Imagine if the following were happening today: African-American students were being harassed and violently attacked on college campuses, nonstop. Massive Ku Klux Klan mobs were setting up encampments, blocking African-American students’ passage to classes, punching them in the head, and screaming for every African-American on the planet to be murdered.
Imagine if KKK professors were teaching blood libels that African-Americans are evil occupiers who have no right to live in their homes, and if KKK mobs were taking over libraries and stopping African-American students from studying during finals week. Meanwhile, the college presidents were doing virtually nothing to stop this violence, lawlessness, and discrimination.
Then, finally, along came a US president who started following civil rights laws guaranteeing African-American students – and all students – safe campuses free from harassment and cracked down on the do-nothing colleges, including invoking civil rights penalties calling for cutting off federal funding to such universities.
And in response, instead of thanking the president, African-American “leaders” paid for and published a full-page ad in The New York Times maligning the president, demanding more freedoms and civil rights for the KKK mobs and recalcitrant universities, and saying that campus racism was being “used as an excuse” to weaken higher education.
It sounds ridiculous. But substitute the words “African-American students” for “Jewish students” and replace “KKK mobs” with “pro-Hamas mobs,” and you have precisely the dystopian situation that we see today.
Jewish students have been assaulted, prevented from going to classes and even walking across campus, and subjected to pro-Hamas mobs’ constant calls to murder every Jew on the planet (globalize the intifada). They have been thrown out of libraries, directly threatened with violence (including to set Jewish students on fire), and have to deal with antisemitic professors who indoctrinate students that the Jewish people are genocidal evil occupiers of their own Jewish homeland.
Fortunately, we finally have a US administration that is employing lawful civil rights protections to help Jewish students, including defunding federal grants to universities that fail to protect their Jewish students and deporting Hamas-allied foreigners.
But instead of thanking US President Donald Trump and his administration for cracking down on the horrors of campus antisemitism, 36 left-leaning former leaders of Jewish organizations spent tens of thousands of dollars to publish a full-page New York Times ad criticizing the White House’s sorely-needed efforts to finally stop the scourge of campus antisemitism.
Shamefully, these former Jewish leaders come from organizations that are supposed to help Jews and Jewish students, including the Anti-Defamation League, American Jewish Committee, Hillel International, American Israel Public Affairs Committee, United Jewish Appeal, the Union of Reform Judaism, National Council of Jewish Women, Jewish Council for Public Affairs, and the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations.
Should Diaspora leaders 'resist the exploitation of Jewish fears'?
THESE FORMER Jewish leaders’ twisted, pricey ad nonsensically said that the federal government was using “a purported concern about Jewish safety as a cudgel to weaken higher education, due process, checks and balances, freedom of speech and the press,” and called on Jewish leaders “to resist the exploitation of Jewish fears.”
How sickening that former so-called Jewish leaders want Jews to “resist” the protection of Jewish students.
The ad provides no explanation as to how the Trump administration’s actions are supposedly weakening higher education, due process, freedom of speech and the press, etc. In fact, assuring that campuses are safe, instead of hotbeds of violent antisemitism and antisemitic indoctrination, strengthens higher education.
Refusing to allow Hamas-infested mobs to ransack, take over, and expel students from campus libraries strengthens the precious freedoms of every student who comes to the library and the university to read, learn, and study. Students do not have the right to disrupt other students who want to learn. Lawless violence and threats of imminent harm to Jewish students are not protected free speech.
Invoking the federal grant defunding penalties authorized by the Civil Rights Act of 1964 is not a violation of due process. As president John F. Kennedy stated in 1963, “Simple justice requires that public funds, to which all taxpayers of all races [colors, and national origins] contribute, not be spent in any fashion which encourages, entrenches, subsidizes, or results in racial [color, or national origin] discrimination.”
Yet, these former Jewish leaders essentially absurdly theorize that protecting and granting untrammeled license to antisemitic, Islamist mobs who are tormenting our Jewish students will somehow help American Jewry and democracy “thrive.” Well, we’ve seen how that theory has worked. The failure to protect Jewish students has resulted in campus antisemitism and violence becoming worse and worse over the past two decades.
Could you ever imagine even a single African-American leader calling for “resisting” protecting African-American students who faced the types of horrors that Jewish students face these days? Of course not. If African-Americans faced the sort of situation Jews are facing today, every African-American leader would be screaming to protect the African-American students.
Every former and current Jewish leader should likewise be screaming to protect Jewish students, instead of advocating for protecting the Jewish students’ tormentors.
The writer is the national president of the Zionist Organization of America.