Why, at an institution of higher learning, do intelligent students feel free to indulge themselves in such outright aggressions against their peers? In part, surely, because of the license, tacit or explicit, given them by their professors. In part, too, because they are unafraid of a backlash from their peers. None exists.
To the contrary, the aggressors naturally command the support of the university’s greatest influencers: the social-justice groups and their crushing weapon of “intersectionality.” Indeed, that was precisely the banner under which the Columbia campaign for BDS was first launched. A few months after the summer 2014 riots in Ferguson, Missouri, SJP hosted a panel discussion on black-and-Palestinian solidarity under the tell-all title: “Race, Violence, Resistance—from Gaza to Ferguson.” Linking the “long history [sic] of solidarity between the struggle for Palestinian liberation” with the “African American struggle” at Columbia, Jeff Jacobs, a former organizer for SJP, declared that he’d been inspired to get involved in BDS by the “tradition of grassroots activism throughout our past.” His one piece of evidence was Columbia’s 1985 support for divestment from South Africa.”
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Contributed by Tamara Berens. She is a Krauthammer Fellow at Mosaic magazine in New York City and a former CAMERA U.K. Campus Associate. She was raised in London.