The defenders of free speech on campus are out in force. Far-left members of congress like Ilhan Omar and Jamaal Bowman defend the right of agitators to yell for the genocide of Jews and destruction of the Jewish State as a matter of “uncomfortable speech” that should be allowed. Lawyers debate what crosses the line when calling for killing a group of people generally as being protected speech in public spaces but similar language directed at individuals and/or what could be considered an immediate call for violence, which would be prohibited speech.
Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) was spotted smiling at the anti-Israel encampment at Columbia University. (Photo: Reuters)
One would therefore imagine the free speech advocates easily standing alongside students drawing the Islamic prophet Mohammed on placards around campus, and most definitely, showing Mohammed in art classes, much the way paintings and statues of Jesus, Moses and David are discussed.
But the opposite has been the case.
Professors are being fired or intimidated to not show artwork with Muhammed. In Minnesota, Erika López Prater was fired from her position at Hamline University for showing a 14th-century painting depicting the Prophet Muhammad in a lesson on Islamic art. A student complained that she was upset and that it was blasphemous to show a depiction of the Islamic prophet and got the school to fire the professor. The professor had zero malicious intent and was simply reviewing artwork of religious figures but was nonetheless terminated.
The French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo often lampoons religions and has made cartoons of the Islamic prophet as well. Jihadi radicals were incensed when their prophet was the subject matter, and shot up the company’s offices in 2015. The Islamic killers then shot up a kosher supermarket which had nothing to do with the magazine, simply to kill Jews.
A couple of months later in 2015, Pamela Geller held a “Draw Muhammed contest” in Texas, and two Muslim extremists shot up the event but were themselves killed. Both the Geller and Charlie Hebdo events were lampooning religion and Islam specifically, but covered under American and French ideals of free speech.
It will be an interesting spectacle to watch campuses with anti-Israel protests have counter-protests with Mohammed featured prominently on their placards with such statements like “Would Muhammed endorse Hamas’s rape of women?” and “What would Muhammed say about Hamas’s shooting the elderly?” Will Ilhan Omar rise to the defense of actual peace advocates the way she defends supporters of genocide?
There are several matters fomenting antisemitism at universities. One of them surrounds the topic of “decolonialization” and its impact on Jews on campus.
It is a plain fact that many European countries planted colonies in far away lands. The United Kingdom planted flags in the Americas, South Africa, India and Australia. Portugal took over Brazil, Angola, Mozambique, Macau and others. Belgium took the Congo. France had controlled Morocco, Algiers, Tunisia, Senegal, Cameroon and Madagascar. Spain took much of Central and South America while Italy took Libya. It seemed that any European country with a fleet sailed the world from the 15th to 19th century and seized lands and goods.
In the aftermath of the Second World War, European countries left their colonies and those emerging countries had varying degrees of success establishing new functioning governments. Universities established departments devoted to this topic, which analyze how the past 75 years shape events today, such as Brown University connecting the 2011 Arab Spring to “Decolonization, Development and State Building in North Africa.”
Many of the departments and conferences consider how post-colonial state-building left countries vulnerable to autocratic regimes. The issues are typically handled by region, such as Columbia University discussing decolonialization in the Americas in the Latin American Studies department and those in Africa in the Middle East Studies departments. Other schools do much the same.
Things devolve when it comes to Israel.
Many professors in Middle East Studies departments are deeply anti-Israel. They consider the Jewish State to be a colony thrust upon the local Arab population by the United Kingdom and other countries after World War I. They ignore the fact that the UK did not send any Jewish citizens to Palestine nor did the British seize local resources for British use.
Most glaringly, the anti-Israel professors ignore the fact that Jews are indigenous to the land of Israel. The history of Jews and the core of Judaism is in the Jewish holy land.
Those basic truths are not only ignored on university campuses, but a counter-narrative is proffered. For example, Columbia University’s Joseph Massad called the Jews in the Bible “Palestine Hebrews,” ignoring the reality that Arabs did not come to the land en masse until the 7th and 8th centuries.
It’s grossly antisemitic, and ignored by the school administration.
Beyond the cultural appropriation and historical theft, the anti-Israel movement manufactured a lie that Zionism isn’t even Jewish. At a BDS (boycott, divestment and sanctions) vote at the University of Wisconsin in 2017, a student said “Israel in its inception is not a Jewish idea but a European one,” a principle at the heart of the decolonialization project.
That insane idea is gaining backers. The Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism (ICSZ) is hosting conferences to advance this proposition in universities around the country. According to its “Points of Unity” which people must sign-on to, the number one affirmation is “Zionism is a settler colonial racial project. Like the US, Israel is a settler colonial state. The Institute opposes Zionism and colonialism, and abides by the international, Palestinian-led call for Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions.”
Its webite goes on that it “aims to support the delinking of the study of Zionism from Jewish Studies, and to reclaim academia and public discourse for the study of Zionism as a political, ideological, and racial and gendered knowledge project, intersecting with Palestine and decolonial studies, critical terrorism studies, settler colonial studies, and related scholarship and activism.”
This group is trying to sever Jews from the Jewish State and Zionism, and place Zionism in the camp of “decolonial studies” and “critical terrorism studies.”
Not surprisingly, this group masks its Jew-hatred under the guise of “academia.” It said that Jews had the October 7 savagery coming to them as part of decolonialization, and was outraged at Jews demanding justice. ICSZ wrote an “open letter to universities and other institutions, demanding they retract their statements endorsing Israeli genocide against Palestinians.” By “genocide”, they meant Israel trying to rescue 200 hostages seized by Hamas, pursue maximum justice for the Satans of Gaza who butchered 1,400 Israelis, and try to return the region to coexistence on either side of the border. Equally upsetting to these evil people at ICSZ, they were “horrified by the ubiquity of messaging from our university administrations that has expressed empathy for Israeli life,” because beheading children and raping women doesn’t deserve “empathy” if the “victims” are Jewish “colonizers.”
This is the state of American academia.
Universities are miseducating students that Jews have no history in the land of Israel and that the Jewish State’s founding was a racist European colonial project. They believe that Israel’s continued existence is an “ongoing Nakba” and Israel must be dismantled “by any means necessary,” which includes the October 7 massacre.
When Joseph Massad of Columbia University wrote about the “start of the Palestinian War of Liberation,” he did not see Arab terrorists hacking children to death and killing the elderly; he saw freedom fighters throwing off the yolk of oppression of Jewish invaders as a moment of “jubilation and awe.”
America’s universities are indoctrinating students in the antisemitic screed of the Hamas Charter, retouched with leftist jingoism to support the slaughter of Jews. And they are pushing the movement to go global. Jews on campuses everywhere have every reason to be terrified.
ACTION ITEM
Demand antisemitic professors and clubs like Students for Justice in Palestine be kicked off campus.
A number of high-level individuals have recently taken aim at their alma maters for the toxic environment that exists for Jewish and Zionist students on campus.
They are very late to the party.
Jewish Philanthropists Donating To Humanities
For many years, billionaires like Ron Perelman, Bill Ackman and Marc Rowan donated tens of millions of dollars for health care facilities, art centers, humanities and economic studies at Harvard, University of Pennsylvania, Brown University and others. Yet they seldom put any money into Israel or Jewish Studies programs at these institutions, assuming all was fine and the schools they attended decades earlier remained much the same.
Now, as noxious antisemitism has reached a boiling point as campuses host “Resistance” rallies in support of Palestinians slaughtering Jewish civilians, these philanthropists have suddenly recalled the Jewish and Zionist part of their humanity programs.
Marc Rowan called on alumni to stop donating to the University of Pennsylvania after the school hosted an anti-Zionist and anti-Semitic “literary festival.” He said that the heads of the university should step down for failing to stop the tidal wave of hatred at his beloved school.
These billionaires, who made fortunes in the business world by investing intelligently and properly predicting the future, utterly failed to understand universities today.
Billions from Muslim Countries For Muslim Studies
The Saudi Arabian government, corporations and particular individuals gave $600 million to several universities between 2011 and 2017 according to The Project On Government Oversight. MIT alone took in $78 million. George Washington University, Columbia University, Tufts University, and the University of Southern California each took $1 million or more.
According to POGO, “the largest foreign funder by far is Qatar, the only country to give over $1 billion in the seven years covered by the Higher Education Act data.” Qatar is a principal funder of the political-terrorist group Hamas which committed the heinous massacre of over 1,000 people in Israel this week, which finally made the Jewish billionaires pay attention to the campus problem.
POGO added that “Harvard University received by far the most foreign money in the period, reporting just over $1 billion from over 60 countries. In addition to Harvard, MIT, Johns Hopkins University, Georgetown University, and Northwestern University are among the schools that reported receiving the most foreign gifts, each totaling over $300 million.”
Harvard students after Hamas’s jihadi massacreHarvard editorial of 2022 supporting boycott of Israel
The foreign donations take several forms, each of which embeds foreign culture into the universities’ campuses, and ultimately into the country.
Some international money was used to establish university branches in foreign countries. These centers enable U.S. students to study abroad and become more familiar with autocratic regimes in a friendly college environment.
Arab states funded Islamic Studies and Middle Eastern studies departments on U.S. campuses like the president of the United Arab Emirates, Sheik Zayed bin Sultan al-Nahyan, who donated $2.5 million to the Harvard Divinity School to endow the Sheik Zayed Al Nahyan Professorship in Islamic Religious Studies. Within a short period of time, the Zayed Center became a noxious fountain of anti-Semitic screed complete with Holocaust denials and blood libels.
Significantly, millions of dollars from Arab countries have funded student scholarships for thousands of Muslim students to come to the U.S. to study. During the Obama Administration, tens of thousands of students from Arab countries were present at universities, a number which began to decline significantly under the Trump Administration.
The presence of thousands of foreign students and Muslim teachers taking over Middle Eastern Studies Departments created a toxic brew. Students were able to petition universities to open chapters of Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) with a faculty adviser, which were conveniently now present and paid for. The AMCHA Initiative showed that schools with five or more academic advisers favoring boycotting Israel “were 7.24 times more likely” to issue anti-Israel statements than schools with fewer than five advisors. Further, AMCHA Reports “analyzing antisemitic incidents in 2015, 2016, 2017 and 2018 indicate a significant increase in actions which directly harm or threaten Jewish students, including physical and verbal assaults, destruction of property, harassment discrimination and suppression of speech, at schools with an SJP or similar anti-Zionist chapter.”
In short, Gulf states spent billions of dollars over decades at American universities building an anti-Zionist and antisemitic infrastructure, while Jewish philanthropists had ribbon cutting ceremonies on general intellectual matters. The Jewish billionaires are waking up too late to their poor investments, when the anti-Zionist and antisemitic culture on campuses is deeply ingrained and universities are highly addicted to the stable flow of Islamic money.
While Rowan and Ackman may make a lot of noise about getting alumni to stop donating to these schools, they should put at least as much effort to get universities to stop taking money from autocratic, anti-democratic regimes which are poisoning the minds of America’s future and making schools inhospitable for Jews.
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