The breathtaking denial of anti-Semitism at Columbia
Like all good social-justice warriors of a certain age, Reich harkens back to the romantic 1960s, recalling the campus protests against segregationist governors George Wallace and Ross Barnett, and against the Vietnam War. Reich writes: ‘If Columbia or any other university now roiled by student protests were doing what it should be doing, it would be a hotbed of debate about the war. Disagreement would be welcome; demonstrations accepted; argument invited; differences examined.’ Ah, those halcyon days of campus kumbaya.They aren’t revolutionaries. They’re bigoted brats
Maybe Reich hasn’t noticed, but today’s protesters have no desire to debate or examine differences. This is not about two-state solutions or how to arrive there. Read the placards or listen to the chants and you will see that this is all about a world without Israel and eradicating the Jews. As Brendan O’Neill pointed out recently on spiked: ‘Their longing for Israel’s erasure was made clear… “We don’t want no two states / We want ’48!” That is, 1948, a time when the modern state of Israel didn’t yet exist.’ I challenge Reich – or indeed anyone – to find one poster in all those photographs of the Columbia protests calling for peace, negotiations or an acknowledgment of Israel’s right to exist. Just one.
Much of what Reich writes is fantastical. ‘The atrocities committed by both sides’, he writes, ‘illustrate the capacities of human beings for inhumanity and show the vile consequences of hate. For these reasons, it presents an opportunity for students to re-examine their preconceptions and learn from one another.’ Yes, perhaps a morning teach-in on the campus green, where everyone can share their thoughts on anti-Semitism. After lunch, calls for the extermination of the Jews.
To be fair to Reich, he is merely a conspicuous representative of America’s elite academic class. There are plenty out there who are as clueless as he is. Some are active participants in the hate. Others are fellow travellers in the Palestine cause who do nothing to speak against the anti-Semitism in their movement. For decades, they have been marinating in the social-justice language of the left: whiteness, colonialism, systemic racism and so on. And now, they are so thoroughly immersed in so-called progressive ideology that they are oblivious to their surroundings. Like the honchos at National Public Radio, who deny their woke bias even when their employees point out obvious examples, these leftists and liberals have become disconnected from the reality around them.
Protesters at Columbia have been chanting: ‘Remember 7 October? That will happen not one more time, not five more times… but 10,000 more times.’ Yet still Reich claims that this does not express anti-Semitism. You couldn’t find a better illustration of George Orwell’s observation on the ignorance of intellectuals: ‘One has to belong to the intelligentsia to believe things like that: no ordinary man could be such a fool.’
As the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) points out, civil disobedience is not the same as expressing an opinion or engaging in peaceful protest. The whole point of it is to break the rules. Indeed, it ‘derives expressive power from the willingness of participants to accept the consequences of breaking the rules’. That these students and junior academics are shocked to be handcuffed for breaking the law reveals a profound sense of entitlement among young ‘radicals’.Prominent rabbi asks anti-Israel activists to stop singing his song at protests
We shouldn’t be surprised. FIRE president Greg Lukianoff has pointed to two dispiriting, parallel trends in American universities: a willingness to curtail free speech, all while giving a green light to violent, intolerant protests. At the University of California, Berkeley, where students rioted in 2017 because that tiresome weirdo Milo Yiannopoulous was speaking, the university ‘showed cowardice in its unwillingness to punish the rioters’, writes Lukianoff and Angel Eduardo in a recent op-ed. We saw a similarly rank capitulation at Evergreen State that same year, where marauding students were effectively allowed to chase professors Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying off of campus. Since then, ‘shutdowns and shout-downs have become commonplace’, they write.
Some critics of campus cancel culture have been caught off guard by the pro-Hamas protests. Almost a decade ago, they observe, we were all gawping at the ‘Yale Snowflakes’, those absurd Ivy Leaguers who went into open, teary-eyed revolt because academic Erika Christakis sent them an email saying they should chill out about offensive Halloween costumes. How did babyish offence-taking give way to open support for anti-Semitic terrorists?
But it all makes a perverse kind of sense. Students taught that freedom of speech is a form of violence have begun to see violence as a form of free speech. Young radicals reared on a crude, conspiratorial racial identity politics have begun to apply it to geopolitics, with predictably anti-Semitic results. A new generation of elite youth, overprotected and indulged in equal measure, have come to think they can do no wrong.
So let’s retire the Sixties comparisons. In 1964, when Mario Savio – civil-rights activist and student leader of the Free Speech Movement – was leading a campaign of civil disobedience, aimed at liberating Berkeley students from censorship, his cause was just and he was happy to suffer the consequences of his methods. ‘There is a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious’, he famously said, ‘you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels… you’ve got to make it stop!’. Meal plans did not get a mention.
At the same time, let’s not pretend that today’s revolting students just appeared, fully formed, from the womb. They are the products of an academic and upper-class culture that has kindled their prejudices and inflamed their intolerance. They aren’t revolutionaries. They’re bigoted brats. And they’ve been pandered to for far too long.
A New York rabbi is reiterating his call for his music not to be sung by anti-Israel demonstrators, after students at Yale University used his song during protests there.
Rabbi Menachem Creditor said he was “distraught” to learn that “Olam Chesed Yibaneh,” a song he wrote after 9/11 that has become a mainstay of progressive Jewish activists, was sung at the conclusion of a seder held by the anti-Zionist group Jewish Voice for Peace on Yale’s campus. Yale is one of dozens of schools where anti-Israel protest encampments have sprung up in recent weeks.
“Let me be clear: I vehemently object to the song being used in any context that is against Israel or the Jewish people,” Creditor said in a statement. “Those who are using the song in these protests are misappropriating its message of love and support for Israel. I cannot accept its use by the protesters, whose beliefs could not be further from my own.”
Creditor, the rabbi in residence at UJA-Federation of New York, first called for his song not to be sung at pro-Palestinian protests in November, a month after the start of Israel’s war with the Hamas terror group in Gaza, which began after thousands of invading terrorists slaughtered some 1,200 people in southern Israel on October 7, and seized 253 hostages, most of them civilians.
At the time, a member of the anti-Zionist group IfNotNow said the group would stop including “Olam Chesed Yibaneh” and a song written by another Jewish musician who objected to its use in national actions calling for a ceasefire, though a national spokesperson declined to answer questions about the songs’ use.