It’s creepy and corrosive to watch campuses repeatedly turn a blind eye to expression that is anti-Semitic or anti-white while instituting totalitarian crackdowns on those who say the same or even milder things about groups that are politically en vogue. I don’t believe America can survive with speech policing generally, but I know it can’t survive by making groups of people second-class citizens.
via jamesgmartin:
On October 11, a number of students gathered outside the George Washington University’s Jewish student center in protest of a routine event held by the student group GW for Israel. The event, focused on Israeli innovation and start-ups, was not expected to elicit controversy, let alone national media attention. The protest featured the typical (and falsely predicated) slogans often chanted by anti-Israel groups: “war criminals,” “ethnic-cleansers,” and “child murderers.” But the protesters also engaged in a chant that had not previously been heard on the George Washington University campus: “There is only one solution, Intifada revolution!”
The word “Intifada” refers to two periods in Israeli history, 1987-1993 and 2000-2005, when thousands of Israeli men, women, and children were murdered by hundreds of Palestinian terrorists. During the Intifadas, it became routine to hear weekly about buses blowing up, stabbings and shootings at marketplaces, suicide bombings in popular restaurants, and explosions at weddings and other celebratory events. When GW students call for the renewal of the Intifada, they are not offering a nuanced discourse on a complex geopolitical conflict. Rather, a call for the renewal of the Intifada is a clear endorsement of the indiscriminate murder of innocent civilians, solely for being Jews.
As a senior at the George Washington University, I found this episode shocking but not surprising. The steadily increasing prevalence of antisemitism on campuses across the country has left Jewish college students unsettled, worried, and often fearful. In my three and a half years in school thus far, incidents of antisemitism have become routine and have left Jewish students on my campus wondering not if a subsequent incident will occur but when. These incidents are sometimes (subtly) manifested as criticism of Israel, Israel’s existence, or Israeli policy, but they can also be overt, heinous acts of hate.
ANALYSIS: TRUE. NYU prof argues Gen Z is too ‘fragile,’ causing ‘national crisis.’ “When you look at Americans born after 1995, what you find is that they have extraordinarily high rates of anxiety, depression, self-harm, suicide and fragility.”
h/t Robert Shibley