Our Universities: Israel Hatred and Anti-Semitism is Old News

A powerful, swelling wave of anti-Semitism on American campuses has surprised many an observer. I was not one of them. The writing was on the wall once radical leftism seized control of America’s higher education in the wake of the...

The post Our Universities: Israel Hatred and Anti-Semitism is Old News appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

A powerful, swelling wave of anti-Semitism on American campuses has surprised many an observer. I was not one of them. The writing was on the wall once radical leftism seized control of America’s higher education in the wake of the countercultural revolution of the 1960s.

I witnessed it at over a dozen academic institutions I was associated with in various ways. While both an undergraduate and graduate student I made it a rule to attend as many lectures and sit in on as many classes in as many institutions of higher education as possible. (READ MORE: Antisemitism Is Not a Major)

I went to four colleges on a six-year plan. Why? My American foster family in California wanted me to study banking and computer science; I wanted to major in history and international relations. So I put myself through college and, then, an Ivy League graduate school, which allowed me to hop around its three sister institutions and a related one.

I ended up teaching: at three community colleges, three universities, and now my mother ship, the Institute of World Politics, a graduate school of international affairs and national security in Washington, D.C.

Here’s what I have seen in most of these places and the conclusions I have drawn. American academia has been slowly turning totalitarian, reminding me of my childhood in Communist Poland and stories I heard about Nazi Germany. The basic totalitarian framework and complementary attitudes were in place already in the early 1980s.

A German resistor against Hitler, who had been briefly a Nazi sympathizer, Protestant theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, admitted that he did not stand up to the Third Reich until it was too late. “In Germany they came first for the Communists, and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Communist. Then they came for the Jews, and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Jew.”

In American universities we have a similar situation. First, they came for the conservatives, then for moderates, and, finally, for the Jews. The reasons and mechanism of repression are quite predictable.

Jews in particular have irked the radicals because of Israel and because of their efforts to keep the memory of the Holocaust alive. In our intellectual context where moral relativism is king and deconstruction rules, the Holocaust remains virtually the only unassailable phenomenon of America’s culture. You can deny Communist crimes all you want, but not the Holocaust: at least not yet.

There have been negationist cranks, of course. However, overall, the screaming truth of the Shoah seems permanent. Is it, though? It seems that soon the verity of the Holocaust will come under serious fire. Why? Because it contradicts the narrative of the intersectional revolution. Where is your white privilege? The answer is simple: In Auschwitz. This cannot endure.

First, the radicals have set out to balance, and, then, overthrow the legacy of Auschwitz with their anti-Israeli propaganda: Israelis are Nazis, of course, and Israel is an apartheid state. That’s an old saw in radical circles which has now emerged in full bloom in mainstream academia — freedom of speech, you see. Next, there will naturally be moves against the legacy of the Shoah.

To secure the domination of the intersectional revolution the Holocaust must go because, whereas everything else must be “critiqued,” i.e., besmirched and relativized, there is only room for radical leftist absolutism. Everything else is competition for martyrdom and the moral high ground.

And then Israel stands athwart of the leftist revolutionary project. Israel is the last Western nation state that behaves like a nation state in pursuit of its interests and its very survival. There is no room for an outlier like this in our globalist universe, where the European Union is the progressives’ dream.

Like with conservatives in academia earlier, who challenged the leftist totalitarian monoculture of American universities, Israel must be delegitimized. The smears that applied earlier to conservatives now serve to disparage Israel: a genocidal state and an apartheid state. Reductio ad Hitlerum once again. We are told that Zionism is racism: the Soviets started that trope. And the Israelis are Nazis and, of course, fascists. For now this applies to Bibi Netanyahu and his Likud, and also to the settlers. Soon all Israelis and their supporters will be tarred with the same brush unless they go woke, intersectional, and self-dissolve by, preferably, committing mass suicide.

The aim is to destroy the “Zionist entity.” This will require seizing the moral high ground; the story of the Holocaust will have to be overshadowed by the Nakba, the tragedy that Israel’s detractors believe to have been the state’s founding act, and the Palestinian genocide that allegedly stems from Israel’s existence.

I have observed this nefarious logic develop since I came to this country in 1982: first delegitimize and cancel the conservatives, then the nationalists, including, ultimately, Israeli ones and their supporters.

At the College of San Mateo in California only campus security — retired cops — under Lieutenant Bogan, were openly conservative and anti-Communist. The most outspoken faculty and students hated the United States and they hated Ronald Reagan, both of whom I loved. They hated his attempts to topple the Evil Empire. Since Israel was America’s partner in the endeavor, their approach to the Jewish state was rather icy, while, admittedly, no open anti-Jewish venom was evident yet. (READ MORE: To Hell With the Universities)

Soon, I became a frequent visitor to the Hoover Institution, where I learned at the feet of the late Robert Conquest. Outside of his office, I saw Stanford University’s pro-Sovietism and anti-traditionalism in action: “Hey, ho! Western Civ has got to go,” the radicals chanted. There was also affirmation of Third World causes, including that of Palestine. Israel got slammed. So long as they were leftist, Jewish actors were celebrated like other fellow radicals. This was not the case with conservative and libertarian figures, including Jews such as, for example, Milton Friedman. Lesson learned: Jewishness does not grant one immunity from progressive hate.

At the same time, I volunteered for Amnesty International at UC Berkeley. My bailiwick was Asia: between Afghanistan and China. My boss, Sister Laola Hironaka, was considered a “fascist,” of course, because she supported Eden Pastora and his Contras in Nicaragua, and she also backed Israel.

I remember when we collected signatures to stop Communist torture in Afghanistan, campus leftists tried to mob us: “Why are you doing this? Perhaps it is in their culture? Don’t be a cultural imperialist and impose your values on Third World people.” Translation: it’s okay to torture people so long as it is for the benefit of the Red revolution. Later, the Communists picketed our Afghanistan conference to help the victims of bombing and torture. I’m not kidding. These were the same people who called Sister Laola a “fascist.” Of course, I was a “fascist” by default for being an anti-Communist.

The only bright lights at Berkeley for me were Professor Martin Malia, a Soviet expert, and Professor George Lenczowski, a Middle East specialist. The latter joked that it took him 14 years to discover who the other conservative was at the Department of Political Science. His views on the Middle East were extremely balanced: respect of the Muslims (conservative monarchies in particular, and understanding of Israel’s predicament). But he was an exception.

Meanwhile, I ended up at San Francisco State University, where — though a leftist — Professor Anthony D’Agostino, who taught Russia, tolerated my anti-Communism and conservatism. However, I remember clashing with a Maoist professor who called for “a revolution of villages” in San Francisco, and his student followers who tried to intimidate me. It did not work. The Same happened with another professor who hated the paper I wrote on the Polish-Bolshevik War I wrote for his methodology class, the only history class in my career where I received a B+ instead of an A. I guess that is because the Poles won, to the academic’s great chagrin.

My true refuge at SFSU was Professor Stuart Creighton Miller, who taught me international relations. He fought against the Communists as a pilot in Korea. He marched with Martin Luther King Jr. for human rights. And in the 1970s he began defending Israel. I recall his anger when a scurrilous anti-Israel piece appeared in our student newspaper. “They are shrewd,” he bellowed, “to publish it on a Friday. I’ll have to wait until next week to rebut it.”

Still, anti-Jewish animus remained as a pervasive, if unspoken, undercurrent. It was usually masked as “anti-Zionism.” Later, I also saw it at Columbia, where I attended graduate school. After the U.S. launched its operation to liberate Kuwait, there were demonstrations on campus. I was the only graduate student who objected to the burning of the American flag. Happily, there was a handful of undergrads who dubbed themselves Zionists, perhaps five kids or so, that intrepidly pressed against the leftist sea and chanted “USA! USA!” In exchange, they got an earful, including ethnic slurs.

Around that time, at Columbia’s public event, a visiting rapper, Dr. Dre, addressed the student audience as follows: “Welcome to Columbia Jewniversity in Jew York City.” Liberalism did not allow the Columbia administration to intervene forcefully; there was a bit of whining, partly crocodile tears, in the aftermath of the scandal, but its feebleness confirmed the university’s tolerance of anti-Semitism, so long as it was expressed by the Fanonian wretched of the earth.

Aside from perfunctory babble from the university’s president, none of it seemed to bother Columbia’s academic establishment much. They were busy enforcing ideological uniformity.

At my historical methodology seminar, for example, the instructor required us to read Leon Trotsky’s propaganda book on the revolution in Russia, not as a primary source but as an academic monograph. When I asked the instructor for a suggestion of an alternative scholarly interpretation of revolutions, he scoffed: “Like who? A monarchist?” I responded: “Why not?” He briskly brushed me off. (READ MORE: Universities Must End DEI and Implement DEI)

It was solely by my own effort that I later discovered Jacob L. Talmon and his Origins of Totalitarian Democracy. Otherwise, he was a non-person at Columbia, at least in my classes. Lesson learned: Communist psychopathic mass murderers could serve as role models for budding historians at Columbia, but brilliant intellectual defenders of freedom cannot. A revolutionary of Jewish origin was eulogized; his polar opposite was disappeared.

What obtained at Columbia also concerned other Ivies. I heard lectures at Yale, Princeton, and Harvard: we even had an exchange program with them, where one could take classes there to augment Columbia’s offerings and vice versa.

The same spirit ruled, though at Yale one could still enjoy (the now late) Professor Piotr Wandycz. At Harvard I delighted meeting my family’s former neighbor and friend, Professor Adam Ulam. Neither of them was politically correct, even if both were rather restrained publicly about their anti-Communist reflexes.

After Ulam’s death I greatly benefited from the kindness of his widow, Molly, when I taught at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. In its predictably stifling leftist atmosphere, gentlemanly Professor Kenneth Thompson at the Miller Center provided much needed intellectual relief. Otherwise, it was predictable. Conservative thought was discouraged, leftism was promoted, and the topic of Israel was avoided as an embarrassment.

At Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, where I taught summer school, the affairs were similar to UVA except that, for the first time, at a faculty party I heard an open attack on Israel: the usual refrain about apartheid, if not yet Nazism.

There were exceptions. Earlier, in the late 1990s, I parked myself by the University of Chicago Law School to finish my dissertation. Thanks to the Antient and Honorable Edmund Burke Society there I found myself in my element among a bevy of fellow conservatives and anti-Communists. For the first time, I was among the likeminded. We had conservatism galore, Communism de rigueur, and no one mistook Israel for the Third Reich.

While in Chicago, it was a delight to be able to visit Mecosta, Michigan, to pay tribute to late Dr. Russell Kirk and to sing Polish war songs with his widow, Annette. A perfect setting for America’s prime academic experience, the Kirk Center was (and is) everything that a U.S. university should be. I found there everything that was missing from Columbia and other places.

Last but not least, as for as exceptions, I shall shill for my mother ship, the Institute of World Politics. Freedom of speech rules; there is no selective sensibility where one hates Pinochet and gets giddy over Pol Pot. We study equally revolutionary and progressive propositions as well as conservative and libertarian thought. Jews are not Nazis here and Israel not the Third Reich. And our students actually know how to spell the word Palestine and to locate the river and the sea on the map. I should know. I teach, among other things, Geography and Strategy, and not leftist anti-Semitism.

The post Our Universities: Israel Hatred and Anti-Semitism is Old News appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.