The president of a new Columbia Law School group formed to combat rising antisemitism on campus told Jewish Insider that its adoption of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s working definition of antisemitism played a role in the Law School Student Senate’s vote to reject it as a recognized university group.“A group of students were strongly opposed to our formation from the very beginning,” Marie-Alice Legrand, president of the Law Students Against Antisemitism, recalled, noting that some condemned its use of the State Department-adopted IHRA definition.
The article goes on to say that an anti-Israel group, “Concerned Jewish Students at CLS,” sent a letter against the proposed student group. In that letter, they wrote:
Many individuals accurately believe that the creation of a State of Israel was a racist endeavor because doing so involved killing more than 15,000 Palestinians, expelling more than 700,000 Palestinians, and creating a refugee crisis that has resulted in over 2 million Palestinian refugees worldwide.
The "15,000 Palestinians" killed, "700,000 Palestinians expelled" and "2 million Palestinian refugees" are all lies.
But let's set that aside. By their own definition and false figures, virtually every major war is racist, since it involves killing and displacing the enemy's civilians.
Let's pretend that we are woke college students and we want to say that the United States is racist.
Let's take accurate facts about the Pacific Theater in World War II.
3 million Japanese were killed, including hundreds of thousands of civilians. And there was plenty of anti-Japanese racism in America. Here's a typical cover of a comic book from that era, and there are scores more.
Not only that, but the US rounded up Japanese Americans and put them in camps. Moreover, the US occupied Japan for years after the war.
If those are the only facts you know about the war between the US and Japan, you would conclude that the war was a racist endeavor by the US, just because Americans hated Japanese people and coveted their land.
But anyone with even a passing knowledge of history knows that this doesn't accurately describe the war. It is just a highly selective set of facts meant to bring an ignorant reader to a foregone conclusion.
In this case, unlike the anti-Israel group at Columbia's letter, all of the facts are 100% accurate. But they ignore Pearl Harbor, Japan's partnership with Nazi Germany, Japanese expansionism, Japanese war crimes and inhumane war practices. If the facts I listed are all you know, your conclusion would be wrong even though, in this case, the facts are accurate.
This is how anti-Israel propaganda works. The Israel haters hate context. They don't want anyone to know anything besides their own highly curated version of events.
And they also lie, knowing that most people won't bother to publicly correct them. Think about it: they sent this letter to the senators, presumably the top leaders at Columbia's law school, secure in the knowledge that none of them would point out that the letter was filled with lies not only about history but also about the IHRA definition. They have learned from the Palestinians (and the Soviets) that lying is an excellent strategy, especially when you claim to be supporting a supposedly oppressed group. Instead of being treated worse than cheaters and plagiarists, they are rewarded by their fellow students.
Propaganda works. Lies work.
If Columbia's law students accepted this letter and its implications as truth, they are going to be spectacularly poor lawyers and judges in the future.
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