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April 2024

Ilya Shapiro Abolish Anti-Semitic Student Groups The government may prohibit even nonviolent “material support” for terrorist organizations, including legal support and other advice, without violating the First Amendment.

https://www.city-journal.org/article/abolish-anti-semitic-student-groups

The heart of anti-Semitism in America lies among the nation’s most educated. Elite university campuses hosted calls for the annihilation of Israel even before the IDF entered Gaza last October.

As investor Bill Ackman observed the day that Harvard president Claudine Gay resigned, anti-Semitism is the “canary in the coal mine,” a warning about larger issues. This “oldest hatred” is always a leading indicator of assorted underlying pathologies, from cancel culture and ideological indoctrination to intellectual corruption and moral decay. The core mission of universities—to seek truth—has been subverted, as classical liberal values like free speech, due process, and equality under the law fall by the wayside.

One aspect of that illiberal takeover of higher education is the prevalence of anti-Semitic student groups. For example, nine groups at Berkeley Law began the 2022–23 school year by amending their bylaws to ensure that they’ll never invite speakers who support Israel or Zionism. Dean Erwin Chemerinsky, a progressive Zionist, noted that he himself would be banned, as would 90 percent of Jewish students.

“Hate speech” is, and should be, constitutionally protected. And student groups shouldn’t be forced to express any particular messages. But discriminatory conduct isn’t kosher. Like many universities, Berkeley requires student groups to accept “all comers,” regardless of “status or beliefs.” More importantly, the school has adopted rules, aligned with federal and state law, banning discrimination based on such classifications as race, ethnicity, heritage, or religion.

Excluding Zionists is thus unlike excluding Republicans, objectionable as the latter may be. As former assistant secretary of education for civil rights Ken Marcus has observed, using “Zionist” as a euphemism for “Jewish” is a confidence trick. It wouldn’t be acceptable for student groups to adopt bylaws banning black or Chinese speakers, even if they made exceptions for speakers who criticize their own communities. That’s why the Education Department launched an investigation of Berkeley Law in December 2022 for failing to remedy a hostile environment for Jewish students, faculty, and staff.

US Campuses: Incubating Terrorism by Alan M. Dershowitz

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20600/us-campuses-incubating-terrorism

Some of the signs say “pro-Palestine”, “ceasefire now” and “end the humanitarian crisis in Gaza”. But these benign statements hide a far more malignant agenda, the end of Israel as the nation-state of the Jewish people, the end of America as the world’s leading power and the end of democracy and the free market economy. Even if there were a unilateral ceasefire, accompanied by massive humanitarian assistance to the people of Gaza, many of these protests would continue, because Gaza is merely an excuse for a much wider agenda: to destroy Israel and destroy America.

One never sees a sign calling for a two-state solution or for peace between Israel and the Palestinians. These are not the goals. What is demanded is the end of any Jewish presence in the Middle East. “Death to America,” similarly, means the end of America’s influence and Western values.

Many of the signs call for “revolution.” These are not directed against Israel, but rather against America, American Jews and all other Western democracies.

As in the 1960s, many of these students are being groomed to be the terrorists of the future — in the manner of Kathy Boudin and Bernardine Dohrn back then – and, in the United States, a fifth column, the aim of which is taking down America.

That these useful idiots are young does not make them less dangerous. Young students were instrumental in bringing to power tyrants such as Hitler, Stalin, Castro, Pol Pot and Mao.

Where are the armed guards escorting Jewish students to class, as there were escorting the threatened Black youths to integrated school in the 1960s in the South?

Universities are failing not only their Jewish students but all their students by refusing to educate them about what behavior is acceptable and what is not.

Thousands of young students – from universities, high schools and even middle schools – are joining in demonstrations, marches and protests against Israel, against the United States and against Jews. Some even are Jews. They are joining Muslim and Arab anti-Zionists, radical anarchist anti-Americans and community organizers who oppose Israel’s right to exist.

Shai Davidai’s war on campus antisemitism Ruthie Blum

https://www.jns.org/shai-davidais-war-on-campus-antisemitism/

Due to his battle for the past six months against campus antisemitism—unleashed in the aftermath of the Oct. 7 massacre in southern Israel—Columbia University business school assistant professor Shai Davidai has become an Internet sensation.

His impassioned, unscripted speeches on the premises of the Ivy League institution in upper Manhattan have gone viral since they first emerged, less than a week after Hamas terrorists perpetrated the worst atrocities against Jews since the Holocaust. The latest example is a clip of his confrontation on Monday morning with Columbia Chief Operating Officer Cas Holloway, who denied him access to the main campus.

When Davidai arrived to hold a peaceful sit-in and discovered that his ID card had been deactivated, he berated Holloway for preventing Jews from entering an area where pro-Hamas demonstrators were welcome to hold a protest. He then addressed the COO on X.

“Cas, you’re a really great guy,” he wrote. “[But] I am still trying to understand how you could … keep a straight face when you capitulated to the pro-Hamas mob … I think I know how. You were just doing your job. … Look, I get it. You’re scared. You are worried about how the pro-Hamas extremists (and the brainwashed cult they’ve amassed) will react if you try to disperse them. … The problem is that you are not alone. There are thousands of administrators like you all over U.S. campuses who are also scared. … Like you, they are just doing their jobs. And there were millions of Germans like you in the 1930s. Good Germans, upstanding Germans, who were just doing their jobs. Who do you think ran the universities of Berlin and Munich and Heidelberg and Frankfurt in the 1930s? Who helped the Hitler Youth check out books by Jewish authors to burn outside of campus? Administrators. Just like you…”

It takes guts these days for an academic to entertain an independent thought, let alone shout it from the rooftops when his tenure isn’t yet secured. But this is only part of the reason that Davidai’s courage is worthy of note.

How anti-Semitism became a virtue on American campuses The anti-Israel camps taking over elite universities are a physical manifestation of the DEI agenda. Joanna Williams

https://www.spiked-online.com/author/joanna-williams/

First it was Columbia, now anti-Israel protests have spread across America. Over the past week, students have set up camps at elite universities, including Harvard, the University of Michigan and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Yesterday, dozens of student occupiers were arrested at the University of Southern California on trespassing charges. The ‘rage of the privileged against the world’s only Jewish nation’, as Brendan O’Neill described the Columbia protests on spiked earlier this week, now rings out on leafy campuses from California to Boston.

In these ostensibly ‘anti-war’ protests, students have demanded the total destruction of Israel, while waving placards in support of Hamas and singling out Jewish professors and students for abuse. The terrifying orgy of anti-Semitism that has been unleashed in America’s top universities should disturb everyone. There is an urgent need to condemn the actions of these students. Yes, we should defend their right to protest. At the same time, it is vital that we engage in an honest reckoning with how the anti-Semitism they demonstrate has been allowed to fester unchallenged.

Unfortunately, so far, the response to the campus protests has been far from level-headed. Students have been flattered and appeased in one instance, and then subjected to violent police crackdowns the next. Yesterday, police sought to squash protests at the University of Texas in Austin. Students were manhandled and a journalist was thrown to the ground in a disproportionate response to what was a seemingly peaceful protest. This display of police force risks turning student protesters into martyrs and lending moral weight to their cause.

Meanwhile, far from condemning the bigoted outbursts of student protesters, professors are coming out in their defence. At Columbia this week, hundreds of faculty members demonstrated in solidarity with the students. Staff held a mass walkout after police were allowed on campus to arrest previously suspended students. A law professor said he was defending the student protesters because: ‘It’s not any different from everyday life on campus.’ When anti-Semitism is trivialised in this way by academics, students are emboldened in their beliefs. It should be possible to defend the right to protest while, at the same time, strongly criticising the students’ statements and behaviour.

Tom Cotton Is Right. Again ‘Pogrom’ is an accurate description of what we’re seeing on campuses. Noah Rothman

https://www.nationalreview.com/2024/04/tom-cotton-is-right-again/

There’s something about Senator Tom Cotton that drives his critics to madness. That condition becomes particularly acute when he’s obviously correct. Indeed, Cotton’s correctness maintains a directly proportional relationship with the degree to which he compels his detractors to abandon their good sense.

The latest example of this phenomenon comes to us via Mediaite’s Michael Luciano, who accused the senator of indulging in “hysteria” in his recent comments about the ongoing convulsion of nominally anti-Israel but functionally pro-terrorist demonstrations on some of America’s most elite college campuses.

“Whatever scant coverage these abominations were receiving in the U.S. press has been supplanted by abject hysteria about anti-Semitism supposedly running amok on college campuses – particularly Columbia University,” Luciano wrote. He accuses the press of promulgating lurid tales of protesters shrieking xenophobic attacks at their Jewish classmates, some of which “did not actually occur on campus.”

True enough. When, for example, Jewish students were attacked at Tulane University last year for objecting to the burning of an Israeli flag, leaving one traumatized student to reflect on the “Jewish blood on my hands,” defenders of the current campus culture were quick to note the event occurred just outside the campus’s property line. Presumably, those who raise this objection believe it to be indisputably dispositive of . . . something.

But this was not Cotton’s sole offense. In what became an indictment of the Israeli government and the “war crimes” he believes it has committed — the lack of evidence notwithstanding — Luciano attacked the senator for indulging in hyperbole.

“I do agree that if Eric Adams won’t send the NYPD to protect these Jewish students, if Kathy Hochul won’t send the National Guard, Joe Biden has a duty to protect these Jewish students from what is a nascent pogrom on these campuses,” Cotton told Fox News this week. “These are scenes like you’ve seen out of the 1930s in Germany. They should never be witnessed or tolerated here in America in 2024.”

Anti-Semitism Should Not be Part of the American College Experience For years, leadership at U.S. colleges has incubated and tolerated extreme left-wing ideologies that led to the current anti-Semitic and anti-Israel protests. Fred Fleitz

https://amgreatness.com/2024/04/26/anti-semitism-should-not-be-part-of-the-american-college-experience/

Most Americans have been shocked by recent images of violent anti-Israel and anti-Semitic protests on college campuses. Jewish students at America’s top universities, including Columbia, NYU, and MIT, are being physically attacked and intimidated. Jewish students are fleeing Columbia University because campus police cannot guarantee their safety.

How can this happen in America in 2024? Why are we seeing the return of the vile prejudices and hatreds of the 1930s at our leading universities? Who is responsible for this?

The leadership of America’s colleges and universities bears most of the blame.

Many of these student protesters are not high-minded crusaders for justice but lazy, ill-informed morons who know little about Israel, Palestine, and the Middle East. They are also cowards who are hiding behind masks because they don’t want their anti-Semitic and anti-Israel radicalism to prevent them from getting high-paid jobs in corporations and law firms. These student protesters are afraid that heroic organizations like Canary Mission will put their names and faces on mobile billboards and list them in databases to hold them accountable for their hateful extremism.

Anti-Israel/anti-Semitic professors are the source of much of the violent protests and are egging them on. On Monday, hundreds of Columbia University faculty members staged a walkout to protest the school’s decision to have police arrest student protesters. Also in New York City, police blamed faculty and professional agitators for causing heated standoffs after university officials asked the police to remove a protest encampment and arrest 120 protesters, according to the New York Daily News.

One has to ask: if these student protesters are actually demonstrating for justice and peace, why didn’t they begin their protests on October 7, 2023, after Hamas terrorists waged the deadliest attack on Jews since the Holocaust—slaughtering babies, raping women, burning whole families alive, and taking hundreds of innocent Israelis hostage? More than 1,200 Israelis were killed. The Hamas terrorists also took about 240 hostages and imprisoned them in tunnels in Gaza. Israel believes about 100 of these hostages are still alive.

Where’s the outrage on college campuses over the rapes, murder, and brutality committed against innocent civilians in Israel on October 7? Where are the demands that Hamas immediately free its hostages?

Irena’s Vow A new film dramatizes the life of an almost unbelievable heroine. by Danusha V. Goska

https://www.frontpagemag.com/irenas-vow/

Irena’s Vow is a 2023 film dramatizing the World War II heroism of a young Polish nursing student, Irena Gut. Irena’s Vow is a two-hour, color film. It was shot in Poland. The film is in English. It received a limited US release in April, 2024. Irena’s Vow has an 86% professional reviewer rating on Rotten Tomatoes and a 93% fan reviewer rating. Veteran reviewer Rex Reed calls Irena’s Vow “One of the most astounding holocaust stories.” He says, “It’s true, if fantastic.” The film is “anchored by the powerful, heartfelt performance of Sophie Nelisse as an innocent girl whose integrity and resolve turns her into a woman of maturity and strength.” Roman Haller, a Holocaust survivor, says, “It is a very great film. I expected a good film, but it is even more than I expected. … I saw my mother. I saw my father. I saw Irena … She was like a mother to me … I want to tell you there were people like that.”

Dr. Glenn R. Schiraldi wrote the 2007 book, World War II Survivors: Lessons in Resilience. He devoted a chapter to Irena Gut Opdyke. She was, he writes, “a diminutive, elegant woman with warm, radiant blue eyes and delicate features. She is one of the kindest, most loving women I have encountered. She reminds one of Mother Teresa. As she spoke, I often found myself choking back tears.”

Dan Gordon is a veteran screenwriter and also a former captain in the Israeli Defense Forces. Gordon says, “About 25 years ago, I was driving to my home in Los Angeles and listening to the radio. I heard a woman, Irene Gut Opdyke, telling her story. When I got home, I sat in the car in the driveway for another hour and a half, because I couldn’t stop listening.” He worked for years to get the film made.

The Hamas Nazi Ivy League Why history is repeating itself on campus. by Daniel Greenfield

https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-hamas-nazi-ivy-league/

The Nazi cheers of Sieg Heil didn’t start out in Munich, but in Massachusetts.

The Nazi chant was borrowed from Harvard football cheers and imported to Germany by Ernst “Putzy” Hanfstaengl, a Harvard man in good standing who befriended Hitler and helped build a more respectable brand for the National Socialists.

“Putzy” was one of a number of Ivy League elites who were enchanted by the Third Reich.

Socialism forcefully implemented by great men, whether it was FDR, Mussolini, Stalin or Hitler, was the great obsession of America elites of the era who were convinced that it was the only answer to the chaos of capitalism and the hurly burly of democracy and technology.

Columbia University, whose Hamas occupation fills the front pages of every newspaper in the country while driving Jewish students off campus, has changed little in some ways. A hundred years ago, Columbia University President Nicholas Murray Butler was laboring to keep Jewish students out while celebrating Mussolini’s fascism. Butler’s admiration for fascism was common among university presidents, leaders of society and even in the FDR administration.

Not just remastered football cheers, but eugenics, another obsession of Ivy League elites, made its way over to Germany where it was implemented in a far deadlier fashion, not only against Jews, but against German disabled and others deemed to be “life unworthy of life” in keeping with the ideology whose adherents included Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger.

Peeling back the layers of the dominant ideologies that Ivy Leaguers hold today leads to National Socialist or Communist ideologies. The Ivy League elites who were environmentalists, socialists, globalists and population control advocates a century ago were strongly influenced by these totalitarian ideologies that called for tyranny and mass murder.

The fantasy of open borders Mass migration will only lead to more suffering Ayaan Hirsi Ali

https://unherd.com/2024/04/the-fantasy-of-open-borders/

Before entering today’s torturous immigration debate, we would do well to remember James Baldwin. “Power without morality is no longer power,” he observed. And the border question is fundamentally a moral one.

On one side, there is a growing belief that an open borders policy is a vital moral response to the economic inequality between countries. In these milieus, national citizenship within a bounded community in the Western world is increasingly seen not as a birth right but as just another unfair advantage. As the political theorist Joseph Carens puts it, Western citizenship is “the modern equivalent to feudal privilege — an inherited status that greatly enhances one’s life chances [that] is hard to justify when one thinks about it closely”. And just like feudal privileges, they should be cast aside.

On the other side, meanwhile, the vox populi disagrees. Polling consistently shows that most Western citizens want less immigration, a sentiment that has risen in recent years in the US, UK, France and Germany. Faced with the elite-approved “human right” to unlimited free movement, popular opinion responds with an emphatic no.

With die-hards on both sides, it’s no wonder the Senate border bill has become such a point of contention. For Democrats, the problem is not that too many foreigners are abusing asylum claims in order to immigrate illegally; it’s more that, with an election coming up, news coverage of chaotic conditions at the border doesn’t paint Biden in a good light. For the rest of us, meanwhile, the problem is the assumption that everyone in the developing world has a moral right to claim asylum in the US.

The Democrats’ Plan To Steal The Presidency For Good-The “national compact” is little more than an effort to disenfranchise RedState voters.

https://issuesinsights.com/2024/04/26/the-democrats-plan-to-steal-the-presidency-for-good/

While Americans brace for another contentious presidential election, the Democrats have a better idea: Subvert the Constitution in the name of “democracy.” Once again, the party of the left shows why it’s losing Americans’ trust.

Quietly but steadily, the Democratic Party has been advancing its latest bold idea to create a uni-party state: A “National Popular Vote Interstate Compact.”

In case you missed it, the Associated Press reported last week that “Maine will become the latest to join a multistate effort to elect the president by popular vote,” the 17th state to do so.

As the AP noted, “Under the proposed compact, each state would allocate all its electoral votes to whoever wins the national popular vote for president, regardless of how individual states voted in an election.”

The goal of this “movement” — it’s really a plot — is to get enough states to join to get to the magic number of 270 electoral votes, the amount needed to win the Electoral College. With Maine, the group now claims 209 electoral votes, a mere 61 away from their goal.