The KKK at Columbia

By Rich Lowry

Wednesday, April 24, 2024

 

Is there space for more haters at Columbia University?

 

Imagine if a contingent of alt-right students established their own encampment on a corner of the quad and began to shout antisemitic slogans — say, the infamous chant “Jews will not replace us” from the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville in 2017.

 

Would the president of Columbia, Nemat “Minouche” Shafik, hesitate to have them arrested as many times as necessary to make them go away?

 

Would a huge contingent of faculty walk out to protest the arrests?

 

Would the president of Barnard, Laura Rosenbury, quickly lift the suspensions of the arrested students?

 

Answers: No, never, and of course not.

 

As Phil Klein has noted, there is a gross double standard in how progressive opinion regards antisemitism depending on who is peddling it. The antisemitism of the Right is considered morally abhorrent and inherently threatening. The antisemitism of the Left is very often ignored, explained away, or viewed as a regrettable excess.

 

The “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville — an execrable but relatively small-scale event — caused a near-national crisis. According to Joe Biden, it was such a galvanizing moment that it, and Trump’s response, prompted him to run for president.

 

The protests at Columbia have been widely criticized, but they have also garnered elite sympathy, most notably from supportive left-wing members of Congress and the school’s own faculty, who have clearly been staying Shafik’s hand. Meanwhile, more than 1,400 academics from a variety of schools are calling for a boycott of Columbia for allegedly being much too tough on the protesters.

 

There are obviously differences between Charlottesville and Columbia. The rally in Virginia featured violent clashes with counter-protesters and led to a murder. The groups involved were explicit hate groups, like the KKK, with violent pasts. Still, the bottom line is that the antisemitism of “Unite the Right” was roundly condemned as such.

 

One of the most enduring images of Charlottesville is the tiki-torch march on the grounds of the University of Virginia the night before the main rally. And that episode wasn’t so different from what’s been happening at Columbia — it involved an unauthorized protest, intimidating behavior, and noxious slogans. “Jews will not replace us” is relatively mild compared to some of what’s been shouted and chanted at Columbia. (One protester shouted at a Jewish student, “The 7th of October is going to be every day for you,” and other Jewish students leaving campus were told to “go back to Poland.”)

 

If the tiki-torchers showed up at Columbia, though, faculty members themselves would be calling the police.

 

No doubt, they’d accuse the marchers of using eliminationist rhetoric and having an eliminationist agenda. But, as Jonathan Chait has pointed out, two of the national groups organizing anti-Israel student protests are themselves frankly eliminationist.

 

Clearly, not all antisemites are created equal.

 

What accounts for the double standard? Some of it is pure tribalism and hesitancy to rebuke one’s own side. Some of it is a sympathetic understanding of the protesters — sure, some of them have gone astray, but most are good kids — and a shared opposition to the Gaza war.

 

More fundamentally, through the perverse prism of the woke Left, alt-right antisemites are the victimizers while pro-Hamas antisemites are the victims. Put another way, devotees of the alt-right are racist antisemites, while supporters of Hamas are “anti-racist” antisemites, and that makes all the difference. All the other forms of “anti-” of the Columbia protesters and their ilk — anti-Israel, anti-American, anti-Western, anti-colonial — redeem their antisemitism.

 

By the same token, the Jewish student menaced by tiki-torchers at UVA is worthy of protection and sympathy, whereas the Jewish student who wants to stand on the quad at Columbia in the vicinity of the encampment should probably save everyone a lot of trouble and go someplace else.

 

In sum, the white supremacists should stay away from Columbia — their kind of antisemitism isn’t welcome there.