RICH LOWRY: The KKK at Columbia – why shouldn’t it camp out at the university, too?

Is there space for more haters at Columbia University?

Imagine if a contingent of alt-right students established their own encampment on a corner of the quad and began to shout antisemitic slogans — say, the infamous chant “Jews will not replace us” from the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville in 2017.

Would the president of Columbia, Nemat “Minouche” Shafik, hesitate to have them arrested as many times as necessary to make them go away?

Would a huge contingent of faculty walk out to protest the arrests?

Would the president of Barnard, Laura Rosenbury, quickly lift the suspensions of the arrested students?

Answers: No, never, and of course not.

As Phil Klein has noted, there is a gross double standard in how progressive opinion regards antisemitism depending on who is peddling it. The antisemitism of the Right is considered morally abhorrent and inherently threatening. The antisemitism of the Left is very often ignored, explained away, or viewed as a regrettable excess.

The “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville — an execrable but relatively small-scale event — caused a near-national crisis. According to Joe Biden, it was such a galvanizing moment that it, and Trump’s response, prompted him to run for president.

The protests at Columbia have been widely criticized, but they have also garnered elite sympathy, most notably from supportive left-wing members of Congress and the school’s own faculty, who have clearly been staying Shafik’s hand. Meanwhile, more than 1,400 academics from a variety of schools are calling for a boycott of Columbia for allegedly being much too tough on the protesters.

There are obviously differences between Charlottesville and Columbia. The rally in Virginia featured violent clashes with counter-protesters and led to a murder. The groups involved were explicit hate groups, like the KKK, with violent pasts. Still, the bottom line is that the antisemitism of “Unite the Right” was roundly condemned as such.

Based on events on the past several days, I would assume “the terrorist wing of the Democratic Party” would feel quite at home at Columbia: