Professor Jacobson has written this new column for the James G. Martin Center:
Hatred of Western Civilization Stokes the Campus Antisemitism CrisisThe unspeakable brutality and depravity of the October 7 Hamas assault on Israel led soon afterward to aggressive protests on many of our college campuses. The protests (and declarations, blog posts, marches, signs, etc.) were overwhelmingly in favor of Hamas, not the victims. Liberal feminist and women’s-rights groups were silent or dismissive of the widespread gross sexual abuse of Israeli women during the attack.At a large rally near campus, one professor at my school (Cornell) said that the attacks were “exhilarating.” While paying lip service to protecting civilians, his visceral reaction to what was known to be a barbaric attack elicited applause and genocidal chants from the large crowd. A student at Cornell was arrested for making threats against Jewish students. Jewish students have testified in Congress to the poisonous atmosphere at Cornell and the complicity of some faculty.Jewish students have been vilified as if they were guilty of some heinous crime. Mobs of pro-Hamas students have harassed and taunted them. At Cooper Union, a group of Jewish students had to take refuge in the library when they were harassed by an anti-Israel mob. At George Washington U., slogans like “Glory to Our Martyrs” were projected on buildings. The genocidal chant “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” is now commonplace. At Arizona State, Jewish students needed a police escort to escape a howling mob throwing rocks. “By any means necessary” is the frequent phrase used by these student mobs to justify Hamas’s crimes against humanity.Why did American campuses erupt with expressions of hatred for Israel and Jewish students? What could possibly motivate college students to act in such an inhumane, deplorable way?In my view, the October 7 assault ignited an antisemitic blaze that has been decades in the making. I can trace it back to my days at Harvard Law School in the early 1980s, with the racialization of education. That is when Critical Legal Theory, later repackaged as Critical Race Theory (CRT), took hold at Harvard and quickly spread throughout American colleges and universities. At my website, CriticalRace.org, we have documented how deeply CRT, and variants like “anti-racism” and Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI), have captured American education.
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