Blog #30 Anti-Semitism in America

Victor Davis Hanson

The Torn Away Campus Scab—and the Sore Beneath

How strange that at the 11th hour, a few college presidents, three weeks after the October 7 massacres, are finally issuing some criticism of the anti-Semitism that they, and their faculties had long ago tolerated and thus fueled.

Their concern arose only when their campuses are heading to Kristallnacht-like violence—with students displaying the same Sturmabteilung combination of widespread ignorance and visceral hatred.

Their faculties’ are no longer shy, in Heidegger-like fashion, in supporting Hamas as they contextualize its mass murder.

PhDs especially cannot differentiate an autocratic side that beheads and rapes, hides under hospitals and schools, uses its own civilians as shields to protect terrorists while deliberately upping its own civilian body count, and sends rockets into civilian centers—from a democratic state that does not, but drops leaflets and warns civilians to keep away from impending attacks against the Hamas targets hiding in their midst.

Or as 100 Columbia faculty put it of the mass murdering by Hamas terrorist gunmen (“military operations”)—and the Gazan civilians (“a people”) who tagged behind for the spoils: “military operations and state violence did not begin that day, but rather it represented a military response by a people”.

So 85 years later, Jewish students find themselves under siege in a library. Jewish dorms require security officers.

Posters of Hamas’s kidnapped captives are routinely torn down at campuses.

Hundreds of thousands of “students”, at the nanosecond they heard news of the mass murder of Jews–but before any retaliation from the Israeli Defense Forces—massed to cheer the mutilations, rapes, and executions.

Now pro forma faculty committees will be appointed.

Reports will be filed. “Concern” must be aired.

On- the-one-hand/on-the-other-hand recommendations will be applauded.

And the universities will remain the American bastion of anti-Semitism, as higher education continues to erode to pre-high-school levels.

Why?

No college president dare wishes to concede that the fusion of its guest students from the Middle East and its DEI industry is at the heart of visceral hatred of Jews.

No college president will dare return the curriculum to legitimate classes in history, literature, philosophy, languages, math, and science, and thus discard mostly worthless therapeutic courses on popular culture and -studies classes fixated on race and gender.

Such gut courses, after all, are designed mostly for virtue signaling, mediocre faculty and for the increasing majority of students accepted without reasonable (or if any) SAT scores or competitively ranked high-school GPAs.

In other words, the standards that colleges once insisted to the public were necessary all these decades to ensure meritocratic and top-flight study are now repudiated by their own creators as having been either worthless or racist or both.

So why is the Harvard or Cornell president finally being forced to address anti-Semitism after weeks of their campuses cheering for the death work of Hamas murderers?

The answer is self-evident.

Universities presidents know all too well that the monsters they have long birthed are now overt and on the move. So they are frightened that the public knows what they have been up to.

True, campuses obviously are afraid of the mass exodus of irate Jewish-American mega-donors who longer wish to subsidize higher-education’s hatred of Israel or Jews in general.

But they will still calibrate whether such funding losses will be more than offset by even more billions of dollars pouring in from the Middle East on news of universities’ near institutionalized anti-Semitism and support for Hamas.

Universities are also a bit anxious that their Ivy-League, Stanford, Berkeley, etc. tony brand is going the way of Bud Lite, Target, and Disney—given the public has encountered their recent graduates in the media, and in the workplace, and is, to put it mildly, unimpressed.

In other words, the universities are losing support also from upper-middle class donors, and are starting to see just how quickly among the general public they have reduced their brand to one of mediocrity.

Or is it worse than that?

Will a Stanford or Harvard BA soon certify not a superb general education, or expertise in a demanding major, but instead stamp the graduate as mostly uneducated, arrogant, and foolish for paying so much for so little?

Will the working student moonlighting at a community college who aced multiple-choice factual exams be rightly seen as better educated than the subsidized Ivy Leaguer who churns out half-literate essays on decolonization on spec?

How can it be any other way with weaponized-studies classes, an arrogant campus sense of entitlement, and a toxic political landscape that is now exposed to the public as anti-Semitic, race-obsessed, and weepily passive-aggressive when occasionally called to account?