By Seth Mandel
Thursday, May 07, 2026
Whenever I see a headline claiming that so-and-so was
criticized or canceled for their “pro-Palestinian advocacy,” I usually try to
find out what was actually said. In media terms, “pro-Palestinian advocacy”
doesn’t mean that the person said “the Palestinians should have
self-determination.” Rather, “pro-Palestinian advocacy” inevitably ends up
meaning the person said something psychotic about Jews.
And of course, that’s what happened this week.
Rutgers University disinvited
its engineering school’s commencement speaker, Rami Elghandour, who is the
producer of a revisionist passion play about the Gaza war. I can understand
Rami and his fans being disappointed at the cancellation, but you’d be
hard-pressed to find them accurately characterizing Rami’s own conduct.
Elghandour himself, for example, whined about being canceled for his “advocacy
for Palestine.”
What he actually said was: Israel is “running dungeons
where they train dogs to sexually assault prisoners.”
In other words, he’s a bit of a lunatic conspiracy
theorist who wanted to take his blood libel tour to a college campus. No doubt
his speech would have been highly entertaining, as he told a taxpayer-funded
university all about “Jewish rape dogs” or whatever he might have said.
The accusations of Jewish sexual deviancy aren’t new, of
course—the Hamasniks trying to storm synagogues in New York have taken to
emphasizing their belief that Jews are pedophiles. Elghandour fits right in
with the activist left and, one imagines, with many in his intended audience.
That’s probably part of the reason for Rutgers’s skittishness here: How would
it look when a commencement speaker told graduating college students about the
importance of destroying the Jewish nation before the Jewish nation gets your
kids—and having the crowd applaud in delirious ecstasy?
At the same time, what exactly did Rutgers expect when it
invited him? He was on their radar because he’s famous for producing war
propaganda. Aren’t they getting precisely what they asked for? You want to
invite the sun with no light or heat? You invite the guy who’s famous for
calling Jews child-murderers but want him to talk about engineering?
Meanwhile, another graduation speaker got the axe. This
time, the school was Georgetown University—though recent reports
suggest it might be better understood as a kind of Qatari satellite campus—and
the infraction was a bit different.
The law school had invited Morton Schapiro, former
university president at Northwestern, to speak to graduates. But then students
discovered that Schapiro had expressed pro-Israel sentiments. He has been replaced
as commencement speaker.
Now here is where the two diverge: When you see the
phrase “pro-Israel,” it means exactly that. Schapiro said nice things about
Israel. It is not, therefore, the direct inverse of “pro-Palestinian,” which
often means “Jewish rape dogs” or some other mental breakdown masquerading as
analysis.
The protesting students helpfully pointed to two sources
of their discontent: a column in the Jewish Journal written by Schapiro,
and comments Schapiro made about violence, as quoted
by Insider Higher Education.
The Jewish Journal column,
in which Schapiro lists a few lessons he’s learned since October 7, has some
interesting insights, given the context. For example, Schapiro writes:
“State-sponsored famines, ethnic cleansings and other atrocities abound across
the globe, but it is Israel that always seems to take center stage.”
No doubt the current situation vindicates him. Both
canceled speeches—at Rutgers and at Georgetown—are because of the world’s
anti-Israel obsession.
Schapiro manages to get through his own columns without
accusing anyone of bestiality. He would make a terrible “pro-Palestinian”
activist.
He does, in fact, show the open-mindedness the pro-Israel
world is known for:
“I am trying my best to separate a worthy cause from the
actions of its leaders, but the outrage from being betrayed following Oct. 7
makes me hesitant to continue to support what has long been important to me. I
have a friend who generously funded an inner city after-school program for many
years, only to visit recently and discover pro-Hamas posters on the walls. What
do you do? I struggle with the answer. Our eyes have been opened to the fact
that devoting ourselves to a meaningful endeavor will not necessarily buy any
love for the Jewish people, but sometimes we might choose to do it anyway.”
In other words, he’s wrestling with whether to support an
organization that is opposed to Jewish rights. Schapiro advocates trying to
continue to compartmentalize the world post-October 7. Whether this is
possible, he doesn’t know. But he chooses to extend an olive branch to those
who would never return the consideration.
In the end, that promotion of open debate and thoughtful
nuance might be what truly offends the progressive Georgetown students the
most.
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