Gross hypocrisy or willful complicity: The US campus
Anti-Semitic hate speech has become common on American college campuses, where the classroom is used to promote radical ideals and students with dissenting viewpoints are ridiculed and harassed. Leftist academics abuse their positions as teachers to disseminate anti-Israel propaganda while their institutions provide safe-havens for Jew-hatred misrepresented as political commentary.
They claim their words are shielded by the First Amendment, but deny the same constitutional protection to those with contrary views. Jewish students and advocates are routinely slandered and denied any forum for rebuttal, and when progressive invective leads to physical violence, faculty stooges often blame the victims.
The annual spectacle of Israel Apartheid Week shows how easily anti-Semitism is accepted and how firmly traditional stereotypes are entrenched in multicultural ideology. Demagogues on both the right and left have traditionally used straw enemies as bogeymen to generate support for radical programs, and anti-Jewish hatred has always been an effective tool for riling the masses – particularly in Europe and the Muslim Mideast. But whereas conservatives in America have confronted the past and denounced anti-Semitism, the left continues to demonize Jews as it justifies radical Islam and delegitimizes the Jewish State.
Despite the myth of progressive tolerance, the left has always been ambivalent regarding Jewish religion and nationality, which were reviled by many of the fathers of European liberalism from Voltaire on down. Considering today’s progressive affinity for enlightened churches that promote liberal values and for Islamists who do not, there is clearly more to the left’s defamation of Jewish religion and nationhood than political ideology. How else to explain progressive sympathy for radical Islam despite its rejection of democratic ideals? In the absence of similar core values, this “red-green alliance” seems more bound by common hatred of Jews, Israel, and western society.
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