Hatred of Israel is the great moral disorder of our time
If I forget thee, O Jerusalem… (Psalm 137)Arsen Ostrovsky and Amjad Taha: It's Time to Act Against Antisemitic Behavior on Campus
It is the great moral disorder of our time.
Dear Israel is but a spit of earth on a huge globe. Three years after six million Jews were put to torture, humiliation, whippings, rape, medical experiment, starvation, and vile death, was it not surely time — time for all the nations of the Earth who had reached some moral understanding of life and government — to allow Jewish people time to rest, time to mourn, time to see what and who might be left of them.
To find just one period, just one time, just one place where and when they did not have to start up in the middle of the night when unfamiliar sounds disturbed, did not have to hear demagogues howling at them from street corners, or put up with the trendy, ignorant western pseudo-radicals shouting in bullhorns from library steps. To not see their shops and homes targets of mobs and slanders, their synagogues battered.
A time when they might gather on a bit of land where dogs were not set upon them; where children did not mock them; where passerby thugs did not attack their elders in the street; where Jews unique in their sorrow and pain could meet with some of their tormented doubles, if for nothing else but to share laments and profound griefs, generate solace by shared company and memory.
Ah, Jews. Ah, Israel.
Poor Jews. It was not enough that Europe built a hecatomb of your kind because a madman and his mad country hated you. When you were nearly ripped out of history altogether, your spectacular survival over centuries and millennia genuinely threatened, averted as much by the chances of a war in which one side ignored you while the other industrialized your killing.
A guilty world — no, only a part of what should be a guilty world — offered you a spit of land: dust, bush, waterless (the former B.C. cabinet minister was correct in her description). I believe it’s called a desert.
It was “presented” as the homeland for Jews in 1947. For (wrung with accents of burning pity whenever the word was said in this context) the “survivors.”
This was when “survivors” meant people — men, women, children, infants — who had been rounded up, packed into railway cars, families ripped asunder, thrown into hideous camps with sadistic guards and vicious dogs, worked to death, starved, and for days, weeks or (some few) for years, spat upon, beaten, treated like less than dogs — hollowed out from torture, starvation and hopelessness.
To still be breathing after that! That’s a survivor.
(One of the heresies of our careless times is how we have let moralizing idiots, fat and comfortable woke types, haul out this word — “survivor” — to describe their own ignorant obsessions, their hypertrophic sense of privilege, to claim our attention.)
When universities continue to permit anti-Jewish hatred under the guise of anti-Zionism; indulge hate groups such as Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), and cannot even answer whether calling for genocide against Jews is against university policy, what did they think was going to happen?Andrew Neil: Anti-Semitic campus know-nothings aren't pro-Palestine... they're pro-WAR! And, in their stupidity, they're making the strongest case yet for Israel's survival
In a statement ahead of the Jewish holiday of Passover, President Joe Biden said "this blatant antisemitism is reprehensible and dangerous—and it has absolutely no place on college campuses, or anywhere in our country."
Condemnations of the protests and expressions of solidarity with Jewish students are certainly welcome, and in fact necessary, but in the absence of urgent action, they are hollow and meaningless.
The following, therefore, is a 10-point action plan to restore order and protect Jewish students:
1. These ugly scenes must be labeled not as peaceful protests, but as pro-Hamas demonstrations by antisemites.
2. Universities need to call in the police to remove these rioters and anarchists from their encampments on campuses. If the police won't, then the National Guard should be called in.
3. Leaders must speak to Jewish students who are scared to enter campus, listen to them, and provide all the support they need.
4. Students found in breach of school policy must be punished, including with expulsion, and banning of their registered student organizations, while foreign students found in violation should have their visas revoked and be deported.
5. Lecturers, professors, and staff found taking part should also be disciplined.
6. Do not cancel in-person classes. That would be cowering before the bullies and haters, putting students who want to learn at a disadvantage. If universities and teachers take appropriate disciplinary measures and security precautions, there should be no need to resort to virtual classes.
7. Follow the money to find out who is funding these protests and protesters. Qatar, for example, has poured billions of dollars into Ivy League universities, buying up schools, chairs, and fellowships.
8. Initiate an avalanche of lawsuits and Title VI claims. Jewish students are not powerless and universities that receive federal funding are prohibited under the Civil Rights Act from discriminating against students on the basis of race or national identity, or allowing a hostile environment to form.
9. The International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) working definition of antisemitism, the most widely endorsed definition of Jew-hatred in all its manifestations, must be adopted and applied by every university. The IHRA definition has already been adopted by more than 40 countries, thousands of civil society organizations and has received bi-partisan support in the United States.
10. And lastly, Congress must immediately pass legislation rescinding federal funding from any university that does not take satisfactory action against this tidal wave of antisemitism or fails to protect Jewish students from discrimination or harassment.
We are at an inflection point where universities must decide whether they want to remain respected places of higher learning for all or become no-go zones for Jewish students. The decision is theirs.
Nobody is wondering that now as, even in America, radical Muslim leaders call for the destruction of Israel, backed by students at the nation's most elite universities and therefore those possibly (and frighteningly) running the country in the years to come.
America's Muslim population can only grow while Jews will become an ever smaller percentage of the total population.
Violent Islamism has a strong footing in many Western democracies these days and its influence is likely to grow stronger. Suddenly that Jewish homeland looks more necessary than ever.
This sorry tale still has some way to run. The pro-Hamas protestors have strong allies on the Left of the Democratic Party. They will be out in force come the Democratic convention in Chicago this August.
Chicago, of course, was the scene of the most violent Democratic convention ever in 1968, at the height of the Vietnam War, when Mayor Daley's somewhat robust police force clashed with radical demonstrators trying to disrupt the convention.
I don't say we're in for a repeat as bad as that but it will not be pretty on the streets of the Windy City this summer.
The President, for today's protestors, is 'Genocide Joe'. They will be out to pressure the Democrats into ending their support for Israel the way they wanted the party to end its support for the Vietnam War all these years ago.
Vietnam involved the conscription of hundreds of thousands of young American men to fight a massive war on the other side of the world, which eventually cost over 55,000 American lives. That gave the protests a special edge and relevance. Israel involves none of that, which is why it does not have the same piquancy for most folks.
But pro-Palestinian sentiments are the coming force in the Democratic Party, with all the attendant anti-Semitism we are currently witnessing.
There can be no compromise with such forces, whatever the superficial attractions of winning the youth vote by pandering to know-nothing students. We shall see if Biden is up to the challenge and stands firm in his resolve to support Israel.