Stop the Campus War Against Israel and the Jews

David Horowitz

The radical Islamic state of Iran is leading a global movement calling for a second Holocaust — the elimination of Israel from the face of the earth. The Islamic terrorist organizations Hizbollah and Hamas are calling on Muslims to destroy the Jewish state and kill the Jews in those exact words. And on campuses across the United States, radical professors and student groups are lining up to support the genocide.

The day Israeli troops left Gaza – a territory that has been used as a launching pad for three aggressive wars against the Jewish state – Hamas terrorists began a three-year campaign of rocket attacks on Israel that was only halted by an Israeli counter attack, which began in December 2008. As Israel was defending itself from these Hamas attacks, University of California Sociology professor William Robinson assembled pictures university administrators described as “lurid” of Nazis persecuting Jews and emailed them to all the students in his course on globalization along with a diatribe about how the Israeli soldiers fighting Hamas terrorists were no different from fascist troops in World War II destroying the city of Warsaw.

Robinson’s propaganda message had no educational context, was unrelated to the subject of the course, and allowed for no alternative viewpoints. It had nothing to do with education. It was purely an act of aggression, part of an intensifying war against the Jews that has broken out on many fronts across American higher education:

* A University of Rochester sit- in during Israel’s defensive war in Gaza intimidates school administrators into backing a demand for the university to divest from companies doing business with “the Israeli war machine.”
* During Israel’s war to defend itself from 7,000 unprovoked rocket attacks launched at civilian targets from the Hamas-run Gaza strip, “teach-ins” were held on campuses across the country whose theme was that Israel is a Nazi apartheid state and the Hamas terrorists are freedom fighters.
* An event at UCLA’s Center for Near Eastern Studies encourages the audience in a “Zionism is Nazism” chant and portrays the genocidal terrorists of Hamas as peace-seeking, unjustly provoked victims.
* At University of California Irvine graduation ceremonies, members of the Muslim Students Union wear green stoles mimicking those of suicide bombers with Arabic word shahada (“martyr”) printed on them.

The campus war against Israel and the Jews, with its ominous overtones of the 1930s, is both a reflection of the Middle East conflict and something much more: an effort by radical groups to stigmatize America and the west by stigmatizing Israel. This campus conflict has been building for several years, as radical professors and student groups have targeted Israel and the Jewish students who defend it. But in the aftermath of 9/11, as Israel became a front line state in the war on terror, this campus war has intensified. Students, particularly Jews, who refuse to join the attack on Israel are not only criticized; they are subjected to hatred and intimidation.

At one level it is a war of symbols: campuses are adorned with banners in which the Star of David is joined to the swastika by an equal sign; as Israel is the only Jewish state and was created against the backdrop of the Nazi Holocaust, this is a hate crime in itself; student governments and academic senates push measures for disinvestment based on the blood libel that Israel – the only democratic state in the Middle East — is morally equivalent to the racist apartheid regime of South Africa; in a cynical reversal of the Biblical story, the genocide inciting Islamic world, enabled becomes David and tiny and outnumbered Israel becomes Goliath.

The conflict increasingly features the threat of real, as opposed to merely rhetorical violence. Pro-jihad groups such as the Muslim Students Association, an organization that supports Hamas and is part of the Muslim Brotherhood network which now has hundred of campus chapters and regularly sponsors fundamentalist Islamic prophets of hate, have dropped the pretense that it is only Israel and not Jews that are in their gun sights. In demonstrations at UCLA, its members showed that there is no such distinction as they chanted “Death to Israel!” in almost the same breath as “Death to the Jews!” At a pro Palestinian demonstration at UC Irvine, MSA members threaten Jewish students with violence and chase them off campus.

Stopping the Campus War Against Israel and the Jews

Until now, the unholy campus alliance of Muslim supporters of the Islamic jihad and secular radicals at war with America, have been winning these battles. In large part this is because of the support they receive from faculty members who use their classrooms to reinforce the virulent anti-Israel and anti-American messages of the jihad. They are abetted by administrators, who otherwise rigorously punish even the suspicion of “hate speech” but are so cowed by the campus left that they refuse to apply similar standards to the Jew-haters on their faculties and among their campus organizations. But the real problem is that this campus war has been going on for so long now and has been so one-sided that it has created a culture of stigma for Israel and the Jewish students who support it or who criticize the genocidal ambitions of Hamas and other Islamo Fascist groups involved in the Palestinian cause.

During the week of October 12-16, 2009 the David Horowitz Freedom Center is organizing a nationwide protest whose theme will be “Stop the Campus War Against Israel the Jews.” We intends to attack the culture of stigma that has placed a target on the back of every Jew attending a college and to support students who are standing up to the hate and fighting back. We will do this in several ways:

* In a series of pamphlets and flash videos, we will document the fact that the all out, totalitarian attack on Israel is in fact a blatant form of anti Semitism. These publications will show the full range of the left’s anti Semitic assault —in classrooms, in administrative decisions, and especially in the abusive arena of campus politics.
* We will report on the bigotry Jewish students on campuses experience as part of their every day academic and social lives in a series of first person accounts that will dramatize the crushing way in which the virulence of the hatred against Israel affects individuals, especially when they speak up in or out of class with an opposing view.
* We will establish alliances with Jewish student groups under attack and with Christian groups defending Israel. We will also reach out to Scholars for Peace in the Middle East, an embattled faculty organization that attempts to promote an even handed discussion of Israel and Palestine on campus, and increase their visibility and influence. We will do the same with individuals such as Alan Dershowitz, who has waged an often lonely struggle against the “divestment” movement that has become one of the left’s most potent weapons in its offensive against Israel.

The centerpiece of the Freedom Center’s campaign to “Stop the Campus War Against Israel and the Jews” will be a week-long series of demonstrations . Based on the Center’s successful “Islamo Fascism Awareness Weeks,” these teach ins will feature films, lectures, and panel discussions with figures such as Nonie Darwish, Yossi Ohlmert, Robert Spencer, Daniel Pipes, and myself. By revealing the irrational hatred of the left’s attack on Israel, and documenting its anti Semitic overtones and its support for terrorist groups, this week of demonstrations will win space for an honest discussion of Israel and the Middle East conflict and of the objectives of the campus left in our universities.

For more information, go to www.terrorismawareness.org.