Seth Mandel: Every Conspiracy Everywhere All At Once
Jews have often noted that conspiracy theories about us openly contradict each other: at one moment, we’ll be accused of being communists; in another, they’ll hate us for being capitalists. But social media today means we live in the era of what I’d call Kitchen Sink Anti-Semitism: Like the movie that cleaned up at the 2022 Oscars, it’s everything everywhere all at once.Jonathan Tobin: There’s no middle ground in the fight against DEI antisemitism
A month I ago I wrote about how Israel’s haters love to accuse the Jewish state of genocide because it’s the ultimate way to universalize the Holocaust and deny the particular destructive animus toward the Jews. Since then, such discourse has become ubiquitous: just yesterday, National Security Council spokesman John Kirby had to field a question about it at a White House briefing, and there’s even been a lawsuit filed against President Biden for his supposed complicity in the “genocide.”
But then there’s the fact that Princeton University just concluded a semester in which a Near Eastern history course assigned the book by Rutgers professor Jasbir Puar featuring the classic blood libel of Israeli organ-harvesting. As Jonathan Marks noted in COMMENTARY in 2016, Puar herself rejected the “genocide” accusation, saying: “The Jewish Israeli population cannot afford to hand over genocide to another population. They need the Palestinians alive in order to keep the kind of rationalization for their victimhood and their militarized economy.”
And so it is that the Jews are simultaneously guilty of genocide and of perpetuating a multi-generational campaign of evil that precludes genocide. Both of these allegations coexist within the same cohort—academic anti-Semites—in psychopathic harmony.
Yet too many moderates and liberals are still trying to argue that outrage about the mobs chanting for the destruction of Israel can be separated from the genocide of Jews. It is this warped view that has sent such “progressives” into the streets and onto campuses to vent their rage.Douglas Murray: Harvard tarnished itself with the Claudine Gay debacle
You don’t have to like Stefanik or Rufo, or plan to vote for the Republicans, to understand that so long as woke commissars like Claudine Gay—and her counterparts elsewhere—are dominating America’s college campuses, the virus of antisemitism will continue to grow. Democrats must understand that unless DEI rules are thrown out of academia, the corporate world, the media and the government (where an executive order by President Joe Biden put them in place throughout the federal apparatus), their party will be completely taken over by leftists who hate Israel and are indifferent at best to the spread of antisemitism.
The aftermath of Oct. 7 and the fall of Claudine Gay ought to be a turning point in this debate. But it won’t be if those who acknowledge that antisemitism is on the rise don’t draw the appropriate conclusions about why this has happened.
Gay’s fate or that of any other college administrator is secondary to whether their toxic ideas will be allowed to continue to be the official new secular religion of American civic life. On this question, there is no middle ground. There’s no way to make DEI less antisemitic since it is designed to divide and target some for opprobrium in this manner. Treating the impact of woke ideas as nothing more than a conservative culture war controversy won’t work anymore.
Americans have to choose and traditional political loyalties are no longer relevant. They can either join those seeking to roll back the woke tide and restore basic American values of equality and fairness, or they can stand by and watch as a neo-Marxist faith destroys American liberty piece by piece with the Jews just being the first victims.
What must you do to fail at Harvard?Seth Mandel: Mutiny at the Anti-Defamation League
It used to be pretty clear.
You had to be caught cheating.
Or doing something so outrageous that it’d get you thrown off campus.
Not anymore.
Today Harvard is an institution that thinks that antisemitism is OK and believes that plagiarism is fine.
Not long ago, a student would have been kicked out for either of these sins.
Today the president has been caught at both.
And the board of the university stuck by her.
Even when she decided to step down this week, both she and her supporters went into full-on “victimhood mode.”
Nothing was her fault.
In a bitter farewell piece, Claudine Gay said she was the victim of “demagogues” who had “weaponized” her presidency to “undermine the ideals animating Harvard since its founding: excellence, openness, independence and truth.”
If those are the animating ideals of Harvard, then they are ones that Gay herself trampled all over. With her lack of academic distinction, her total lack of scholarship, her plagiarism and self-pity.
Gay has published no books, written only 11 articles (most of which turn out to have been plagiarized), but still she was appointed president of Harvard.
As the Somali-born author and activist Ayaan Hirsi Ali told me in an interview this week, “My grandmother wouldn’t have trusted Claudine Gay to herd her goats.”
Unlike Hirsi Ali, Gay comes from a privileged background, and she will continue her privileged lifestyle.
It emerged this week that although Gay has left the presidency, she is going to stay on at Harvard as a lecturer.
At a salary of an extraordinary $900,000 a year.
Jonathan Greenblatt, CEO of the ADL, for years has spent the organization’s political capital on accruing acceptance in progressive spaces. The ADL has become home to a great many AsAJews. After Oct. 7, the bill came due: The AsAJews and their political mentors decided it was time for the ADL to throw off the yoke of its pretensions and defect from Jewish organizational life to officially join the ranks of those marching on Jewish neighborhoods chanting “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.”
Greenblatt balked, and his creation has apparently risen from the table and walked out of the lab. According to Jewish Currents, the house organ of the AsAJews, several employees have left the ADL unit dedicated to countering online hate, including the Obama administration alum who led that unit, because of Greenblatt’s attempts to get social-media services to crack down on anti-Semitism:
“Former staffers told Jewish Currents that in the past months, Greenblatt has redirected the ADL’s day-to-day work to target pro-Palestine activism rather than focusing on antisemitism in American life, a shift they say seriously undermines the organization’s credibility.”
To translate that from doublespeak: The Anti-Defamation League’s public opposition to those calling for the mass murder of the Jewish people is not what these staffers signed up for. Perhaps this clash was inevitable: Greenblatt’s support for censorship in the public square was a weapon his progressive allies were never going to accept being turned on them.
And there is much anger at the realization that the activists who thought they had fully captured this particular institution still have work to do. Greenblatt’s conscience has awoken in the wake of Oct. 7, and now he won’t just take orders from his subordinates, which apparently was the state of play prior to the massacre.
“There’s a pattern of Jonathan going rogue—belittling in-house experts and ignoring talking points prepared for him,” one former ADL staffer told Jewish Currents, with no apparent self-awareness.