It would be easier for everyone involved if progressive social activists in higher education would just come out and be honest that they hate Jews and would rather see us killed off once and for all.
News broke the night of February 4 that the public City University of New York (CUNY) planned to host a seminar later this month that was originally titled “Globalize the Intifada: Mapping Struggles for Palestine between the Streets and our Classrooms.” For the sake of optics, the incendiary prefix appeared to have been dropped before CUNY outright canceled the event.
🚨🚨 #Breaking – UPDATE 2:
The title of this @CUNY seminar, scheduled for Feb 16, has now been changed with mention of “Globalize the Intifada” REMOVED. It is part of a broader course on: “Engagement, Equity & Antiracism” pic.twitter.com/gBQnXZbMFR— Jonathan Harounoff (@JonathanHaroun1) February 5, 2024
CUNY was right to cancel the event because no matter the language used, the seminar’s original “Global Intifada” title betrays the murderous spirit lurking beneath the event’s surface.
Intifada refers to the organized and indiscriminate killing of Jewish civilians through terrorism. Palestinian terrorists launched the First Intifada in 1987 and the Second Intifada in 2000. Both used bombings to kill innocent Jewish civilians.
Murder has no place in higher education. Like Mike Myers’ “Coffee Talk” bit on SNL, I can only say that Intifada is neither educational nor a higher ideal. The would-be panelists and attendees do not express sophistication, intellectualism, or empathy when they invoke murder. Instead, they only appeal to the worst elements of human emotions and hatred.
The CUNY seminar operates in an axis of Jew-hatred holding together anti-Semitic social justice crusades both on and off college campuses. The event description accordingly states that it will “bring together organizers at Lehman College and the Bronx, and across CUNY and New York City, to highlight how students, workers, and our communities can act in solidarity to achieve justice in Palestine.” For social justice progressives, killing isn’t murder when it’s solidarity.
Make no mistake. These people want Intifada everywhere. But they refuse to sacrifice their respectability and thus cloak their complicity with murder in the deceptively polite aura of scholarly discussions.
As a country, we cannot expect to defeat Jew-hatred as long as a critical mass of the public and academia buys into this deception and duplicity. Last fall, America got a glimpse into the true nature of the far-Left’s anti-Semitism from the other side of the country.
On Oct. 10, University of California, Davis, Professor Jemma Decristo appeared to tweet murder and kidnapping threats against Jewish journalists, implying like-minded progressive academics and activists would carry out the acts: “one group of ppl we have easy access to in the US is all these zionist journalists who spread propaganda & misinformation … they have houses w addresses, kids in school … they can fear their bosses, but they should fear us more”
Hey @ucdavis, do you think it’s appropriate that one of your faculty advisors, @jemmaisOKeh, is publicly threatening to murder Jews at their homes and their children at their schools? pic.twitter.com/xAx97LHYbr
— Jason Bedrick 🇮🇱 (@JasonBedrick) October 19, 2023
If you want to know what political desires motivate the CUNY seminar, imagine if Decristo’s threats actually happened. Mob massacres that eliminate Jews are the end-point of Intifadas and Jewish students are already the target of physical attacks on campus.
Last semester, university officials did not lift a finger to stop Jews from being attacked at Harvard University, Cooper Union, Tulane University, and Columbia University.
That’s why I filed 21 Title VI complaints against American universities – these colleges have failed in their duty to respond to campus antisemitism and Jew hatred. These events and rhetoric are neither benign nor examples of political speech that deserve protection. They are calls for violence.
So far, these complaints have resulted in seven opened investigations: Brown University, Temple University, Arizona State University, Northwestern University, Binghamton University, University of Wisconsin, and Indiana University Bloomington.
I feel encouraged by these investigations, but they will not stop Jew-hatred in this country as long as the public remains gullible to higher education’s lies and distortions. It is possible to rail against Israeli foreign policy without invoking murder – secular liberals in Tel Aviv do it all the time – but progressive academics and activists hardly seem interested in doing so. They relish in genocidal designs.
The pro-Hamas invocation “by any means necessary” that sprung up last fall from professors and students persists four months after October 7 as the slogan “You Don’t Get to Choose How We Resist.” On campus and off, today and last fall, these chants endorse murder and rape against civilians. They envisage the genocidal promise of “From the River to the Sea.”
Alexi J. Rosenfeld/Getty Images
These are the same tactics that Russian tsars used in the 1800s to execute their pogroms that killed hundreds of thousands of Jews. In a 2023 graduation speech, CUNY Law student Fatima Mohammed indulged in anti-Semitic tropes that maliciously link Jews to murder and global finance. It was this combination of stereotypes that fueled the pogroms and Holocaust.
No wonder Jewish students feel unwelcome in higher education. Every time they step on campus, they teleport back to a time and place when it was permissible – and popular – to persecute and kill Jews.
Jews are not safe in higher education, but history shows us that we are safer when we fully understand the threats against us. The Holocaust developed so gradually over the 1930s and early 1940s in Germany and Austria, that many Jewish contemporaries remained complacently in denial about the threat until it was too late.
That’s why we are better off if anti-Semites who indulge in murderous rhetoric and fantasies would just admit their deepest desires.
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Zachary Marschall is the editor-in-chief of the Leadership Institute’s Campus Reform and an adjunct assistant professor at the University of Kentucky.
The views expressed in this piece are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.