A number of American college campuses are experiencing a spate of well-coordinated anti-Semitic activities. Demonstrations appear to be orchestrated by a nucleus of students fomenting anti-Semitic and anti-Zionistic demonstrations augmented by a small contingent of faculty members who espouse similar views. The college experience is a wonderful time to spread one’s wings, expand horizons and enjoy exposure to new political and philosophical viewpoints. However, that same four-year stint also offers an opportunity for some to align themselves with a recalcitrant cohort determined to vehemently protest some egregious event. Uninvolved faculty, and many college administrators, may be intimidated by student organizers for their neutrality or opposition to these protests. It is unfortunate, however, that students who have every right to advocate political positions as they see fit, are too often unaware that many anti-Israel demonstrations have a not-so-latent anti-Semitic agenda as well.
During my academic career at Columbia University, in the late 60s and early 70s, there were endless, tense, sometimes violent campus confrontations. Well-organized supporters of the Black Panthers, with the ubiquitous placards extolling the virtues of The Baader-Meinhof Gang, The Red Army Faction of France and other anti governmental, often subversive, movements were quite popular then on university campuses. At that time, my student peers and I had no idea what these counter culture groups really stood for nor did we grasp by what means their ostensible revolutionary changes were to be effected.
Hearing Caucasian, middle class college students, chanting “Allahu Akbar” in their best Arabic accents is not novel or revolutionary. I would guess that the great majority of these protesters may not have had the opportunity to visit the Middle East and would benefit immensely from an opportunity to do so. Acquiring more first-hand knowledge of the geography, politics, culture and history of that region would add a very helpful perspective to campus demonstrators. It is disappointing to view a small number of faculty members with anti-Semitic or anti-Zionistic philosophies stand before significant numbers of fresh-eyed students and lecture their biased and skewed viewpoints. Our hallowed and often abused First amendment, offers excellent subterfuge.
My family and I lived in Israel for six years, admittedly at a somewhat different time. My wife and I had coffee regularly in Tulkarem and Qalqilya, now hotbeds of West Bank terror activity. We often stopped in Jericho for fresh orange juice, since then having become a home base for the late Yasser Arafat. When my parents came to visit us from the States, I thought nothing of taking them for a picnic outside of Gaza. We often ate in a warm and inviting restaurant just inside ancient Jerusalem’s Jaffa gate, having been guided through the kitchen to see what our friend, the Palestinian owner, had prepared that day. It was never Kumbaya, but there seemed to be hope for the future. Current events in the Middle East, most notably the recent Hamas-Israel war in Gaza, and the determination of an organized core dedicated to linking Israeli politics with anti-Semitic propaganda, have blurred that hope and have effectively contaminated some college campuses with their rabid philosophy.
Perhaps most unfathomable is the dearth of energetic college demonstrations reviling the extraordinary depravity that fills so many pages of our newspapers. The New York Times, February 6, 2015 edition, identifying the sub-human abuse of Boko Haram states: “Forced marriage, slavery and imprisonment are vital institutions for the militants…and casually meted-out death is common.” Our media are constantly reporting on the barbarism of ISIS, the assassination of dissenters by Hamas, the storming of a school and the slaying of hundreds of defenseless students by the Taliban. The list is too long for full enumeration here. It is mystifying that any semblance of organized campus demonstrations protesting public beheadings, women who are unempowered, kidnapped and sold into slavery or forced marriage, unable to drive in select countries, victimized by honor killings and inhumanely brutalized by gang rapes rampant in parts of the world, is met with profound silence on our campuses.