The Antisemitism Is the Point

By Jim Geraghty

Monday, October 07, 2024

 

This planet is full of people who just want to kill Jews, and this country has no shortage of people who just want to cheer on the murderers.

 

I hate to begin your Monday morning with such a bracing statement, but that’s the lesson of the past year.

 

When’s the last time you saw a college campus with a protest against the Chinese government’s ongoing genocide of the Uyghurs? (Perhaps the students are just following the guidance of billionaire investor Chamath Palihapitiya: “Nobody cares about what’s happening to the Uyghurs, okay?”)

 

Russia has kidnapped an estimated 20,000 to 25,000 Ukrainian children over the course of the war, sending them deeper into Russian-occupied territory or to Russia, and a couple hundred have been shipped off to a boot camp, where the Russians are training them to become child soldiers against their own homeland. This is separate from the 11,743 Ukrainian civilians killed during the war through August, the 24,614 injured, and the 168 summary executions of civilians, including five children, committed by the invading forces.

 

Anybody on campus want to march in the quad about that?

 

When’s the last time you saw a college campus with a protest against the Taliban and its nightmarish oppression of women? How many college students even know that the Taliban has now banned all women from public spaces — banned their faces, banned their voices?

 

Anybody seen any campus protests against the Iranian government’s rapidly increasing rate of executions — in August, 29 executions in one day?

 

Have you seen any college protests against the Houthis’ “partial and limited reintroduction” of slavery and child marriages?

 

There are ongoing “atrocities against Black African ethnic groups in Sudan — wrenchingly similar to the Darfur genocide here two decades ago.” Nicholas Kristof reports:

 

After two military factions started a civil war in 2023, one of them — a descendant of the janjaweed called the Rapid Support Forces, armed and supported by the United Arab Emirates — tried once again to drive Black Africans from Darfur. Naima recounted the same pattern I heard from so many people: The militia surrounded her village, lined up men and boys, then shot them one by one.

 

“We’re going to get rid of this Black trash,” she quoted the Arab gunmen saying.

 

Then the gunmen went house to house to kill, plunder and rape. Mostly, those they raped were girls and women, she said, but they also raped at least one man.

 

Do these black lives matter? Apparently not, judging from the lack of reaction of the overwhelming majority of America’s college students.

 

Any activists even notice new claims of the mass killing of the Rohingya by the Arakan Army in Myanmar?

 

Nope, the only “genocide” that seems to interest the angry young leftists on America’s college campuses is the Israeli use of military force against Hamas in retaliation for the massacre perpetrated by the terror group.

 

If your lone measuring stick of geopolitical events was the reaction of American college students, you would think that (a) the October 7 massacre and mass rapes were a minor provocation, not even worth much discussion, and (b) the Israeli military response to that massacre is a greater outrage than the Rwandan genocide, the Islamic State’s brutality, the “ethnic cleansing” of the Balkan wars, or the millions killed or displaced in Congo.

 

Maybe, if you look hard enough, you can find a sparsely attended, largely ignored, on-campus effort against these other moral abominations, one that garnered little or no media coverage and minimal student interest.

 

But only Israel gets American college students’ blood pumping, propelling them up off the dorm bed and out to march, protest, occupy buildings, and assault their classmates. (From an Anti-Defamation League report released last month, summarizing the 2023–24 academic year: “Twenty-eight assaults were recorded on approximately 20 campuses across the country in the following states: California (10), Massachusetts (4), New York (4), New Jersey (2), North Carolina (2) and one assault each in Georgia, Louisiana, Michigan, Tennessee, Washington and Wisconsin.”)

 

I would ask how many of these students could find the Uyghur homeland or Sudan or Myanmar on a map, but we learned that many of those protesting Israel, and chanting “From the river, to the sea, Palestine will be free,” have no idea which river and which sea are the subject of their chants. (My favorite answer is “the Caribbean.”)

 

Allow me to offer an ugly theory: The antisemitism is the point. You could hate the Chinese regime for what it’s doing, or Russia for what it’s doing in Ukraine, or the Iranians or the Houthis. (Let’s face it, the overwhelming majority of Americans have no idea who the Rapid Support Forces or Arakan Army are.) Lord knows those regimes — not the people trapped under the boot heels of those thuggish governments — deserve to be hated.

 

But if you’re really mad at Xi Jinping or Vladimir Putin or the Taliban, whom do you protest?

 

Most of the Chinese-government-sponsored Confucius Institutes are gone, having withered away once Congress cut off Department of Defense research funding to any school that had one. But there are still enormous financial ties between America’s higher-education system and Chinese companies, often either state-run or state-influenced. The Wall Street Journal reported: “Nearly 200 U.S. colleges and universities held contracts with Chinese businesses, valued at $2.32 billion, between 2012 and 2024, according to a review by The Wall Street Journal of disclosures made to the Education Department. The Journal tallied roughly 2,900 contracts.”

 

That’s separate from the $4 billion from Qatar, the nearly $3 billion from Saudi Arabia, and the nearly $2 billion in contracts and gifts from Chinese-controlled Hong Kong. The higher-education administrative blob will be extremely sensitive to any student actions that might mess with any country with institutions that are paying U.S. universities a giant pile of money.

 

(I’m sure people will accuse me of being cynical about higher education and downplaying the mutual benefits of these partnerships. I mean, just imagine the kinds of life-changing, globe-altering discoveries, innovations, and breakthroughs that would result from joint research between, say, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the Wuhan Institute of Virology!)

 

If you’re an angry young man (or woman) — “boring as hell,” as a lyric once accurately described the type — you’ve got no easy, convenient, or useful target for your fury when it’s those autocratic, brutal regimes that are the object of your rightful outrage.

 

But if you hate Israel, well, just about every college campus has a Hillel:

 

Hillel International, the premier Jewish on-campus organization that supports Jewish life at hundreds of colleges across the United States and abroad, has been one of the most frequent targets of anti-Israel activists and other antisemites in recent months, totaling more than a hundred incidents in the U.S. since Hamas’s October 7, 2023 attack on Israel. Jewish students and Hillel staff members have received threatening emails and phone calls; Hillel buildings have been vandalized and tagged with graffiti; and Hillel-sponsored events have been protested; and in some cases, anti-Israel student groups have even launched campaigns demanding that Hillel be banned entirely from universities.

 

Most recently, on July 19, 2024, an anti-Zionist student group at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee posted a message on social media declaring that “ANY organization or entity that supports Israel is not welcome at UWM,” calling out Hillel and the Jewish Federation by name. The post went on to ominously state that these organizations “will be treated accordingly as extremist criminals. Stay tuned.”

 

The university administration quickly denounced the threatening language, but UW-Milwaukee Popular University for Palestine — the group that published the original post and also served as a key organizer of the anti-Israel encampment at the school earlier in the spring — doubled down on its rhetoric in a follow-up post that reiterated that Zionist groups “will not be normalized or welcomed on our campus.” The group’s statement was endorsed by UW-Milwaukee’s chapters of Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), Young Democratic Socialists of America (YDSA) and others.

 

The university has since temporarily suspended the SJP chapter and those of SDS and YDSA.

 

These folks don’t really care about human rights in some far-off land. They just want someone to hate; more specifically, someone whom it is socially acceptable to hate. These people would likely insist that they’re not racist, homophobic, or sexist. They just appointed themselves the arbiters of who is “normalized or welcomed on our campus” and have decided that the kinds of people who go to Hillel must be treated like extremist criminals, driven out and barred from returning.

 

Hey, what do we call the kinds of people who go to Hillel? Oh, that’s right . . . Jews.

 

These snot-nosed punks found someone they can openly hate without too much of a negative social or legal consequence.

 

A dear friend told me of their rabbi’s Rosh Hashanah sermon last week — I nearly typed “homily” — discussing the three concepts of “Israel” covered by that name. The first is the people, the greater Jewish community. The second is the nation, the land long called by that name. And the third is the current government of the nation. The rabbi talked about the challenges of always supporting the first and the second while having disagreements with the third.

 

I would note that it works in the other direction as well. A whole lot of people who claim they only hate Israel, the government, let out their bile at anybody who is Jewish, looks Jewish, or they think is Jewish — which means they really loathe the greater Jewish community.

 

When you’re tearing down the menorah on the quad, or in the public square, or outside some family’s home — as we saw at Harvard, and in Staten Island, Brooklyn, Framingham, Mass., Montgomery County, Md., Palm Beach, and Oakland, screw you! You’re not an anti-Zionist, you just hate Jews.

 

ADDENDUM: Remembering October 7 elsewhere at NR . . .

 

Our Jessica Hornik remembers the hostages — 97 hostages remain in captivity — and offers brief biographical portraits of the four Americans still held by Hamas.

 

Our Haley Strack honors the extraordinary courage of the survivors, particularly the survivors of the sexual violence.

 

Marking the “anniversary of evil,” our Phil Klein observes, “For many American Jews, the last year has been one in which to reconnect with their religion and their communities and to learn who their actual friends are. (Hint: It isn’t the people who peddle bromides about diversity, equity, and inclusion.)”

 

Our Ryan Mills shares the chilling experiences of Noy Leyb, a 33-year-old New Yorker and Israel Defense Forces reservist who was part of the first wave of soldiers to enter northern Gaza in late October last year. Leyb describes children’s rooms decorated with photographs of Hamas terrorists, grim evidence of “generational hate” that is so deep-rooted in Gaza.

 

Our James Lynch reports on the number of antisemitic incidents in the U.S., which has surged by over 200 percent this past year.

 

Finally, the editors of National Review take the long view: “Whether it is the mufti, the PLO, Hamas, the ayatollahs, or college protesters who chant “From the river to the sea,” the goal is the same — to snuff out Jewish statehood. Jews have suffered too much throughout their history by entrusting their survival to others, and Israel is not going to allow that to happen without a fight.”