General Discussion
Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsJewish faculty reject the weaponization of antisemitism
https://www.columbiaspectator.com/opinion/2024/04/10/jewish-faculty-reject-the-weaponization-of-antisemitism/
Dear President Shafik,
We write as Jewish faculty of Columbia and Barnard in anticipation of your appearance before the House Committee on Education and the Workforce on April 17, where you are expected to answer questions about antisemitism on campus. Based on the committees previous hearings, we are gravely concerned about the false narratives that frame these proceedings to entrap witnesses. We urge you, as the University president, to defend our shared commitment to universities as sites of learning, critical thinking, and knowledge production against this new McCarthyism. Rather than being concerned with the safety and well-being of Jewish students on campuses, the committee is leveraging antisemitism in a wider effort to caricature and demonize universities as hotbeds of woke indoctrination.
Its opportunistic use of antisemitism in a moment of crisis is expanding and strengthening longstanding efforts to undermine educational institutions. After launching attacks on public universities from Florida to South Dakota, this campaign has opened a new front against private institutions. The prospect of Rep. Elise Stefanik, a member of congress with a history of espousing white nationalist politics, calling university presidents to account for alleged antisemitism on their campuses reveals these proceedings as disingenuous political theater. In the face of these coordinated attacks on higher education, universities must insist on their freedom to research and teach inconvenient truths. This includes historical injustices and the contemporary structures that perpetuate them, regardless of whether these facts are politically inexpedient for certain interest groups.
To be sure, antisemitism is a grave concern that should be scrutinized alongside racism, sexism, Islamophobia, homophobia, and all other forms of hate. These hateful ideologies exist everywhere and we would be ignorant to believe that they dont exist at Columbia. When antisemitism rears its head, it should be swiftly denounced, and its perpetrators held to account. However, it is absurd to claim that antisemitismdiscrimination, prejudice, hostility or violence against Jews as Jews, according to the Jerusalem Declarations definitionis rampant on Columbias campus. To argue that taking a stand against Israels war on Gaza is antisemitic is to pervert the meaning of the term.
Labeling pro-Palestinian expression as anti-Jewish hate speech requires a dangerous and false conflation of Zionism with Jewishness, of political ideology with identity. This conflation betrays a woefully inaccurate understandingand disingenuous misrepresentationof Jewish history, identity, and politics. It erases more than a century of debates among Jews themselves about the nature of a Jewish homeland in the biblical Land of Israel, including Israels status as a Jewish nation-state. It dismisses the experiences of the post-Zionist, non-Zionist, and anti-Zionist Jews who work, study, and live on our campus.
snip
Isnt genocide a form of hate?
shrike3
(3,742 posts)Whatever one feels about Israel, Jewish citizens of this country trying to live their lives shouldn't feel threatened or be threatened. It's not that long ago we had the Tree of Life synagogue incident. It could happen again.
Last edited Thu Apr 18, 2024, 05:50 PM - Edit history (1)
Deleted post.
shrike3
(3,742 posts)Mossfern
(2,547 posts)to delete or change your post.
tulipsandroses
(5,124 posts)In their crusade against wokeness. The same folks throw around George Soros name as an epithet.
Celerity
(43,485 posts)Beastly Boy
(9,408 posts)As per repeated statements from Columbia's President herself:
https://president.columbia.edu/news/statement-columbia-university-president-minouche-shafik-4-5-24
https://president.columbia.edu/news/statement-columbia-university-president-minouche-shafik
https://news.columbia.edu/news/university-announces-members-task-force-antisemitism
https://president.columbia.edu/news/standing-solidarity
and rampant enough to warrant this preliminary report from the Task Force on Antisemitism
Across Columbia University, there also have been repeated violations of the rules on protests. Although peaceful demonstrations are permitted at Columbia and Barnardand, indeed, are an indispensable element of civic life in a free societythe University has rules to keep them from interfering with our academic mission. Unfortunately, these rules often have been violated in recent months. Protesters have disrupted classes and events, taken over spaces in academic buildings, held unauthorized demonstrations, and used ugly language to berate individuals who were filming these protests or just walking by.
https://president.columbia.edu/content/report-1-task-force-antisemitism
I would imagine that antisemitism on college campuses from Florida to South Dakota is the primary driver for weaponizing antisemitism, and the characterizing the well documented expressions of antisemitism on Columbia's campuses as "taking a stand against Israels war on Gaza" is indeed a perversion.
This is not a comment on Congress meddling in academic affairs of institutions of higher learning, but it is certainly a rejection of certain sentiments being expressed by the authors of this address.
Sympthsical
(9,099 posts)Just because they can be trotted out doesn't mean their opinion is dispositive. I'd also argue people in academia have long had a vested interest in going along with the radical Left's anti-Israel sentiments that have saturated many of these places for decades. Maybe a little bit of career incentive there. That said.
The Big Book of Minorities Whose Opinion I Like is always an unfortunate one to pull off the shelf.
And, of course, it's based on a towering strawman - that mere pro-Palestinian sentiment is considered antisemitic. It's not. It's all the rest that frequently accompanies it. The destruction of Israel, the harassment of Jews around the world, the October 7th denialism, the celebrations, the cynical use of genocide to confound the issue, the constant repetition and spreading of Hamas propaganda, lately the apologias for Iran, and the silence in the face of it as the Giant Bow of Shittiness to tie it all up.
Being for a two-state solution and anti-Netanyahu without playing jacks in the Dumpster Fire of Global Antisemitism is super easy, barely an inconvenience.
Which really makes one wonder why people repeatedly find it so difficult to manage.
Almost as if they don't want to manage it.
But that's none of my business.
David__77
(23,484 posts)Sympthsical
(9,099 posts)It happens sometimes.
Usually while vacuuming.
David__77
(23,484 posts)Sympthsical
(9,099 posts)Oneironaut
(5,522 posts)There is no in-between. You either support the rights of settlers to randomly execute people and commit genocide, or, youre a bigot! /s
/us As someone who sometimes sees bad actors in her community try to accuse others of transphobia because of (absurd, self-serving reason), I have no patience for this bullshit.
shrike3
(3,742 posts)It wasn't that long ago we had the Tree of Life Synagogue. It could happen again.
Oneironaut
(5,522 posts)In that it has absolutely nothing to do with Israel, Netanyahu, or Likud. However, theres a strange bad faith attempt to justify ANY actions by Israels government with claims of anti-semitism.
This mentality reminds me of the people who said that 9/11 changed everything, and, we should just go around the world murdering everyone who disagreed with Bush, because America was attacked.
It amounts to using a tragedy for political power and silencing any criticism.
shrike3
(3,742 posts)Last edited Thu Apr 18, 2024, 03:36 PM - Edit history (1)
And not conflate the average American Jew with Israel. There are those who are not so intelligent.
Antisemitism is one of the oldest hatreds there is. Easy for it to bubble to the surface. That's why intelligent people differentiate.
DU was outraged when Muslim-Americans were blamed for 9-11. I don't see that much difference here.
TheRealNorth
(9,500 posts)But AIPAC, the ADL, and their backers seem to want it that way.
TheProle
(2,193 posts)Mountainguy
(537 posts)Which has kill many times the civilians that the war in Gaza has.
I wonder what the difference is...
Celerity
(43,485 posts)TheRealNorth
(9,500 posts)Or provide him with diplomatic cover.
But the comparison of the actions of Syria to that of Israel are not too far off. But I don't think that was the point you were trying to make.
Beastly Boy
(9,408 posts)the protesters would limit their demands to ending US arms deliveries to Israel. An if that were to be their only demand with regard to Israel, they would also demand that Russia stop arming Syria's Assad as well. That would remove suspicion of prejudice in the actions of the protesters.
Why do you think this is not happening? Could it be that the distinction you brought up does not adequately address what the true motives of the campus protesters are all about?
Mountainguy
(537 posts)That's the difference.