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ANTI-SEMITISM

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No Task Force Can Save Harvard What hope is there for an institution where nobody can be fired for promoting antisemitism and other stupid and wicked ideas? Dominic Green

By on January 26th, 2024

https://www.wsj.com/articles/no-task-force-can-save-harvard-antisemitism-higher-education-db4caa72?mod=opinion_lead_pos5

Harvard is the Boeing 737 MAX of higher education. A great American brand is squandering the public’s trust. Failures of quality control are damaging its market dominance. Like any corporation, Harvard is looking for new management and working to burnish its image. Unlike most corporations, Harvard has no idea what it is doing. Boeing still has engineers; Harvard has only professors. When the wheels came off at Chrysler in 1978, the company brought in Lee Iacocca. Harvard has brought in Derek Penslar.

Mr. Penslar is a professor of Jewish history. He calls Israel a “settler colonial” state and compares the Jewish state’s establishment to France’s colonial takeover of Algeria. In August he signed an academic petition called “The Elephant in the Room.” It endorsed the conspiracy theory that the Netanyahu government’s proposals for judicial reform mask a plan to “ethnically cleanse all territories under Israeli rule of their Palestinian population.” It asserted that Israel imposes a “regime of apartheid” on Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza and accused the country of “Jewish supremacism.”

“Jewish Supremacism: My Awakening to the Jewish Question” is the name of a book by white supremacist David Duke. If you go far enough left, you go far right without knowing it. Mr. Penslar leads Harvard’s Center for Jewish Studies and has been named a co-chairman of the university’s Presidential Task Force on Combating Antisemitism. The latter appointment was an “unforced error,” Deborah Lipstadt, the U.S. special envoy for monitoring and combating antisemitism, told the Journal Wednesday.

The spontaneous campus celebrations after Hamas’s massacre, rape and kidnapping of Israelis on Oct. 7 meant that Harvard could no longer ignore its problem with Jews, and especially the Jewish state. Prodded by donors and shamed by the media, the university’s then-president, Claudine Gay, commissioned a committee.

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Antisemitism on College Campuses Has Shot Up 1,753% Since Oct. 7. Higher Education Spawned This Culture of Hate. Jarrett Stepman

By on January 25th, 2024

https://www.dailysignal.com/2024/01/24/study-finds-antisemitism-college-campuses-rose-1753-heres-how-higher-education-created-culture-hate/

The nation’s college campuses have created a climate of hate.

A report released Monday by the Combat Antisemitism Movement in partnership with the Center for the Study of Contemporary European Jewry at Tel Aviv University in Israel found that antisemitism has exploded in U.S. higher education.

The numbers are shocking, but not surprising.

The report found that in the fourth quarter of 2023, from October through December, there was a 1,753% increase in far-left incidents of antisemitism and a 268% increase of Islamist antisemitic incidents on college campuses since the previous quarter. 

That obviously stems in no small part from the Oct. 7 Hamas terrorist attack on Israel.

A news release from the Combat Antisemitism Movement said that nearly all the antisemitic incidents were “tied to anti-Zionist forms of antisemitism and the conflation of worldwide Jewry with the state of Israel.”

The report confirms what many already assumed, but there are a few things worth noting here.

First, it’s absurd to contend that this increase in antisemitism is a general societal problem, as witnesses at the now infamous congressional hearing on antisemitism in higher education suggested.

Polls show overwhelming U.S. support for Israel. The older the American, the more likely they are to support Israel. While there has certainly been an increase in antisemitic incidents in general since Oct. 7, it’s on a whole other level in the ivory tower.

 Americans didn’t suddenly become frothing antisemites after Oct. 7, but college campuses and left-wing enclaves did.

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Harvard’s ‘Apartheid’ Prof and the Antisemitism Task Force Guess who the university picked to investigate antisemitism on campus?

By on January 24th, 2024

https://www.wsj.com/articles/harvard-antisemitism-task-force-derek-penslar-israel-hamas-67391846?mod=opinion_lead_pos3

Harvard University has been embroiled in a public brawl over antisemitism, causing much reputational harm. So how does the school propose to get past this mess, reassure Jewish students and restore comity on campus? Well, how about appointing to lead an antisemitism task force a professor who believes Israel operates a “regime of apartheid” that employs “Jewish supremacism”?

We wish we were kidding. Last week Harvard announced a new Presidential Task Force on Combating Antisemitism, and its co-chairman is Derek Penslar, a history professor. Mr. Penslar’s work on the history of Zionism isn’t uniformly extreme, but it shares an emphasis on “settler colonialism” with the protesters who have harassed Jewish students on campus.

On Oct. 7, the day of the Hamas massacre, Harvard’s Palestine Solidarity Committee and 33 other student groups leapt to blame the victim and absolve the butchers. “We, the undersigned student organizations, hold the Israeli regime entirely responsible for all unfolding violence,” they wrote. “The apartheid regime is the only one to blame.”

The apartheid lie echoes the old Soviet anti-Israel propaganda. Then, as now, its purpose was to mark Israel as beyond the pale, outside the community of nations, and thus legitimate to attack, even with terrorism. In a 1982 United Nations resolution, the Soviet and Arab blocs grouped Israel with South Africa to affirm “the legitimacy of the struggle . . . by all available means, including armed struggle.”

We don’t know what’s in Mr. Penslar’s heart, though we wonder what’s in his head. It seems obvious that he can’t lead a credible investigation into campus antisemitism if he equates Israel with apartheid.

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They’re Coming After Us by John Podhoretz

By on January 21st, 2024

https://www.commentary.org/articles/john-podhoretz/antisemites-coming-after-jews/?utm_medium=email&_hsmi=290858331&_

‘IHAVE NEVER FELT LIKE THIS BEFORE’

I have lost count of the number of times the phrase “I have never felt like this before” has been spoken in my ear, texted to me, or sent to me in an email, in the three months since the Hamas attack on October 7, 2023.

When I talked with Israelis on a trip in November, the phrase described a gut emotion few under the age of 50 said they had ever experienced—the sense that they were personally vulnerable to outside attack in a manner more like an extended military invasion than a terrorist blow. They had lived through years of ineffectual rocket fire that was all but magically extinguished by the Iron Dome and Arrow anti-missile systems. Those interceptions had provided a feeling of near-divine protection. No longer. Israelis feel raw now, and such vulnerability is never momentary or transitory; one might say the opposite. Once it seizes you, it might take years before you wake up one morning and notice suddenly it’s no longer there.

I experienced that blissful moment once in my life, in New York City in 1998, when I was walking alone late at night across Central Park and realized I was doing something I simply would never have done before in my 37 years as a native Manhattanite. The feeling in the gut of every New Yorker of my age—the need to protect oneself from some sudden onslaught, in part because everyone we knew had been attacked in one way or another—was just no longer there, and I had never felt it disappearing. Because of the crime drop, because of increased police visibility, because of the presence of others like me in exactly the same place at exactly the same time, this new sense of freedom was now my new reality.

I am not saying Israelis ever felt secure in quite that way before October 7. They had, of course, lived through 60 years of terrorist attacks (the Palestine Liberation Organization was founded in 1964 as a violence-worshipping gang designed to attack civilians on the model of the anti-colonialists in Algeria) and several short wars over the past half century. But through the 2010s and early 2020s, the sense of immediate danger for Israelis had split in two—and might therefore have seemed, oddly enough, twice as weak.

The threat had either become too geopolitically large to affect their quotidian existences (like the existential risk posed by Iran’s nuclear program) or could have only come so suddenly and unexpectedly that it would have been absurd to disrupt your daily life taking personal countermeasures (Palestinians engaged in a bus-stabbing spree at one point; how do you defend against that?).

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Harvard Establishes New Antisemitism Task Force, Appoints Professor Who Called Israel a ‘Regime of Apartheid’ By David Zimmermann

By on January 20th, 2024

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/harvard-establishes-new-antisemitism-task-force-appoints-professor-who-called-israel-a-regime-of-apartheid/?

Harvard University has established an antisemitism task force designed to identify the “root causes” of anti-Jewish sentiment on campus, but in doing so appointed a professor who has been critical of Israel.

Interim Harvard president Alan Garber announced on Friday that the Presidential Task Force on Combating Antisemitism will be led by Derek Penslar, a professor of Jewish history, the Washington Free Beacon first reported.

In August, before the outbreak of the Israel–Hamas war, Penslar signed an open letter along with nearly 2,900 other signatories who at the time called Israel a “regime of apartheid” over its treatment of Palestinians.

“We, academics, clergy, and other public figures from Israel/Palestine and abroad, call attention to the direct link between Israel’s recent attack on the judiciary and its illegal occupation of millions of Palestinians in the Occupied Palestinian Territories,” the August letter read.

It has since been replaced by two new petitions, neither of which Penslar has signed. The latest petition, published in December, calls on President Joe Biden to help negotiate an immediate cease-fire between Israel and Hamas, facilitate a second prisoner-hostage exchange, and supply additional humanitarian aid to Gaza in the midst of the Middle Eastern conflict.

Penslar was also one of the faculty members to spearhead a December letter in support of former Harvard president Claudine Gay, following calls for her resignation after she failed to condemn the genocide of Jews at a House hearing on campus antisemitism. In the letter, over 700 faculty members urged Harvard’s administration to keep Gay in her post. Gay was fired nearly a month later.

Raffaella Sadun, a professor of business administration, will co-chair the antisemitism task force with Penslar.

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Enabling Hatred of the Jewish People By Eileen F. Toplansky

By on January 19th, 2024

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2024/01/enabling_hatred_of_the_jewish_people.html

In Viktor Frankl’s classic Man’s Search for Meaning he writes that “there are only two races – the decent and the indecent.” 

No more proof is needed when one considers the events of October 7 and the ongoing animus of much of the world toward Israel.

The bestiality of the Islamic Jihadists continues unabated.  The rabid hatred is truly difficult to fathom.  The indifference to life, to creativity, and to progress defies the imagination.

But it is not a new story. In teaching about the evolution of the ancient Israelites, sacred writings emphasized that the ancient Canaanites were more brutal than any other people in the region.  Prominent in Canaanite religious ritual was child sacrifice.  In Deuteronomy 12:30-31, it states “Do not ask about their gods — burning their sons and daughters in sacrifice to their gods.”  In essence, the Canaanites believed and taught others that their gods wanted and enjoyed cruelty toward human beings.  In fact, the ancient Israelites were warned not to assimilate to the Canaanite ways but instead retain their differences and follow the Ten Commandments.   

Jewish people believed that they owed G-d a debt for the miracles He had performed for the early Israelites. Consequently, they became a people devoted to morality and justice as taught by the Torah.  In essence, Torah-loving people seek to do tzedakah u-mishpat -– righteousness and justice. 

Fast forward to today when the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) is faced with an implacable foe coupled with a media that creates a myriad of lies about the IDF’s actions. Nonetheless, according to FrontPage magazine:

What does Israel do in Gaza? Does the IDF deliberately rape, torture, and murder Palestinian civilians, as Hamas did to the Israelis at the dance party and in the kibbutzim? Does the IDF take delight in killing, in as sadistic a way as possible, as many Gazan civilians as it can? No, of course not. The IDF tries instead, to minimize civilian casualties. It has no desire to harm the truly innocent. Unfortunately, Hamas wants to maximize those civilian casualties, and to exploit that result to undermine Israel’s standing in the world.

Whenever it can, the IDF warns civilians away from areas about to be targeted. These warnings are enormous undertakings. When the IDF had concluded that it was first going to concentrate its war-making in northern Gaza, it dropped 1.5 [sic] leaflets on that area, urging inhabitants to move south of the Wadi Gaza, so as to avoid the most intense fighting that was about to begin in the north. 900,000 Gazans ultimately heeded the warning, and headed south on the north-south corridor of Salah al-Din Street. Hamas fired on, and killed, some of the Gazans trying to move south, in order to keep their civilian shields trapped in the north. Later, when the IDF began to attack Hamas in the south, it dropped both leaflets, and sent emails, with maps included, that showed Gazans the precise areas in the south, in and around Khan Yunis, where the IDF would not be attacking, and that, therefore, they should move to for safety’s sake. It was the same with buildings — schools, apartment buildings, mosques — where the IDF was about to attack. The IDF messaged, emailed, telephoned, and used the ‘knock-on-the-roof’ technique to warn civilians living in or near those buildings soon to be targeted to leave them. Furthermore, Israeli pilots will call off an airstrike if they detect too many civilians near the target.

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Antisemitism From the Left “I can’t believe this is happening in our country today.”by Betsy McCaughey

By on January 18th, 2024

https://www.frontpagemag.com/antisemitism-from-the-left/

Jews are feeling increasingly afraid and unwelcome. Last week, girls on the basketball team of a Jewish private school in suburban Hartsdale, New York, were jabbed and hit with antisemitic slurs by players from Yonkers’ Roosevelt High School. “I support Hamas, you f—-ing Jew,” a Roosevelt player snarled. The game had to be called off in the third quarter, and the Jewish girls needed school security to help them leave.

Antisemitic incidents were already on the rise in 2021 and 2022. Now they are up nearly 400% year over year since the Oct. 7 Hamas attack against Israel, according to the Anti-Defamation League.

ADL CEO Jonathan Greenblatt explains, “I am not talking about, you know, stores producing IDF T-shirts. I’m talking about a coffee shop on Long Island, an ice cream parlor in the Bay Area, a restaurant in Chicago.” It reminds him of his grandparents’ barbershop, which was vandalized by the Nazis in Germany. “I can’t believe this is happening in our country today.”

Believe it.

The mainstream media choose to downplay it and the Democratic Party is, at best, divided. Antisemitism has often come from the Right, but it appears now to be coming from the Left.

When the presidents of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Harvard University, and the University of Pennsylvania caused outrage by saying at a congressional hearing in December that calls for Jewish genocide don’t necessarily violate campus policy — “it depends on the context” — Democrats’ reactions were mixed.

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Patients, Not Medical Students, Are a Vulnerable Population By Sheldon Rubenfeld

By on January 13th, 2024

https://www.nationalreview.com/2024/01/patients-not-medical-students-are-a-vulnerable-population/

Baylor College of Medicine’s cancellation of a lecture on antisemitism in medicine is just one sign of the troubling consequences of DEI.

Two months after Hamas’s October 7 invasion of Israel, Baylor College of Medicine canceled a lecture scheduled many months before on “Antisemitism in Medicine,” to be given by me and another physician who has received many antisemitic threats, some of which led to police protection. Last year, my long-running course at Baylor on medicine and the Holocaust was canceled. It has become increasingly evident that medical schools, medical-licensing bodies, and medical organizations are reluctant to acknowledge, let alone confront, the fact that their diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) policies breed antisemitism in medicine.

For the past 20 years of my nearly 50-year affiliation with Baylor, I offered an elective course, Healing by Killing: Medicine during the Third Reich, to first-year medical students. The course describes Hitler’s adoption of the German medical profession’s eugenic racist ideology and the central and indispensable role of physicians in designing and implementing the Holocaust. It also includes many disquieting photos and film clips from Auschwitz, Dachau, and other concentration camps. Judging by essays submitted in earlier years, the students took to heart the lessons about the potential for physician abuse of patients.

In April last year, I gave the fifth of the course’s nine lectures, “Why the Jews?” The first half of the lecture outlines the history of antisemitism; the second half is about countertransference, a common psychological phenomenon that occurs when a physician allows his or her feelings to influence a patient’s treatment. I asked the students to identify personal biases that could interfere with good patient care, such as biases against patients with a particular diagnosis, disability, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, political party affiliation, religion, educational level, personal features such as tattoos, and so on, and gave as an example my experience as a young doctor with a suicidal Palestinian graduate student, an example I had used many times before.

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NO RUTHFULLY YOURS TODAY

By on January 13th, 2024

WEEKEND NEWS TOMORROW

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Harvard Hasn’t Learned Its Lesson Catherine Salgado

By on January 12th, 2024

https://pjmedia.com/catherinesalgado/2024/01/11/harvard-to-host-pro-terrorist-anti-israel-summer-program-n4925395

Scandal-ridden Harvard University is doubling down on its antisemitism with a plan to host a summer program in partnership with a pro-jihadi Palestinian school.

In the wake of the unspeakably heinous Hamas attack on Israelis on Oct. 7, which the terrorists proudly broadcast to the world, a horrifying number of Westerners deliberately ignored what the terrorists and Gazans themselves avow and all historical and current evidence to support the Gazans and demonize Israel. Sadly, this was especially true of college students, as anti-Semitism is rife on campuses poisoned with Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI).

“Harvard University will host a summer program where students will be briefed on ‘settler colonialism’ at a Palestinian university that called for ‘glory to martyrs’ after the October 7 terrorist massacre in Israel and has a student body that overwhelmingly elected a Hamas-affiliated bloc to run its student government,” The Daily Wire reported on Jan. 10. If you don’t know, “glory to the martyrs” is a slogan celebrating terrorists who are killed while waging jihad on Israel.

Harvard’s “Palestine Social Medicine Course” is set to send students for the second year in a row to Birzeit University in the “West Bank,” which is the Palestinian misnomer for Judea and Samaria (which belonged to ancient Israel centuries before Islam was invented). 

Below is from the program website, but keep in mind there is no such thing as “occupied Palestinian territories.” The latter term is merely terrorist propaganda, falsely claiming ownership of land that rightfully belongs to Israel:

This three-week intensive summer course is designed to introduce students to the social, structural, political, and historical aspects that determine Palestinian health beyond the biological basis of disease…

The course offers both conceptual and practical engagement with the structural determinants of health affecting Palestinians in the West Bank, Gaza Strip, Israel, and the Diaspora. The Palestine Social Medicine Course occurs annually at Birzeit University in the West Bank, occupied Palestinian territories. It includes travel throughout the West Bank and Israel for site visits focused on evaluating the range of health care available, as well as the variable social conditions which contribute to and determine health outcomes.

Curriculum content includes “Settler colonialism and its manifestations in Palestine” and “Health and racism.”

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