How Inclusive are Our Universities?
What do you consider to be hateful behavior?
Using ethnic and/or religious slurs?
Intimidating students who do not agree with you to such a degree that they are afraid to attend classes or feel the need to transfer to a different university?
Creating videos that distort a particular ethnic group so much that they look like monsters?
Supporting a violent campaign that has murdered hundreds of innocent men, women, elderly, and children from various ethnic groups?
Sharing Nazi propaganda on your student organization’s website?
Selling shirts on campus with a terrorist emblazoned on them?
Hijacking every liberal cause on campus to target one ethnic group?
If you’ve answered yes to any or all of the above questions, then you shouldn’t be surprised with what you will read next. Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) is a hate group. All of the above has been orchestrated on US campuses by SJP or by their affiliated organizations.
What does this mean? Does it mean that every member of SJP is a hateful extremist? No. Does it mean that every organization that sponsors an event with SJP or co-signs a petition with SJP is also a hate group? No.
What it does mean is that every university that permits an SJP chapter to register as a recognized student organization on campus is abetting hate speech. It means that every organization that sponsors an event with SJP or co-signs a petition with them is legitimizing their hateful messages. Every professor who serves as their faculty advisor, officially permitting SJP to conduct and spread their hateful rhetoric on campus, is completely responsible for the manipulation of these naïve students who join SJP thinking they are fighting for a just cause and against hate.
At the university level, we might assume that students are receiving information from various sources. That their professors are guiding them to ask the right questions, to blindly follow no one, and to try their best to get an even-handed account on all issues that matter to them by looking to different perspectives.
That is not happening.
Instead, professors on campus are taking advantage of their doe-eyed, impressionable students, who look to them as their omnipotent mentors. With social media and Google filtering content only to items that interest people, and with most millennials following only those who share the some opinion on Facebook or Twitter, it is almost absurd to think that university students are getting the type of college education where all voices are heard and considered.
One result of this is a spike in campus anti-Semitism.
At Brown University, Janet Mock, a trans-gender, black, native Haiwaan activist was pressured to cancel her event because the Hillel, a Jewish institute, was sponsoring her talk.
Stanford alumna Molly Horwitz did not receive a bid for Student Senate from the Students of Color Association because she was Jewish and those interviewing her suspected that she may have dual loyalty.
At UC Santa Cruz, Daniel Bernstein was accused of a having a partisan position because he was elected by the “Jewish agenda” to the Student Government and thus could not vote fairly on a BDS petition.
Recently, after a class at UC Berkeley was suspended for a short period of time due to its extreme bias on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, the campus saw an outbreak of anti-Jewish literature.
These cases spark many questions.
Will you, social warriors, who scream against cultural appropriation on campus, come to the defense of your Jewish classmates? Will those who chant for lower tuition fees stamp out anti-Semitic claims that Jews or Zionists are the reason for the high costs? For the feminists, will you jump to the side of the future Rachel Beydases and Molly Horowitzes whom you have left behind? Those who fight Islamophobia, will you also protest until the anti-Semites are kicked off campus? Those who fight night and day for LGBQT rights, will you support the only country in the Middle East where gays feel safe?
Lastly, those of you, who honestly want to help find a peaceful end to the Arab-Israeli conflict, will you denounce those who support the murder of innocents or will you continue to trample on those who speak for the peace of all people: Israelis, Palestinians, Arabs and Jews?
Originally published in Israel Hayom
Contributed by Aviva Slomich, International Campus Director at CAMERA