Wednesday, January 15, 2025
From Ian:
Seth Mandel: Pardoning the Universities
Seth Mandel: Pardoning the Universities
CUNY, a public system of 25 schools with one of the worst anti-Semitism problems in the country, was ordered to remedy its sins by: investigating Jewish and Arab/Muslim complaints, telling the Education Department what CUNY found and what they’re doing about it, and training employees in nondiscrimination.Noah Rothman: A Clockwork Blue: How the Left Has Come to Excuse Away and Embrace Political Violence
In other words, practically nothing.
Has that changed since last year? Not at all. A couple weeks ago, Rutgers University (my alma mater) followed the same path. Pro-Hamas mobs on campus threatened Jewish students and called for violence against Jews worldwide, but the school “admitted” it failed both Jewish and Palestinian students, because academia refuses to address anti-Semitism without saying “and Islamophobia.”
Rutgers, a state school with one of the largest populations of Jewish students in the country, was directed to make amends by: reviewing its policies, stating it won’t tolerate discrimination, providing training, etc. etc.
Can more be done? Mark Yudof, former president of the University of California system, told Jewish Insider that federal funding cuts should be on the table. Trump himself threatened colleges with the possibility of losing accreditation, should they ignore calls to clean up their acts.
A Trump Office of Civil Rights should also make clear that taking anti-Semitism seriously means being capable of addressing it without legitimizing the standard anti-Zionist response. The playbook is as follows: Jewish students make a civil-rights complaint and Arab/Muslim students treat that civil-rights complaint as a violation of their own civil rights. This makes a mockery of the entire concept of civil-rights protections in public institutions. It is, in fact, intended to do nothing more than torpedo the application of civil-rights law to Jews. The Hamas fanboys on campus and their supporters believe that the purpose of having a civil-rights regime is to make sure it is two-tiered.
Universities love this trick, but they are probably correct in assuming that just because Biden fell for it doesn’t mean future presidents will. Which is why they’re rushing to deliver the fatal blows to Title VI while they still can.
This intellectual environment is profoundly redolent of the one in which the violent radicals of the late 1960s and early 1970s were steeped. Terrorist groups like Weather Underground, the FALN, and the Black and Symbionese Liberation Armies—organizations that engaged in targeted assassinations and thousands of domestic bombings from the late 1960s through the late 1970s—immersed their members in revolutionary literature to help their followers think of actual people as abstractions, the better to disengage their emotions from the maiming and killing they were pursuing.Documentary exposes campus protests and hateful vitriol for what they are
In his chronicle of the Students for a Democratic Society and its devolution into a variety of factions, Kirkpatrick Sale identified the psychological predisposition that had radicalized so many of the SDS members. “There was a primary sense, begun by no more than a reading of the morning papers and developed through the new perspectives and new analyses available to the Movement now, that the evils in America were the evils of America, inextricably a part of the total system,” he wrote. “Clearly, something drastic would be necessary to eradicate those evils and alter that system.”
This explanation is as true of today’s left as it was of the left when it was written in 1973. Just as 1960s and 1970s liberals came to echo revolutionary rhetoric that contributed to the foul atmosphere in the country rather than looking to stem the passions and cool the national temperature, so too do today’s liberals make common cause with those who believe the American system is delegitimizing itself.
If one makes a careful survey of the progressive press, there isn’t much about America in 2025 that is still worth preserving—least of all, its legal structure. In the progressive view, the courts are hopelessly corrupt, and the rot goes all the way up to the top. “The Supreme Court has now allowed Trump to carry out this agenda in a second term through literally criminal methods of repression so long as he calls them ‘official acts,’” yelped Slate’s Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern. Then-Vice President Kamala Harris speaks in 2021 after Derek Chauvin was found guilty for George Floyd’s death. (Photo by Doug Mills-Pool/Getty Images)
Even when the courts function in ways progressives like, as they did when George Floyd’s killer was convicted, they are still viewed as tools of a corrupt system. “America has a long history of systemic racism,” Kamala Harris said in response to the conviction of Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin. Joe Biden similarly used the occasion not to speak of justice being served but of the injustice the original crime supposedly represented. “The systemic racism is a stain on our nation’s soul,” he concurred. “The knee on the neck of justice for black Americans.” What is this but a leftward echo of the idea expressed by Donald Trump in 2015 and 2016 that America is “rigged”? Taking measures into your own hands under such conditions is a rational response.
After all this, it surely does not come as a surprise that Americans are growing increasingly comfortable with political violence, at least in theory. A 2017 poll by UCLA’s John Villasenor found that nearly one-fifth of the students he surveyed said violence was acceptable as a form of protest against speakers with whom they disagreed. By the fall of 2022, the William F. Buckley Jr. Program at Yale found more than 41 percent of students believed that physical violence to prevent the articulation of dangerous ideas is justified. In 2024, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression revealed that one-third of the 50,000 college students it surveyed believed violence might be an acceptable response to nonviolent behaviors—even if those polled would prefer that someone else take on the associated risks.
This outlook is migrating off America’s campuses and into the whole of society. A third of respondents in a 2021 Washington Post poll said violent action against the government could be justified, up from just 1 in 10 in the 1990s. A University of Chicago survey in 2024 found that 10 percent of respondents agreed that “violence is justified” to “prevent Trump from becoming president.” Does the percentage sound small? Fine, but it represents some 26 million Americans.
While the argument over the past 25 years in the mainstream media has been that political violence is primarily a threat from the right, the history I have laid out here suggests something very different. We’ve been lucky that no single act has set off a truly cataclysmic chain reaction, but the potential for a spiraling cascade of vengeance and reprisals is ever present. And one day soon—unless we grow sick of the sight of blood or become revolted by the thought of an America descending into actual political carnage, and unless the left is willing to take a long and hard look in the mirror—our luck will run out.
I recently attended a screening of “October H8TE,” a documentary film by director and executive producer Wendy Sachs, which was followed by a question-and-answer session. Later, I had a one-on-one conversation with executive producer Debra Messing, in addition to a student featured in the film.
Unlike some of the other films about the Hamas-led terrorist attacks and atrocities in southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, in which 1,200 people were massacred and 251 others kidnapped and dragged into the Gaza Strip, this documentary focuses on the wave of Jew-hatred that has spiraled upward in America since Oct. 8.
The film starts and ends in Israel, but the story is told through an American lens. “I am an American Jew,” says Sachs, the filmmaker and mother of a college student. “So, I’m telling it through my experience and what’s happening here in America.”
“This is not a film about the Republican Party or the Democratic Party,” says Sachs. “But at the same time—what is shocking to me, and, I think, to many of us—is what is happening in the progressive left of the Democratic Party—the not just refusal to call out the antisemitism but a hostility toward Israel and even the term ‘Zionism’.”
Anti-Israel bias and loathing have become rampant on many campuses. Clips of angry student protests with their calls for Israel’s destruction weave throughout the film. Unfortunately, but not surprisingly, a recent Harvard-Harris poll found that 52% of Generation Z, those between the ages of 18 and 24, said they side more with Hamas than Israel.
I asked Messing, who appears in the film, what she would say to them.
“I would say you’re sympathizing with terrorists,” she told me. “Then I would ask: What kind of civilization do you want? One in which women can’t show their hair, speak in public, sing, learn? Where gay people are hung in the town square or pushed off buildings to their deaths? Where there is no freedom of speech, no freedom of religion, no freedom of movement? If this is not what you want, then you have to stop marching with people carrying Hamas, Hezbollah and ISIS flags.”
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