Religion is a Mental Illness

How Wikipedia’s Pro-Hamas Editors Hijacked the Israel-Palestine Narrative

a powerful group of editors is hijacking Wikipedia, pushing pro-Palestinian propaganda, erasing key facts about Hamas,

piratewires.com

a powerful group of editors is hijacking wikipedia, pushing pro-palestinian propaganda, erasing key facts about hamas, and reshaping the narrative around israel with alarming influence

• A coordinated campaign led by around 40 Wikipedia editors has worked to delegitimize Israel, present radical Islamist groups in a favorable light, and position fringe academic views on the Israel-Palestine conflict as mainstream over past years, intensifying after the October 7 attack
• Six weeks after October 7, one of these editors successfully removed mention of Hamas’ 1988 charter, which calls for the killing of Jews and the destruction of Israel, from the article on Hamas
• The group also appeared to attempt to promote the interests of the Iranian government across a number of articles, including deleting “huge amounts of documented human rights crimes by [Islamic Republic Party] officials”
• A group called Tech For Palestine launched a separate but complementary campaign after October 7, which violated Wikipedia policies by coordinating to edit Israel-Palestine articles on the group 8,000 member Discord
• Tech For Palestine abandoned its efforts and its members went into a panic after a blog discovered what they were doing; the group deleted all its Wiki Talk pages and Sandboxes they had been using to coordinate their editing efforts, and the main editor deleted all her chats from the group’s Discord channel

On everything from American politics to corporate brands, Wikipedia plays host to a smoldering battle of ideas and values that occasionally erupts into white-hot, internecine edit wars. But no fire burns hotter than the Israel-Palestine topic area. The topic is such a flashpoint that the Palestine-Israel Articles (PIA) designation is used synonymously with its own dispute resolution abbreviation — Requests for arbitration/Palestine-Israel Articles, known as ARBPIA in Wiki-speak.

While always contentious, over roughly the past four years, and intensifying since October 7, PIA has been subject to a highly coordinated, sustained and remarkably effective campaign to radically alter public perception of the conflict. Led by around 40 mostly veteran editors, the campaign has worked to delegitimize Israel, present radical Islamist groups in a favorable light, and position fringe academic views on the Israel-Palestine conflict as mainstream.

A separate but complementary campaign, launched after October 7 and staged from an 8,000 member-strong Discord group called Tech For Palestine (TFP), employed common tech modalities — ticket creation, strategy planning sessions, group audio “office hour” chats — to alter over 100 articles. Operating from February 6 to September 3 of this year, TFP became a well-oiled operation, going so far as to attempt to use Wikipedia as a means of pressuring British members of parliament into changing their positions on Israel and the Gaza War.

These efforts are remarkably successful. Type “Zionism” into Wikipedia’s search box and, aside from the main article on Zionism (and a disambiguation page), the auto-fill returns: “Zionism as settler colonialism,” “Zionism in the Age of the Dictators” (a book by a pro-Palestinian Trotskyite), “Zionism from the Standpoint of its Victims,” and “Racism in Israel.”

The aggregate effect of these efforts is a wholesale shift to the landscape of the Palestine-Israel topic online. As I reported in a previous Pirate Wires investigation, this is largely thanks to Google, which grants Wikipedia a “most favored nation” status with articles automatically given the first spot on any topic-related search result. If you Google “Zionism and settler colonialism,” for example, what you get is a Wikipedia article automatically anchored to the very top of the Google search results, with its own knowledge panel to the right. A fringe concept that would have only shown a smattering of unfocused articles just two years ago — before the article was created — now has its own primetime Internet stage.

“The recent issue with the ‘Zionism’ Wikipedia page is fundamentally a Google problem,” says someone familiar with the matter. “Wikipedia articles act as an unprotected back door to top Google search results, with the article's introduction often populating the knowledge panel, giving the impression Google has vetted this content — when it hasn’t. Malicious editors exploit this vulnerability, platforming fringe views and giving them priority over more reliable sources.”

The kind of coordination carried out by these groups violates many of Wikipedia’s most fundamental policies, including one of its core content policies, Neutral Point of View (NPOV), which states that, “Wikipedia aims to describe disputes, but not engage in them.” The practice also violates the Gaming the System guideline, which prohibits editors from “engineering ‘victory’ in a content dispute.” It runs afoul of the broader Wikipedia ethos discouraging Tag teaming, when “editors coordinate their actions to circumvent the normal process of consensus.” Most flagrantly, it violates a guideline called Canvassing, which prohibits secret coordination with the “intention of influencing the outcome of a discussion in a particular way.”

To skirt this, the pro-Palestine group leverages deep Wikipedia know-how to coordinate efforts without raising red flags. They work in small clusters, with only two or three active in the same article at any given time. On their own, many of these edits appear minor, even trivial. But together, their scope is staggering, with two million edits made to more than 10,000 articles, a majority of which are PIA or topically associated. In dozens of cases, the group’s edits account for upwards of 90% of the content on an article, giving them complete control of the topics.

One of the most prominent members of the pro-Palestine group is the user Iskandar323, a prolific editor whose nuanced approach to historical and even esoteric articles is representative of the larger effort. In the article on “Jews,” for example, he removed the “Land of Israel” from a key sentence on the origin of Jewish people. He changed the article’s short description (a condensed summary that appears on Wikipedia’s mobile version and on site search results) from “Ethnoreligious group and nation from the Levant” to “Ethnoreligious group and cultural community.” Though subtle, the implication is significant: unlike nations, “cultural communities” don’t require, or warrant, their own states.

Iskandar also worked to sanitize articles on Hamas, in one case removing mention of Hamas’ 1988 charter, which calls for the killing of Jews and the destruction of Israel, from the article “Hamas.” (The edit remains intact today.) He removed mention of Hamas’ 1988 charter in at least three other articles.

To expand his reach, Iskandar also goes on editing rampages, or “speedruns.” Last August, he removed 22,000 characters from the article on Amnesty International that were critical of the organization, in one case wholesale deleting a 1,000-word long passage related to criticism of its stance on Israel. On the “History of Israel” article, Iskandar deleted a paragraph critical of the Iranian government; removed an account of 16th century Jewish immigration to Israel; excised a mention of the Palestinian Mufti of Jerusalem's alliance with Hitler; and made dozens of similar edits — all in a matter of minutes.

Far from a lone wolf, however, Iskandar is part of a group of editors that uses coordinated “swarm” tactics that, taken together, invert Wikipedia’s founding vision, turning the site's perceived neutrality and authority into an attack vector that can be hijacked to advance ideological aims at a mass scale.

In August, an analysis of the intensity of editing in PIA between January 2022 and September 2024 found that the top contributor to PIA by number of edits, a user called Selfstudier, made over 15,000 edits in the space in that period. Iskandar323 contributed over 12,000 edits to PIA articles in the same period. Other members of the pro-Palestine group are equally prolific, with top contributors including CarmenEsparzaAmoux (8,353), Makeandtoss (8,074), Nableezy (6,414), Nishidani (5,879), Onceinawhile (4,760) and an admin called Zero0000 (2,561).

The 15,000 edits by Selfstudier and the 12,000 by Iskandar323 put those two users in the top 99.975% of editors by number of edits — solely for their PIA edits made in under three years. The other pro-Palestine group members’ PIA edits from this period place them among the top 99.9% of Wikipedia editors. All together, the top 20 editors of this group made over 850,000 edits to more than 10,500 articles, the majority of them in the Palestine-Israel topic area, or topically connected historical articles.

It’s not just the raw number of edits that matters. The same analysis shows that fully 90% of total edits by Selfstudier in that period were made to Palestine-Israel articles. Other members of the group clock in at 90% (sean.hoyland), 86% (CarmenEsparzaAmoux), 82% (Makeandross), 64% (Nishidani), and 43% (Onceinawhile). After October 7 the intensity increased, with Selfstudier peaking at 99% in October 2023, while others got to 97%, 98% and even 100% of their total monthly edits dedicated to PIA.

To evade detection, the group works in pairs or trios, an approach that veils them from detection. They also appear to rotate their groupings for the same reason. Likewise, one or more of the group’s editors can come to the aid of another in the case of pushback. In many instances, editing by the group is made to articles focused on historical issues, where a single editor might be patrolling for this kind of abuse, making it easy for two dedicated users to overwhelm or exhaust the lone editor.

A separate analysis shows the number of instances in which two members of the group edited the same article to be extraordinarily high. As of time of publication, Nableezy and Onceinawhile have co-edited 1,418 articles. Nableezy and Iskandar323 1,429 co-edited articles. Onceinawhile and Zero0000 have co-edited 2,119 articles. Zero000 and Nableezy have co-edited 1,754 articles. Onceinawhile and Iskandar323 have 1,594 co-edited. Huldra and Onceinawhile have co-edited articles 2,493 times. Nableezy and Huldra have co-edited 1,764 times.

One of the articles targeted most intensively by the group is the one for Amin Al-Husseini, the Mufti of Jerusalem from the 1920s to the 1950s, a pivotal figure in Palestinian history. While Iskandar323 worked to remove negative content from the Al-Husseini article, it was two other members of the group — Zero0000 and Nishidani — who would have the greatest impact, together making over 1,000 edits to the article, often in an attempt to erase or downplay Al-Husseini’s well-documented collaboration with Hitler.

In one instance in April 2021, Zero0000 and Nishidani worked together to keep a photo of Al-Husseini touring a Nazi concentration camp out of the article. While a single editor, Shane (a newbie), advocated for its inclusion, a trio of veterans including Zero0000, Nishidani and Selfstudier fought back. After Selfstudier accused Shane of being a troll for arguing for the photo’s inclusion, Zero0000, days later, “objected” to its inclusion, citing issues of provenance. Nishidani stepped in to back up Zero0000, prompting a response by Shane. The following day, Zero0000 pushed back against Shane, who responded. The day after, Nishidani returned with his own pushback. The tag-team effort proved too much for Shane, who simply gave up, and the effort succeeded: the photo remains absent. To date, Nishidani’s contributions to the article on Al-Husseini comprise 56.4% of its content.

In another case, Nishidani worked with a member of the pro-Palestine group editors, Onceinawhile to produce an article called “Zionism, race and genetics.” (The article’s title was later changed to “Racial conceptions of Jewish identity in Zionism”.) The article attempts to tie Zionism’s roots to 19th century views on “race science” embraced by the Nazis, thereby drawing an implicit — and, in at least one instance in the article, explicit — parallel between Zionism and Nazism. Pro-Palestine group member Onceinawhile created the article in July of last year, accompanied by a note arguing, “Early Zionists were the primary supporters of the idea that Jews are a race, as it offered scientific ‘proof’ of the ethno-nationalist myth of common descent.”Together, Onceinawhile and Nishidani’s contributions account for nearly 90% of the article’s content. Onceinawhile would continue to push this view in numerous other articles, including the article on “Zionism.”

In March, a Wikipedia user submitted a case to Wikipedia’s Arbitration Committee (Arbcom) alleging “a systematic removal of instances documenting human rights crimes by Iranian officials on Wikipedia, accompanied by the addition of misleading information favoring the IRP (Islamic Republic Party) on the platform.” The case shows that a member of the pro-Palestine group called Mhhossein edited the article on the Mahsa Amini protests — the months-long anti-regime demonstrations that rocked Iran when a young woman died in custody after being arrested for improperly wearing her head scarf — to change key wording to falsely depict widespread support for the Iranian regime and whitewash violent calls from pro-government counter-demonstrators.

According to the allegations, Iskandar323 (who has co-edited with Mhhossein nearly 400 times) worked with a separate editor to delete “huge amounts of documented human rights crimes by [Iranian] officials.” This included a claim about Iran’s post-revolution death commissions that executed thousands political prisoners; details showing executions were carried out by “high-ranking members of Iran’s current government”; mention of the Iranian government’s “unprecedented reign of terror” in the early 1980s; the sentencing of an Iranian official to life in prison in Sweden for his role in the executions; the targeting of an Iranian dissident group with “psychological warfare,” and dozens of others.

The charges are serious, and the evidence backing them up abundant. Nevertheless, seven months later the Arbcom case is still pending. The reason is systemic: in a lengthy request for arbitration on a separate PIA case, one of Wikipedia’s arbitrators noted that the final decision-making panel is staffed by 12 volunteers, only 10 of whom are active. “It is clear that AE [arbitration enforcement] has run out of steam to handle the morass of editor conduct issues in PIA,” the arbitrator wrote. “PIA is a Gordian knot; and AE has run short of knot detanglers.”

Electing more Arbcom members would require a massive overhaul of the site’s governing regulations, a task akin to the US government amending its constitution. And though Wikimedia Foundation, which owns the site, has around $500 million in assets, because of the air-gap between Wikipedia and WMF and the volunteer ethos of Wikipedia’s mission not a penny can be used to hire people to oversee contentious topics.

So the group’s pro-Iran efforts go unchecked. One of its most prominent members, Nableezy (over 6,000 PIA edits since 2022), has put considerable effort into sanding the hard edges off of Iran’s most powerful proxy, Hezbollah. Nableezy — who took the extraordinary step of including a userbox on his Talk page that links to a text that reads “This user supports Hezbollah.” — has worked to rebuff claims that Hezbollah is a terror organization. In one instance, Nableezy pushed back against another user characterizing a Hezbollah attack on Israeli population centers as a terror attack, arguing “An attack on military targets is not terrorism.” Last year, Nableezy, who appears to be an American, argued in the Talk page for the “Hezbollah” article that, “The US military is designated as a terror group by Iran, should we include that as an endnote everywhere the US army is mentioned?”

But Nableezy’s main area of focus is Israel. To this end, Nableezy’s editing has included subtle, ideologically consistent moves like removing a picture of the Dead Sea Scrolls from the “Israel” article (the image remains absent at time of publishing), pushing for the removal of the ancient history of Israel from the article, and altering a sentence on Zionism that described it as a call by its leaders for the “restoration of the Jews to their homeland” to a call for “the colonization of Palestine by European Jews.”

This exchange embodies the rhetorical approach taken by the group: the shifting of language, the torturing of settled definitions, and positioning fringe academic theory as mainstream — an approach developed by the radical left, in concert with global Islamist movements, in the wake of 9/11, when the attacks put Islamism on the moral back foot. In response, the leftist-Islamist alliance launched two decades of ideological assault on the US, and the West more generally. The same post-9/11 dynamic took place after October 7, when the savagery of the Hamas attack opened a vulnerability as the broader public would recognize it as a barbaric attack on civilians.

In response, the ideological push-back on Wikipedia ramped up. In February, an explicitly coordinated effort was launched when leaders on a group called Tech For Palestine (TFP) — launched in January by Paul Biggar, the Irish co-founder of software development platform CircleCI — opened a channel on their 8,000-strong Discord channel called “tfp-wikipedia-collaboration.” In the channel, two group leaders, Samira and Samer, coordinated with other members to mass edit a number of PIA articles. The effort included recruiting volunteers, processing them through formal orientation, troubleshooting issues, and holding remote office hours to problem solve and ideate. The channel’s welcome message posed a revealing question: “Why Wikipedia? It is a widely accessed resource, and its content influences public perception.”

At the heart of TFP Wikipedia Collaboration was a veteran editor called Ïvana, who was tapped as the resident expert on the site, and whose Discord username featured the red triangle affiliated with Hamas’ targeting.

With Ïvana’s guidance, as well as her hands-on editing of articles, the TFP Wikipedia Collaboration group coordinated both on Discord and Wikipedia, where they created editing staging grounds on Talk pages that included elements like “Work in Progress Table,” “Investigate and Decide,” and a volunteer job board with detailed responsibilities. Off-wiki, the group created planning documentation with agendas, meeting notes, goal setting, role allocation, skills and breakdowns. Their activities ranged from editing celebrity articles by adding pro-Palestine statements they made to creating new articles out of whole cloth, like a proposed article called “Palestine: The Solution.” The group focused extensively on the article for German discount supermarket Lidl, adding a section in the “Criticism” section about products from Israel being incorrectly labeled as Moroccan. They also put special emphasis on articles concerning sexual violence perpetrated by Hamas on October 7, with Ïvana questioning the veracity of reports of rape from that day, while adding to other articles claims that Israeli soldiers raped Palestinians. (In March, a senior UN official who investigated sexual violence on October 7 concluded that, “There are reasonable grounds to believe that conflict-related sexual violence — including rape and gang-rape — occurred across multiple locations of Israel and the Gaza periphery during the attacks on 7 October 2023.” The official wrote her investigation produced a “‘catalogue of the most extreme and inhumane forms of killing, torture and other horrors,’ including sexual violence.”)

In its most audacious case, TFP members developed a project to use Wikipedia as a means of pressuring British Members of Parliament to change their stance on the Israel-Palestine conflict in advance of UK elections in July. The plan called for scraping data on visits by MPs to Israel and Israel-related donor information, to create a dedicated Wikipedia article using the data to (as the originator of the project put it) inform “voters to put pressure ahead of the next [parliamentary] elections.”

Within the TFP channel, there was always a background awareness that what they were doing was not in keeping with Wikipedia norms. Early in the channel’s existence, a user and veteran Wikipedia editor called shushugah wrote, “I’m a little confused what the goal is here. I’m an active Wikipedia editor, and for any Israel/Palestine topics you need a solid grasp of Wikipedia policy/culture, and have 500 edits/30 days of activity…no shortcuts.” Within minutes, another user, Heba, wrote “Let’s chat [hand wave emoji].” One of the channel’s power users, zei_squirrel, who runs an X account with 270,000 followers, noted “it’s important to keep this as decentralized and organic as possible to avoid it being used against us, but again this should all be familiar to those who know how wiki works.”

The anxiety was not unwarranted. In September, a researcher discovered the TFP Wikipedia Collaboration channel and published a number of posts on a blog called Wikipediaflood. (A magazine called Jewish Insider also stumbled across the group, but mostly failed to appreciate its full significance.) These events sent the group into a panic, with Ïvana erasing all her chats in the channel, and deleting the Talk pages and Sandboxes staging pages she’d created. The group locked down the TFP Wikipedia Collaboration channel in September. At minimum, the group made revisions to at least 112 articles on celebrities, American cities, pro-Palestine organizations, and figures and events related to the Gaza war.

There is little doubt that the kind of careful, intelligent Wikipedia coordination detailed above will continue. Wikipedia is simply too powerful a tool — and one too easy to manipulate — for actors like the pro-Palestine group and TFP activists to stay away from. But Wikipedia is coming to a crossroads. The ask-and-answer modality of generative AI will eat away at the value of the site’s privileged position within the Google information ecosystem. Groups less savvy than pro-Palestine will also learn to exploit the site, to much more public effect. As with so many of our once-cherished institutions, trust will be lost, and credibility will soon follow.

One of the hallmarks of an institution in crisis is that, far from preparing for the future, it is barely capable of managing the present. With Arbcom grinding to a halt and edit wars erupting in all corners — all while Wikimedia Foundation, fiddling to the baroque tunes of DEI, has turned its attention to funding progressive activism — it seems Wikipedia is facing exactly this challenge. In most cases, calling a crisis existential is overblown. While Wikipedia may not be there just yet, it’s clear that moment is not far off.

“Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.” -- George Orwell, "Nineteen Eighty-Four"

Against Racialism, Left and Right

Since the outbreak of the Israel-Hamas war more than a year ago, perplexing forms of open anti-Semitism have cropped up on both sides of the

Compact

Since the outbreak of the Israel-Hamas war more than a year ago, perplexing forms of open anti-Semitism have cropped up on both sides of the political aisle. First visible on the political left with an eruption of protests and even of violence on Ivy League campuses, it also appeared soon enough on the political right.

What has transpired is a complex story about the academy and the internet, the elite and the fringes—one that we must confront directly as it reveals something rotten in our politics. This concerning trajectory can only be changed through the restoration of higher principles that once kept these threats in check. In the face of dangerous identity-based ideologies, it is crucial to return to America’s historic defense of colorblindness, meritocracy, and fair play.

Left-wingers have participated in anti-Israel and pro-Hamas agitation, in some cases even defending the Hamas militants who massacred approximately some 1,200 innocents, including at a music festival. Keffiyeh-clad student protesters captured buildings at Columbia, eventually setting off a wave of copycat flashpoints at other universities. Elites institutions like Harvard—which previously had issued statements on political controversies ranging from Black Lives Matter and #MeToo to the war in Ukraine—suddenly went silent on the Israel-Hamas war in the name of protecting freedom of speech.

These institutions have failed to keep in check the simplistic oppressor-versus-oppressed ideology that undergirds the worldview of today’s left. The provincial-minded elites that call the shots in these institutions tend to filter every conflict through this ideological lens, looking primarily to skin color and then power dynamics as the main criteria for judging the rectitude of a cause. Palestinians, with their slightly darker skin tone and less developed economy and military, fit the “oppressed” mold, thus making the Jewish state their “oppressor.” 

Though this line of thought dates back to the 1960s (think of the Black Panthers’ alliance with the Palestinian cause), this is the first time that it has come to dominate discourse on university campuses. This is thanks in part to the collapse of intellectual diversity on campus. But it also has attracted numerous students and professors because of the prevalence of victim worship and the subsequent resentment toward successful groups. In their eyes, Palestinians are a kind of eternal victim. A pseudo-historical narrative tells us they have been victimized for time everlasting, and lack any agency in their own fate. Ironically, the oppression of the Jews dates back to biblical times, yet American Jews are one of the most successful groups in academia and other intellectual professions. The success of a minority group throws a wrench into the left’s narrative gears.

Across the political aisle, anti-Semitic ideologies have a history of appearing in the form of conspiratorial thinking on the fringes of American conservatism. Lately, it has been the non-traditional right-wingers—who, because of how our politics works, have been lumped in with “conservatism” writ large—who espouse such views. Take Kanye West, who was a kind of ally to Donald Tru.mp and then embedded himself within the right, eventually suffering from mental breakdowns and going off on anti-Semitic rants. 

Or Candace Owens, who, although always controversial, once understood where the lines lay. This was in part because of her employers, her partners, and the rules on platforms like YouTube or X (formerly Twitter). Yet in recent months, she began questioning whether the Axis powers deserved Western antipathy, and even apologizing for Kanye’s threat to “go defcon three on some Jews” and musing about a “small ring of people in Hollywood who are using the fact that they are Jewish to shield” their supposed crimes (always careful to hedge, she insists this characterization doesn’t apply to American Jewry writ large, but the hallmarks of classic anti-Semitism are unmistakable in her discourse).

On X, many right-wing accounts espouse open anti-Semitism, often posting allegedly ironic memes about Adolf Hitler. I once posted something about critical race theory, and was told by one of these accounts, “Well, you know that critical race theory was invented by Jews.” Though this kind of right-wing conspiratorial thinking is nothing new, the fact that it has become so commonplace on online platforms like X is an alarming novelty that merits our concern.

The growing distrust of mainstream institutions that is characteristic of today’s right can’t be written off completely. This sentiment—ushered in by figures like Donald Tru.mp—swept away the broken establishment Republican consensus, yet it has failed to fill the ideological vacuum it has created. Tru.mp tried to fill it with partisan politics but lacked an adequate intellectual framework. Those who retrofitted their ideologies to Tru.mp attempted to create an intellectual substructure for his presidency, in some cases ushering in a kind of chaotic element. To be sure, chaos can create space for creativity. But it always comes with a downside.

This ideological vacuum is compounded with relaxed censorship policies on platforms like X, thanks to its new owner, Elon Musk. To be sure, this has allowed more space to express legitimate viewpoints and is preferable to the old censorship system. But it has also allowed conspiratorial thinking to gain traction. Worse, it has opened the door to alt-right influencers and the so-called Groypers, who have taken politics as a method of garnering attention and then monetizing it either on or off their platforms. This has all been exacerbated by the disappearance of gatekeepers and overall quality control within the post-establishmentarian right.

At face value, the fact that such seemingly opposed cultural subsets can find a point of convergence is perplexing, to say the least. One is in the academy, an elite group pursuing prestige. The other is on the internet, a fringe phenomenon, pursuing clicks. But if we take a closer look, we find that both are identity-based movements. Both movements are driven by envy, resentment, fear, and the impulse to locate a scapegoat to achieve their general political objectives. What’s at stake in these two groups having such an influence over discourse is something much bigger than the Israel-Hamas conflict. 

Should we fail to restrain their growth, we will have two large factions in the United States that want to abandon the principles of colorblind equality, fair play, and judging individuals on their own merit. Thus, this isn’t just a question of anti-Semitism, but a question of how we want to govern our society. It is in our best interest as a nation to reject both left-wing identity politics, which seeks to categorize everyone in an intersectional hierarchy and then use the state to force equity or the equalization of outcomes, and right-wing conspiratorial thinking, a form of pessimism used to pin one’s failures on someone else’s success.

We are blessed to live in a country where people can succeed when they work hard and put their talent to good use. It is imperative that we fight to maintain a narrative that reflects this reality, rather than capitulating to pessimistic ideologies divorced from the facts. 

In 1790, George Washington wrote a letter to the Hebrew Congregation of Newport, RI. This letter offers us a model of how American principles can assimilate minority groups and, in particular, American Jews. Some scholars view it as the first time that Jews were welcomed as full citizens of a modern national polity. Washington acknowledged that Jews have the same liberties, rights, and benefits of citizenship. And that citizenship requires all of us to work hard, to contribute to society, and to play by the rules. 

Washington’s letter should cause us to reflect on how far we have come since the time he wrote it. Today, our nation is home to a diverse mix of people from a variety of continental, racial, and religious backgrounds. The principles that Washington laid out are precisely the ones that can still work today if we are dedicated to them. The recent surge in racialist and conspiratorial thinking calls us to renew the case for these principles and to argue for them. 

This is the only way forward for the country.

In Israel, Every Day is October 7. In the U.S., Every Day is October 8.

Jews across the world have the sense that the “universal collective” to which we thought we finally belonged has thrown us out and turned it

Jewish Journal

Jews across the world have the sense that the “universal collective” to which we thought we finally belonged has thrown us out and turned its back.

Ever since witnessing an ecstatic pro-Hamas celebration in Time Square just 24 hours after the deadliest day for Jews since the Holocaust, I thought nothing could surprise me. Then to commemorate the one-year anniversary of those atrocities, the Guardian published an essay by Naomi Klein titled, “How Israel has made trauma a weapon of war.”

“What is the line between commemorating trauma and cynically exploiting it?” Klein asks. “Between memorialization and weaponization? What does it mean to perform collective grief when the collective is not universal, but rather tightly bound by ethnicity?”

As someone who encountered gruesome videos of Hamas’s “cynical exploitation” and “weaponization” of Israelis’ trauma exactly a year ago, watched as terrorists referred to terrified Israelis in the South — those who just happened to be most likely to oppose “settlements” — as settlers and dogs, and heard firsthand from people who witnessed livestreams of family and friends held at gunpoint, most of them murdered or taken hostage, I found the premise grotesque.

It was particularly appalling because beyond the therapeutic effect of creating artwork, the cri de cœur that motivated the art installations from Tel Aviv to American college campuses, “kidnapped” posters across the globe, the Nova Exhibition, online maps of the massacres, and documentaries about October 7, is the denials of the trauma itself. And the feeling that since that horrific day, we have been abandoned. That we are profoundly alone. That every day in Israel is October 7th.

Given the depth of depravity of what happened that day, some Jews initially believed the world would finally stand with Israel. I didn’t. But I did think that everyone would at least condemn the atrocities. I couldn’t have been more wrong. Israel has faced obscene denialism and false accusations while young people across the globe celebrate monstrous barbarism and valorize those who perpetrated it. Jews across the world have the sense that the “universal collective” to which we thought we finally belonged has thrown us out and turned its back.

Where is the world’s outrage? Where is the world’s empathy? Where are the calls for Hamas to return our stolen souls? Where is the Red Cross? Where are the organizations and so-called allies with whom we stood, we marched, we campaigned? It’s #MeToo unless you’re a Jew.

American college students have borne the brunt of the rise in antisemitism. Days after the massacres, rapes, and kidnappings, when antisemitic student groups like Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) used images of motorized hang-gliders to advertise their anti-Israel demonstrations, I wanted to believe that they didn’t know what really happened. When they used the same image to advertise celebrations of their “resistance” and “martyrs,” marking the one-year anniversary, they no longer had an excuse. “Happy October 7th everyone!” at least one school’s SJP posted on Instagram. They all refer to the massacres by the name the terrorists use for it, “Al Aqsa Flood.” To mark the anniversary, the openly pro-Hamas student group “Within Our Lifetime” (WOL) organized demonstrations, calling them “Students Flood NYC for Gaza.”

Last semester, Columbia University student activist Khymani James publicly declared, “Zionists don’t deserve to live,” and “be grateful that I’m not just going out and murdering Zionists.” His anti-Zionist student group, Columbia University Apartheid Divest (CUAD) issued an apology for his remarks. This year, the group apologized to him for its “so-called apology,” which, they declared, “does not represent Khymani or CUAD’s values or political lines.”

That was apparent when CUAD celebrated a recent terrorist attack at a light rail station in Tel Aviv/Jaffa. Terrorists murdered 7, including the young mother of a baby, and wounded at least 16. The group referred to the horrors as a “bold attack” and a “significant act of resistance” that “reached deep into the heart of settler-colonial territory, further destabilizing the Zionist regime’s claims to security…”

Almost a year after going to the October 8 Times Square demonstration, I went back to the scene of the crime. This time, there were signs glorifying not just Hamas, but Hezbollah. There were also more activists, more keffiyehs, more police, and more of the same familiar chants calling for the eradication of Israel and the destruction of the Jewish people.

“There is only one solution: intifada revolution.” (Bonus points for harking back to the Nazi “final solution.”) “Palestine,” if they got their way, would extend “from the river to the sea,” making everything within Israel’s current borders as Jew-free as the Palestinian territories. If you thought they wanted an end to the shootings, stabbings, beheadings, suicide bombings, rapes, tortures, kidnappings, burning people alive…etc., you’re sadly mistaken. “Globalize the intifada.” “Long live the intifada.”

To hear the media tell it, though, especially when demonstrators add “ceasefire now” to their chant list, they’re “anti-war activists.”

This year, while students across the country attempted to hold anniversary vigils for the victims of October 7, terrorist-sympathizers celebrated the same events within earshot. As if that weren’t enough, anti-Zionist posters now include images of red anemones, the symbol of Israel’s South — where the atrocities happened. This is especially galling because survivors of October 7 see the red anemone as a symbol of their connection to the land. Many now have tattoos of the flower to remind themselves of resilience, possibility, and hope.

Relatedly, a chant that stood out to me as I left the Times Square anniversary celebration is “Hey hey, ho ho; Zionism has got to go.” Maybe because it seems banal compared to the others, it doesn’t get much attention. But in some ways, it’s more illuminating. We all know that for terrorists and their supporters, intimidation, harassment, and unimaginable violence is their love language. “From the river to the sea” is a threat. “Intifada” is a call to arms. But “Zionism has got to go” is something else.

Our connection to our ancient, biblical, historical, and permanent home is intolerable to those who hate the Jews. Perhaps that’s why student-jihadis now appropriate not just the date of the worst massacre of Jews in most generations’ living memory, but’ symbols too: In addition to red anemones, there seems to have been a proliferation of Anti-Zionist charms and t-shirts sporting maps of Israel.

That our connection to the land predates the birth of Mohammed, that we are the prototypical indigenous people and our presence in the land has been continuous, that we acquired the land through purchases and other legal means, that the majority of Israelis have relatives who were ethnically cleansed from Arab countries, that the only non-colonial, non-imperial sovereign power that has ever existed in that land was, and is, Jewish, and that the State of Israel came about in exactly the same way as countries that don’t face delegitimization campaigns, all puts the lie to the antisemitic conspiracy theory that Jews are “white settler-colonialist” robbers and thieves sent from Europe who stole land rightfully owned by ethnic Palestinians in 1948 — a time when there was no such designated ethnic group.

The Zionist-hating chant illustrates how antisemitic terrorists intend to take more from us than our land. They want to rob us of our hopes and dreams, too.

Maybe that’s why we always end up singing Hatikva when confronted by those who wish to destroy us — as if to say, “you might take our ability to live in peace today, but we won’t let you take our hopes and dreams.” As long as the heart within the Jewish soul yearns, and toward the East, an eye looks to Zion, our hope is not yet lost. Our hope is two thousand years old: To be a free people in our land, the land of Zion and Jerusalem.

A day before Klein’s poisonous piece, the New York Times published a fawning article about a student-founder of WOL, one of the anti-Zionist organizations behind many of the activities that make campuses hostile to Jews. “Pro-Palestinian Group Is Relentless in Its Criticism of Israel, and It Isn’t Backing Down,” the headline reads. The goal of WOL, to be clear, is to destroy Israel“ within our lifetime.” Calling that “criticism of Israel” is like referring to the defacing of priceless artwork as “criticism of Monet.”

WOL “has galvanized pro-Palestinian activists who are calling for the end of Israel,” the subtitle reads, “and [are] facing accusations of antisemitism.” The message seems to be: Let’s be reasonable. They don’t hate Jews. They just want to destroy the home of more than half of them — the one country where Jews aren’t a minority. Can you believe they’re accused of being anti-Jewish? The poor dears.

In the past year, I noticed a chant I don’t remember hearing before. It’s in Arabic, and it means “from water to water, Palestine will be Arab.” Anyone who thought this would finally put an end to the nonsensical claim that “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” wasn’t about the destruction of Israel might be right. It seems we’re all on the same page now: It is a call for the annihilation of Israel.

But get with the program; calling for the destruction of Israel is now merely “criticism.” To quote from Dr. Strangelove: Our source is the New York Times. 

The Beginning of the End for the Squad?

Jamaal Bowman, the Representative for New York’s 16th congressional district, has lost his primary election. Bowman was defeated by Westches

restorationbulletin.com

Jamaal Bowman, the Representative for New York’s 16th congressional district, has lost his primary election. Bowman was defeated by Westchester County Executive George Latimer, a Democrat, to be sure, but one a little more in tune with the policy preferences of his affluent soon-to-be constituents. This makes Bowman the first member of the infamous “Squad,” a cadre of far-left Democrats including Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, to lose his seat. If we are lucky, perhaps this is the beginning of a positive trend. Bowman was a rising star in progressive politics, known for willfully pulling a fire alarm in the Cannon House Office Building in Washington, D.C. to delay a budget vote, for which he was formally censured.

More recently, Bowman has been in the spotlight for embodying another time-honored Progressive tradition: deliberately antagonizing his own constituents to score political points online. Specifically, Bowman has been one of the most vocal anti-Israel and anti-Jewish politicians in Congress, in a district with a rich and powerful Jewish community. Roughly 9% of his district is Jewish – a small, but politically engaged demographic. Bowman found that out the hard way.

Bowman’s flop campaign might reasonably lead one to assume he was running in Gaza. To understand why Bowman lost, let’s start from the beginning.

* * *

In the days after the attacks on October 7th, when the world was still reeling from the senseless tragedy, Bowman took time out of his busy schedule to call reports of Hamas terrorists raping Israeli women “propaganda.” Bowman posted a TikTok video in which he said, “There was propaganda used in the beginning of the siege… There’s still no evidence of beheaded babies or raped women. But they still keep using that lie [for] propaganda.” Bowman posted this video in November just days after lawmakers viewed a 45-minute video of the attacks on Israel. Bowman only began to backtrack on these claims once the evidence became unquestionably clear. Nonetheless, Bowman only apologized for the remark last week in a vain attempt to stem any further vote hemorrhaging.

Also in October, the House passed a resolution with near-unanimous support declaring that the United States "stands with Israel as it defends itself against the barbaric war launched by Hamas and other terrorists." Exactly ten members of Congress voted against the resolution, nine of which were Democrats, including Bowman. The resolution condemned Hamas and demanded the terrorist group release all hostages immediately.

Bowman has also called Israel’s actions “genocide.” He’s described Israel as a “settler-colonial project.” And he believes Hamas’ attacks were not unprovoked, claiming “If we’re calling this an unprovoked attack, that means we’re going to ignore 18 human rights organizations calling Israel an apartheid state, and we’re gonna ignore 75 years of military occupation…or several hundred thousand settlers expanding into the West Bank.” He followed that up with, “I am not justifying the killing of civilians by Hamas on Oct. 7, there is no justification. It’s just an explanation of what the circumstances were that led to Oct. 7… If you want to end extremism, then we need a free Palestine.”

So far, this is all par for the course for recent Progressive politics: blame Israel for everything while condoning, equivocating, or covering for terrorists and their sympathizers. Of course, as should be familiar to all of us by now, scratch the contemporary Progressive and you will often find an antisemite. Bowman is no different. Many of his bizarre claims about Israel and his dismissive actions towards his own constituents expose his thinly-veiled antisemitism.

In January, Bowman took the honor of introducing Norman Finkelstein to a panel on the Israel-Hamas war in his home district. Finkelstein is notorious for his book The Holocaust Industry, which claims that Jews are exploiting memory of the Holocaust for their own benefit. “I’m a bit starstruck,” Bowman said, and he thanked the panelists “for being here and coming to Yonkers and delivering the truth to us.”

In April, Bowman called Jews in his district a “segregated” community. He said, “Westchester is segregated. There’s certain places where the Jews live and concentrate. Scarsdale, parts of White Plains, parts of New Rochelle, Riverdale. I’m sure they made a decision to do that for their own reasons… but this is why, in terms of fighting antisemitism, I always push — we’ve been separated and segregated and miseducated for so long. We need to live together, play together, go to school together, learn together, work together.”

Things became nasty when Bowman turned his ire to AIPAC, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. When Jewish activists, organizers, and leaders successfully encouraged Latimer to challenge Bowman in the primary, everything became about AIPAC. On Latimer’s entry into the race, the Bowman campaign released a statement saying, “Congressman Bowman's focus remains first and foremost on delivering for the people of his district and standing up to powerful special interests in Congress. It's not a surprise that a super PAC that routinely targets Black members of Congress with primary challenges, and is funded by the same Republican mega-donors who give millions to election-denying Republicans including Donald Trump, Ron DeSantis, and Ted Cruz, has recruited a candidate for this race.”

In a campaign speech earlier this month, Bowman screamed into a microphone that, “because I am fighting against genocide, I am being attacked by the Zionist regime we call AIPAC.” In May, at a campaign event in the sliver of the Bronx in his district, Bowman told volunteers, “They are so afraid of us — those who oppose the working class, multiracial, multieconomic, multicultural democracy that we are trying to build… They’re spending more money in this race than they have ever spent in the history of any race. That’s how afraid AIPAC is.” In his concession speech Tuesday evening, Bowman spared no invective. He said that “We should be outraged. We should be outraged when a Super PAC of dark money can spend $20 million to brainwash people into believing something that isn't true… They spent a record amount of money, the most in US history, to beat this Black man.”

When Jews in his district are the driver of “segregation,” when they are told they are brainwashed by AIPAC, when the contrast is between a Jewish neighborhood and a “multiracial, multieconomic, multicultural democracy,” any sane Jewish voter would be justified in thinking Bowman might have lost his marbles. And lost his marbles, he did. Bowman’s personal social media is a treasure trove of conspiracy theories and deranged technobabble. His recently uncovered YouTube page reveals Bowman’s engagement with 9/11 truthers, flat earthers, and theories of CIA time travel devices, alien technology, and secret elite communication frequencies. In other words, Bowman was already primed to believe antisemitic conspiracy theories well before he ever got to Congress.

Bowman was right about one thing, however: AIPAC was working behind the scenes to tank his campaign, it just wasn’t as important as he thought. In targeting AIPAC, Bowman exposed his two incorrect assumptions: that his opponents were nothing without AIPAC, and that all external money was pouring into his opposition. In reality, neither of these are correct. Yes, AIPAC invested $14 million into the race, but AIPAC funding did not sink Bowman’s campaign. As others have already pointed out, polling indicated that Latimer was up by double-digits well before AIPAC had contributed a single dollar to the race. (I note in passing that AIPAC’s funding is justified given the Antisemitic vitriol spewed by Bowman and his campaign.)

Meanwhile, only 10 percent of Bowman’s own funding came from contributions inside his district. The remaining 90% is from outside sources. Conversely, half of Latimer’s donations came from within the district. If you want to see dark money in action, look no further than the Bowman campaign.

Bowman failed for entirely predictable reasons: he lost touch with the real, specific needs of his constituents. Bowman came to care more about what radical progressives online thought and less about his district. He pandered to a rabid political coalition that was organized only in Gaza, on Twitter, and in the tent encampments scattered across a few dozen elite universities. At the same time, he became obsessed with a shadowy cabal of Jews masterminding his takedown, a theory which slotted neatly into his pre-existing conspiratorial mindset. Latimer, on the other hand, was a seasoned politician who had been working the area for decades before Bowman ever showed up. He could be seen at nearly any local event and he knew the district very well. The irony of Bowman treating the race like a proxy-war for the Israel-Hamas conflict is that Latimer rarely talked about the issue. The campaign ads that AIPAC funded almost never touched the subject. Bowman was playing to an issue that everybody else wanted to go away. It takes two to tango, and Bowman was dancing all alone.

Opinion | Should American Jews Abandon Elite Universities?

An incident at Columbia suggests that schools beset with antisemitism are beyond salvation.

nytimes.com

The notable fact about the anti-Israel campus demonstrations is that they are predominantly an elite phenomenon. Yes, there have been protests at big state schools like the University of Nebraska, but they have generally been small, tame and — thanks to administrators prepared to enforce the rules — short-lived. It’s Stanford, Berkeley, Yale, Penn, Harvard, Columbia and many of their peers that have descended to open bigotry, institutional paralysis and mayhem.

Two questions: Why the top universities? And what should those on the other side of the demonstrations — Jewish students and alumni most of all — do about it?

Regarding the first question, some argue that the furor over the campus protests is much ado about not much. The demonstrators, they say, represent only a small fraction of students. The ugliest antisemitic expressions occasionally seen at these events are mainly the work of outside provocateurs. And the student protesters (some of whom are Jewish) are acting out of youthful idealism, not age-old antisemitism. As they see it, they aim only to save Palestinian lives and oppose the involvement of their universities in the abuses of a racist Israeli state.

There’s something to these points. With notable exceptions, campus life at these schools is somewhat less roiled by protest than the media makes it seem. Outside groups, as more than one university president has told me, have played an outsize role in setting up encampments and radicalizing students. And few student demonstrators, I’d wager, consciously think they harbor an anti-Jewish prejudice.

But this lets the kids off the hook too easily.

Students who police words like “blacklist” or “whitewash” and see “microaggressions” in everyday life ignore the entreaties of their Jewish peers to avoid chants like “globalize the intifada” or “from the river to the sea.” Students who claim they’re horribly pained by scenes of Palestinian suffering were largely silent on Oct. 7 — when they weren’t openly cheering the attacks. And students who team up with outside groups that are in overt sympathy with Islamist terrorists aren’t innocents. They’re collaborators.

How did the protesters at elite universities get their ideas of what to think and how to behave?

They got them, I suspect, from the incessant valorization of victimhood that has been a theme of their upbringing, and which many of the most privileged kids feel they lack — hence the zeal to prove themselves as allies of the perceived oppressed. They got them from the crude schematics of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion training seminars, which divide the world into “white” and “of color,” powerful and “marginalized,” with no regard for real-world complexities — including the complexity of Jewish identity. They got them from professors who think academic freedom amounts to a license for political posturing, sometimes of a nakedly antisemitic sort. They got them from a cheap and easy revision of history that imagines Zionism is a form of colonialism (it’s decidedly the opposite), that colonialism is something only white people do, and that as students at American universities, they can cheaply atone for their sins as guilty beneficiaries of the settler-colonialism they claim to despise.

They also got them from university administrators whose private sympathies often lie with the demonstrators, who imagine the anti-Israel protests as the moral heirs to the anti-apartheid protests and who struggle to grasp (if they even care) why so many Jewish students feel betrayed and besieged by the campus culture.

That’s the significance of the leaked images of four Columbia University deans exchanging dismissive and sophomoric text messages during a panel discussion in May on Jewish life on campus, including the suggestion that a panelist was “taking full advantage of this moment” for the sake of the “fundraising potential.”

Columbia placed three of the deans on leave. Other universities, like Penn, have belatedly moved to ban encampments. But those steps have a grudging and reactive feel — more a response to Title VI investigations of discrimination and congressional hearings than a genuine acknowledgment that something is deeply amiss with the values of a university. At Harvard, two successive members of the task force on antisemitism resigned in frustration. “We are at a moment when the toxicity of intellectual slovenliness has been laid bare for all to see,” wrote Rabbi David Wolpe in his resignation announcement.

That’s the key point. More dismaying than the fact that student protesters are fellow traveling with Hamas is that with their rhyming chants and identical talking points, they sound more like Maoist cadres than critical thinkers. As the sociologist Ilana Redstone, author of the smart and timely book “The Certainty Trap,” told me on Monday, “higher education traded humility and curiosity for conviction and advocacy — all in the name of being inclusive. Certainty yields students who are contemptuous of disagreement.”

And so the second question: What are Jewish students and alumni to do?

It’s telling that the Columbia deans were caught chortling during exactly the kind of earnest panel discussion that the university convened presumably to show alumni they are tackling campus antisemitism. They were paying more lip service than attention. My guess is that they, along with many of their colleagues, struggle to see the problem because they think it lies with a handful of extremist professors and obnoxious students.

But the real problem lies with some of the main convictions and currents of today’s academia: intersectionality, critical theory, post-colonialism, ethnic studies and other concepts that may not seem antisemitic on their face but tend to politicize classrooms and cast Jews as privileged and oppressive. If, as critical theorists argue, the world’s injustices stem from the shadowy agendas of the powerful and manipulative few against the virtuous masses, just which group is most likely to find itself villainized?

Not even the most determined university president is going to clean out the rot — at least not without getting rid of the entrenched academic departments and tenured faculty members who support it. That could take decades. In the meantime, Jews have a history of parting company with institutions that mistreated them, like white-shoe law firms and commercial banks. In so many cases, they went on to create better institutions that operated on principles of intellectual merit and fair play — including many of the universities that have since stumbled.

If you are an Ivy League megadonor wondering how to better spend the money you no longer want to give a Penn or a Columbia — or just a rising high school senior wondering where to apply — maybe it’s time to forgo the fading prestige of the old elite for the sake of something else, something new. That’s a subject for a future column.

Luxury beliefs are ideas and opinions that confer status on the upper class, while often inflicting costs on the lower classes. – Rob Henderson

Columbia task force reveals full extent of antisemitism on campus since Oct. 7

***

Haaretz.com

Antisemitic comments by professors, harassment of Jewish students – Columbia University's antisemitism task force has heard hundreds of testimonies since its formation in November. Its members tell Haaretz about the mandatory orientation they plan and say they have agreed on an 'educational' definition of antisemitism

NEW YORK – One professor encountering a Jewish-sounding surname while reading names before an exam asked the student to explain their views on the Israeli government's actions in Gaza. Another told their class to avoid reading mainstream media, declaring that "it is owned by Jews." A third revealed a student's complaint about an offensive comment regarding Jews by publicly displaying their email to fellow students.

Several times, professors encouraged students to participate in pro-Palestinian protests or the Gaza Solidarity Encampment for extra credit, or conducted classes at protest sites. Other incidents included students wearing Jewish symbols having them torn from their person. Some were pushed out of student clubs they had been part of because they did not want to participate in group actions and statements against Israel's right to exist.

These are just a few of the hundreds of testimonies the Columbia Task Force on Antisemitism has documented that detail harassment, intimidation, discrimination and exclusion against Jewish students by professors and fellow students at the New York university since the October 7 Hamas massacre and subsequent war in Gaza.

The task force conducted over 20 listening sessions across the university, which found itself at the epicenter of the campus protests that have engulfed America this year, hearing from about 500 students and receiving dozens of written appeals.

Some of these testimonies are set to be published in the coming weeks in a new report focusing on Jewish students' experiences at Columbia.

The task force was formed last November by Columbia University President Minouche Shafik, Barnard College President Laura Ann Rosenbury and Teachers College President Thomas R. Bailey. The aim was to address the "harmful impact of rising antisemitism on Columbia's Jewish community and to ensure that protection, respect, and belonging extends to everyone."

From its inception, the task force faced accusations of being illegitimate from some pro-Palestinian faculty and students. Critics claimed its existence was politically motivated, designed to spread fear by exaggerating antisemitism and perceived dangers to Jews, suppress criticism, and distract from the plight of Palestinians in Gaza and the violent arrests of pro-Palestinian protesters.

Jewish students active in the pro-Palestinian protests and Gaza Solidarity Encampment also criticized the move, saying the task force misrepresented Jewish students who did not feel endangered on campus.

Haaretz has interviewed several members of the task force, who say they have documented hundreds of cases of Jewish students feeling discriminated against. This month, the task force has commissioned a large survey of the entire Columbia student population in order to collect data about different aspects of antisemitism on campus.

The members also discussed Columbia's planned response, including a new antisemitism orientation – mandatory for all new students and faculty – to educate on what Jewish students might find offensive. It will also provide for the first time an educational, not legal, definition of antisemitism.

The new definition is expected to determine that statements calling for the destruction and death of Israel and Zionism can be considered antisemitic, while criticism of the Israeli government cannot.

"I'm a social scientist, and I believe exploratory research is important. Therefore, in order to make recommendations for changes on campus, we needed to truly understand student experiences first," says task force co-chair Prof. Ester R. Fuchs, who teaches at Columbia University's School of International and Public Affairs.

"We heard from students who feel their identity, values and very existence on campus have been under attack," adds Fuchs, who has been a public affairs and political science professor at Columbia for 40 years. "My heart was broken listening to these students and what they were being forced to deal with."

Another co-chair, Prof. David M. Schizer, from Columbia Law School, notes: "Only when we talked to the students did we realize how serious the problem is. Unfortunately, there are still many faculty members who do not believe that there is antisemitism on campus, and some claim that antisemitism is being weaponized to protect pro-Israel views. We can put it this way: have there been antisemitic incidents? Yes, absolutely. Are there antisemitic faculty and students? Yes, there are some. Are all of them antisemitic? Absolutely not."

The third co-chair, Prof. Nicholas Lemann, from Columbia Journalism School, highlights the fact that the task force didn't have the authority to investigate specific cases. Instead, it was intended to identify wide patterns and solutions.

"In terms of what we've heard, Jewish and Israeli students are feeling very targeted and ostracized," he says. "The concept of Zionism has become unacceptable in some circles at Columbia. People are asked to promise that they're not Zionist. In the classroom, some feel uncomfortable because of intense criticism of Zionism."

Prof. Gil Zussman, an Israeli electrical engineering professor and member of the task force, is especially concerned by faculty members "who have been creating a discriminatory environment – by, for example, moving their classes and office hours into the encampment where 'Zionists were not welcome.'

"Based on conversations with students, we now know that some faculty members are unfortunately also creating a hostile environment toward Israelis in classrooms and are encouraging rule-breaking by student protesters," Zussman says. "For example, over 10 faculty and staff were standing outside Hamilton Hall when students broke in [on April 29 as part of the pro-Palestinian protest]. If I were a parent of one of these students, I would have major concerns about these faculty."

Schizer, who has worked at Columbia for over 25 years, says he is concerned about the inability of opposing groups on campus to have discussions with each other. "There used to be healthy discussion, including debates about Israeli government policy and the occupation," he says. "However, since October 7 the conversation has changed, with many asserting that Israel itself is illegitimate, and with students who disagree refusing to speak and study with one another.

"Part of what a great university does is introduce us to people with different opinions," he continues. "For a democratic society to flourish, we need shifting coalitions, not warring camps. People can agree about X and disagree on Y. The situation now on campus is not healthy. We're really missing something because we see the world as divided into two opposing camps that have nothing to do with each other."

One of the key points emphasized by task force members is that, unlike past protests at Columbia, which were directed at the establishment and the university itself, this protest has in many ways been aimed at students who lack the tools to cope with the intensity of the anger directed against them.

Student protesters targeting other students "are causing pain and isolation in a way I have never seen before on campus," Schizer says.

Fuchs adds that one of the task force's observations is that "the burden of dealing with these situations of harassment, intimidation, discrimination and exclusion has primarily been on the students. We can't allow it."

Several task force members highlight what they see as the university's double standards in ignoring discrimination against and exclusion of Jewish students.

Zussman elaborates. "If, for example, a student group were to use an abhorrent chant such as 'We don't want BLM supporters here,' there would be immediate consequences. However, chants such as 'We don't want Zionists here' have been normalized and currently have no consequences. These double standards are unacceptable and will eventually fracture the university."

Fuchs concurs, noting that the "standard at the university has always been to listen to those experiencing discrimination or hate. During the Black Lives Matter movement, we recognized the need to understand how certain words and behaviors affected individuals. Now, we need to be consistent and apply the same standard to Jewish students."

Both pro-Palestinian and pro-Israeli groups have demanded that the task force provide a legal definition of antisemitism to address the burning questions: Is anti-Zionism a form of antisemitism? Is challenging the right of the State of Israel to exist antisemitic? Is criticizing the Israeli government antisemitic, as some Israelis believe?

However, the task force members told Haaretz that providing a specific definition in the university's rules would contradict federal law – specifically Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which requires that policy definitions of discriminatory harassment be general and not treat separate groups differently. Title VI stipulates that no person in the United States shall, on the grounds of race, color or national origin, be excluded from participation in, denied the benefits of, or subjected to discrimination under any program or activity receiving federal financial assistance.

"In theory, we could specify what terms like 'discriminatory harassment' and 'hostile learning environment' mean when applied to Jews. But doing so would violate the law," says Schizer, who adds: "We don't need a dedicated definition for Jews."

A second reason the task force did not define antisemitism straight away was their belief that the university's definition should emerge from the experiences of the people themselves.

"If we were to define antisemitism for the students in advance, then we are narrowing the possibilities and precluding their experiences," says Fuchs. "In fact, other task forces at Columbia – such as those focused on gender and race following the George Floyd [murder in 2020] – did not start with a definition."

But after hearing from hundreds of students, the task force has decided to establish and publish a definition of antisemitism based on the students' experiences – an educational one, that is, not a legal one. This definition is designed to inform faculty and students about what can offend Jewish people and which types of statements can cause pain and discomfort.

An educational definition will not infringe upon freedom of speech on campus or prohibit potentially antisemitic phrases. It will simply inform community members of the harm their words might cause. This approach is not the decisive action some Jewish groups on campus were seeking.

"We are not trying to draw a very thick boundary around what is antisemitic and say everything outside that boundary is fine," Lemann explains. "However, certain kinds of statements can make a lot of Jewish and Israeli students at Columbia feel intensely uncomfortable. This does not necessarily mean that you will be forbidden to say those things – but you should understand how they are received."

The task force members confirmed to Haaretz that their definition of antisemitism will likely include chants calling for the annihilation of the Jewish state as being offensive to many Jews on campus. Chants criticizing the Israeli government will not be considered antisemitism in any way.

One of the key innovations the team is working on is a new antisemitism orientation and training program, which will be mandatory for all new students and faculty.

"Columbia is a highly international community, and we recognized a significant gap in people's understanding of what can constitute an offensive statement for Jewish and Israeli students," Fuchs relays. "The training and orientation are designed to provide everyone beginning their time at the university with initial knowledge of what is acceptable and unacceptable in our community – similar to programs on sexual harassment and other issues. We aim for consistency: a consistent set of rules that are consistently enforced, ensuring everyone feels they are being treated fairly within the system."

Since the protests began, the university has initiated disciplinary proceedings against numerous students who allegedly broke Columbia's rules. This included suspending students and initiating other disciplinary actions, including putting them on disciplinary probation, restricting attendance at future events, and being required to attend educational meetings about their behavior and conduct.

Until this April, the initiated actions were published transparently on the Columbia website, but these have been deleted in recent weeks. The university also brought outside law enforcement onto campus to empty the pro-Palestinian encampment. More than 100 students were arrested, which resulted in harsh criticism of the university and widespread pro-Palestinian protests on campuses across the United States and Europe.

The first release to emerge from the task force was a report on protests, demonstrations and free speech, published in March. The next report will include a series of recommendations expected to go into effect before the next semester begins in September.

The task force has also highlighted the urgent need for better management of antisemitism complaints. The task force uncovered deficiencies in the complaint-processing systems across the university's various schools, with some complaints lost in bureaucratic procedures without any response. Many students are unaware of the appropriate channels for reporting issues, while many staff members are unsure how to handle such complaints. Additionally, there is a lack of transparency in the complaint-handling process and its outcomes.

"Different complaints go to different offices and you almost need a law degree just to understand the process," according to Schizer. "It's not enough to have good rules on paper: they must be enforced. Jewish and Israeli students currently experience unequal treatment, and I don't want them to get different treatment – and the law entitles them to the same protection as other groups. The key issue for the coming year is whether Columbia will enforce its rules equally."

In response to this story, a Columbia University spokesperson said: "We are committed to combating antisemitism and taking sustained, concrete action to ensure Columbia is a campus where Jewish students and everyone in our community feels safe, valued and able to thrive."

A paradigm shift in countering antisemitism: Make American values relevant again

The Jewish community's inability to counter the growing antipathy toward Israel and Jews on college campuses with its current policies compe

eJewishPhilanthropy

While the Jewish world was reeling from the inhumanity of the Oct. 7 massacre, an immediate aftershock came in the form of the anti-Israel rallies on college campuses and on the streets of major cities. Since that time, the protests have only intensified. Opposing Israel has become fashionable in some circles. Campus activists feel imbued with a sense of historic mission, perceiving themselves as the modern embodiment of the protest movements of the 1960s. Many Jewish professionals and lay leaders remain overwhelmed and unclear as to how to proceed. Years of investment in countering various forms of antisemitism have been proven inadequate. It should be clear by now that we need a new strategic approach and a comprehensive plan to enact it.

The post-Oct. 7 reality dictates a strategy that counters underlying ideological currents, places Jewish concerns in the context of broader American interests and upholds American and Western values. The current focus on antisemitism makes it appear that the strife on and off campus is a Jewish problem rather than an American problem. Antisemitism is low on the relevance scale for most Americans, but the health of American society is central. Based on our assessment of what went wrong, current survey data and key trends, we believe that the Jewish security is inextricably linked to firming up larger support for American values and a renewed commitment to the U.S.’s key geopolitical interests. We further argue that American Jewish organizations should prioritize work with new partners in civil society who share this mission and who should take center stage in effecting a larger cultural shift. In short, we believe the best defense against antisemitism is restoring the commitment of Americans to the nation’s founding principles under which American Jews and other minorities have thrived.

The anti-Israel narrative — Israel as an apartheid, colonialist enterprise — gained limited support on college campuses over the past few decades. Yet trends in survey data indicate that while the anti-Israel narrative caused a slow erosion of support for Israel, the overwhelming majority of college students remained neutral and attitudes towards Jews were largely unaffected. In fact, the data through 2016 indicates that, even in the face of hostile campus rhetoric, most college students and most Americans cared little about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The issue was just not relevant to them and they remained in the “middle” — neither “core supporters” nor the “unreachable.” Likewise, antisemitism among college students remained low. Research indicated that the large group in the middle represented an opportunity as it could be swayed towards Israel once it was shown the broader face and humanity of the Israeli people.

So if the same anti-Israel narrative has been around for decades, what explains the dramatic increase in its acceptance now? Simply put, anti-Israel forces have found a way to make their cause relevant to a growing swath of Americans by linking it to the significant cultural and ideological shifts over the past ten years.

With the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement in 2014 and changes in the social media landscape, a binary ideology that divides society into oppressors and oppressed, skyrocketed in popularity on campuses. Anti-Israel groups successfully aligned themselves with activist groups representing marginalized communities, thereby significantly expanding the cohort of young Americans sympathetic to their cause. For the first time, Jewish students found themselves excluded from student social justice activities due to their sympathies towards Israel.

In the heated aftermath of the murder of George Floyd in 2020, this binary, oppressor-oppressed ideology found new audiences outside campuses. Diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) efforts, which frequently enshrined the oppressor-oppressed ideology, gained broad-scale penetration into numerous mainstream institutions including business, government, media, science, medicine, culture, K-12 schools, etc. So while the State of Israel and, now, Jews are seen by many as white, privileged oppressors in a broad swath of institutions, Hamas is increasingly seen as a legitimate resistance movement representing the marginalized.

It is important to note that notwithstanding the titular expression of solidarity with the Palestinian cause, protests against Israel on U.S. campuses are about far more than the Jewish state. Instead, they are often part of a larger agenda that aims to reshape the power structure, dismantle the larger social order, defund the police, undermine the very notion of meritocracy and undo the market economy and concept of private property. Many protesters on campus explicitly cite this larger worldview as a motivation for their campus activism. 

Against this backdrop, it is not surprising that in the wake of Oct. 7, most surveys of young people show high levels of support for Palestinians/Hamas and declining support for Israel. The majority are no longer in the swayable middle. Moreover, for the first time since the Anti-Defamation League began measuring such trends, young Americans are more likely to believe antisemitic tropes than older Americans. In short, by aligning with cultural shifts occurring among the progressive left, anti-Israel forces — many representing extreme Islamist perspectives — have successfully made their narrative relevant to many young Americans.

While the Jewish community was busy maintaining support for Israel in the political arena, ideologues sought to and succeeded in changing the culture. We are now experiencing the downstream effects of our collective failure to counter dangerous cultural trends.

If Israel is to retain American support down the road and if Jews are to be safe in this country, then action must be taken to reverse these cultural shifts. For the most part, the Jewish community has responded to the post-Oct. 7th onslaught with well-funded efforts to counter antisemitism and anti-Zionism. It is not doing enough to make its case more relevant to Americans than it was years ago, unlike the anti-Israel camp, which broadened its appeal in the intersectional arena.

Yet there is good news amid the bad. In this highly charged environment, Israel and its allies have lost support among college students, but not among most Americans. Raucous anti-Israel protests on campuses have alarmed many Americans, who are concerned that these anarchists pose a clear and present danger to the U.S. The Jewish communal world needs to take a page from its enemies’ playbook and make its cause more broadly relevant by aligning with the significant percentage of Americans who believe in the American dream, oppose chaos and support the principled use of American power in the world. Jews represent only 2% of the American population; we cannot win this battle on our own.

The Jewish community needs to work with those who are already fighting back on various fronts and to catalyze the energies of those who may be concerned but are not yet taking action. The focus of such coalitional efforts must be on strengthening the American narrative and values, not on antisemitism or Israel. And these efforts need to be led by diverse American voices rather than Jewish groups, as they will be seen as more believable and less likely to have an agenda. In short, the Jewish community needs to lead from behind.

We are currently developing a white paper that lays out in greater detail the needed strategic shift and will be holding sessions in person and online in the coming months. For more information, email: [email protected] 

We should be honest. Liberal democracy is an experiment. And a very recent one, and a very recent one.

So, like all new ideas, it can go off the rails very easily, if the core of what made it what it is is not maintained. And I think the reason that many of us have been speaking up about this for some time now, and the reason I wrote my book, and many other people have been talking about this, is I think we are abandoning the things that made us who we are, and we're abandoning some of the things which we ultimately, after centuries of struggle and bloodshed and violence and disagreement, we actually were starting to reach a place where we were identifying some of the memes, as you like to call them, that work in the type of society that we want to create.

The idea that people should be treated on the content of their character was a meme that was developed through a lot of pain and a lot of suffering and a lot of violence and a lot of discrimination and a lot of awful treatment of, in that particular case black people, but if you go to other parts of the West, there would have been other ways of conceptualizing that that still exist, right, and we eventually came to the idea that actually, that ancient thing that is so hard-wired into us - the tribalism, the, you know, call it racism, call it xenophobia, whatever it's, just ingroup-outgroup, right - that thing that is hardwired into us, we have an intellectual idea that can sit on top of that, that can mitigate a lot of that.

That's incredible. It's an incredible-- I mean, this idea doesn't exist in China. The idea that all ethnic groups are to be treated equally does not exist in Russia. Not even remotely. Russia is, to a large extent, a multi-ethnic country. It has large Muslim populations, it has large ethnic minority populations. The idea that they are the same as everybody else would seem absurd to anybody. Most parts of the world, the idea that gay people should be treated the same as straight people? You would be laughed out of the room. People don't like hearing this in the west because they can't process that reality.

But it's like, you know, this endlessly joked about "Queers for Palestine" thing. They will throw you off a fucking roof. That's what they're going to do to you, right. And from that extreme, you can work your way down. Most of the rest of the world, they're not going to throw you off a roof, but you're not going to be treated equally.

So, we struggled, and we fall, and we went through a lot of horror to get to that place. And the symptom of that unraveling that I'm deeply troubled by, is that we are doing the exact opposite.

DEI is the exact opposite of that idea. And it's embedded in every institution now. The idea that you can pick people, you can say this group is got better outcomes than that group, that means-- and we need to treat these people better than these other people, right. It doesn't matter which way you play that dynamic, it's irrelevant. It doesn't matter if you if you put black people at the top, white people at the bottom, brown people at the top black people-- it doesn't matter how you play that game, it always leads to bad outcomes.

And the reason that anti-Semitism now is becoming much more prominent is it's a natural reflection of that worldview. It's a reflection of the worldview in which successful people are successful by virtue of privilege or corruption or abuse of others. And unsuccessful groups, or groups that don't do as well in certain fields, are there because they have been abused, because they've been taken advantage of.

Once you implement that, every successful minority is going to be in the firing line, whether that's Jews, whether that's Asian-Americans, whether that's African-Americans who are first generation from Africa, right - they're incredibly successful in America - you're going to see all these groups being attacked in some way whether that's in words or other ways, because we are breaking the thing that made us who we are.

Thread by @wokal_distance on Thread Reader App

@wokal_distance: 1/ Want to know how Woke activists take over buildings, smash windows, trash university campuses, and still have the press

threadreaderapp.com

Want to know how Woke activists take over buildings, smash windows, trash university campuses, and still have the press call them "non-violent"?

Well, as it turns out these are well trained activists using intelligent, highly developed tactics. Here's a primer:

First off: none of this is spontaneous.

IE: The protestors in the video going around have shields. (pic 1)

In 2020 we learned these shields can take hours to make and are made by volunteers working all day. You don't do that spontaneously. It takes planning. (pics 2 +3)

Here's a thread on the shields used during the 2020 Portland protests. They are well built and are distributed to those wishing to engage in "direct action" (AKA violence and vandalism).

Not all shields are built like this, but this is typical:

Another clue that this is all VERY well planned is the fact they tend to all have the same tent.

This is because the organizations that run and fund the protests purchase the tents in bulk and then give them to the protestors as needed.

Again, It is all VERY well planned.

Further, these are NOT "student protests."

Lisa Fithian is a 63 year old professional protestor, not a student. She's planned protests for decades.

According to the NYPD 1/3 of the people arrested at Columbia, and most of the people arrested at the CCNY, were not students

Now we need to understand the TACTICS that are being used here.

The first strategy is to put their target in a "decision dilemma." This is where they select a method of protest that leaves the person with no good options. No matter how the target reacts they look bad.

As John Searle explained in his 1971 book "The Campus War," the strategy is to leave the University with no good options:

They either let the protestors take over, or call police and then students play victim and use the optics to look like sympathetic martyrs for the cause.

The decision dilemma strategy is paired with: "the real action is your targets reaction." You use someone's reactions to your protest against them.

IE: Taking over a building. If the police arrest you, you film it and play the martyr. If they don't, you control the building

Those two strategies are used hand in hand to create actions which activists can turn to their advantage.

When they do this correctly they can paint themselves as the sympathetic powerless underdogs even when they are the aggressors.

It's social and political jiu-jitsu  This is performative, but not in "look good to your peers" kind of way.

The principle is "play to the audience that isn't there." Activists protesters want to LOOK good to the people on Youtube or watching the news.

It's the OPTICS that matter.

Toolbox — Beautiful Trouble

Dive into the Beautiful Trouble toolbox, an interconnected web of ideas and creative best practices that puts the power of organizing for so

Beautiful Trouble

Please pay careful attention to this:

Activists want to LOOK like they are trying to change the minds of people they protest against, but that's just for show. They see their targets unrepentant evil doers that are just props in the drama they are staging.

This is awful.

The point of the protest is not to change the mind of the people whose building they have taken over, the goal is to use the protest as a way of building social and political pressure against the people they are trying to make give it.

THAT is the goal. 

This next strategy is self-explanatory: "do the media's work for them."

This is where activists find press releases and film footage that make them look good get into the hands of sympathetic journalists. This explains a lot of what gets on TV

Toolbox — Beautiful Trouble

Dive into the Beautiful Trouble toolbox, an interconnected web of ideas and creative best practices that puts the power of organizing for so

Beautiful Trouble

So how do they do all this and still get sympathetic coverage?

The strategy is: "lead with sympathetic characters." It's EXACTLY what it sounds like. They put sympathetic people out front to garner sympathy and create the APPEARANCE of underdogs fighting against the powerful.

This is why in the coverage of these protests you rarely see the images of smashed glass, trashed buildings, broken doors, and blood on the street, but you will often see pictures of the people below which are meant to make the protestors look sympathetic.

The protestors have a highly developed theory of protest optics. They understand videos can be sliced and diced to tell any story, and the story that "resonates" with people most, wins. So they are intentional in trying to create moments on video that can go viral... 

That isn't to say they aren't also intentional in doing damage. They are. The book Black Bloc, White Riot: Anti-Globalization and the Genealogy of Dissent by author AK Thompson is the starting place for their theory of what counts as violence, and when violence is justified. 

Here is Alex Hundert writing is rabble defending "a diversity of tactics" which is a euphemism for allowing violence at protests. Hundert explicitly states a commitment to non-violence is "dogmatic" and "stifles debate" about which tactics to use.

So the violence and vandalism at these protests is intentional. Where the elderly protestor is meant to win hearts, the black bloc is there to intimidate. If police react to the violence with arrests protestors claim the police "attacked students."

See how the game works?

The point is that none of these protests are happening spontaneously.

These are well planned protests, using high level tactics that are given to people supported by a well organized protest infrastructure (where did you think the tents and shields came from?) 

These radical protestors have organized an infrastructure to, in their words, disrupt, dismantle, and deconstruct your society.

I don't want to scare any of you, I just want you to know what's happening because you can't push back against what you don't understand.

Every single one of these protests operates according to a set of methodologies, principles and tactics and theories that have been created with the specific goal of allowing the radicals to gain social and political victories by creating and controlling the narrative.

As @realchrisrufo points out, the conflict at Harvard is reaching a "decision point," but Harvard can't end the conflict without looking bad and damaging their own reputation.

This is the result of activist tactics applied perfectly against Harvard.

Do not underestimate the ability of radical leftist protestors to win the narrative battle, particularly since we have a media complex sympathetic to leftist causes.

The goal here is not to scare you, but to show you what's going on under the hood of these protests....

Beating woke activists means understanding their tactics are so you can anticipate them and respond in a way that is effective. If universities had anticipated the Activist tactic "occupation" They would have known the goal was to put them in a "decision dillemma" (pic 2)

And the activists will explicitly tell us that these occupations are "well planned" (that's why I keep using that phrase" and that they want to expose the "power holders" (in this case universities) inability to enforce the rules. That's literally the whole point...

Had universities known this they would have understood that the right move is to eject the encampments the minute they start. There was not way to negotiate with the protestors because, as the activists themselves tell us, negotiating is not the point. The point is to create a situation where the University has no good option and expose the university as weak, and then use that to extract concessions and make the university fold because they have ZERO good options.

Knowing that this is the strategy allows you avoid the trap by taking the PR hit and ejecting the protestors and tearing down the encampments on day 1. You're taking a PR hit no matter what, so take the hit day 1 and then ride it out. The longer the protests last, the bigger a story they become, so end it quick and kill the momentum.

Instead universities did not know the tactics, thought they could reason with the protestors or negotiate in good faith, and now they are in exactly the bind that @realchrisrufo lays out here:

Learn how the woke activists operate, learn how their tactics function, and learn how to respond accordingly when they seek to impose their will on you using these tactics.

Thanks for reading.

/fin 

Melanie Phillips: Dead Israelis disturb the narrative. They upset the narrative. By which I mean that it's not just a view, it's become a kind of-- not even just a cause, it's a kind of article of faith among the progressive West that Israel was created by the Jews through Western guilt over the Holocaust, being parachuted in to a country called Palestine and uprooting the indigenous people of Palestine who've been there since time immemorial and taking over and booting them out and then oppressing the rest who remain. And who wish to expand their territory as a result.

Every single part of that is untrue. It's a lie. It's a falsehood, okay. But that is the narrative. The narrative is of oppressive Israelis and oppressed Palestinians. And therefore, because in our victim cultural world, if you are a victim and you are oppressed, you are given a moral free pass for anything that you do. Anything that you do that's bad, cannot be-- you cannot be morally responsible for it. It must be the result of what's been done to you.

So, Palestinian terrorism has been regarded as, okay we don't-- we don't approve of it, we can't bear violence but nevertheless it's resistance, it's understandable given the despair that they are in.

And conversely, anything the Israelis do as the oppressors cannot ever-- they cannot ever be victims. They cannot ever be victims; they can only be oppressors.

Suddenly one has, suddenly, people with this mindset have been faced with the appalling visual proof that the people and the cause they've supported resulted in acts of barbarism, of a kind that nobody ever thought they would see again after the Holocaust. And it's been perpetrated by people that they have broadly supported and a certainly a cause they have absolutely supported. And suddenly the cause turns into something which is genocide.

But they've been accusing Israel of genocide, which is amazing considering the population of Gaza and the Palestinian territories has increased by what, three times, four times since 1948 when Israel was created? That's some genocide. But put that to one side.

So, it's to serve the narrative and they can't have that. Now, why can't they have that? Why can't they say, okay it's a bit embarrassing to have to admit that the cause I've pinned my idealism on for the last 30 years is actually fake, but nevertheless, I have to agree, um, uh you know, uh, right.

Now, why can't they say that? And my view having been part of that way of thinking for a long time and certainly having had all my friends and colleagues as part of that way of thinking for a long time, and studied them up close, my view is that they can never say this to themselves because it's not simply a question of saying they're wrong, their belief system is based on the fact that every single thing they believe encompasses and embodies moral virtue.

They believe in the betterment of society, they believe in creating a better world, they believe in standing up for the oppressed against the oppressor, they believe in justice against Injustice, they believe in in all these wonderful things. And consequently, anybody who stands up and says anything against them, against any of these wonderful things is not only wrong but evil and has to be stamped out as basically an enemy of humanity. Now, we see this in our domestic politics, victim culture and all of that, over a range of domestic issues.

But it is absolutely part of their moral personality. What they dread more than anything else, the worst thing in the world that could happen to them, is to take a position which in their minds would make them a right-winger and therefore evil, or evil and therefore a right-winger, because all evil comes from the right and all right wingers are evil.

And consequently, faced with this situation that they saw on October the 7th unfolding in front of our horrified gaze, they are faced with the challenge in which they say to themselves, you know am I supposed to junk what I've believed? That will make me an evil right-winger. And that's so terrible to them because they think that will disintegrate their entire moral personality.

So, they're going to find a way of dealing with this. So, we hear, for example, on the one hand the silence. The silence from so-called "feminists" who have told the entire male population of the world they are intrinsically evil because they're all intrinsically potential rapists and therefore, you know, "the patriarchy" and all the rest of it you know.

Untold numbers of men are unable to have proper relationships with women because of that. All those feminists are silent. Well not perhaps all, perhaps some have come out. Silent when faced with the appalling rapes of women in that October the 7th atrocity. And the way they deal with it is by saying saying, I don't believe it. I don't believe it. Regardless of what we've all seen and heard.

So, there's those people who are silent. And then there are people who try to invert it. They say, well, I mean it was terrible, yes and of course I abhor these brutal things, but nevertheless, but, but, but...

As soon as you hear the "but," you know. The cause, the cause. And when you say to them, as I have done over decades, what are you talking about, the cause? What cause of despair? You're talking about the fact they don't have a Palestine state? They have been offered a Palestine state over and over again from the 1930s onwards. The last offer consisted of approximately 95% plus of the territory they were demanding, and their reaction has always been to refuse and to start murdering Jews again.

And when you say that to them, they say, no, no that's not true, that's not true, and they bring up a whole load of chaff, verbal chaff. In other words, their reaction is, it's not true, it's not true, I'm not believing what I'm seeing in front of my eyes even.

Because they cannot ever tolerate this idea that their moral personality was based on a monstrous inversion of morality.

"Because antisemitism is the godfather of racism, and the gateway to tyranny and fascism and war, it is to be regarded not as the enemy of the Jewish people alone, but as the common enemy of humanity and of civilization. And it has to be fought against very tenaciously for that reason. Most especially in its current, most virulent form, of Islamic jihad... We must make sure our own defenses are not neglected. Our task is to call this filthy thing, this plague, this pest, by its right name, to make unceasing resistance to it, knowing all the time that it is probably ultimately ineradicable. And bearing in mind that its hatred towards us is a compliment. And resolving, some of the time at any rate, to do a bit more to deserve it." -- Christopher Hitchens

Fight those who do not believe in Allah or in the Last Day and who do not consider unlawful what Allah and His Messenger have made unlawful and who do not adopt the religion of truth from those who were given the Scripture - [fight] until they give the jizyah willingly while they are humbled.

Narrated Anas bin Malik: Allah's Messenger said, "I have been ordered to fight the people till they say: 'None has the right to be worshipped but Allah.' And if they say so, pray like our prayers, face our Qibla and slaughter as we slaughter, then their blood and property will be sacred to us and we will not interfere with them except legally and their reckoning will be with Allah."

“Israel is only the first target. The entire planet will be under our law.” -- Mahmoud al-Zahar, Hamas Commander.

The new antisemitism

Whether it comes from the right or the left, this ancient hatred always finds a way.

andrewdoyle.substack.com

Her agony slides through me: am I glass That grief can find no grip Save for a moment when the quivering lip And the coughing weaker than the broken wing That, fluttering, shakes the life from a small bird Caught me as in a nightmare? Nightmares pass; The image blurs and the quick razor-edge Of anger dulls, and pity dulls. O God, That grief so glibly slides! The little badge On either cheek was gathered from her blood: Those coughs were her last words. They had no weight Save that through them was made articulate Earth’s desolation on the alien bed. Though I be glass, it shall not be betrayed, That last weak cough of her small, trembling head.

Anti-Israel Protests and the ‘Signaling’ Problem - WSJ

archive.ph

The anti-Israel protests on college campuses present a puzzle for observers of academic norms and mores. Today, even relatively minor linguistic infractions, like the failure to use someone’s preferred pronouns, are categorized as abuse at many elite institutions, some of which even define potentially offensive speech as “violence.” One need not even speak to run afoul of campus speech codes; I recently participated in a training in which we were warned of the consequences of remaining silent if we heard someone “misgender” someone else.

Definitions of “harmful” speech have become so capacious that one assumes they include antisemitism. In some cases, they surely do: A university wouldn’t take a hands-off approach to a student or faculty member who expressed prejudice against Jews in the manner of Archie Bunker or the Charlottesville marchers. Yet that’s what many of them have done when faced with protesters’ speech that is offensive to Jews, even when it crosses the line into threats, intimidation and harassment.

At a December congressional hearing, the presidents of Harvard, Penn and MIT struggled to answer when Rep. Elise Stefanik (R., N.Y.) asked whether “calling for the genocide of Jews” violates the schools’ “code of conduct or rules regarding bullying and harassment.” Two of the presidents lost their jobs, but the central question remains unresolved: How could it be that the university is zealous about policing pronouns but blasé about the advocacy of hateful violence?

For someone who prides himself on adherence to fact, reason and rationality, trying to follow the logic of university decision-making over the past five years has been a mind-bending experience. But universities are also political entities, where competing interests vie for influence over the function and purpose of the institution. In the case of the protests, two competing interests have made themselves heard most loudly: students and faculty who are hostile to Israel and alumni donors who see the protests as antisemitic. Caught between them are administrators, who must figure out how to balance these interests without entirely losing the faith of either group.

This dynamic can be explained by economic theory. In the early 1970s, economist Michael Spence introduced the concept of signaling, which has since become one of the foundations of information economics and earned Mr. Spence the 2001 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics. This seminal concept helps explain how individuals and organizations communicate their attributes or intentions in situations of information asymmetry.

The best-known application is the job market. Employers and potential employees face a situation in which applicants have more information about their productivity than the employer, since the employer can’t directly observe those qualities before hiring. To overcome this asymmetry, job seekers engage in signaling—taking actions that can credibly convey information about their abilities. Such signals include everything from educational credentials to the way the applicant dresses for an interview.

When I encountered Mr. Spence’s model in graduate school, I was mesmerized. My doctoral dissertation extended his work to understand underinvestment in education in some black communities. The basic economics also seem applicable to what’s going on now on college campuses.

The key idea is that the protests present university administrations with a two-audience signaling quandary: Behaviors that appease students may anger alumni, and vice versa. Like a job applicant’s potential productivity, university administrators’ political preferences are hidden from students and alumni, but they may signal them in various ways. They may choose a liberal commencement speaker rather than a conservative one, they may create programs that emphasize “inclusiveness,” and so on. Students and alumni observe these strategic disclosures of preference, and each group decides whether to accept the decision or agitate against it.

University administrators whose preferences align most closely with their alumni will ignore the students and simply do what they think is best, as the University of Florida’s president did when he banned encampments and declared that the school is “not a daycare.” Those whose views align with the protesting students will do the opposite.

But most top administrators don’t have such strong preferences. They will engage in a high-wire act of trying to appease both students and alumni. If students decide “safety first” is the most important initiative on campus, administrators—even if they disagree—will adopt stances consistent with that and hope the alumni don’t revolt too much. If a few months later students set up encampments and chant anti-Israel slogans, then administrators will also adopt stances consistent with that and, again, hope the alumni don’t complain too much.

The congressional hearings revealed that this signaling strategy was at work. The three presidents would risk alienating students if they disavowed anti-Israel slogans and alumni if they endorsed them. So they offered lawyered-up equivocations that signaled confusion and weakness.

Economic theory can explain why the situation on so many campuses has spiraled out of control and why no interested party—neither students nor donors nor seemingly anybody else—has anything good to say about how administrators are handling the protests. But economics can’t address the more essential issue at play, which is moral. Elite universities decided years ago that they would adopt a basic principle: Any speech act that attacks, questions or even declines to affirm the self-understood identity of another constitutes harm worthy of punishment.

I may not like that principle, but it’s now a fait accompli. And if you’re going to punish one person who violates it, you have to punish everyone who violates it. To permit attacks on one identity group while prohibiting attacks on others is worse than hypocrisy—it is profoundly immoral. If administrators had the courage of their stated convictions, if they had principles rather than merely gestures meant to signal their status as good liberals, the most egregious antisemitism on campus would have been stopped before it could snowball.

Mr. Fryer is a professor of economics at Harvard, a founder of Equal Opportunity Ventures and a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute.

A Yale Professor Wrote an Op-Ed About Anti-Semitism on Campus. The University Spent Over a Year Investigating Him.

Yale University spent more than a year investigating a Jewish professor for six words of an op-ed he published in a pro-Israel newspaper, ra

Washington Free Beacon

The school has declined to investigate faculty members for celebrating terrorism and calling for the destruction of Israel.

Yale University spent more than a year investigating a Jewish professor for six words of an op-ed he published in a pro-Israel newspaper, raising questions about the school’s approach to anti-Semitism and free speech as the campus continues to cope with the fallout of the Israel-Hamas war.

Evan Morris, a professor of biomedical engineering at Yale School of Medicine, penned the 2022 op-ed in the Algemeiner along with 14 other professors. They described a pattern of anti-Semitism in the Yale Postdoctoral Association, a group that runs social and academic events for researchers.

The authors listed several examples of anti-Semitic and anti-Israel bias. In one aside, they claimed that a researcher at the medical school, Azmi Ahmad, had "blocked an Israeli postdoc from speaking" at an October 2021 screening of a film about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Those six words triggered a marathon investigation by the medical school’s Office of Academic and Professional Development—a body responsible for disciplining professors for "unprofessional behavior"—that began in February 2023, over six months after the op-ed was published, and concluded in April 2024.

The office told Morris that it had been "tasked with assessing the accuracy" of the six-word statement, according to an email reviewed by the Washington Free Beacon. It did not tell him who filed the complaint, what policy he had allegedly violated, or what the consequences of that violation could be but said the review was likely to be completed by June 2023.

Instead, it dragged on without updates for over a year, according to Morris and emails reviewed by the Free Beacon. During that time—including in the post-October 7 era—Yale repeatedly declined to sanction students and professors for vicious anti-Israel speech, citing the importance of free expression.

The university took no action against Zareena Grewal, a professor of ethnicity, race, and migration, after she called October 7 "an extraordinary day" and stated that "settlers are not civilians." Nor did it investigate a Yale Law School student group that called for "armed struggle" against Israel and said that Hamas should be delisted as a terrorist organization.

"Yale is committed to freedom of expression," a university spokesperson, Karen Peart, said of Grewal’s remarks. "The comments posted on Professor Grewal’s personal accounts represent her own views."

By contrast, Morris earned a rebuke from the head of the university’s professional development office, Robert Rohrbaugh, who on April 11 shared the findings of the school’s investigation in an email.

"We were not able to substantiate the allegation that one postdoc was blocked from speaking by the postdoc identified in your article," Rohrbaugh said. "Our request to you for the future is that when attributing conduct to a named university community member, particularly a trainee, you be as diligent as possible to be sure information presented is accurate."

The protracted and seemingly selective probe has outraged Jewish faculty members, who say that the finger-wagging at Morris—and the decision to engage in it amid a nationwide surge in campus anti-Semitism—is tone deaf to say the least.

"Apparently, you have learned nothing from the last 6 months of rampant, unremitting and sometimes destructive and threatening anti-Semitism on campus,"  Morris wrote to Rohrbaugh. "Yale spends its resources and 2 years investigating 6 words in an OpEd by its faculty but fails to discipline professors who call for the annihilation of the Jewish people."

Pnina Weiss, a pediatrician at Yale Medical School who did not sign the 2022 op-ed but reviewed the correspondence between Morris and Rohrbaugh, said the investigation was  "hard to reconcile" with Yale’s stated commitment to free speech.

"The administration has defended the right of professors like Zareena Grewal to post on social media—celebrations of the rape, kidnapping, and cold-blooded murder of Israelis on October 7," she told the Free Beacon. "Yet when a group of 15 Jewish faculty write an op-ed about anti-Semitism and the suppression of an Israeli postdoc’s speech, the faculty are ‘investigated’ and reprimanded for misusing the word ‘block.’"

Double standards, Weiss continued, "are the cornerstone of anti-Semitism."

Aside from the verbal slap on the wrist, Yale has yet to formally sanction Morris, and the school declined to comment on its decision to single him out for investigation or say whether any other discipline remains on the table. In a statement on Rohrbaugh’s behalf, the university’s communications office said that the medical school was "not aware of any disciplinary action" against Morris, suggesting the rebuke in April was unofficial.

"Yale University and the School of Medicine vigorously reject anti-Semitism," the communications office said. "For example, the School of Medicine provides support for educational events on anti-Semitism organized by Dr. Morris through a grant from the Academic Engagement Network."

Ahmad, the postdoc named in the 2022 op-ed, did not respond to a request for comment.

The blowback to the investigation comes as Yale president Peter Salovey is preparing to submit testimony to Congress about the school’s handling of anti-Semitism, which, while less heavily criticized than Columbia’s, has generated its share of bad press.

Administrators stood by for days as protesters occupied a university plaza, defaced a World War II memorial, and harassed Jewish students who attempted to film the chaos, culminating in an April 20 confrontation that injured one student and prompted a sheepish apology from protest organizers. Additional encampments and occupations—one of which shut down a major intersection—sprung up sporadically in the following weeks.

Those disruptions followed a string of quieter scandals at the Ivy League university, where the campus aftershocks of Hamas’s assault fueled charges of hypocrisy and double standards. At Yale Law School, for example, the Schell Center for International Human Rights—which in 2022 spon.sored a talk on Israeli "apartheid"—resisted calls to host an event about Oct. 7, telling one Jewish student that the situation was "complex."

"What kind of 'Center for International Human Rights' would refuse to host an event condemning the largest pogrom since the Holocaust," Jewish students at the law school asked in an open letter. "Does the Schell Center not think that Israelis are entitled to human rights, too? Or is it perhaps because they were Jewish?"

The center only agreed to host an event after weeks of pressure, including from Jewish alumni. In the interim, several students posted defenses of the Oct. 7 massacre on a law school-wide listserv, which soon devolved into ad hominem back-and-forths.

"Expecting Palestinians to peacefully respond to unspeakable war crimes and illegal collective punishment they've experienced at the hands of Israel is laughable," Iesha Phillips, the lead editor of the Yale Journal of Law & Liberation, responded to one Jewish student. "Too many lives have been lost over the past few decades. We shouldn't only start to care because it's now affecting Jewish folks."

The law school’s hands-off approach to those posts contrasted sharply with its response to Trent Colbert, a second-year law student, when he invited students to his "traphouse" in 2021. Within hours of sending the invitation, Colbert was hauled into a meeting with school administrators who demanded he sign a pre-drafted apology and hinted he could face discipline—including consequences with the bar—if he refused.

They would later claim the encounter had been misconstrued. "We would never get on our letterhead and write anything to the bar about you," Yaseen Eldik, then the law school’s diversity director, told Colbert a month after their first meeting. "You may have been confused."

The backpedaling foreshadowed the tactics Yale used with Morris: launch an investigation, raise the possibility of discipline, then suggest after the fact that the probe’s target overreacted and imagined the threat.

"My prior communication did not question the right of faculty authors to voice their opinion or ask you to change your opinion," Rohrbaugh wrote in response to Morris’s message criticizing the investigation. "Although we found that one of the statements made about a trainee in a national media outlet could not be substantiated, my communication did not raise the topic of apology."

Rohrbaugh also chided Morris for declining to be interviewed as part of the investigation, after the school repeatedly refused to tell him what rule he’d been accused of breaking or who made the accusation, according to emails reviewed by the Free Beacon.

"Have I violated a Yale morality code?" Morris had asked Rohrbaugh in May 2023. "If so, where can I find it?"

He never heard back.