UPDATE: Today’s New York Times has a story about anti-Semitism among European soccer fans, something completely new to me. And nowhere outside the Middle East are they more pervasive than on American college campuses. Apparently they haven’t: they’ve just gone underground. I heard these more often when I was a kid, but thought that they had simply vanished from my country.
And also be aware that the kind of statements made above (and I’ll take Gundzik at her word, because these accusations are so common) are not accusations against the state of Israel, are not accusations against the tenets of Judaism, but expressions of hate against Jewish people. Yet, my community is forced to stand in front of hundreds of people year after year and explain to them why something is racially offensive to us.īy all means try to boycott Israel if you want-it’s your right to frame such resolutions-but be aware that the BDS movement’s explicit goals are to completely eliminate the state of Israel. The resolution would be dismissed without question. If any other minority had voiced these same concerns regarding any other resolution, no administration would dare question the validity of their feelings. Ironically, it was the people who made these statements who also argued that this resolution was not anti-Semitic and that my personal feelings of it being anti-Semitic were invalid.
Of course if such talk had been aimed at Muslims, blacks, gays, or anyone else, the campus would have recoiled in outrage. Many of the slurs above, like Jews being rich, in charge of the government, and so on are old staples of anti-Semitism, and the idea that “the marginalization of Jewish students is justified because it prevents the marginalization of other minority groups” is reprehensible-but typical of the distorted thinking of today’s college Social Justice Warriors. They are a minority that, it seems, are reviled even more than Muslims. Well, Jews are not a race but a religious group, but that’s irrelevant here. I saw students smile and cheer enthusiastically as a woman stood up and said the words, “I am ashamed to be a Jew.” The rhetoric I heard from students opposing Israel at this meeting could easily be equated to arguments that I have only seen in quotes at museums or mentioned in textbooks for their use in the justification of historical persecution of the Jewish race. I heard a senator-someone who is supposed to be my representative-say that people were only voting against this resolution because they were afraid of losing “Jew support.” I heard my peers laugh at the mention of terrorists hurling stones at the heads of Israeli civilians intending to kill them. In those eight hours, I was told that Jews control the government, that all Jews are rich, that Zionism is racism, that the marginalization of Jewish students is justified because it prevents the marginalization of other minority groups, that Israel sterilizes its Ethiopian women (this is obviously not true), and that Palestinians in America who speak out against Israel are sought out by the IDF and denied entrance into Israel (also a ridiculous conspiracy theory).
I’ll excerpt just one paragraph to show the slurs that were raised by advocates for BDS:įurthermore, I am disgusted by the normalization of anti-Semitic language so casually thrown around at the meeting. The divestment resolution barely lost (12-12, with 5 abstaining), but Margaux Gundzik, a Jewish student who attended the meeting to oppose the resolution, wrote a letter to The Bottom Line (the UCSB student newspaper) detailing her experiences. The University of California at Santa Barbara’s student senate voted Friday on whether to join the BDS (Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions) movement against Israel, which aims to bring Israel to its knees-and, ultimately, to dissolve that state-with economic and social pressure. So here’s a real instance of hate speech from a college campus.
(This, of course, is not to justify discrimination against anyone.) and Europe, there are roughly five times more committed against Jews than against Muslims.Īll of which is to say that while Islamophobia is used as a common epithet (especially in the atheist blogosphere), we don’t hear much about a genuine animus against individuals of another ethnic group: Jews. While accusations of Islamophobia are being bandied about, conflating dislike of Muslims with the real issue, dislike of the tenets of Islam (in particular, those tenets that are violent or oppressive), nobody’s much worried about a real phobia: “Judeophobia,” which I’ll coin as a neologism for what it really is: anti-Semitism.
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