V The anti-Jewish “tentifada” on the campuses of some of America’s most prestigious universities should shock everyone but surprise no one. Providing, that is, they have been paying attention over the last forty years.
If, however, they were Jewish alumni who kept sending the cheques while clinging to the American faith that education is both a universal straightener of the crooked grain of humanity and also a sure path to professional status, they will be very surprised indeed.
The big donors are the winners of Wall Street. They’re smart operators. And they fell for the bait-and-switch from a bunch of liberal arts professors. They allowed themselves to be bilked because they wanted to be fooled.
The universities took their money in the name of enlightenment and uplift. If the donors gave enough, they got their name on a building. Then the universities funnelled it to the academic equivalent of terrorism.
“Intifada” means “throwing off”. The campaigners against Israel who call for “globalising the intifada” intend to throw the Jews off campus. They are an alliance of two factions, and they meet under the chupah of hatred that is Students for Justice in Palestine.
One group is left-wing identitarian. They are the pronoun police, home to absurdities like Queers for Palestine, a notion that would have delighted Yasser Arafat. The other group is Islamist.
The identitarians, who are heavily white and middle-class, see the Jews as their racial and class enemies. Admission to the Ivy League is a ticket to the good life. Like all the goodies in America life, the tickets are handed out according to federally mandated quotas on race, sex and grievance. Pushing out the pushy Jews makes more space for less talented whites, including the “legacy” spots that are reserved on hereditary basis.
This is daft and corrupt, but at least the quotas are familiar. The Islamists, however, represent a new kind of challenge. The identitarians’ radical talk is a means to preserve their privileges, but the Islamists are genuine revolutionaries. Pushing the Jews out of top schools is only the start. They want a world without Israel, and if their world has a place at all for Jews, it is at the bottom.
The identitarians are funded by Democrat-aligned NGOs like the Tides Foundation, Ploughshares, the Rockefeller Foundation and George Soros’ Open Society Foundations. The Islamists are largely funded by other Islamists.
National Students for Justice in Palestine (NJSP) is what you get when American Muslims for Palestine (AMP) goes to college. AMP is what you get when the leaders of its parent charity, the Holy Land Foundation, go to jail for sending money to Hamas, which is what happened in 2007.
The National Jewish Advocacy Center, the International Legal Forum and the firm of Greenberg Traurig have filed a suit against AMP and NSJP in a Virginia court. The suit claims that after the Hamas massacre of October 7, AMP and NSJP “answered Hamas’s ‘call for mass mobilisation’ by disseminating a manifesto and plan of attack”. That would make AMP and NSJP accessories to terrorism.
Shocking, but not surprising. The same goes for the Biden administration’s three-year effort to do nothing about anti-Jewish incitement on campus. The Democrats have a coalition to hold together. The explosion of hatred after October 7th exposes the coalition’s impossible incoherence — unless, of course, the party throws off the Jews like its student wing is doing now.
Fortunately, we have Joe Biden’s moral leadership. As he said on Monday at a commemoration of Jewish American Heritage Month, “The Department has to investigate… discriminating and aggressive… discrimination and aggression… that’s my special envoy to monitor the cabinet of antisemitism… Deborah… Deborah… you are… is the Deborah here?”
