The Campus Inquisition

In 1478, the rulers of Spain sought to consolidate their power and establish a society free of undesirable elements. Under the flag of the Catholic Church, the Spanish kingdom sought out “heretics,” principally Jews, as well as Muslims and Protestants. They used inquisitors who questioned people’s beliefs, giving them a choice of converting to Catholicism, expulsion or death. Over 200,000 Jews were expelled from Spain in 1492, tens of thousands were killed and thousands more converted from Judaism. Portugal followed a similar course in 1497, and both countries enforced the Inquisition in their colonies in the Americas well into the 19th century.

Universities are using a similar tactic against Jewish Zionists today in the Campus Inquisition.

Jews are being singled out by student groups and governments to understand their positions about Israel. At McGill University in Canada, people called for a Jewish student to resign if she traveled to Israel. A Jewish student applying to a Student Council Judicial Board at UCLA was rejected after being asked “Given that you are a Jewish student and very active in the Jewish community, how do you see yourself being able to maintain an unbiased view?” The Jewish student government president at USC was harassed with a campaign to “impeach [my] Zionist a**” after people found out she was a Zionist. San Francisco State excluded the Jewish group Hillel from a school information fair.

These same schools do not ask Chinese students if they support the Chinese persecution of Uyghurs. They do not ask Iranian students if they support hanging gays. They do not ask Saudi students if they support killing minors or bombing Yemenis. They don’t even think of asking Turkish students how they feel about Turkey jailing journalists, nor do they demand that Sudanese students be expelled from groups if they don’t condemn female genital mutilation prevalent in Sudan.

But they pursue Israel, the most liberal country in the entire Middle East and North Africa region.

Campus groups only demand that Jewish students state their position about Israel, not the tens of thousands of non-Jewish Zionist students. It is blatant anti-Semitism in targeting only Jews and only the Jewish State for inquiry.

The university system has adopted an outrageous false narrative as a tenet of the new woke religion, that Israel engages in “apartheid, genocide and war crimes” (City University of New York) in promoting “white supremacy Jewry” (University of Illinois-Urbana) based on colonialism, stating “Israel in its inception is not a Jewish idea but a European one” (University of Wisconsin). This extremist progressive-socialist-BlackLivesMatter-Muslim cancel Jewish culture on campus has inverted the Jewish victims of white supremacy, to be the evil architects of racism in a re-launch of the debunked “Zionism is racism” campaign of the 1970’s. They are demanding that Jews be purged from their safe havens on campuses and in their homeland in the Middle East.

*Students for Justice in Palestine march*

In the Campus Inquisition, heresy is defined as believing Jews are a people, indigenous to the land of Israel, who have a natural right to live free of persecution, with self-determination in their homeland. The new inquisitors demand that Jews either denounce such belief and become “good Jews” like those in the anti-Israel group Jewish Voice for Peace, or be banned from society.

Approximately 550 years after the Catholic church ethnically cleansed the Jewish community from the Iberian Peninsula, universities are unleashing a new Inquisition to root out Jewish Zionists. And just like the anti-Semitic tormentors of yesteryear, today’s inquisitors wrap themselves in the shroud of a perceived higher calling, ridding society of the small and most persecuted ancient people.