Tuesday, March 04, 2025
From Ian:
Seth Mandel: Columbia’s Choice: Hamasnik Anarchy or Taxpayer Cash
Seth Mandel: Columbia’s Choice: Hamasnik Anarchy or Taxpayer Cash
The biggest myth regarding the campus anti-Semitism crisis is that it’s about speech. It is a self-serving myth: Institutions and activists that want to disregard their abuse of Jewish students will fall back on the claim that any attempt to hold them accountable for their actions is actually an attack on free speech.Rise of the antisemitic psychologists
Columbia University is learning what happens when that disingenuous trick starts to backfire: Students and professors take it as a license to do whatever they want, people end up in the hospital, and the government steps in to say this cannot continue to be done on their dime.
The Biden administration was fearful of standing up to the Hamas youth groups on campus. The Trump administration is happy to do so. Thus we have the announcement that three government agencies—Health and Human Services, the Department of Education, and the General Services Administration—will be reviewing federal contracts and grants with Columbia totaling around $5 billion.
Crucially, the announcement clearly avoids the penalizing of mere speech:
“Americans have watched in horror for more than a year now, as Jewish students have been assaulted and harassed on elite university campuses,” Education Secretary Linda McMahon said in a statement. “Unlawful encampments and demonstrations have completely paralyzed day-to-day campus operations, depriving Jewish students of learning opportunities to which they are entitled. Institutions that receive federal funds have a responsibility to protect all students from discrimination. Columbia’s apparent failure to uphold their end of this basic agreement raises very serious questions about the institution’s fitness to continue doing business with the United States government.”
Assault isn’t speech. Harassment, the definitions of which are laid out in these schools’ policy handbooks, doesn’t include “criticism of Israeli government policy,” as activists and well-meaning but foolish free-speech groups routinely claim. At Harvard, for example, “such aggression must be sufficiently severe or pervasive, and objectively offensive, that it creates a work, educational, or living environment that a reasonable person would consider intimidating, hostile, or abusive and denies the individual an equal opportunity to participate in the benefits of the workplace or the institution’s programs and activities. Unless sufficiently severe or pervasive, a single act typically would not constitute bullying.”
Last, discrimination is also not speech. I wrote about one such prominent example last week: George Washington University’s professional psychology program penalized Jewish students for their religious background and Israeli students on the basis of their national origin, a textbook Title VI civil-rights violation.
In February, the western world was shocked when a TikTok video exposed two Australian nurses, Ahmad “Rashad” Nadir and Sarah Abu Lebdeh, openly reviling Jews and Israelis, insinuating they would not only refuse to treat, but might actually kill — or have killed — an Israeli patient that presented at their hospital. The duo have rightfully been banned from practice anywhere in Australia, but that will not soothe Australian Jews’ fear that this loose-lipped pair are the tip of an iceberg constituted of less self-sabotaging, but equally hateful fellow travellers.Michael Rapaport: A Message to My Haters up North
In a previous era, it was well understood in the healing professions that practitioners must never bring their personal biases to the workplace. That is no longer the case. Nobody in the medical community is encouraging nurses to kill Israeli patients, to be sure, but in professional mental-health circles dominated by far-left ideology, discrimination against Jewish students, practitioners and patients is well tolerated, and sometimes encouraged. In short, the domain of mental health, including social work, has become a psychological minefield for North American Jews.
For example, at a November psychology conference in Philadelphia, Villanova University Counseling Center director Nathalie Edmond gave a presentation on “dismantling oppression” featuring a slide show, including one titled “the colonized mind,” which positioned Zionism as equivalent to “internalized racism,” “homophobia” and “rape culture.” Social media pushback came fast and furious, but no heads rolled.
This anecdote captures the spirit of the movement to exclude therapists who identify as Zionists — that is, people who believe Israel has a right to self-determination as a nation-state — from the therapy community. In March 2024, the Facebook group Chicago Anti-Racist Therapists endorsed a blacklist of “therapists/practices with Zionist affiliations that we should avoid referring clients to,” justifying it as a strategy to preclude the promotion of “White supremacy via Zionism.” A responsive flashback to Nazi Germany is not an over-reaction. One “shocked and scared, but not surprised” blacklisted therapist, Michelle Magida, founded a private Jewish therapist Facebook page.
As psychiatrist Sally Satel notes in a Free Press article on the subject, two issues arise from the story. The first, trying to prevent clinicians who support the existence of Israel, or are simply Jewish, from treating patients “constitutes a grave breach of professional ethics.”
The second is the “alarming” trend in psychotherapy — she calls it “critical social justice therapy” — to insist on psychotherapy as “foremost, a political rather than a clinical enterprise.” Under this rubric, therapists with the “wrong” politics are not trustworthy with patients. As for patients with the same “wrong” convictions, correction of their error should be the focus of treatment.
This Sovietization of psychotherapy is a cross-border phenomenon, and so is a heavy antisemitic presence in therapy associations. The American Psychological Association (APA), the largest psychological association in the world, is considered a hotbed of antisemitism by many observers. A just-published Open Letter “demanding accountability” from APA, replete with evidence, signed by 3,556 “Psychologists against Antisemitism,” notes that “(w)hile APA has issued statements in solidarity with Ukraine and apologized to People of Color for perpetuating racism, it has remained inactive regarding the 500% spike in attacks against Jews, who represent only 2% of the population yet experience over half of all religion-based hate crimes according to FBI statistics.”
I’ve seen a lot of hate in the past 513 days. Two months after Hamas’s massacre, anti-Israel groups launched a social media campaign to discourage people from attending my show in Sacramento. In January last year, my show in Portland, Oregon, was protested, too. Six months after that, a Chicago venue canceled my act over “safety concerns.” And the day after hooligans chased Jewish soccer fans through the streets of Amsterdam in November 2024, hundreds turned up to demonstrate against my gig in Lakeview, Illinois—a Chicago suburb heavily populated with Jews.
I’m not alone. Many of my fellow Jewish performers are facing this kind of abuse right now simply because we support the existence of a Jewish state.
But on Friday morning, I woke up to the craziest campaign against me yet.
When I checked my social media feed, I saw that Heather McPherson, who is in the Canadian Parliament and a member of the New Democratic Party, was not just attacking me, but calling on her government to deny my entry into the country.
“New Democrats are alarmed that American personality Michael Rapaport is scheduled to perform in Canada,” she posted.
“Rapaport, who has a significant criminal history, also has a long history of racist and Islamophobic speech, and of inciting violence and supporting terrorism. We are witnessing an alarming increase in Islamophobia in Canada and globally. All Canadians deserve to feel safe in our communities.”
At the end, she once again urged Justin Trudeau’s party to take action against me, saying: “New Democrats are calling on the Liberal government to deny entry to Michael Rapaport.”
Now, I’ve got no beef with Ms. McPherson. I’ve never met her or even heard of her, which is something I have in common with most people. But I guess what ticked her off is that I’m headed to Canada this week to perform five stand-up shows in Edmonton, Alberta’s capital city, which McPherson represents.
Buy 
.jpeg)
.jpg)
