No Safe Spaces
| April 25, 2023A first-person account from America’s hotbed of radical progressivism: college campuses
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first, I thought my eyes were playing tricks on me when I saw the student bulletin advertising an upcoming event on campus: “Z*on*sm Is Not Welcome.” I quickly deciphered the strange characters, but still didn’t understand why it had been rather haphazardly encrypted. I asked a friend if he could explain what was intended by the advertisement.
“An IDF soldier is coming to speak to some Jewish students, and it’s causing an uproar,” he said. “Students for Justice in Palestine wants him censored.”
As for the weird spelling, he said, “The word ‘Zionism’ may make people feel too unsafe, so they asterisked some of the vowels.”
My confusion was only amplified the next week, when I saw a new advertisement posted on the quad: “Glory to Our Martyrs.” It was an unmistakable Muslim battle cry, “glory” referring to life in paradise, and the “martyrs” being Palestinian terrorists.
Welcome to life at America’s elite universities, where Jewish students either find themselves subject to violence and death threats if they speak out against this rhetoric — or they adopt it themselves, hoping to cloak themselves in progressive righteousness and thereby avoid being targeted.
On California’s college campuses, largely unbeknownst to the wider American public, Jewish students face a radical strain of anti-Semitism. Terrorism earns support from university administrators, while academic prestige is wielded to defend violence in the name of “pluralism.” Campus doctrines mandate a Manichean hatred of Israelis, who are tarred as imperialists, and their American counterparts become guilty by association.
In 2010, 84 percent of Jewish college students favored Israel in the conflict with the Palestinians; in 2016, 57 percent did; in 2020, only 34 percent of Jewish Americans aged 18 to 29 opposed BDS (boycott, divest, sanction), and only one in three believed Hashem gave the Land of Israel to the Jews. Among American millennials in general, support for the Palestinian cause has tripled in the last three years.
The precarious position of Jewish students on American college campuses was perhaps nowhere better illustrated than at a student debate held at the University of California, Berkeley, last month.
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