Why I Am Glad to See Campus Antisemitism Revealed
The recent revelation of just how deeply antisemitism is embedded in some of our nation’s leading universities is certainly quite disturbing. But it is not in the least surprising. That’s why I, for one, am glad to see all this coming to the surface. It’s ugly. It’s insidious. It’s inexcusable. But, at last, it’s being exposed for the world to see.
In the 2019 edition of my book Our Hands Are Stained with Blood: The Tragic Story of the Church and the Jewish People, I wrote, “And why is anti-Semitism spreading like wildfire on college campuses in America (and abroad)? An April 28, 2018 report in the Washington Times announced, ‘Anti-Israel sentiment sweeps U.S. college campuses.’”
I then shared these sobering quotes from the article, written April 28, 2018, by Cheryl K. Chumley:
“No matter how [the BDS movements are] packaged, they’re not about exercising a free speech right by targeting an unfair business practice.
“They’re about wiping Israel from the face of the map.
“They’re about driving home the point that Palestinians are the rightful heirs to Israeli lands, and Jews should not only vacate — but die. . . .
“It’s anti-Semitism, pure and simple. It’s alarming and hate-filled. And it continues to sweep across America’s places of higher learning, landing soon at a university or college campus near you.”
Chumley also pointed to an October 17, 2017 article in the Jerusalem Post where Dan Diker asked, “What do Hezbollah, Islamic Jihad, Hamas and the Palestinian Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) have in common?” His answer: “These terrorist groups have all been lionized and glorified by Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), the campus arm of the global boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) campaign.”
What? Anti-Israel terrorist groups being lionized and glorified on our college campuses? And this was in 2017.
Yet all this was hardly breaking news.
In 2012, I was invited by a Messianic Jewish campus group at the University of South Florida to participate in a public debate on the relationship between Israel and the Palestinians. This was because, I was told, there was such a high level of antisemitism on campus, something that I had learned was growing on many campuses in our nation, especially through the influence of radical anti-Israel professors.
When no one would step forward to debate me, I agreed to do a lecture on the subject, “Was Israel an Evil Occupier?”, but with the request that the lecture would be followed by audience Q&A, giving the listeners an opportunity to challenge me. Some of the questions I was asked were quite telling.
This, again, was in 2012, but already, in 1998, speaking at Howard University in Washington, DC, Louis Farrakhan said, “Don't be afraid of the Zionists. Don't be afraid of their power, Mr. Clinton. Stop bowing down.” Were these isolated sentiments?
As for the revelation of the level of destructive, radical leftism on some of our elite campuses, that, too, is no surprise.
As noted by Nicholas Confessore in the New York Times on December 10,
“Jay P. Greene, a senior researcher at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, said that antisemitic and anti-Israel protests on campuses — and the university presidents’ lawyerly responses at last week’s hearing — were akin to what he called the ‘Zoom moment’ during the pandemic when some parents first listened closely to what their children were learning in school and concluded it was ‘subpar in quality and radical in content.’
“‘One of those things we’ve struggled with, those of us who want to reform higher education, is convincing people that there’s a problem,’ Dr. Greene added. ‘Historically, they look around and say, ‘Huh, this seems fine.’ Everything they’re seeing right now is that things are not fine.’”
Not fine indeed.
As I pointed out in my January 2 article, “A Liberal Professor Admits to the Leftist Takeover of America,” “writing for the Washington Post in 2016, Christopher Ingraham noted that, ‘If you’ve spent time in a college or university any time in the past quarter-century you probably aren’t surprised to hear that professors have become strikingly more liberal. In 1990, according to survey data by the Higher Education Research Institute (HERI) at UCLA, 42 percent of professors identified as ‘liberal’ or ‘far-left.’ By 2014, that number had jumped to 60 percent.’
“He continued, ‘In the academy, liberals now outnumber conservatives by roughly 5 to 1. Among the general public, on the other hand, conservatives are considerably more prevalent than liberals and have been for some time.’
“That’s why Jon A. Shields penned an article for National Affairs in 2018 titled, ‘The Disappearing Conservative Professor.’ Shockingly, he wrote, ‘According to a recent [2018] study on faculty party affiliation by the National Association of Scholars, the ratio of Democrats to Republicans at Williams College is 132:1; at Swarthmore it is 120:1; and at Bryn Mawr it is 72:0. At many of America’s best research universities, the ratios are only moderately better.’
“As I noted in my 2022 book The Silencing of the Lambs, ‘A recent [2020] survey by the Harvard Crimson found that conservatives make up just over 1% of the school’s faculty’ (see here for more details.) The handwriting has been on the wall and this radical shift has long been predicted.”
In fact, while giving a student-invited lecture at Yale University more than 30 years ago, I was shocked to see some of the sentiments being expressed on campus, sentiments documented by scholars like Roger Kimball as far back as 1990, if not much earlier.
If only Harvard, along with our other elite universities, had heeded the prophetic warnings of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn delivered at his Harvard commencement speech in 1978, things would look very different today.
That’s why I asked on September 11, “Are our secular universities, especially those leaning most radically left, soon to collapse – or at least, soon to lose their current positions of power and influence?”
I answered, “A good case can be made that the answer could well be yes.”
The bad news is that many (if not the vast majority) of our elite academics scorned his call rather than heeded it.
The good news is that the rotten fruit is being exposed for the world to see.
