The University of Pennsylvania Has Become Comfortably Numb to Antisemitism By Zach Kessel
The University of Pennsylvania plans to host the Palestine Writes Literature Festival on its campus later this month, but it appears the event’s focus will lean more toward the elimination of Israel than the promotion of Palestinian authors.
The festival’s website describes itself as being “dedicated to celebrating and promoting cultural productions of Palestinian writers and artists,” which seems innocent enough. There is, of course, nothing wrong with celebrating one’s culture and the artistic output thereof, but a closer look at the festival’s roster of guests will clue you in as to the true aims of its organizers.
The four most notable speakers at the conference are Australian writer Randa Abdel-Fattah, Rutgers University professor Noura Erakat, City University of New York professor Marc Lamont Hill, and former Pink Floyd frontman Roger Waters. Each one of those four, suffice to say, has a spotty record where the Jews are concerned.
Abdel-Fattah, as Jewish Insider’s Matthew Kassel reported, has called Israel a “demonic, sick project” and said she “can’t wait for the day we commemorate its end.” Erakat has a history of comparing Zionism to Nazism and falsely accusing Israel of targeting Palestinian civilians in military operations. Hill — who was a CNN contributor until a 2018 speech he made at the United Nations calling for a “free Palestine from the river to the sea” led to his firing — has a history of palling around with noted antisemite Louis Farrakhan. That phrase, which I’ve written about for National Review in the past, advocates the establishment of a Palestinian state extending from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea, erasing Israel from the map. Accomplishing that goal would necessarily entail the ethnic cleansing of the almost 7 million Jews living within Israel’s borders.
Waters, by far the most famous of the bunch, is so outspoken in his hatred for Jews — which he couches as support for the Palestinian cause — that one of his former bandmates, David Gilmour, has publicly agreed with the notion that Waters is an antisemite. His rhetoric goes so far that the U.S. State Department condemned him after a concert in Berlin in which he donned a Nazi SS uniform in an apparent attempt to compare Israel to Hitler’s Germany and insulted Anne Frank’s memory. Waters has repeatedly flown a pig balloon emblazoned with the Star of David at his concerts, intimated that Israelis are not human, accused Jews of controlling American media, and referred to a “Zionist cabal,” an antisemitic canard dating back to the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.
Again, there is absolutely nothing suspect about the idea of a Palestinian literature festival in theory. But the fact that many of the speakers are neither Palestinians nor authors sheds some light on the truth of this conference. While an educational institution should embrace principles of free expression and open discourse, the fact that the University of Pennsylvania is hosting an event packed to the gills with people who have time and again openly and unrepentantly called for the deaths of Jews should at least give some observers pause.
If a university has an institutional commitment to diversity and a zero-tolerance approach to discrimination, which Penn does, it needs to enforce it regardless of the perpetrators’ claims of minority status. While such DEI programs are often deleterious to academic freedom and a healthy culture of inquiry on campus, if they apply to everyone but Jews, they don’t mean much.
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