JOHN LEO WRITES ABOUT CAMPUS ANTISEMITISM:
An op-ed writer at the Detroit News asked, “When did antisemitism lose its seat on the bus of political correctness?” He meant, why doesn’t the PC culture protect Jews? The answer is that seats on the PC bus are reserved for certified victim groups, but Jews don’t count. They have been historic victims for centuries but are doing too well in America to qualify as officially aggrieved. And as Muslims have been welcomed into the grievance culture, the status of Jews on campus, the stronghold of PC, has become problematic.
Israel itself is often seen as an intolerable colonial outpost, planted in the historically victimized Third World by the West. The thing that most Americans admire about Israel, that it has many of the same features as the United States–free speech, an open society, democratic institutions–makes it a natural target of America-hating campus sentiment. Hostility to Israel was a strong feature of the New Left in the Sixties as it is of the campus left today. And as Boston Globe columnist Cathy Young pointed out last week, sympathy for the Palestinians, even when they are blowing up Israel’s women and children, “stems largely from the knee- jerk instinct to romanticize the ‘wretched of the Earth.’ ”
Anti-Israel activism on campus is mostly the work of Muslim students and the far left. Some of the ugliest incidents have occurred in the San Francisco Bay area, where the left is unusually strong. At Berkeley, Silver says, “Instead of rallying behind Iraq, the hard left here tends to keep focusing on Israel.”
Well, they do some of the rallying-behind-Iraq stuff, too. Leo has some comments on the University of Michigan’s upcoming conference on Israel, but readers should be aware that some some statements attributed to the organizers of that conference seem to be a hoax. I don’t think that the passages that Leo quotes are from the faked email announcement (which I haven’t seen in its entirety, but only in excerpted form in news stories), but in reading coverage of that conference it’s worth keeping in mind that some false statements may still be in circulation.