A lot of effort goes into finding creative ways to discriminate against Jews on college campuses, but this is a new one. The Telegraph has interviewed several Jewish professors in Britain, and one of them tells the paper that her school’s diversity team sends out greetings on Christian, Muslim, Hindu and Sikh holidays, but not Jewish ones. When she asked them to include Jewish holidays as well, she got a pretty incredible response:
“I was told that Jews could only be mentioned when marking a religious festival that makes no reference to the land of Israel—which possibly leaves one, a minor festival called Purim.”
The article chronicles several other recent incidents, most notably the ongoing harassment of Michael Ben-Gad, an economics professor at a University of London-affiliated school, including activists storming his class and threatening to behead him for the crime of being Israeli.
Ben-Gad is standing his ground quite well and keeping his sense of humor throughout this ordeal. But it is an illustration of a counterintuitive new reality: The pro-Hamas demonstrations have been much reduced (though not eliminated entirely) but the bigotry itself has accelerated.
Take for example what happened recently at Pomona College in California. Pro-Hamas protesters stormed an event commemorating the October 7 attacks featuring a survivor of those attacks, Yoni Viloga. A group calling itself Claremont Undercurrents then took credit for the attack with an open letter that, the Algemeiner reports, appears to threaten Viloga with murder.
Unsurprisingly, the letter accuses Viloga of being “a settler on stolen land” and says his “fictitious ‘state’ destroyed 92% of Gaza.”
Viloga, of course, lives in Israel. To the pro-Hamasniks in the West, it remains a crime to be a Jew living in the Holy Land.
This is no mere land dispute. It’s an argument over whether the educational institutions of the West will persist within established reality—Israel exists, the Jewish holidays mention Israel because the people of Israel are indigenous to that land—or within a bubble of genocidal science fiction.
One can’t help but notice just how much the truth of history bothers these zombies. Their concerns have nothing to do with the lives and the rights of anyone living there now; they simply can’t handle that the people of Israel are living in the Land of Israel, as they have for thousands of years.
And here we see how the academic invention of decolonization theory has backfired. It has convinced students of the importance of indigeneity but failed to convince them that the Jews don’t have it. So we have the worst of both worlds—a student body convinced the Jews have the strongest claim to the land without realizing that such a thing doesn’t have to matter. One can simply support both Jews and Arabs living in the land together. That, after all, is Israel’s position: Its Arab citizens have equal rights, and it has offered the Palestinians a state of their own alongside it.
The fools of the professoriate have created a monster. Campus thought police are forbidding mention of Jewish holidays because the history of those holidays testifies enthusiastically in favor of the justice of the Zionist cause. And activists are going around threatening to behead Jewish professors or murder survivors of the biggest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust. At the very least, it’s time for decolonization theorists and other revisionist academics to face up to their role in all this mayhem. It’ll cost them their pride, but at least it won’t cost Israeli professors their heads.
