Jewish students at the New York University School of Law are upset after the Students for Justice in Palestine chapter at the school released a statement complaining about the “Zionist grip on the media.”
Making matters worse for the school, they are obliged to respond due to a settlement with the Education Department’s civil rights division over previous incidences of anti-Semitism.
Aaron Sibarium reports at the Washington Free Beacon:
Under Federal Scrutiny, NYU Law School Faces Uproar Over Anti-SemitismNew York University School of Law may be legally obligated to punish some of its star students after nearly a dozen student groups signed a statement that defended terrorist attacks on Israeli civilians and bemoaned the “Zionist grip on the media.”The statement, drafted by NYU Law School’s chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine, has elicited harassment complaints from Jewish students who say that the letter—and some of the responses it sparked from students—constituted vicious anti-Semitic attacks.”The Zionist grip on the media is omnipresent,” the statement read. “Palestinians are not obligated to engage in racialized ‘nonviolence’ theory and wait around for a United Nations action that will never come as their homes are taken from them.”Several students who signed and organized the statement are attending the law school on scholarship as part of the Root-Tilden-Kern Program, widely considered the most prestigious public interest law scholarship in the country. The scholarship’s winners have gone on to hold federal office: They include Lamar Alexander, a U.S. senator and former secretary of education, and Jenny Yang, who served as chair of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission during former president Barack Obama’s second term.
Here’s why the school can’t just sweep this under the rug:
NYU may have no choice but to punish these students because the university in 2020 agreed to adopt a zero-tolerance policy toward anti-Semitism as part of a settlement with the Department of Education’s civil rights office, which was investigating a string of anti-Semitic incidents at the elite scool.
David Bernstein of Reason’s Volokh Conspiracy blog explains why this qualifies as anti-Semitism:
A Remarkable Outbreak of Antisemitism at NYU Law SchoolNYU Law’s chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine circulated a statement that, besides casually endorsing the murder of Israeli civilians, argued that “framing is everything and the Zionist grip on the media is omnipresent” and also referenced the “Islamophobic, Zionist-funded US and Western media.”Let’s be clear–criticism of Israel, no matter how harsh, isn’t necessarily antisemitic. And there are marginal cases where harsh criticism of Israel is skirting the borderlines of antisemitism, sufficient at least to give the critic plausible deniability.This is not one of those cases. First, the objectionable language noted above is not criticism of Israel, it’s criticism of the “Zionist” media in the US and the West.Second, the clearest, most obvious form of antisemitism that tries to obscure itself behind antizionism is when one can substitute the word “Zionist” for the word “Jew,” and one is left with an obvious, longstanding antisemitic trope.The SJP statement falls exactly into that category. Anyone who knows anything about the modern history of antisemitism knows that Jewish control of the media is about as clear as antisemitic trope as there is. “Controlling the media” is even listed as one of the most prominent “antisemitic canards” in Wikipedia’s entry on that topic.
David M. Friedman, the former U.S. Ambassador to Israel, commented on Twitter:
As we have documented repeatedly, this is an ongoing problem in American higher education.
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