The Hate That Doesn’t Know Its Own Name
By Bret Stephens (Opinion Columnist)
When the historian Deborah Lipstadt defeated a libel suit brought against her in a British court by the Holocaust denier David Irving in April 2000, it was almost possible to imagine that antisemitism might someday become a thing of the past, at least in much of the West. Taking a trip to Israel was not an ideologically fraught choice. Wearing a Star of David was not a personally risky one. College campuses did not feel hostile to Jewish students. Synagogues (at least in the United States) did not have police officers stationed outside their doors.
Not anymore.
The Anti-Defamation League recorded 751 anti-Semitic incidents in the United States in 2013. There were 3,697 in 2022. There was a nearly 400 percent increase in the two weeks after the Hamas massacre of Oct. 7 compared with the year before. Last week, “Jewish students specifically were warned not to enter M.I.T.’s front entrance due to a risk to their physical safety,” according to a public letter from Jewish students there. In Montreal a Jewish school was targeted by gunfire twice in a single week.
Today, Lipstadt is the U.S. special envoy to monitor and combat antisemitism, and her battle against Irving (the subject of the 2016 film “Denial”) seems almost quaint. “I never imagined antisemitism would get this bad,” she told me when I spoke with her by phone on Monday evening. “Something about this is different from anything I have ever personally seen.”
One of those differences, I suggested, is that antisemitism is the hate that doesn’t know its own name — that is, that many of those who call themselves anti-Zionists or chant “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” would vehemently deny that they are engaged in anti-Semitic behavior.
Lipstadt allowed that at least a few people have no idea what the chant means. But many more do: a call for “a purely Palestinian state without Jews.” She added, “You may want to redefine it, but what it has stood for, for decades, is quite clear.” (Yes, there are those who imagine Jews and Palestinians coexisting harmoniously in some future river-to-sea Palestine. Hamas murdered that fantasy, along with so much else, on Oct. 7.)
As for anti-Zionism (never to be confused with ordinary, even stringent, criticism of Israeli policy), “we have to make a historical distinction,” she said. A century ago, before the creation of the state of Israel, questions about Zionism were “more of a political or intellectual debate. But when you are talking about a state with 7.1 million Jews and when you are saying they have no right to exist and should all go someplace else, that’s something far more than an ideological point.”
What about more specific anti-Zionist arguments, such as the view that the Jews displaced native inhabitants to create Israel? Or that Israel is a racist state that practices apartheid?
Lipstadt made short work of those claims. If Israel ought to be abolished because it is guilty of displacing native inhabitants, then the same should go for the United States or Australia, among many other countries. If Israel is racist, then how is it that more than half of Israeli Jews have non-Ashkenazi roots, because their ancestors came from places like Iran, Yemen and Ethiopia? If Israel is an apartheid state, why are Israeli Arabs in the Knesset, on the Supreme Court, attending Israeli universities, staffing Israeli hospitals?
Then there is the double standard that’s so often applied to Jews. On college campuses, she noted, “when other groups say, ‘We are a victim,’ the default position is to believe them. When Jews say it, the default position is to question, to challenge, to say, ‘You caused it’ or ‘You don’t have a right to that’ or ‘What you say happened to you is not really an example of bigotry.’
Why is so much of today’s antisemitism coming from well-educated people, the sort who would never be caught dead uttering other racist remarks? Lipstadt recalled that of the four Einsatzgruppen — the German death squads entrusted with the mass murder of Jews in World War II — three were led by officers with doctoral degrees. “You can be a Ph.D. and an S.O.B. at the same time,” she said.
She also pointed to academic fads of the past two decades, “narratives or ideologies that may not start out as anti-Semitic but end up painting the Jew as other, as a source of oppression instead of having been oppressed.” One of those narratives is that Jews are “more powerful, richer, smarter, maliciously so,” than others and must therefore be stopped by any means necessary.
The idea that opposing Jewish power can be a matter of punching up, rather than down, fits neatly into the narrative that justifies any form of opposition to those with power and privilege, both of them dirty words on today’s campuses. It’s how Hamas’s “resistance” — the mass murder and kidnapping of defenseless civilians — has become the new radical chic.
The challenge that Lipstadt confronts isn’t confined to campuses. It’s worldwide: the streets of London (which saw a 1,350 percent increase in anti-Semitic hate crimes in the early weeks of October from the previous year) and on Chinese state media (which hosts discussion pages about Jewish control of American wealth) and in Muslim immigrant communities throughout Europe (with Muslims handing out candy in one Berlin neighborhood to celebrate the Oct. 7 attacks).
Lipstadt was clear about where this leads: “Never has a society tolerated overt expressions of antisemitism and remained a democratic society.” What to do? Governments alone, she said, can’t solve the problem.
“I know it sounds ludicrous, but a lot comes down to what happens at the dinner table.” She told me of a friend whose fifth-grade daughter was taunted by anti-Semitic remarks by her classmates at a “fancy Washington school.”
“Where did they get that? Where did it come from? How did they learn it was OK?”
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Palestinian education:
Why a two state agreement is virtually impossible as long as Palestinians want to eliminate Israel and indoctrinate future generations with this dangerous nonsense.
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HOOVER DAILY
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| The Progressive Movement’s Revealing Response To Hamas by Joshua D. Rauh, Aharon Friedman via Liberty Lens Its position illustrates why the axioms of the entire movement should be rejected. ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Is Nikki Haley A Secret Liberal Like DeSantis Claims?+++ |
Eight years ago Mike Rowe said he was switching the channels on his television back and forth watching the news and saw a number of college students setting fire to the American flag and dancing around a pile of burning flags telling reporters in interviews they were disgusted with Old Glory and “fearful” of the American Flag.
“It wasn’t lost on me in the moment that all of these events were happening at what is considered the best of the best elite universities across the country,” said Rowe in an interview with the Examiner.
Rowe said it didn’t take long for him to figure out why those students drew those conclusions about Old Glory; explaining the ideal of associating fear with the American Flag came from the very people who were supposed to be instructing them.
Rowe said the evidence was no more crystal clear than the actions then college president, Jonathan Lash at Hampshire College, who instead of using his experience and wisdom to assure the students that no country offers more liberties to their people and therefore there was nothing to ‘fear’ from the flag, decided instead this teachable moment was to validate their fears.
“Lash actually removed any traces of the American Flag from the campus and said in a statement that removing the flag from the campus ‘will better enable us to focus our efforts on addressing racist, misogynistic, Islamophobic, anti-immigrant, anti-Semitic, anti LGBTQ rhetoric and behaviors,’” explained Rowe.
Lash, a former Peace Corps volunteer, federal prosecutor, Harvard graduate and president of a D.C. based environmental think-tank, left the college in 2018; Hampshire College under Lash in 2015 was one of the first elite schools in the United States not to accept SAT scores from applicants, in part because Lash said SAT’s were strongly biased against students of color.
Rowe said if Americans watching these massive anti-Israel, pro-Hamas protests across elite American colleges and universities across the country are shocked by the blatant anti-Semitism they are seeing among American college students, but also the students clear lack of understanding history and their inability to intellectually challenge their professors and peers over joining these protests, they haven’t been paying attention to the ethos of elite universities for at least two generations.
Higher education for decades has been trending not liberal but radical left; Philip Magness and David Waugh wrote earlier this year in the Independent Review that sixty percent of faculty in universities across this country identified as “hard left.”
Magness and Waugh wrote while the modal college professor has sat to the political left of the American public since the 60’s it wasn’t until very recently that this overall skew obscured an underlying stability in the political composition of faculty.
Their data showed that it was in in 2001 that faulty members went from liberal to hard left and now are nearing a supermajority in the academic world.
It is not lost on Rowe that the two places of higher education where you don’t see campuses erupting in violence and destroying the safety of Jewish students are trade schools and community colleges.
“In 2016 I was feeling very proud to have a scholarship fund that was earmarked for trade schools when everywhere I looked, I saw people burning the flag at elite universities,” said Rowe, adding, “Maybe it happened then or maybe it is happening now, but I looked and I couldn't find a single incident of a trade school or community college burning the American flag.”
Rowe said once again for the second time in a decade he remains so proud to run the mikeroweWORKS foundation, “Of all the pushback I get, I never get any in this space. These schools simply don't go there,” he said of the trade schools and community colleges across the country whose certificate programs and two year degrees are designed around filling the skills gap in this country.
Rowe’s foundation has given away millions in worth ethic scholarships to trade school students and helped thousands find jobs in the trade industry.
So why is it that community college students and trade school students aren’t as motivated by their peers at elite colleges to participate in these rallies? John Surma, a Wisconsin native who now calls Texas home, attended both and offered a very unique prospective.
“I graduated high school in a class of less than 100 from Elkhorn High School in Wisconsin in 1987,” he said then went off to the University of Wisconsin Madison where his class size averaged 250 to 300 students.
“I was lost, everything was massive and I floundered,” he said.
Surma had decided to quit college the next year, “I had worked in a machine shop that summer, liked it, and felt like I belonged,” he said, but his parents were having none of it so he instead went to the local community college and found himself surrounded by students who were looking for an education and he fit in.
“About half of the faculty had day jobs, my accounting professor worked at the Janesville General Motors truck plant for example, so the instructors weren’t just super accessible, they communicated in a way we could relate to,” he said.
“There was also an interesting sense of camaraderie as folks who weren’t in a glamorous university, but who all had purpose,” he said.
Surma eventually went to law school which he admits he hated, “I was working in manufacturing and going to school and it was clear professors took exception to that,” he explained.
Today he lives in a little patch of heaven in East Texas where he is a safety lawyer taking his machine shop skills and marrying them with his law degree and spend his days “fighting the administrative state.”
Surma said the reason you don’t see students at trade schools or community colleges is pretty simple, “It is because the student body pays for their own education more or less and won’t tolerate it as its eating up their time and tuition dollars.”
Surma offers this as an example when he was at Madison, “The first protest I saw there was related to some minor military event…they were clearly ‘finding themselves’ on someone else’s dime. When you work to pay for your school like most trade and community college students do you don’t see the value. And the faculty and administration seem to share that sentiment at those schools,” he said.
Rowe said Sumra nails it on all points especially something that is lost on a lot of people who don’t realize their tax dollars are paying for those uninformed pro-Palestine and pro-Hamas students to intimidate and terrorize Jewish students.
“No one's disputing the right to protest. But what I'm curious about is how many of those protestors are getting their tuition from federal grants,” he said, adding, “If you're talking Fannie Mae, who holds the note on the current $1.7 trillion of outstanding debt, well then it is the feds,” he said.
The typical financial aid package at Harvard University—where pro-Palestinian rallies have cost them financial support from alumni—the total budget for a student this year is $80,600, with federal scholarship amounts set at $64,500.
Over 55 percent of the students attending Harvard received federal grants or loans.
Rowe said if you want to throw a little gas on the fire on the psyche of the American who is sitting at home shaking heir head wondering what these kids are up to, “Just remember you're paying for it,” he said.
The U.S. Department of Education tallies show there are nearly 4,000 colleges and universities across this country with 40 percent of their students holding some type of job while attending school.
In contrast there are just a little over 1,000 community colleges in the United States and 7,407 Trade & Technical Schools in the US as of 2022, with 80 percent of those students employed while attending school in the former and many of the trade students working in the trade they are learning.
Rowe said so much breaks him about today is this feeling shared by so many that we're going through totally uncharted territory and we've never been in such a divided place, and we've never seen such ignorant behavior, “But of course, there's nothing new under the sun. We've been there and we've done it a thousand times, and I nearly forgot that I had written about the burning flag in 2016 until I saw the same type of behavior unfold again,” he said.
Rowe said when the protests at the elite universities once again started to unfold after the October 7 massacre he wondered what it seemed so familiar, “And the answer isn't because it's familiar in terms of bad behavior. It was familiar because it's another thing that never happens at schools where people go to learn a skill.”
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Israel’s 40th Day of War
By Sherwin Pomerantz
On the 40th day of war with Hamas there are now 46 IDF troops who have died in the fighting. Reports this morning indicate that the IDF is in control of the entire northern half of Gaza and is, in fact, inside Al Shifa Hospital as well, where it has located the underground bunkers of Hamas and entrances to numerous tunnels. There is also suspicion that it is an area where hostages are either currently being held or was used to hold them until recently.
On the northern border, Israel Defense Forces jets struck Hezbollah terrorist infrastructure in southern Lebanon on Tuesday as escalations continue on the northern border.
“Fighter jets recently attacked a number of terrorist infrastructures of the Hezbollah organization in Lebanon. In addition, an IDF tank attacked a terror squad that tried to launch anti-tank missiles from Lebanese territory towards the Yiftah area,” the military said. Earlier on Tuesday, Lebanese terrorists launched anti-tank missiles and mortar shells at military outposts throughout Israel’s upper and western Galilee regions, activating air-raid sirens in Moshav Margaliot, Moshav Shomera, Kibbutz Yiftah, Arab al-Aramshe and Mattat. IDF forces attacked the sources of the fire in Lebanon.
Regarding the hostages, Israel and Hamas are reported to be negotiating a deal that would include the release of most of the women and children being held hostage by the Palestinian terror group in the Gaza Strip, The Washington Post reported on Monday. In exchange, Jerusalem would agree to a temporary ceasefire of up to five days, allow an influx of goods into the Strip and release jailed Palestinians. “The general outline of the deal is understood,” an Israeli official was quoted by the Post as saying. Israel TV today has started speaking about this as well as something that is imminent, without specific details, but being overseen by Egypt, Qatar and the US,
An Israeli man was seriously wounded after Palestinian terror groups launched a barrage of rockets from the Gaza Strip at the Tel Aviv area on Tuesday evening. The Magen David Adom emergency response organization reported that its medics evacuated a 20-year-old man with serious shrapnel wounds to Wolfson Medical Center in Holon. In addition, a 43-year-old woman sustained minor injuries. Israel has seen a decrease in Red Alert sirens warning of incoming rockets, drones and terrorist infiltrations since the IDF launched “Operation Swords of Iron” on Oct. 7, IDF Home Front Command data shows.
Finally, video footage today shows a large number of IDF soldiers delivering significant amounts of medical aid to Al Shifa hospital including incubators and respirators, as well as items such as beds, cribs and the like It appears that Hamas is not standing in the way of the hospital accepting Israeli aid. Sadly, all of the international news agencies ae focusing on the fact that babies in Gaza had to be removed from their incubators for lack of electricity with no mention of the Israel aid
40 is a significant number in Jewish history marking the length of time that Moses was on Mt. Sinai receiving the tablets of the Law (both times) as well as the length of time Noah and his family were in the Ark, to name just a few references. Given that after 40 days these travails ended, let’s hope that this will be the case for the 239 hostages held by Hamas as well
Sherwin Pomerantz has lived in Israel for 40 years, is CEO of Atid EDI Ltd., a international business development consultancy. He is also the Founder and Chair of the American State Offices Association, former National President of the Association of Americans and Canadians in Israel and a past Chairperson of the Board of the Pardes Institute of Jewish Studies.
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