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Anti-Semitism Ignored by the Media and Fueled by Academia
Take a look at this noteworthy response to the Pittsburgh shooting from Jack Engelhard. He is a novelist (author of “Indecent Proposal”) and a columnist at israelnationalnews.com.
Engelhard contrasts the removal of Megyn Kelly from a daily TV show, despite her tearful apology for a blackface comment, with the apathy towards overt expressions of anti-Semitism, which are not even a blip on the radar of the media and academia. Al Roker self-righteously condemned Kelly, her apology notwithstanding. Per Engelhard: “Will she ever be forgiven? I ask because as King Solomon would have had it, there is a time to accuse, and there is a time to forgive. But this is not the time to forgive, here in America.”
Engelhard then wonders where Roker was when Farrakhan, an unabashed anti-Semite, recently compared Jews to termites, without apology. Others wondered why, at the funeral of Aretha Franklin, Farrakhan was treated like royalty, with the complicity of a fawning media and Bill Clinton, who smilingly shared the stage with Farrakhan.
And where are the opponents of bigotry in academia, where vicious anti-Semitism, in the guise of anti-Israel polemics and protests, goes unchallenged? This phenomenon is addressed in another reaction to Pittsburgh on the part of a Jewish woman who left Russia for America in order to live in a land where she would not be afraid to display her Jewish identity and love for Israel. To her chagrin, she has seen pro-Israel university students ostracized, if not threatened, by their peers and learned that university professors are afraid to express pro-Israel views for fear of being blacklisted by the academic community.
Published in General
Good point.
As they’ll tell you again and again and again, it’s not anti-Semitism; the fact that the object of their concentrated efforts happens to be populated mostly by Jews is irrelevant. The issue is colonialism. A perfect example of religiously-inspired violence perpetrated on a peaceful, minding-their-own-business indigenous population who, oddly enough, seem to have no religious component, but are defined as Nationalists. Which is acceptable in this instance, because they have no nation.
It’s an odd twist, but people who are predisposed to dislike the Jews are frequently absolved by the imperatives of current events, which require principled opposition to something that just happens to involve the Jews. It’s just a historical coincidence that it happens again, and again, and again.
This has been going on for a long time. Here’s a story from 2002:
“This may have been advertised as an anti-war rally,” said Suzanne Davidson, “but I could hear in the distance, as I looked at the hate-filled faces, military boots marching on broken glass.”
Davidson is a leader of a small group in LA that had been meeting regularly to show public support of Israel. Prior to the group’s usual rally on October 6, she learned that an “anti-war” group was planning a major demonstration in the same area. Should she cancel the pro-Israel demonstration? No, she decided…after all, what could be feared from a “peace” rally?
But from the very beginning, Davidson says, members of the “anti-war” demonstration behaved in a hostile and intimidating manner toward the smaller pro-Israel group, beginning with curses and a demand to “F___ off.” This escalated to the cry “You are Zionist Nazi pigs.” 1500 “anti-war” demonstrators marched past the 25 members of the pro-Israel group, some of them shouting “shame on you,” along with assorted name-calling. “I shudder to think what would have happened had the police not been there,” wrote Davidson.
As shameful as this event was, similar behavior–and much worse–has become increasingly common. At Concordia College (Toronto), Benhamin Netanyahu was prevented from speaking by a riot of Palestinian students and their supporters. Thomas Hecht, a Holocaust survivor, was pushed against a wall, spat on, and reportedly kicked in the groin. A woman said that during the same incident, attackers “aimed their punches at my breasts.” Two weeks later, at the same college, a Jewish student was beaten bloody by an Arab student.
Laurie Zoloth, a campus Jewish leader, summed up the campus situation in these words: “This is the Weimar republic with Brownshirts it cannot control.”
(my summary of press and blog reports)
There have been many, many similar incidents since then–but most of the media turns a blind eye toward Leftist anti-Semitism and political violence.
This is not even sane:
Any strategy for enhancing the security of American Jewry should involve shunning Trump’s Jewish enablers. Their money should be refused, their presence in synagogues not welcome. They have placed their community in danger.
I’ve seen quite a few articles/posts like this since yesterday.
I don’t remember ever seeing any Franklin Foer denunciations against the kinds of Leftist anti-Semitism and violence that I described in the previous comment.
I wondered how long it would take to blame it on Trump. It is insane but then liberalism is a mental disease. I always took that as a wise crack, but how else does one explain the last two years.
I think we all must accept that anti-Semitism will always be with us, in one form or another. Whether it’s BDS to punish Israel for apartheid against the Palestinians, or establishing our embassy in Jerusalem, it is inevitable. As a Jew, it is devastating to see an event like Pittsburgh, but it could have happened anywhere: Pittsburgh is just where this man happened to live, and I don’t think his shooting there says anything about the town. As long as I hear people who are not Jews condemning these actions, I will breathe easier. As long as the police come to the rescue as they did in Pittsburgh, I will feel reassured. But I will never rest fully, because every generation will always look for scapegoats. We share that branding with Donald Trump in these particular times.
Not sure exactly what you mean by that passage.
I meant that Jews have always been scapegoats, and Donald Trump is a scapegoat, too, for these times. We are all blamed for all kinds of things that often have nothing to do with us. Happens to Trump a lot.
More generally, media and academia have not in recent years really been opposed to bigotry per se. They only pretend while they choose who the “approved” targets are.
Thank, I understand now. Trump has often been accused of scapegoating–IMO, he is scapegoatED a lot more than scapegoatING–and hoped that wasn’t what you meant.
So if we look at this through the lens of “intersectionality theory”, then BLM trumps, transgenderism, which trumps 3rd wave feminism, which I guess trumps antisemitism. If I’m correct, then on the progressive totem-pole of protected minorities, that would put Jews on the same level as conservatives. I can see these progressive academics setting in their university lounge trying to chart who they are going to like, and who they are not.
Today, on college campuses, there is only one minority that it is permissible to hate: the Jews. As James Lileks notes in a comment above, Israel is a convenient proxy target for anti-Semites.
Eighty-nine percent of the world’s Jews call one of two places home: Israel (49%) and the United States (40%). Outside of these two enclaves, Jewry has never really recovered from the Shoah. Still, because they reside in the two nations that embrace freedom more than most they have had enormous success politically, economically and artistically. And the hatred lies in the envy – and the ignorance.
The hatred is that the academics demand every knee shall bow to the state, not to G-d; Isaiah 45:21-25
I look through my own lens at academia and the phrase “pimp-slap” springs immediately to mind.
What a bunch of lazy losers. The social sciences crew can go jam it. I really can’t think of a more embarrassing job. I’d rather work the janitor gig at a college than sit in an office, surrounded by books I purport to understand, and spend 38% of the day making crap up that I’m paid to sell to already-indoctrinated idiots.
The funny-yet-sad part here is that Bowers can post his hatred for Trump, his Jewish daughter and son-in-law for all to see, but so many are tied up in pushing The Narrative that the murder’s words outlining his beliefs are ignored, in order to push an alternate reality that meshes with the apporved talking points from Friday’s arrest of the bomb sender in Florida, and which was supposed to be in place through Election Day on Nov. 6 (i.e. Trump has to be the cause of all the hatred, not that Trump is one of the targets of the haters). Condemning or even acknowledging hate on both sides is out of the question, because that sort of condemnation can’t be weaponized for political purposes.
As for anti-Semitism and Israel in general, for the first 30 years of the nation’s existence, when voters in Israel were electing Labor to power, you saw less tolerance among American liberals for alliances with people like Farrakhan or the far-left Jew haters elsewhere, because Israeli voters were seen as thinking like they did. That’s been less and less the case over the past 40 years, when voters there have favored the more conservative Likud party the majority of the time.
To a large number of those who lean left, Israel voters electing Begin, Sharron or Netanyahu makes them no better than some flyover country Red State, which therefore isn’t deserving of support. That makes it far easier to look the other way when you’re allying with the BDS crowd or when Farrakhan utters his latest anti-Semitic remark.