Appalling silence on college campuses in the face of antisemitism

After Hamas murdered more than 1400 Israelis in the worst terror attack in the history of the Jewish state, the unimaginable happened. student activists in America and in the international left, mobilized to defend apologize for and appease evil. Who could have predicted that within 24 hours of a pilgrim. The message from the Academy would be in so many words that Israel had it coming. The actions of these young people, and the elites who run the schools where they are supposed to learn the best that has been thought and said, are more than appalling. They are evidence of Western confusion and decadence. After the terror attacks against America on September 11 2001, similar scenes of anti American denunciation and celebration played out in Iraq and the Palestinian territories. Now after Israel’s 911 They take place openly and unabashedly in the heart of the West. Whatever this is, it is not progress. The last war with Hamas in the spring of 2021, was accompanied by a surge in anti semitic violence worldwide. The Jewish community must prepare for another hateful backlash, as Israel conducts its ground campaign to destroy Hamas. Campus anti Zionism and left wing anti semitism are not new. Many of the organizations behind the rallies and letters and social media posts have been around for a while. Democratic socialists of America, Black Lives Matter Students for Justice in Palestine, and the Palestinian solidarity campaign in the United Kingdom have spent years preparing for this moment. What they have set in motion is stunning. Nonetheless, the behavior of university administrations is just as shocking. They have either been mealy mouthed or morally imbecilic. They have done everything they could to avoid the reality of Hamas is barbarism. They are silent as their students celebrate terrorism. They are outraged if called to account for their moral corruption. They have built an environment where dissidents are heckled and harassed and even assaulted, or intellectual freedom is stifled. And where violence so long as it is revolutionary, is glorified. appalled at the anti semitism on America’s campuses, many donors have closed their checkbooks. That is a start. The larger goal is to bust up the higher education cartel and apply lessons learned in the K through 12 education reform movement to the universities. At the same time, alumni and donors, trustees and elected officials must push for higher quality leadership on campus. A great school has a strong leader who was willing to say no to the jackals. Take, for example, Ben Sasse of the University of Florida, and a remarkable October 11 statement, he wrote a quote, our educational mission here begins with the recognition and explicit acknowledgement of human dignity. The same human dignity that Hamas is terrorists openly scorn. Every single human life matters, Ben Sasse said, we are committed to that truth, we will tell that truth close quote. Yet too many of sasses colleagues appear committed to truths opposite. The past two years of seeing the world tumble back into the 1930s. America retreated from Afghanistan. Russia launched the largest ground war in Europe since World War Two. Hamas and its Iranian masters invaded Israel and sparked another war in the greater Middle East. World Order is collapsing, and the consequences death and misery. Nor is it only geopolitics that resemble the interwar period. The intellectual climate does too, as Alan bloom observed in his 1987 classic the closing of the American mind. German universities in the 1920s and 1930s. Were seedbeds of fascism. The most prominent German philosopher of the age Martin Heidegger belong to the Nazi Party. He never apologized for his affiliation or his behavior. Heidegger’s abstract thought laid the foundations for the postmodern critical theory that has dominated the academy since the early 1990s. The result? Two generations of students cannot tell right from wrong good from evil, justice from terror. Faced with a great test of moral seriousness, or educational establishment has skipped class. It has joined the delinquents. Not only is it unable to recognize virtue, it excuses viciousness. The future may be unknown, but one thing is clear. The Academy will never live down this shame