I appeared on the Tony Katz Show this morning, and we talked about several aspects of the anti-Israel reaction and support for Hamas expressed by various groups on campuses. (Full appearance here.)
We talked about this tweet of mine:
One of the focuses was how liberal Jews feel betrayed by leftists they thought were there friends. Here is that segment.
Transcript (auto-generated, may contain transcription errors)
Tony Katz (00:00):The place where we’re discussing it now has to deal with the conversation of antisemitism. So you are Jewish. I’m Jewish, and you have been on lists of influential Jews in media and in academia. I once actually read one of those lists, <laugh>. That’s the best I’ve ever gotten to being on one of those lists.The number of people that I have spoken to since the attack on Israel and the murder of 1400 by the terrorist group, Hamas, the Jews that I have spoken to, are very shaken, beyond shaken, I’ve never seen this in my life. And many of them are surprised that the people that they collaborate with coordinate with, the liberals and the leftists and the progressives that they’ve always been friends with. And they fought for this. And George Floyd was terrible. And, and my gosh, look at the, the oppression over here, and we need Black Lives matter over there.All of a sudden, these people are not with them, and they are shocked, and they are stunned. And there was this video of this, of this girl, the student, at Cal Berkeley saying to one of the deans, we’re doing everything we can, and yet we’re getting all this, all this hate. Why? Why aren’t you doing anything to help us? And my immediate response was, you didn’t know that these liberals hated you.As I now posed a question to you, how much of an eyeopener is this to Jews across America, maybe across the diaspora, that their liberalism will not save them from the antisemitism that is really baked in to today’s progressivism?WAJ (01:53):Yeah. I think this was a wake up, an eyeopener for a lot of left-leaning, liberal progressive Jews who thought that the progressive movement was their friend. And as we’ve known through history, the Marxist movement is not the Jews friend. Might, you know, use them as cover from time to time, but it’s not our friend.And so they have really, I know a lot of people, and I’ve seen this and I’ve heard this, a lot of people are shocked that the antisemitism is coming from the left because they’ve been spoonfed by the media and by their universities and by, you know, the newspapers that antisemitism is a MAGA thing. Antisemitism is people running around in Chicago at night attacking Jusse Smollet with a red hat on. I mean, they’ve been fed a fantasy.That’s not to say there is an antisemitism on the right. Certainly there is, but the right doesn’t control the institutions in our country, the left controls the institutions. And so the progressive antisemitism, the progressive embrace of people who want to destroy half the Jewish population in the world, meaning the Jewish population in Israel, who want to destroy that population in the historic homeland of the Jewish people, they are the real threat. That’s not to say again, that there aren’t isolated incidents where there have been crimes and murders committed by people on the far right, but as an institutional matter, as a societal matter in the United States of America, the left is far more dangerous.Katz (03:30):Talking to William Jacobson, Cornell Law professor, the Mind behind the legal insurrection, uh, dot com, this was the, the tweet that, that made me reach out for the 9,000,000th time. ou write, ‘Academia, particularly in the humanities and social sciences, is completely broken and has been taken over by radicals. More extreme than you can imagine. It cannot be reformed internally.’ And this was in response to a tweet from Guy Benson, who has been doing a very good job of putting things out there. He’s over there at Fox News and Town Hall regarding Northwestern University in this case, the Asian alumni that is saying that Israel is responsible for what has happened. And Hamas, and you hear this in so many ways, from so many of these leftist groups, it is Hamas that is nothing more than a resistance fighting the occupation. This is one heck of a statement from you, sir. It cannot be reformed internally. So how is it reformed?WAJ (04:31):You know, that’s a statement I’ve made. Maybe it’s not the 9000000th time, but maybe the eighth millionth time. I’ve been saying that for years. I’ve been saying it in writing, I’ve probably said it on your show before, that these departments, the Asian Studies Department, the English department at a lot of places, the political science department, have been completely taken over by people who have a worldview that is hostile to Israel, that’s frankly hostile to the United States.And that’s what you get when you have a group of professors at Northwestern, apparently in the Asian studies department, signing a letter basically saying, hey, Hamas is just doing what you would expect them to do. They’re just a political movement. They’re just a militant group. They are nothing out of the ordinary. You are to blame you. The victim is to blame because you’re Jewish in the historical Jewish homeland, which had a Jewish presence before there even was an Islam, before the region was taken over in Muslim conquest, that you are the problem you.So this is victim shaming and victim blaming. That doesn’t really take place with anybody else, except when progressives talk about Jews.
Here’s the full segment:
CLICK HERE FOR FULL VERSION OF THIS STORY