JNS
College “crackdowns” on pro-Hamas mobs are portrayed as repression of free speech. Trump should make good on his threat to defund academic institutions and deport offenders.
Are America’s institutions of higher education finally taking the post-Oct. 7 surge in antisemitism seriously? According to The New York Times, the answer is that they’re taking it far too seriously.
That’s the upshot of just the latest in a series of articles in the Times and elsewhere in the legacy corporate media seeking to flip the script about the widespread toleration of antisemitic activism on college campuses. With many institutions under pressure from Congress and their donors to behave as if they were not complicit in the campaigns of leftist activists to anathematize Jews, there has been a decline in the number and tolerance of demonstrations where mobs chant slogans calling for Jewish genocide. But the reaction to this from liberal journalists is that these so-called “crackdowns” are the real outrage.
According to the Times, the problem is that in a foolish attempt to assuage the hurt feelings of some Jews and to avoid the potential wrath of the federal government, colleges have suppressed “pro-Palestinian” activists. As proof of this, the article pointed to a study conducted by Harvard University (itself one of the worst offenders in the toleration of antisemitic demonstrators), which claimed that the number of “pro-Palestinian” demonstrations held during the current fall semester at American institutions of higher learning to have numbered only 950. That compares to what it says were more than 3,000 such “events” during the 2024 spring semester. And while more than 3,100 arrests were made at demonstrations in the spring, so far, Harvard’s Nonviolent Action Lab says only about 50 have been arrested since the start of the new academic year.
This is being proclaimed by many in higher education and even some in the Jewish community as a great improvement. However, while the numbers are lower, congratulations are certainly not in order.
Would 950 ‘Charlottesvilles’ be applauded?
Would anyone say that only 950 iterations of the “Unite the Right” neo-Nazi rally in Charlottesville, Va., in the summer of 2017, rather than thousands of them, would be something for Americans on-campus or off to applaud? Surely not. Yet that is exactly what is being asked since the pro-Hamas outbreaks represented the moral equivalent of what happened in Charlottesville, replete with antisemitic chants and sometimes (as a photo accompanying the Times article illustrated) with the same sort of imagery of candles held by anti-Israel mobs replacing the tiki torches of the neo-Nazis.
In the bizarro world of liberal media, even a reduction in the number of antisemitic incidents is itself the problem. While liberal groups would have had no trouble with far more draconian actions being taken against anyone on campus who participated in demonstrations calling for violence against African-Americans, Hispanics, Asians or members of the LGBTQ+ community, the notion that supporters of Hamas and opponents of Israel’s existence should be forced to abide by rules that prevented illegal demonstrations or intimidation of a minority group is seen as the real outrage.
Taking the lead from those who have organized these demonstrations (which have, in some cases, been funded by foreign sources like the terrorist-supporting government of Iran), the Times and other liberal media outlets have been treating those engaged in open antisemitism as well-meaning idealists who are motivated by concern for the suffering of Palestinian Arabs. The result is, they say, an effort to silence student activists—something that amounts to a form of authoritarianism.
Todd Wolfson, president of the American Association of University Professors and an associate professor of media studies at Rutgers University in New Jersey, was quoted as saying that the “restrictions” imposed on demonstrators have made people afraid. “They feel like they’re being watched and surveilled,” he said. “I think there’s a strong degree of self-censorship that’s taking place.”
The Times omitted to say that the association he heads has, under his leadership, reversed its long opposition to academic boycotts in order to support BDS campaigns, which amount to illegal discrimination against Israel, Israelis and those who advocate for the Jewish state.
Woke ideology fuels Jew-hatred
As historian Niall Ferguson wrote last December in The Free Press, what has happened in American academia is a new version of the “treason of the intellectuals” in the 1920s and 1930s, as the intelligentsia justified a wave of fascist and Nazi antisemitism in European institutions of higher learning. They, too, portrayed themselves as victims of the Jews and those whom they claimed that the Jews were manipulating—a precursor of today’s efforts to depict pressure from alumni, donors and politicians to stop the toleration of Jew-hatred as intolerable interference with “academic freedom.”
In many cases, this so-called wave of repression has amounted to nothing more than enforcing previously existing rules of conduct. Such regulations were often ignored after the Hamas-led terrorist attacks in southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, as administrators feared the rage of activists—who were often as likely to be school employees or faculty members as students—far more than they did for being called out for their inaction.
This makes sense once you understand that the impetus for the anti-Israel, anti-Jewish mobs was the conquest of American education by those advocating for critical race theory and intersectionality. These toxic ideas not only seek to divide humanity into two permanently warring groups—“white” oppressors and the oppressed, the latter of whom are people of color and other designated minorities. They also define Jews and Israelis as “white” racist colonialists and the Palestinians as their victims, even though race has nothing to do with the conflict in the Middle East and the Jews are the indigenous people of the country. In this way, nothing Israel does is justifiable and nothing the Palestinians do, including the unspeakable atrocities of Oct. 7, is not justified.
This belief has become not so much the current intellectual fashion as the reigning orthodoxy on campuses as well as in many K-12 schools as a result of the imposition of the woke catechism of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) being imposed on so much of American society. Though supposedly intended to promote justice, the result of indoctrination in ideas like equity, which is the opposite of equal opportunity, and the veneration of “diversity” and “inclusion” that excludes non-leftist views and stigmatizes Jews has fueled a surge in antisemitism.
It was this sort of thinking that caused three university presidents to testify to Congress last December that it depended on the “context” as to whether advocacy for the genocide of the Jews would violate the rules of their schools.
In the name of this new secular faith, in the months following the Oct. 7 massacre conducted by Hamas and other Palestinians, thousands of demonstrations took place at universities and colleges in which students, faculty and staff proclaimed their support for anti-Jewish terrorism (“globalize the intifada”), Hamas and its genocidal goal of destroying the Jewish state (“from the river to the sea”).
Campus buildings were taken over and other public spaces were allowed to be turned into encampments, effectively making it difficult, if not impossible, for students who understandably worried for their safety to challenge crowds voicing support for the slaughter of Jews and sometimes to even get to their classes.
But we are now being told that the effort to curb this scourge is itself the problem.
Fearing Trump, not antisemites
That’s hardly surprising since the chattering classes are still largely blind to the way their embrace of woke ideology—and hostility to Israel and its right to defend itself against genocidal terrorists—has unleashed an unprecedented increase in American antisemitism. Indeed, outlets like the Times are still promoting the idea that the victory of President-elect Donald Trump in the presidential election represents the real threat of a revival of Nazi-like authoritarianism.
The day before it published its article about the supposedly deplorable “crackdown” against Hamas, the Times ran an article authored by Joel Grey, who played the emcee in the 1966 original Broadway production of the musical “Cabaret” and the 1972 film version. The 92-year-old actor/singer analogized the election results to the events depicted in the play, whereby the rise of Nazi thugs created an antisemitic regime in Germany. Americans, he wrote, had enabled “the democratic election of an authoritarian figure, the normalization of bigotry,” and that this was done with “the complicity of the frightened masses.”
To write about the re-election of a pro-Israel politician who had done more to combat antisemitism on college campuses in his first term than any of his predecessors in this manner is an outrageous slander. But to do so 13 months after Oct. 7—while 101 men, women and children are still being held hostage in the Gaza Strip and Jews are being murdered elsewhere—is indicative of the tunnel vision of liberal Americans, including Jews like Grey who are unwilling to think clearly about what constitutes the main threat to Jewish security in the 21st century.
Rather than face up to the reality of left-wing antisemitism masquerading as “pro-Palestinian” activism, they prefer to recycle conspiracy theories and fear-mongering about their partisan foes. In such an intellectual atmosphere in academia and the arts, it’s hardly surprising that the legacy media is whitewashing Jew-haters on campus and urging that universities go easy on them.
A real crackdown is needed
The irony to this is that it is exactly Trump’s election win that provides the best hope for effective action against campus antisemitism. He promised a real crackdown, involving cutting off funding for universities that tolerate pro-Hamas mobs intimidating Jewish students and deporting those foreign students (many of whom come from the Arab and Muslim nations) who take part in pro-Hamas, pro-terror activities.
Those who truly care about Jewish security should hope that Trump keeps this promise in the same manner as the way he kept his vow to move the U.S. embassy to Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem in his first term. Given the pro-Israel and philo-semitic beliefs of his cabinet appointments for his second term, there’s every reason to hope that this will happen.
That’s a plan of action that will not only help American Jews. There’s good reason to believe that the Trump 2.0 Department of Justice will begin action to target those institutions that engage in racial discrimination in the name of DEI policies, rather than enabling it as it did under the Biden and Obama administrations. If so, the result will be a much-needed turning of the tide that will roll back the leftist takeover of education that helped exacerbate racial, ethnic and religious division.
Rather than worrying about repressing antisemites on campus, people of goodwill—whether liberal or conservative, Democrat or Republican, Jewish or non-Jewish—should applaud the justified punishment of those who have mainstreamed and normalized antisemitism since Oct. 7. Those who oppose such measures are defending hate, not free speech.
Jonathan S. Tobin is editor-in-chief of JNS (Jewish News Syndicate). Follow him @jonathans_tobin.
