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ANTI-SEMITISM

The Crisis of Antisemitism on Campus and Where It’s Coming From By Janet Levy

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2025/07/the_crisis_of_antisemitism_on_campus_and_where_it_s_coming_from.html

On October 7, 2023, crossing the Gaza border during a ceasefire, Hamas and other Islamic terror groups slaughtered 1,200 Israelis and took 240 hostage. The magnitude of this unprovoked act should have ignited widespread outrage and solidarity with Jews and Israel. Instead, students and professors on many university campuses celebrated Hamas, vilified Israel, and expressed virulent antisemitism that had built up over the years, through slurs, flagrant discrimination, and even assaults.

Prof. Russell Rickford, who teaches history at Cornell, described the Hamas attack as “energizing” and “exhilarating,” and called it a “symbol of resistance.” He later defended his comments, saying he was referring to Hamas’s breaking through a “wall of apartheid” — whatever that means. Five days after the attack, student groups at Cornell justified it and blamed Israel for it. Similar displays of anti-Israel sentiment and blatant antisemitism appeared on other campuses as well. Jewish students and professors reported feeling unsafe, facing hate speech and unprovoked heckling.

An April report by the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) revealed 1,694 antisemitic incidents in 2024, marking an 84% increase from 2023. Likely, the actual numbers are higher, as a survey conducted by the ADL, Hillel International, and College Pulse found that 93% of students did not report antisemitic incidents to university authorities, and 83% of Jewish students have experienced various forms of antisemitism since October 7. Twenty-seven percent reported antisemitic behavior by faculty, and 66% expressed no confidence in their university’s ability to prevent such incidents. In fact, 30% of those who reported incidents said they received no help. Additionally, 23% of Jewish students now take extra security measures, and 41% feel the need to hide their identity.

According to the joint survey, on-campus antisemitism includes disrupting Jewish, Israeli, and pro-Israel speakers; singling out Jews for perceived or actual ties to Israel; subjecting Jews to anti-Israel or anti-Jewish comments both in conversations and online; vandalizing Jewish signs and symbols; forcing students to view course material that is openly anti-Israel; disrupting classes with protests, with some professors offering extra credit for participating in anti-Israel protests; receiving biased treatment from anti-Israel professors; being blamed for Israel’s policies; and facing ostracism by campus groups and students who are strongly anti-Israel.

How DEI unleashed the monster of anti-Semitism A new report has found that Jew hatred is rife among Britain’s lanyard classes. Brendan O’Neill

https://www.spiked-online.com/2025/07/15/how-dei-unleashed-the-monster-of-anti-semitism/

‘Anti-Semitism is a very light sleeper’, said Conor Cruise O’Brien. Indeed it is, and it has been stirred from its thin slumber these past two years. Since Hamas’s pogrom of 7 October 2023 we have witnessed the violent rebirth of English anti-Semitism. And this is one breed of fanatical prejudice that cannot be libellously pinned on the ‘gammon’, on those lower orders who are so often written off as bigots. No, it is in polite society, among the hoarders of virtue, that the revived Jew hate is most prominent and most vicious.

A new report has found that anti-Semitism has been ‘normalised in middle-class Britain’. Wariness of the Jew is rife in the very institutions of bourgeois society that pride themselves on their anti-racist credentials. At universities, in the arts and in the NHS, the report found, anti-Semitism has become ‘pervasive’. The same lanyard classes that organise training sessions on ‘white privilege’ or ‘heteronormativity’ to enlighten the oiks on their inner bigot have created a climate in which Jews feel ‘marginalised’ and ‘tolerated rather than respected’.

The report was commissioned by the Board of Deputies of British Jews. It was written by Lord John Mann of the Labour Party, who advises the government on anti-Semitism, and Dame Penny Mordaunt of the Conservative Party, who was defence secretary under Theresa May. They describe themselves as ‘two non-Jews from opposite sides of the political spectrum’ who were ‘stunned into silence’ by what they heard from Britain’s Jews. We’re ‘hard-nosed politicians’, they write, but still they were shaken by reports of surging anti-Jewish violence, censorship of Jewish artists and even the belittling of Jewish patients in the NHS.

Their report is a difficult read. It reminds us that Britain suffered a historic spike in Jew-hating crimes in the aftermath of 7 October. No sooner had that neo-fascist militia visited its violence on the Jews of southern Israel than its sick mimickers in the UK were visiting abuse on the Jews of Britain. There was a ‘vertiginous growth in anti-Semitism’, the report says. There were a record 4,103 anti-Semitic incidents in the UK in 2023, most of them occurring after 7 October. The fascistic menace persisted into 2024, when there were 3,528 incidents of Jew hate – the second-highest annual total.

The Anti-Semitism Crisis – and What Should Be Done The sources of gravity of rising anti-Semitism are easy to see, to anyone with their eyes open. by Steven F. Hayward

https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-anti-semitism-crisis-and-what-should-be-done/

Regarding the crisis of rising anti-Semitism here in America, it is time for some blunt truths to be stated.

• Anti-Semitism is flourishing mainly in the Democratic Party. CNN’s polling director Harry Entin noted earlier this week that Democrats have turned hostile to Israel, and favorable to “Palestinians” by a whopping net shift of 50 percent (larger among younger Democrats) in less than 10 years:

• Where did this come from? I have many times written about the prescience of the late Aaron Wildavsky, one of America’s pre-eminent political scientists from the 1960s until his passing in 1994, who outlined in 1972 how anti-Semitism would be revived chiefly on campus, as an offshoot of metastasizing leftism:

[S]ometime in the mid-1960s blacks replaced Jews as the nation’s number one oppressed minority and—second—that, toward the end of that decade, white radicals succeeded in having Jews removed from the parlance of left critics of society as “minority,” despite the fact that they constituted no more than 3 percent of the population and were still undoubtedly subject to minor forms of discrimination in banking, business, social life, politics, and elsewhere. It took Christians 1,000 years to go from oppressed minority to inquisitorial majority; those clever Jews seem to have done it practically overnight. Let us investigate this strange case further.

The Anti-Semitism Nexus by Seth Mandel

https://www.commentary.org/seth-mandel/the-anti-semitism-nexus/

When it comes to the fight against anti-Semitism, Democrats and Republicans don’t agree on all that much. Partisanship tends to make people more protective of those on their side of the aisle.

So when the two parties come to the same conclusion, it’s at least worth considering. And one such rare point of agreement? The fact that Francesca Albanese, the UN envoy for the Palestinian territories, is a raging anti-Semite.

Even her boss, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, once told U.S. anti-Semitism envoy Deborah Lipstadt that Albanese is indeed a “horrible person.”

Congratulations, then, to Francesca Albanese, whose horribleness is a rare point of consensus in global politics.

Albanese is again in the news because the Trump administration has sanctioned her for aiding the International Criminal Court’s unlawful attempt to prosecute and persecute Americans and Israelis, despite that agency’s undeniable lack of jurisdiction. And it’s not exactly an “only Republicans would do this” sort of action to take. To wit: Joe Biden’s ambassador to the UN, Linda Thomas-Greenfield, called Albanese “unfit for her role” due to her anti-Semitism, a point echoed by Biden State Department spokesman Matthew Miller in March 2024.

In his announcement of the sanctions last week, Secretary of State Marco Rubio noted that “Albanese has spewed unabashed antisemitism, expressed support for terrorism, and open contempt for the United States, Israel, and the West…. She has recently escalated this effort by writing threatening letters to dozens of entities worldwide, including major American companies across finance, technology, defense, energy, and hospitality, making extreme and unfounded accusations and recommending the ICC pursue investigations and prosecutions of these companies and their executives. We will not tolerate these campaigns of political and economic warfare, which threaten our national interests and sovereignty.”

Well said. Albanese has declared war on the democratic West on behalf of the world’s most repressive and violent regimes, and she has a particular obsession with whipping up anti-Semitism all over the world. Albanese is a truly abominable figure in global politics.

She is also, like most delusional anti-Semites, whiny and self-pitying in the extreme. “I have been tormented for years,” she posted over the weekend, each desperate utterance merely proving that she is every bit the malign martyr-poseur she is accused of being.

How the Left Became Anti-Semitic Daryl McCann (This essay appeared in our November 2012 issue.)

https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/from-our-archives/how-the-left-became-anti-semitic/

Robert Wistrich’s latest work, From Ambivalence to Betrayal, defines Zionism as a national liberation movement. Marx pre-dated Zionism but the analytical tools he bequeathed to his ideological successors predisposed them to sneer at the concept of Jewish national self-determination as a petty-bourgeois folly. Consequently, Kautsky, Luxemburg, Lenin and Trotsky all derided Zionism, and yet Wistrich accuses none of these icons of the Old Left of being overtly anti-Semitic: catastrophically wrongheaded, yes; but anti-Semitic, no. Wistrich has far less sympathy for the anti-Zionist Left of today. Its impenitent pro-Palestinian and pro-terrorist stance marks yet another chapter in the longest hatred of all: anti-Semitism.

Given that Karl Marx accepted in principle the right of Jews in a bourgeois society to demand civil liberties, he was not, in this sense at least, anti-Semitic. Still, these so-called bourgeois privileges were of minor consequence in the greater scheme of things. In a post-capitalist world, Judaism—an antiquated religion of the ego, according to Marx—would become redundant: “Under socialism or communism, there was no need for Jews as Jews to maintain their existence.” Marx’s class-based analysis, insists Wistrich, was a key reason for the German Social Democratic Party (SPD), and later the Russian Social Democratic Party (RSDP), to spurn Zionism.

Because Zionism emerged towards the end of the nineteenth century, the SPD had to make sense of a Jewish national movement without Marx, who had died in 1883. It was Karl Kautsky (1854–1934), the so-called Pope of Marxism, who “came closest to applying the Marxist method of historical materialism in a coherent fashion” to the Zionism project. Kautsky concluded that the Jews were “not a race, a nation, or even a people, but a ‘caste’ with certain quasi-national attributes” that would disappear with the arrival of socialism. This expectation that Jews would lose their “illusionary national characteristics” with the fall of capitalism was disproved by the Soviet Union. Even so, says Wistrich, the line taken by Kautsky runs all the way through to present-day neo-Trotskyist and New Left critiques of Zionism.

Muslim Doctor Who Tried to Run Jewish Congressman Off the Road Indicted Will Islamic Jew-hate be discussed at the trial of Feras Hamdan? by Robert Spencer

https://www.frontpagemag.com/muslim-doctor-who-tried-to-run-jewish-congressman-off-the-road-indicted/

A Muslim physician threatened to kill a Jewish congressman from Ohio, and that’s only one small part of what he did. On Tuesday, that errant doctor was indicted, but the deep hatreds that led to his behavior remain, and we will see them play out again.

The victim, Rep. Max Miller (R-Ohio), says that it was a “bizarre” incident, adding: “The whole thing was weird.” There is no doubt about that. How many times does a man who is professionally dedicated to healing and improving lives threaten to take one? All in all, however, Miller’s characterization is a trifle too cavalier. It was something far worse than bizarre and weird: it was an ominous sign of the times, and of the direction in which our society is heading unless things change, and change drastically, before it’s too late.

It happened on June 19. Miller recounted: “I’m on the freeway. I have somebody who has cut me off, who is flipping me off, who is showing me a Palestinian flag, and is yelling to kill me.” This was Rep. Miller’s introduction to Dr. Feras Hamdan, a physician in Avon, Ohio, who also screamed at him that old standby of ayatollahs and other hate-filled people everywhere: “Death to Israel.”

Cleveland Jewish News (CJN) reported Wednesday that it happened when Miller and Hamdan were both driving on Ohio’s Interstate 90 in Rocky River, and Hamdan started honking his horn at Miller. Miller paid no attention, but Hamdan persisted, pulling his car “window-to-window with me,” says Miller. Once their cars were side by side, the good doctor began “screaming” at the congressman.

In a fight between the NEA and ADL, the Jews lose Jeff Ballabon

https://www.jns.org/in-fight-between-the-nea-and-adl-the-jews-lose/

The progressive coalition that the Anti-Defamation League helped midwife now rejects it as impure.

When America’s largest teachers’ union severs ties with the Anti-Defamation League, it’s tempting to reach for the popcorn. After all, few organizations have done more to undermine Jewish security and moral clarity in recent years than the ADL—and few institutions have been more responsible for indoctrinating children with radical, antisemitic ideologies than the National Education Association.

But the spectacle is no cause for amusement. It is, in fact, a grim warning—another signpost on the road to civilizational hell. Because while the NEA and ADL trade rhetorical blows, it is the Jews who lose. Again.

How did we get here?

Once the flagship of Jewish communal defense against hate (though even then embarrassingly tone-deaf, left-leaning, and partisan), the ADL was commandeered and repurposed as a political weapon by its Obama-operative CEO and national director, Jonathan Greenblatt, who transformed the organization from self-important partisan hackery into a focused partisan war room.

Under Greenblatt, the ADL adopted a strategy of ideological weaponization: labeling mainstream conservatives and pro-Israel leaders as extremists if they dared praise friendly Republicans—or, worse, chastise hostile Democrats—while redefining antisemitism to provide cover for progressive politics, partnering with the very forces that enable and spread anti-Jewish hatred and enmity towards Israel.

Now, having helped define deviancy down to the point where silencing Jews based on the hateful and inane ideology of identity “privilege,” indoctrinating whole societies with blood libels, and calling for the annihilation of the Jewish state are considered legitimate forms of expression in polite society, the ADL finds itself—inevitably—on the receiving end of the very Jew-hating culture it helped foster. The NEA, wallowing in the intersectional dogma Greenblatt championed, has declared the ADL insufficiently “inclusive,” i.e., too Jewish.

Shai Davidai, outspoken Israeli professor at Columbia, leaves the university Controversial advocate for pro-Israel Jewish students says he is departing voluntarily as school closes investigation against him, plans to continue his activism from New York by Luke Tress

https://www.timesofisrael.com/shai-davidai-outspoken-israeli-professor-at-columbia-leaves-the-university/

Shai Davidai, an outspoken Israeli professor at New York City’s Columbia University, said on Wednesday that he was leaving the school and that a Columbia investigation against him had been closed.

Davidai became a prominent and controversial advocate for pro-Israel and Jewish students soon after the October 2023 invasion of Israel, and often clashed with the administration, as the campus was roiled by raucous anti-Israel protests.

Davidai told The Times of Israel that he left Columbia voluntarily.

“I’ve lost all trust in the institution and respect for my colleagues,” Davidai said.

“I feel like it’s a place that is unwilling to change on its own. It’s only doing things when forced by the government or forced by money,” he said. “That’s not a place where I think anyone would want their name to be associated with.”

Earlier Wednesday, Davidai shared a letter from the university saying that an investigation against him was closed without finding any wrongdoing or taking any disciplinary action against him.

The university opened the investigation last year. It was carried out by Columbia’s Office of Equal Opportunity and Affirmative Action, which responded to allegations of harassment and discrimination on campus. The office was later replaced by the Office of Institutional Equity, which sent Wednesday’s letter to Davidai, according to a screenshot he shared online.

Davidai said there were aspects of his departure he could not discuss for legal reasons, but that he had told the university, “There is no way that I’ll ever leave before they find me innocent.”

In Melbourne, the Latest Pogrom Roger Franklin

https://quadrant.org.au/news-opinions/anti-semitism/in-melbourne-the-latest-pogrom/

Let it drop in a casual conversation that you’ve spent a lot of time in the United States — half an adult lifetime in my case — and it can be quite the cue for a recitation of misconceptions. Oh, America, so violent, so heartless and cruel to its poor, so racist in closing borders to illegal aliens and deporting those already there! Read Tony Wright’s paint-by-numbers column in today’s Nine rags and you’ll get a quick taste of the shallow silliness that passes for informed commentary in the Australian press.

Or go back a further couple of days and find the same SMH and Age giving opinionista space to a young lawyer’s utter delight that Zohran Mamdani, a red-raggin’ Muslim intent on “seizing the means of production”, has just won the Democrats’ mayoral primary in New York City. Unmentioned was that only 5% of eligible voters bothered to cast their ballots and that Mamdani’s chances of ever being addressed as ‘Hizzoner’ are slim to non-existent. New Yorkers can be quite odd at times, but they’re not that stupid. It’s as if, somewhere over the Pacific, there’s a wrinkle in the time-space continuum that twists, distorts or simply erases news and views flowing our way.

Consider, for example, a recent incident at a church in Wayne, Michigan, where a young man armed to the teeth set out to massacre the congregation at their prayers. He managed to get off a few shots and wound a church elder, but that was it before he was himself cut down by church members who whipped out their own guns and returned fire. It barely rated a mention in Australia’s legacy media, notions of gun-crazy Americans having at it being par for the course, so where is the news in one more volley of shots?

What brings all this to mind is Melbourne’s latest shame, for on Friday night in Trashcanistan on the Yarra a piece of bipedal filth allegedly tried to burn down Victoria’s oldest synagogue and incinerate the 20-or-so Jews inside. Meanwhile, a flying squad of keffiyeh’d thugs invaded Miznon, a Jewish-owned restaurant in the Hardware Lane foodies’ strip, roughing up diners and overturning tables while chanting ‘Death to the IDF’. That the owner/chef is an Israeli was all the reason they needed. (Update: Police have now arrested a NSW man and charged him with various arson-related offences).

It would be shocking were such incidents not now commonplace. In December arsonists destroyed the Adass Israel Synagogue, and only last week, another synagogue, this one in South Yarra, was desecrated with graffiti hailing Iran and demanding ‘freedom’ for Palestine. If you remember Melbourne as once it was, a place where it was safe to be a Jew and the insanity of the wider world’s hatreds seemed so far very away, the response can only be tears.

Not that Premier Jacinta Allan was sobbing. Tears would have interrupted the flow of her boilerplate empathy. “This is disgraceful behaviour by a pack of cowards,” Ms Allan said. “That this happened on Shabbat makes it all the more abhorrent.”

Free Speech vs Personal Safety Peter O’Brien

https://quadrant.org.au/news-opinions/the-law/free-speech-vs-personal-safety/

“Yes, Jewish Australians – even though you have contributed to this nation since the First Fleet and even though your families and friends are being murdered in Israel, and elsewhere, by the very forces these wielders of free speech are promoting – toughen up.”

Free speech has gotten a bit of a run recently, following, inter alia, the Glastonbury kerfuffle and the Wassim Haddad ruling.

Our esteemed editor in chief, Rebecca Weisser, has a powerful piece in the Spectator about Glastonbury, the appalling behaviour of some of the performers, and the crass stupidity of the BBC in allowing some segments to go to air.  She makes some pretty uncontroversial points – indeed, unarguable, in my view.  And yet, she attracted a number of unfavourable comments, a couple of which I reproduce below.

John Jacobsen opined:

Rebecca Weisser’s piece reads like someone clutching pearls while the rest of the world’s trying to have an honest convo. Yeah, some stuff said at Glastonbury was intense—but that’s literally what free speech protects: the right to say provocative, uncomfortable things. You don’t have to agree with the artists, but trying to paint a whole music festival as a jihadist warm-up act is just unhinged. Art is messy. Politics is messy. Get over it. This is like the Trumpification of conservatism. Dumbed down into right-wing “woke”.

And Sirtony added:

If you support free speech, and I do, you have to put up with stupid speech that you find offensive. You, of course, are fully entitled to argue about those views and to say why you find them wrong or offensive. Free speech is useless if we only allow those we agree with to speak. As fashions ebb and flow, what else might be banned that you might actually be sympathetic towards. Stop and think before agreeing to many limits on free speech. Our traditional limits have been on the incitement to violence or the classic shouting “fire” in the crowded theatre not the expression of a political idea.

Is chanting “death, death to the IDF” inciting violence? The argument can be made that it is, but seriously does anyone expect any of these idiots to take on the Israeli military; it is performative nonsense.

The aim of this article is to provide a counterpoint to these opinions, but a couple of specific comments before I proceed.  Firstly, the performers were undoubtedly trying to turn the festival into a ‘jihadist warm-up’ act, and the organisers allowed them to politicize an artistic event.