbing death tolls serve the group’s propaganda ends (see here and here for a couple commentaries). And, pathetically, the group’s lack of value for human life seems based in its perverse interpretation of Islam: its glorification of martydom.

Wyner says the true death figures may never be known. Even the Gaza health ministry admitted in November that the collapse of the health system and the numbers of bodies buried in rubble made it unable to count the dead precisely. The actual figures could be higher or lower.

Indeed, the Gaza ministry’s own numbers suggested in January that the daily counts then were shrinking. As The New York Times reported late that month, the “number of Gazans dying each day ha[d] fallen almost in half since early December and almost two-thirds since the peak in late October.” The newspaper attributed the decline to a reduction in Israeli troops and a shift in military tactics.

Whatever the actual number, the toll in death, injury and destruction is unquestionably awful. If Israel mounts a major move on Rafah, as expected, and if Palestinian civilians are unable to find safe harbors, the number could climb anew.

Source: Combating Terrorism Center at West Point

Tragically, the deaths of thousands of civilians are not unprecedented. Along with Hama, consider the WWII firebombing of Dresden (perhaps 25,000 deaths, perhaps more) and, worse, the nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki (perhaps 214,000 deaths together). With some justification, Israel’s defenders have argued that it’s hypocritical for the world to accept that such tallies from WWII were tolerable in destroying the Nazi and Japanese military regimes, but not in Israel’s efforts to destroy Hamas.

Supporting the Israeli military view, Wyner maintains that Israel is doing much to prevent civilian deaths. “By historical standards of urban warfare, where combatants are embedded above and below into civilian population centers, this is a remarkable and successful effort to prevent unnecessary loss of life while fighting an implacable enemy that protects itself with civilians,” he holds.

That may be so. But one has to wonder how much misery it will take for Hamas’ murderous mentality to be extinguished, much as Naziism was almost entirely stamped out in Germany. Can the awful bloodletting that Glazer suggested he couldn’t stomach give way to some sort of peaceful coexistence someday?

It is a tragic irony that Israel, in continuing to try to eliminate Hamas, is doing the group’s bidding in killing civilians, in creating “martyrs” the group can showcase to the world. And yet, does Israel have much choice? Can the Glazers of the world not see the bind that a terrorist group — one no other nation would tolerate — has put Israel in?

Can Noise Give Way to Civility?

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An exploration of the limits of free speech

Source: Democracy and Me

One my favorite legalistic maxims goes like this: my right to swing my fist ends where your nose begins. The idea, of course, is that we all have a marvelous amount of freedom in the U.S. – much more than in many other countries — but we also must live amongst others. And that “living amongst” part means our individual freedoms go only so far; they are not unlimited.

In physical terms, the limits are easy to define. Along with not having the unfettered ability to toss our hands about, we can’t drive the wrong way down a one-way street. We can’t run naked through our neighborhood, no matter how entertaining that might be for some folks. No matter how much we like the Stones, we can’t blast loud music at all hours in most communities. And we can’t, of course, shout fire in a crowded theater.

But when the subject is intellectual freedom, what are the boundaries? When does one’s ability to argue, to question or to demonstrate cross a line into harassment or intimidation? And what ideas or values are simply beyond the pale, too extreme to tolerate even on a college campus dedicated to academic freedom? When do noxious notions become the equivalent of shouting fire?

Since the atrocities of October 7th in Israel, we have heard much shouting, particularly by pro-Palestinian groups at campuses nationwide. We have also seen efforts to suppress or to contain such outpourings, in part because administrators fear violating Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which requires schools to provide all students an environment free from discrimination based on race, color, national origin or shared ancestry.

The noise has grown since the federal Department of Education on Nov. 7 issued a letter reminding schools of their obligations under the law. The DOE has also launched a bevy of investigations, including into a slew of K-12 districts around the country and at least 44 universities and colleges for alleged violations of that law. The allegations include incidents of antisemitism and Islamophobia, often as a result of demonstrations that make Jews or Arabs feel threatened.

Source: Harvard Gazette

Indeed, at Harvard dueling investigations have been spurred by students or alumni who feel aggrieved. The DOE on Feb. 6 announced an investigation into whether the university failed to protect Palestinian, Arab and Muslim students and their supporters from harassment, threats and intimidation. This came on the heels of probe announced in November alleging that the school failed to respond to antisemitism on campus.

The Muslim Legal Fund of America filed the complaint that generated the early February inquest on behalf of more than a dozen anonymous students. A lawyer for the group told The Harvard Crimson that the students complained of “negative treatment by both the administration and Harvard officials as well as fellow students on campus.” The most common complaint was that students were verbally abused for wearing a keffiyeh, a scarf that has become a symbol of advocacy for Palestinians.

“When they simply walk around campus wearing the keffiyeh, they have been verbally attacked, they have had things thrown at them,” the lawyer said. “They have had students and others accuse them of being terrorists for what they’re wearing.”

On the flip side, the department’s investigation begun in the fall followed a complaint by several alumni that Harvard failed to protect students from antisemitism. And separately, a group of students at the school sued on Jan. 30 in federal court, alleging that Harvard “has become a bastion of rampant anti-Jewish hatred and harassment.”

As the lawsuit describes it, Harvard seems like a hellish place.

“Mobs of pro-Hamas students and faculty have marched by the hundreds through Harvard’s campus, shouting vile antisemitic slogans and calling for death to Jews and Israel,” the suit says. “Those mobs have occupied buildings, classrooms, libraries, student lounges, plazas, and study halls, often for days or weeks at a time, promoting violence against Jews and harassing and assaulting them on campus. Jewish students have been attacked on social media, and Harvard faculty members have promulgated antisemitism in their courses and dismissed and intimidated students who object.”

While the lawsuit maintains that Harvard refused to “lift a finger to stop and deter this outrageous antisemitic conduct and penalize the students and faculty who perpetrate it,” in fact Harvard has created two presidential task forces to combat Islamophobia and antisemitism on campus. In a wrinkle curious because of its academic freedom overtones, one task force is co-chaired by Derek J. Penslar, who heads the school’s Center for Jewish Studies and who became a lightning rod for critics who damn him as too critical of Israel. Ironically, Penslar’s book “Zionism: An Emotional State,” was named a finalist for the 2023 National Jewish Book Award by the Jewish Book Council, and he was widely defended by scholars and rabbis.

Setting up task forces to develop policies to curb Islamophobia and antisemitism has become a common first step at several campuses. But some schools have also taken aggressive action — action that troubles free-speech advocates.

MIT, Source: The Times of Israel

As reported by Inside Higher Ed, MIT, Stanford and Brown, for instance, have all cracked down on pro-Palestinian actions that they said flouted university rules. MIT, along with several other schools, recently suspended student groups for failing to follow rules about protests and Stanford quashed a 120-day sit-in on a campus plaza by first threatening disciplinary action and then by agreeing to talk over the student concerns. At Brown, 19 students taking part in a weeklong hunger strike for Palestine claimed that university officials removed “memorial flags” and washed away chalk messages at recent gatherings as they urged the university to divest its endowment from arms manufacturers.

The question this raises is: just what is acceptable speech and action on campuses? Where does one draw the line?

The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression takes a maximalist view: “The mere expression of an opinion — however repugnant — is always protected. The authority to regulate ‘hate speech’ — an inherently vague and subjective label — is a gift to those who want an excuse to stamp out views they personally detest. FIRE knows from its long history defending free speech on campus how often both sides of the Israeli-Palestinian debate face censorship under this rationale. The target simply depends on who holds power at a given time and place.”

But when does free expression slip into harassment and intimidation? Some cases seem clear. For instance, at the University of Denver, religious items affixed to student doorposts – mezuzahs – were recently torn down from couple dorm rooms and one was defaced. Those are incidents of vandalism, not matters of acceptable expression, and the school administration deplored them. At one dorm there, moreover, pork, which observant Jews shun, was left at a student’s door – a clear case of harassment, it would seem.

Is that the same, however, as people marching and carrying banners that decry the deaths of members of various groups, whether Jews or Palestinians? Should it be illegal to stand up for one’s group, even loudly? And if those marches make members of one group or another feel threatened, should such feelings be the test? Is the freedom to speak one’s mind in an academic setting a value to be protected, regardless of whether it discomfits some students?

Surely, some expression can go over the line. For instance, would any responsible university tolerate students marching with Nazi banners? Indeed, would any tolerate marches with explicitly pro-Hamas or pro-ISIS imagery? The advocates for Palestinians seem mostly to avoid such sentiments as they instead protest “genocide”  or call for ceasefires or an end to the killing in the Israel-Hamas war. Sadly, they often seem ignorant, though, about how phrases such as “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” are calls for the eradication of Israel.

As Ari Berman, president of Yeshiva University, contended in a recent U.S. News and World Report commentary, “Students can and should debate important matters like the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the ethics of war in civilian areas.” Disagreeing, protesting and robustly exchanging ideas are appropriate, he suggested.

Still, as Rabbi Dr. Berman also noted, it would be useful to have “moral clarity” about the war on the agenda at campuses all across the U.S. Making his point, he argued that those who protest for a “free Gaza” should also want it free of Hamas. “In fact, being clear about this distinction could actually help calm campus waters and enable more productive conversations,” he maintained.

Certainly, defenders of Israel will agree that the nation has the right to quash a terrorist group whose barbarism is on par with that of ISIS or other similar groups. Indeed, that may be where well-informed faculty need to step up and educate those who are doing much of the shouting.

Of course, such schooling won’t end disagreements. If education could “calm campus waters” such that civil discussion can replace shouting, we’d all be better off. Sadly, however, at a time when many are dying, emotions are understandably running hot. And that makes free speech difficult.

“People are unrealistic when they say, ‘We want free speech, we want debate, we want difficult conversations,’” legal scholar Randall Kennedy recently told The New York Times. “But then we want all smiles.”

Source: The Philadelphia Citizen

Indeed, the arguments over free speech are slipping into debates over academic freedom, which has come under threat from conservative politicians such as Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis. As the Times noted, DeSantis “has led the passage of laws that restrict what can be taught and spearheaded efforts to reshape whole institutions.”

As the newspaper reported, the Israel-Hamas War has upended longstanding campus arguments over whether conservative voices and ideas were being suppressed. Now, it seems, liberal defenders of Palestinians are making the case that they are being muzzled.

“Some ask why, after years of restricting speech that makes some members of certain minority groups feel ‘unsafe,’ administrators are suddenly defending the right to speech that some Jewish students find threatening,” the paper wrote. “Others accuse longtime opponents of diversity, equity and inclusion efforts of cynically weaponizing those principles to suppress pro-Palestinian views.”

Still, academic freedom, too, must have limits. Such freedom, some note, depends on expertise and judgment – and is not just the right to say whatever one wants. As legal scholar Robert C. Post put it, free academic inquiry depends on the notion that “there are true ideas and false ideas,” and that it is the job of scholars to distinguish them.

The protests and, perhaps, the counterprotests will continue. Arguments over Islamophobia and antisemitism will rage, too, perhaps to be clarified by lawsuits and policies that various task forces can develop. One hopes that amid all the noise, education about truth and falsity can emerge.