Editor’s Weekly Column: No Antisemitism Tolerated In Current Campus Protests

Permit me to associate myself with a couple items in The Washington Post this week, the first being the editorial in the April 30 edition that insists in the context of the campus demonstrations growing across the U.S. there must be “zero tolerance for antisemitism,” and the other being the column the same day by Ruth Marcus that gets graphic in its description of Sheryl Sandberg’s documentary, “Screams Before Silence,” about the violence committed by Hamas terrorists on Oct. 7 and since.

The documentary, Marcus notes, is “about how rape and gender violence were deployed as weapons of war. About breasts cut from bodies. About nails driven into a woman’s vagina.”

As campuses across the U.S. are now convulsing in increasingly strident student demonstrations against the intolerable conditions being foisted on thousands of innocent Palestinians in Gaza now, it is troubling that shouts of an angry antisemitism and of support for Hamas are getting louder.

It must not be overlooked that this is coming as NBC News reported Tuesday night of U.S. intelligence assessments that Moscow is in the middle of the domestic situation in the U.S. hoping to influence yet another presidential election here, and more. Right now, the goal, according to the report, is to sew chaos in the U.S. and, in particular, to deflect attention away from its invasion of Ukraine.

Surely, there are a lot of the old Russian prejudices coming to the fore in the demonstrations being fueled in the U.S. now, the ancient ones of a lethal antisemitism and hatred of any independence of or autonomy for women.

But while these things smack of attitudes in old imperial Russia, the kind that many scholars think are really driving the psyche of Putin, lest we are sucked into the usual game of dissecting and bifurcating reality, it has to be added that the very same attitudes are dominant in a wider circle of humanity, namely to include the male chauvinist sentiments that still prevail in a lot of our own country and especially as they are perceived as the fundamental rights of big sections of our white elites.

Indeed, evangelical so-called Christianity in the U.S. has been fueled by this sentiment for the last century and more here, and has played an obvious role in the wretched assaults on basic women’s rights and their bodies since the overturning of Roe V. Wade occurred last year.

The divisive pro-Moscow elements in the U.S. that are working to inflame the college-aged generation now hope to build a left flank against Biden in the 2024 presidential election to dissemble his base and produce another victory for their preferred candidate Trump.

Now, there is a lot more to the demonstrations than just outside influences. I support the idea of the International Court of Justice in the Hague in considering that Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu should be indicted for crimes against humanity for the atrocities he’s permitted in Gaza. Netanyahu and Trump are two peas in a pod, from what I can see.

I observed a man of the cloth preaching in D.C. last weekend who espoused an uncritical support for the student demonstrators, and who drew loud applause from a largely white liberal audience. But he did not tell them that he is also opposed to a peaceful solution to that crisis, as he shared with me afterwards, by rejecting a two-state solution.

Alas, if you oppose that pathway to peace, then what do you favor instead? Do you favor the elevation of one side over the other, then?

But as one whose political education following college, in my case seminary, was introduced in Berkeley by the student anti-war movement of the late 1960s, I admit that I felt old objecting to the views of this fiery young preacher. I must have seemed to him like the old establishment types I was protesting against back then, I thought. However, I’m not like them at all.

As the best of my generation brings the lessons of all that to this current situation, we must not make the mistake of uncritically backing this latest round of young activism.