The university itself says it is against all hate crime. It has a webpage for their "Hate Has No Home Here" initiative, which talk about anti-Black and anti-Asian hate crimes.
The president said in December that "Our University will not tolerate religious bigotry or harassment." He set up task forces to tackle antisemitism, and, of course, Islamophobia.
What is largely unreported, though, are hate crimes against Jews on campus.
The state of Washington yesterday released its 2023 annual report on crimes, and it has a section on hate crimes. In Washington State, as with most of the country, the vast majority of the anti-religious hate crimes are against Jews.
The report breaks down hate crimes by police departments across the state. It turns out that the University of Washington has its own dedicated police department.
Here are the hate crimes reported by UW police in 2023:
At this liberal, progressive university where there are lots of resources against anti-Asian and anti-Black and anti Muslim hate, there were more antisemitic hate crimes than all the other types combined.
This university police department was only behind the cities of Seattle and Vancouver in the number of antisemitic hate crimes reported.
The amount of antisemitic crimes per capita in UW far exceed every other area of Washington State. Even though there are only 46,000 students in UW there were more antisemitic hate crimes there than Spokane or Bellevue or any other medium size town in Washington with well over 100,000 people.
Where are the student protests against this?
And things have only gotten worse in 2024. One student with a Star of David necklace was spat upon, harassed, screamed at and followed as he passed by an anti-Israel encampment. And the president of the university condemned antisemitic graffiti seen at the encampments, without giving details.
Here are some of the examples of threatening messages and incitement against Jews seen at the encampment at the University of Washington in May:
None of this made the newspapers.
Antisemitism on the UW campus is provably worse than any other kind of hate, yet it gets less coverage and less concern from both students and faculty than every other kind. We don't even know what the specific five hate crimes against Jews at UW in 2023 were - they are simply not mentioned in the media.
Clearly, nothing the university is doing or saying affects student behavior against Jews one bit. On the contrary, the university has tacitly encouraged this behavior, by supporting the encampments (bringing in porta-potties, for example).
In October, the The Office of Student Diversity and Inclusion sent out a letter to all students supporting Hamas and Palestinian terrorism. It was unauthorized, but it still reflects on how the staff on campus thinks.
The rot is embedded in university campuses, and it will not be impacted by occasional letters from their presidents pleading for more civility or handing out flyers saying that they are against all hate including antisemitism.
