WHY PEOPLE THINK JEWS AND ISRAEL ARE EVIL — Part 2: Academia
I will begin at the end….
Jews and Israel are Evil because we have all been trained to believe that Jews and Israel are Evil through a concentrated, systematic, and coordinated effort stemming back four decades.
This is not to defend Israel. Israel has done deplorable things. But it is to say that BOTH SIDES have done deplorable things.
But these concentrated efforts are not presenting both sides. These concentrated efforts are overtly and purposefully one-sided and biased and are aimed at undermining liberal democracies around the world. These concentrated efforts have eroded any chance of meaningful coexistence between Israel and Palestinians.
The ramifications are extremely dangerous:
- Dooming the Palestinian citizens in Gaza to continued oppression
- Promoting Violence and Destroying any chance of coexistence in the Middle East
- Dehumanizing Jews and rampant unfounded antisemitism
- Eroding liberal democracies
Part one explored Social Media. We now explore Academia. After this we will explore Traditional News, and the dangers of all three.
I encourage you to read below with an open mind — all the way to the end — because this affects all of us and it is important to understand what has been going on behind the scenes for 40 years, how it has led up to what we are seeing today, and how it will destroy any path toward peace in the future.
Efforts to sow disinformation against Jews, Israel, and the West started long ago.
The turning point arguably started when Edward Said published Orientalism in 1978. The book offering a skewed, biased, and deeply flawed revisionist version of Western influence on the Middle East. Said’s book became a darling in academic circles, and is the grandfather of much of the post-colonial “oppressed vs. oppressor” dialogue we see today across college campuses.
In 2003, shortly after his death, the Lebanese newspaper Daily Star eulogized Said by writing: “Everyone agrees that Said’s work was a work of fiction designed to derail Western civilization” and that “U.S. Middle Eastern Studies were taken over by Edward Said’s postcolonial studies paradigm.”
But it was too late; the seeds were planted…
25 years ago Ameer Makhoul, director of Ittijah, a network of Palestinian NGOs, explained the full game plan to Gary Wexler:
We will create, over the next years, Palestinian campus activists in America and all over the world. Bigger and better than any Zionist activists… Just like you have been part of creating global pro-Israel organizations, we will create global pro-Palestinian organizations. Just like you today help create PR campaigns and events for Israel, so will we, but we will get more coverage than you ever have.
Makhoul’s vision came to fruition both Directly and Indirectly.
Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), the BDS movement and Israel Apartheid Week all emerged on college campuses in Canada and the US from 2001–2005, and have been gaining steam ever since.
These three initiatives all used the same modus operandi: pushing only one biased version of the complex picture and never engaging in bilateral dialog. Instead of aiming for coexistence, understanding, and mutual respect of both sides, IAW, SJP, and BDS solely focused on a purposefully lopsided agenda that served to created more division.
Dr. Catherine Chatterly, a Canadian historian, summarized IAW in 2011:
If the goal were actual education and informed discussion about the Arab-Israeli conflict, IAW programming would incorporate competing points of view. All subjects central to the conflict would be on the agenda — such as the many wars fought by Arab armies against Israel, the historical and contemporary arguments of Arab nationalism, the Islamization of the conflict itself, and, the very real question of whether anyone in the region actually wants to accept the existence of a Jewish State.
All three initiatives were all rightly criticized for extreme bias at the minimum, and for direct ties to terrorist organizations at the maximum.
What we know today is that all three initiatives are intertwined through shady NGOs like AMP, with direct connections to Islamic terror organizations. SJP specifically, which has been particularly successful on college campuses, is a front for Hamas, has been receiving funding from Hamas for years, and is a consistent collaborator with terrorism. Even Jewish Voice for Peace is overseen by known Hamas operatives.
SJP specifically is also responsible for overt Anti-West bias, pushing only one narrative that the US and other Western countries are solely responsible for all the ills of global society — eerily similar to Said’s theory.
Most importantly, as noted by Dr. Chatterly, these three organizations never made attempts at fostering dialogue, understanding, or progress toward peace. They opted for an extremist track of delegitimization which ultimately undermines bridge-building and mutual respect and bilateral consideration.
The Indirect pathway toward Makhoul’s dream is the growing influence of foreign adversaries on academic institutions in liberal democracies.
Today we know that questionable foreign sovereignties, specifically Qatar, have spent Billions to buy influence on college campuses in the US, Canada, and Western Europe for decades. These donations, which go largely unreported, allow Qatari influence on selecting which academic programs to promote, and which educators will push a one-sided and biased agenda.
According to an independent study from NCRI in November 2023:
A massive influx of foreign donations to American institutions of higher learning, much of it concealed and from authoritarian regimes, with notable support from Middle Eastern sources, reflects or supports heightened levels of intolerance towards Jews, open inquiry, and free expression.
It is not just that Qatari influence pushed a one-sided agenda, NCRI also divulged that “receipt of foreign funding was associated with erosion of free speech norms: Increased campaigns to punish scholars for their speech”.
In other words, Qatari influence on academia punished those who dared to question the blatantly one-sided agenda. In other words, there was no option for students to even explore both sides of the narrative because those trying to foster two-sided objective dialogue were silenced.
A modern day example of shutting down dialogue comes from the CUNY chapter of “Not In Our Name” — an organization that allegedly represents “Anti-Zionist Jews”. The chapter is actively curtailing the voice of students on campus by coercing and intimidating students to lie on a campus-wide survey regarding rising Anti-Jewish activity on campus.
Instead of working toward reconciliation, academic institutions, and numerous shady campus organizations, are actively fostering extreme polarization, pushing the two sides away from each other.
It took about two decades, but Qatari influence paid off. Curricula changed to reflect an echo-chamber of narrow perspectives and a stifling of free speech. Any hint of trying to understand both sides — of any issue — is actively shunned and shut down.
Noted New York Times columnist Ross Douthat summarized the changes in academia recently, where he referred to the state of Academia today as “intellectual narrowing”.
This intellectual narrowing limits perspectives on contemporary issues, and simplifies history into exactly what Edward Said promoted 40 years ago — Oppressed vs. Oppressor.
This perspective simply does not align with the complexity of the modern world. For example, college students shout out for “Jews to go back to Europe”, even though 70% of Israeli Jews come from the greater MENA region, and before that all Jews can trace their lineage back to Judaea.
College students express their wish to “Globalize the Intifada” even though in practice it means killing civilians.
College students support the Houthis even though the Houthi flag explicitly states: “Death to America”.
Israel and Jews are seen as a scapegoat for broader historical grievances, which fuels additional antisemitism. As Douthat states:
Israel is a kind of enemy of convenience for a left-wing worldview that otherwise lacks real-world correlates for its theories.
20 years of “Intellectual narrowing”, coupled with blatant Anti Israel/Jew/West bias from SJP/BDS/IAW have led to what we see today on campuses.
Students have a right to protest, and even the encampments can be tolerated when they do not destroy public property.
But instead what we see are countless videos of Jewish students — who have nothing to do with Israel- being barred from entering campuses. We see countless videos of blatant hate speech — and also actions.
Prof. John McWhorter from Columbia pointed out the hypocrisy when he wrote:
I thought about what would have happened if protesters were instead chanting anti-Black slogans or even something like “D.E.I. has got to die,” to the same “Sound Off” tune that “From the river to the sea” has been adapted to. They would have lasted roughly five minutes before masses of students shouted them down and drove them off the campus.
What we see in many academic circles today is a sad and troubling trend that started decades ago. Harvard Magazine recently asked “Is Harvard Antisemitic?” Their answer, of themselves, is Yes.
But what is most disturbing from what we see on campuses, and the state of Academia today, is the countless videos of Pro-Palestine, Anti-Israel, and Pro-Hamas protesters who refuse to engage in any form of constructive dialogue.
David Lederer, a sophomore at Columbia, eloquently summarized the hypocrisy of SJP and the like when he wrote:
It is unfortunately apparent to me that they [SJP] hate Israelis more than they love the people they claim to champion… They cannot have it both ways. Either they are for peace or they are for war, no matter the cost of Palestinian lives. Their chants of “death to the Zionist state,” which only aid Hamas’ efforts, tell me that they are on the side of perpetual war.
Again and again we see an active disdain for two-sided understanding, for realism, or for pragmatic steps toward coexistence and reconciliation.
Image if, instead of pushing blatantly one-sided agendas, Universities returned back to their original goals of fostering critical thinking, freedom of thought, and intellectual exploration. These university students could potentially build practical bridges toward coexistence instead of promoting belligerent propaganda…
Continue to Part 3 — News and Traditional Media
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