We have reached the point in America today, writes Danielle Pletka of the American Enterprise Institute, where “Jews must now be afraid”

PHOTO: SHUTTERSTOCK/ANDYSOLOMAN

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fter punk rock duo Bob Vylan led tens of thousands of concertgoers in chanting “Death, death to the IDF” at the Glastonbury Festival in Great Britain, Ayaan Hirsi Ali wrote an incisive piece in the Free Press describing what is going on. “What happened at Glastonbury... is part of a coordinated, ideological insurgency against the Jewish people. Not just against the Israeli military. Not just against Israel. Not just against Zionism. Against Jews.”

The goal, she avers, is not just to erase Israel from the river to the sea, but to erase “the Jewish people from the moral map,” by painting “Israel as the nexus of evil and every Jew who does not loudly denounce it as complicit.” Jews are the oppressor and must either sacrifice their dignity or be driven from polite society.

Hirsi Ali describes this insurgency as a weird amalgam of “Islamism soaked in Maoism weaponized for the social media era.” Zohran Mamdani serves as the poster boy for that implausible alliance of Islam and Maoism.

“Islamism brings the fire — holy rage, the fixation on martyrdom, and a visceral hatred of Jews that predates the State of Israel,” according to Hirsi Ali, who grew up as a Muslim in Somalia. “Maoism brings the strategy, the long march through institutions, the cultural struggle session, the rewriting of history, the reframing of reality through social media.”

Maoist frameworks like “decolonization” and “privilege” provide the ideological cover — abstract enough to sound academic, blunt enough to justify destruction. Islamic fervor supplies the moral justification for violence.

And this effort to delegitimize the very existence of Israel has been astoundingly successful. Democrats in America, for instance, sympathized more with Israelis than Palestinians by 13 percent in 2017. Now, it’s Palestinians by 43 percent. Young Democrats, who have recently passed through the universities, now favor Palestinians by 57 percent. In 2017, they favored Israelis by 14 percent.

What have the Palestinians done to justify that newfound favor besides slaughter and violate innocent Jews on October 7, and reject in absolute terms every proposal to divide the land in any fashion put forth over the last 100 years?

As Julian Epstein, who served as Bill Clinton’s leading counsel in his impeachment trial, put it recently, “[Democrats] have become captive of a pagan religion of sorts, a messianic delusion whose meta-narrative is that Democrats are liberators of oppressive Western traditions.” Those “oppressive” traditions pretty much track what one would learn in university “decolonization” studies.

The long march through the institutions of Western culture described by Hirsi Ali did not start yesterday. Renowned political scientist Seymour Martin Lipset described in the New York Times in 1971 how anti-Semitism had become the “socialism of fools.” Whereas anti-Jewish politics had traditionally been associated with the right, “the current wave is linked to governments, parties, and groups which are conventionally described as leftist.... As the war in Vietnam peters out, the various incarnations of the extreme left new and old have reoriented their international emotional priorities to identify the heroes as the Arab terrorists and freedom fighters, and the villains as Israel and its American ally....”

Around the same time, Aaron Wildavsky, another famed political scientist, noted presciently how Jews had lost their identity as a minority: “Jews were all of a sudden taken for imperialists. Actually, it was more like guilt by association. Jews, you see, were identified with Israel, which was defeating Arabs, who resorted to guerrilla warfare, however inefficacious, which somehow gave them membership in the Third World, so that Israel, ipso facto, became an imperialist oppressor, and domestic Jews ceased being a minority.”

Steven Hayward, who originally called my attention to Lipset and Wildavsky, describes how views once limited to a radical fringe were then “mainstreamed on college campuses, in Middle East studies departments, often funded from Arab sources like Qatar,” in which “post-colonialism” is often the dominant ideology.

No one had as malign impact on the treatment of Israel and Jews in academia as the late Columbia professor of literature Edward Said. His Orientalism is the Ur-text of every Middle East studies department. He argued that European orientalists viewed Middle Easterners as inferior. From there it was but a short leap to labeling Zionism — which, according to Said, was of European origin — as racism. That would make the Zionists the bad guys, no matter what, and, by the same token, the Palestinians the good guys.

Said taught the following syllogism. Europeans are racist in their view of Middle Easterners. Zionists are Europeans. Therefore Israel is a racist enterprise. Even the factual premises are wrong — most Jews living in Israel today are of Middle Eastern descent and as dark-skinned as local Arabs. And the idea that right and wrong are determined simply by who is labeled racist or an oppressor is a uniquely modern one. As the aforementioned Julian Epstein puts it, the anti-Western dystopic view ignores, among other things, that the West did more than any other civilization to lift humanity out of poverty and to usher in the concept of individual rights and liberties.

THE MAOIST LONG MARCH through Western institutions requires money, lots of it. That has been readily available for efforts to delegitimize Israel. A recently issued, thoroughly documented report by the Middle East Forum, “Beachhead: Georgetown U.,” describes in intricate detail the web of connections between Georgetown University’s Alwaleed bin Talal Center for Christian-Muslim Understanding (ACMCU), and the Safa Network, a shadowy conglomeration of Islamist charities, businesses, and think tanks headquartered in Virginia. (The lengthy report is beyond my slender powers of concision to summarize, but can be read at the Middle East Forum website.

After 9/11, the Safa Network was the subject of a prolonged federal investigation on suspicion of money laundering and support for terrorist organizations. Those prosecutions were eventually dropped by the Obama administration. The Safa Network, according to the MEF Report, seeks to homogenize Muslim communities, theocratize education, and propagate Islamist ideology. (Islamists advocate for the establishment of sharia law everywhere.)

Because the ACMCU is headquartered in Georgetown’s Edmund Walsh School of Foreign Service, where a high percentage of State Department diplomats are trained, its capture by Islamist sympathizers is a matter of great concern.

Georgetown’s efforts to raise money from the Islamic world go back at least to the late 1970s, when Peter Krogh, dean of Georgetown’s School of Foreign Service and founder of the Center for Contemporary Arab Studies, as well as a member of a coalition to cut US aid to Israel, solicited funding from every Arab embassy in Washington, D.C. His first success was a $750,000 endowed chair from Libya.

Subsequently, Safa Network officials took the lead in brokering a $20 million gift to Georgetown from Saudi billionaire Alwaleed bin Talal, one of the richest men in the world, in 2005, and a series of gifts from the Qatar Foundation, totaling over $900 million. (Harvard and Cambridge University are other beneficiaries of Qatar’s largesse.) Turkey and Malaysia also contributed. To date, over forty ACMCU faculty, non-resident fellows, and researchers have had ties to the Safa Network.

Sami Al-Arian, a former professor at the University of South Florida, was convicted of fundraising on behalf of Palestinian Islamic Jihad, a designated terrorist organization, and subsequently deported after imprisonment. He found refuge in Turkey, where he established the Foundation for Global and Islamic Affairs, with which numerous ACMSU personnel have worked. In an earlier carnation, Al-Arian created the World and Islam Studies Enterprise, under the motto: “Jihad is our way. Victory to Islam. Death to Israel.”

Professor John Esposito, the first director of ACMCU, denounced the charges against Al-Arian, and testified that he was a man of peace and advocate of social justice at his bail hearing. Esposito also dismissed the threat of Bin Laden prior to 9/11, and he has attempted to minimize the intent of the statements by Muslim Brotherhood ideologue Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi, calling for destruction for Jews and their helpers and sanctioning suicide bombings.

In the early 2000s, Esposito was associated with the Chicago-based United Association of Studies and Research, created by Mousa Abu Marzook, a founding member of Hamas and a US-designated terrorist, and served as the editor of the UASR journal. He has frequently participated in conferences in Europe, along with other ACMCU-affiliated academics, together with senior Hamas figures.

Professor Jonathan A.C. Brown, a former director of ACMSU and a professor at Georgetown, is the son-in-law of Sami Al-Arian. He has advocated for the end of “the entity Israel.”

The current director of ACMSU is Nader Hashemi, who charged the Mossad with having orchestrated the stabbing of Salman Rushdie. Farhan Mujahid Chak, a research fellow at ACMSU, has spoken at events together with Sami Al-Arian, and been photographed with the leading Muslim Brotherhood ideologue Yusuf Al-Qaradawi. He has also partnered with Ghulam Nabi Fai, who pled guilty in 2011 to working with Pakistan’s infamous Inter-Services Intelligence, which has extensive connections to terrorist and Islamist groups.

The most public face of the Safa Network is the Islamist think tank Institute of Islamic Thought (IIIT), which shares numerous affiliated academics with ACMSU. Among those who have been on the IIIT payroll are Sami Al-Arian’s former righthand man, Basheer Nafi. IIIT was founded by a former Islamic academic mentor of John Esposito, to advance the “Islamization of knowledge.”

THE IDEOLOGICAL ROT has seeped out of the universities down through the educational system. The National Education Union, Britain’s largest teachers’ union, for instance, is set to hold workshops to train members how to “advocate for Palestine in our schools.” The workshops will include key issues like “the Nakba, settler colonialism, imperialism, and apartheid.” On Nakba Day, teachers are encouraged to circulate petitions calling for boycotts of companies “complicit in Israel’s illegal occupation of Palestinian land,” and to conduct meetings and activities to educate colleagues about “the Palestinian struggle.”

The same themes, such as “settler colonialism,” have been endorsed by American teachers’ unions, and in many states have entered the curriculum in the form of ethnic studies mandates. The curricula were produced in many cases by a team at Brown University and financed by Qatar. (Brown recently closed down that department under threat from the Trump administration.)

America’s largest teachers’ union, the National Education Association, recently severed ties with the Anti-Defamation League over the latter’s promotion of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition of anti-Semitism, as including double standards, blood libels, and opposition to the existence of Israel. The Californian Teachers Association opposed the creation of a state office to combat anti-Semitism, out of a fear that it would restrict teachers’ ability to indoctrinate students against Israel as an illegitimate state with no right to exist.

Lori Lowenthal Marcus, legal director of the Deborah Project, a nonprofit legal defense fighting anti-Semitism in the education system, from K-12 through universities, has said, “The majority of the anti-Semitic materials used in the classrooms are shared and encouraged by the leadership of the teachers’ unions.” She likens the teachers’ unions to Hamas tunnels burrowing, largely undetected, into the hearts of students to fill them with Jew-hatred.

We have reached the point in America today, writes Danielle Pletka of the American Enterprise Institute, where “Jews must now be afraid: afraid to wear a Magen David and to be visibly Jewish, afraid to join protests in support of Jewish hostages, afraid to visit the Holocaust Museum, afraid to take their kids to Jewish schools, afraid to affix a mezuzah on their doors. Just afraid.”

That is not an accident, and we had better be clear about the nature of the threat and where it is coming from.

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 1070. Yonoson Rosenblum may be contacted directly at rosenblum@mishpacha.com)