CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 27, 2019, OR THEREAFTER
BY THOMAS D. ELIAS
“NEW SCHOOL YEAR WILL BRING MORE CAMPUS ANTI-SEMITISM”
FOR RELEASE: FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 27, 2019, OR THEREAFTER
BY THOMAS D. ELIAS
“NEW SCHOOL YEAR WILL BRING MORE CAMPUS ANTI-SEMITISM”
There’s
been a three-month hiatus in the growing phenomenon of anti-Semitism on
California’s college and university campuses, but students and former students
were nevertheless involved in some of the most blatant and violent of the
spring and summer’s hate crimes again Jews.
Example A
was John T. Earnest, the shooter who apparently killed one and injured three
others in the Chabad of Poway rampage late last April. While on campus,
Earnest, a sometime student at Cal State San Marcos, picked up some ideas he
later used in a rambling manifesto attempting to justify his offenses. Like
anti-Semites on other campuses, those at San Marcos in north San Diego County
like to say they don’t hate Jews, but are merely anti-Zionist, meaning they
want Jews to be just about the only people on earth not entitled to their own
country.
That’s the
same tune spouted by the partially terrorist-funded movement called Boycott,
Divest and Sanction, which seeks an end to the state of Israel, its adherents
often spouting a popular Palestinian nationalist slogan, “From the river to the
sea.” That one refers to Palestinians not wanting to control just the lands now
known as the West Bank and Gaza, but all of Israel, from the Jordan River to
the Mediterranean Sea.
The BDS
movement has been strong on some of California’s most prominent campuses,
including UCLA, Stanford University, UC Davis, UC Berkeley and San Francisco
State. It spurred faux roadblocks where the campus group Students for Justice
in Palestine (partially funded by the Hamas terror organization that controls
the unoccupied city of Gaza) stopped Jewish students walking on the Berkeley
campus with cardboard fake submachine guns.
It caused sympathizers at UCLA to try
to deny a student government seat to a properly elected Jewish woman, claiming
no Jew can be fair – an anti-Semitic statement on its face. It inspired
smearing Nazi-style swastikas on buildings and walls at Davis and moved a
Stanford dormitory resident assistant to threat violence against Israelis and
other Jewish students. And it often leads a San Francisco State professor to
post BDS material on her school’s official website.
BDS caused
an attempt by Pitzer College faculty to cancel the school’s exchange program
with the University of Haifa, the most diverse college in Israel, with an
enrollment almost half Arab, pretty much matching the populace of that
picturesque, usually peaceful seaside city. When the campus president vetoed
this, the faculty voted to censure him.
It all
makes some California campuses among the most hostile to Jewish students, who
for the most part are still not intimidated from attending.
Prospects
are that this year will see new incidents and further dissemination of obvious
falsehoods, like the BDS canard that Israel is an apartheid state, despite the
fact it has taken in thousands of black Ethiopian Jews and despite studies by
Arab scholars finding Israeli Arabs enjoy more political and economic freedom
than their ethnic brethren anywhere else in the Middle East.
A
midsummer U.S. Department of Justice conference on anti-Semitism reached five
conclusions supporting that prospect. It said campus anti-Semitism is
increasing “at an alarming rate.” It found the most common forms of campus
anti-Semitism are Israel-related, denying many Jewish students the “ability
to…fully participate in campus life.” It found that faculty are “major
contributors to campus anti-Semitism.” And it said most university presidents
and deans “have not afforded Jewish students equal protection to their peers
from (threatening) behavior.”
Much of the
inaction stems from a lack of understanding of the link between Jews and the
homeland that has been part of Jewish rituals and liturgy for more than 2,500
years.
Wrote
Jonathan Sacks, the former chief rabbi of the United Kingdom, “Uniquely, Jewish
religion and nationhood coincide… Jewishness is not a mere ethnicity, a form of
culture. In Israel, Jews are a walking lexicon of almost every ethnicity under
the sun, so it’s not ethnicity. Jewish nationhood is a matter of religious
vocation…”
Which means
that those who say anti-Zionism is not necessarily anti-Semitism don’t get it.
But lack of understanding has never deterred anti-Semites. Rather, it often
inspires them to greater viciousness and violence.
And there
are few signs things will improve on campuses in California or elsewhere in the
new academic year.
-30-
Email Thomas Elias at tdelias@aol.com. His book, "The Burzynski Breakthrough, The Most Promising Cancer Treatment and the Government’s Campaign to Squelch It" is now available in a soft cover fourth edition. For more Elias columns, visit www.californiafocus.net
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