In the Los Angeles Times, Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of Berkeley Law School, tells us “nothing” has prepared him for the prevalence of antisemitism on campus.
Nothing?
Not even the “Jew-free” zones students set up at Berkeley last year? Not the 11 student groups that promised to exclude any “Zionist” (wink, wink) speakers on campus? Not the Jewish students who complained they didn’t feel welcome on campus? Not last month’s appearance of communist PLO-loving progressive heroine Angela Davis, who once argued that Jewish prisoners of conscience in the Soviet Union deserved what they got?
In a recent Wall Street Journal piece, Steven Davidoff Solomon, a law professor at Berkeley, implores firms not to hire his own students because they have become a clique who “advocate hate and practice discrimination.” This trend did not start yesterday.
Chemerinsky is now traumatized that some Jew-hating Berkeley student asked him “to get rid of the Zionists” so she could feel safe. He’s unhappy that he’s been accused of participating in “a Zionist conspiracy.” And, after 70 years of supernatural cluelessness, the dean of a prestigious law school has apparently figured out that “Zionist” is just a codeword for “Jew.”
A year ago, though, Chemerinsky was asking people not to “generalize about BDS on campus,” arguing that it is “nonsense” and “false narrative” to claim that antisemitism was a problem on campuses. “I have seen little antisemitism among our faculty, staff and students at Berkeley Law or on the campus.” Whoops.
Partisans like Chemerinsky willfully wished away antisemitism — and its Soviet-concocted 20th Century iteration, “anti-Zionism.” But detestation of Donald Trump doesn’t change the fact that bigoted ideas about Jews are inherent in modern progressivism, and it will spread as Democrats turn harder left. None of this happens in a vacuum.
The Women’s March, the leading progressive activism group of the Trump years, was founded by a gaggle of Farrakhan boosters (and led by board members) who were spreading blood libels and conspiracy theories.
The original Black Lives Matter platform accused the Jewish State of being “complicit in the genocide taking place against the Palestinian people” and called it an “apartheid state.” What did it have to do with civil rights? Nothing. And yet 600+ suicidal Jewish organizations and synagogues supported Black Lives Matter.
The Jewish Council for Public Affairs even sent out talking points at the time defending BLM, contending that “it is unfair, untrue and inimical to our own best interests to characterize the movement as antisemitic.” Now that BLM is openly praising paragliders who rape, disembowel pregnant women, and murder civilians, we know it is true.
None of this is to even mention the pro-Hamas faction in Congress. Every election, the Squad adds members. And every year, Democrats coddle these people who sound like they’re quoting the Protocols of the Elders of Zion for fear of being called “Islamophobic” or racist. Then again, 400 congressional staffers allegedly signed a pro-Hamas statement — that’s what the ceasefire position is — so the Squad has allies.
Many of them work in editorial boards, op-ed pages, and newsrooms. The same progressive-imbued media that melted down when moral degenerates marched in Charlottesville treat the thousands of moral degenerates who participate in hundreds of Charlottesvilles across the country as innocuous “protesters.”
Even Jonathan Greenblatt of the Anti-Defamation League — a partisan group that’s spent years highlighting every dog whistle (real and imagined) while ignoring or actively diminishing the rise of antisemitism on the left — felt compelled to ask MSNBC, the leading left-wing cable network, “who is writing the scripts? Hamas?”
No, not Hamas. But their allies. MSNBC is where propagandists from the Qatar state-run theocratic network Al-Jazeera go to work. They host shows and join Al “If the Jews want to get it on, tell them to pin their yarmulkes back and come over to my house” Sharpton, cozying up to the Morning Joe crew. One of them, Mehdi Hasan, has called non-Muslims “cattle” and “people of no intelligence.” This would be tantamount to hiring a Pravda reporter to cover the Cold War.
It is only antisemitism for Democrats if you say something unkind about their sugar daddy, George Soros. An enemy of Jewish people, the billionaire not only funds BLM but numerous Jewish front groups to create the perception of support for terrorists. Two of these groups, “Jewish Voice for Peace” and IfNotNow, beneficiaries of at least $15 million, were at the Capitol calling for Israel to give Hamas terrorists a pass.
Maybe, just maybe, giving unfettered loyalty to a president who played footsie with likes of Farrakhan and Jeremiah Wright and who was good friends with former PLO spokesperson and agitprof Rashid Khalidi was a clue that this kind of thinking would be normalized on the mainstream left. Of course, not only did Obama (and, to a similar extent, Biden) bolster the Islamists in Iran — an effort to blunt Israel’s regional power — but he also reached out to Hamas and pumped millions into Gaza and Hamas.
Our elite schools and protest movements where philanthropic Jews drop millions every year sign petitions defending baby killers? Intersectionality. Decolonization. They’re all intertwined with identitarianism and antisemitism. Berkeley, like most campuses, is teeming with Jew-baiting race hustlers and pseudointellectuals who function in closed-minded havens for extremists.
Sooner or later, those extremists were going to be emboldened. Sooner or later, they were going to be in positions of power.
Sooner is now.
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