European Jews are becoming increasingly worried about the safety of their children who are students at various universities due to the tidal wave of antisemitic hate sweeping the continent — and in fact, the world.
The European Jewish Congress this week called on the rectors of Europe’s leading universities to protect Jewish students’ right to be free from intimidation and attack.
European universities, like those across the United States, are seeing “occupations” and demonstrations from anti-Zionist anarchists who are mimicking some of the most extreme actions occurring across American campuses.
In a letter addressed to the rectors of dozens of European universities in countries that have seen such activity in recent days, EJC President Dr. Ariel Muzicant wrote that freedom of speech on Europe’s university campuses is a misnomer “if it champions violence and intimidation of Jewish students.”
“Calls to ‘globalize the intifada’ or open glorification of Islamist terror organizations like Hamas and Hezbollah, or the Houthis of Yemen, don’t really sit well with a movement that claims to be progressive, non-violent and merely supporting peace,” Muzicant wrote.
In recent days, Jewish students have been denied access to facilities and harassed by violent mobs at Paris’s prestigious Sciences Po, as well as brutally attacked at the Free University of Brussels. Similar attacks and intimidation have been witnessed in universities across the continent.
“The violence of language and harassment are always linked to an agenda of organizations that have one thing in common; the total, immediate and violent eradication of the State of Israel, home to half the world’s Jewish population and central to the Jewish identity of almost all their brothers and sisters in the Diaspora Jewish communities,” Muzicant told university heads.
Moreover, he wrote, these radical demonstrations are the very antithesis of free academic expression and engagement.
“Not only do these actions glorify violence against Jews but they attempt to muzzle any form of expression by Jewish students, labelled Zionists.
“Demonstrators are instructed not to “engage with Zionists”, the antithesis of an enlightened university pledged to protect freedom of speech and access,” he wrote.
Recalling darker times when Jews were forced out of Europe’s universities, Muzicant warned the rectors that they must act against these demonstrations and occupations, because if they do not, the result will be the denial of access to higher education to most Jews in Europe’s universities — as it was in 1932, at the very start of the movement that resulted in the Nazi Holocaust.
