Can’t have this sort of brazen “walking while Jewish.” Might upset the violent Islamicists and their leftist fellow travelers who seem to be proliferating in the West lately:
The Metropolitan Police in London face accusations that they capitulated to radical pro-Hamas activists last weekend by threatening to arrest a British Jew because his presence was deemed provocative to a mob of anti-Israel protesters.
A shocking video published by the British Campaign Against Antisemitism from the pro-Hamas and anti-Israel march shows a Metropolitan Police officer ordering Gideon Falter, the CEO of the Campaign Against Antisemitism, not to cross a street because of his “openly Jewish” appearance. Falter was returning from a Saturday synagogue service and was wearing a kippah, or skullcap.
This reminds me of accusing a woman wearing a short skirt of provoking a rapist into action – come to think of it, isn’t that what the burka is all about?
The officials in London are afraid of the protesters and would rather Jews not wave red flags in front of those particular bulls by walking around with Jewish garments on. But it’s not just London; this is what’s happening on so many campuses today.
If you want a roundup of the latest anti-Semitic campus happenings and various responses to it, please go here, here, here, here, here, and here. There’s plenty more out there, too.
Here’s a tweet from a Columbia assistant professor who is an Israeli:
Note also the responses to what Davidai wrote. Many of them say the restriction is justified because he’s been videoing pro-Hamas student demonstrators and exposing who they are. Why is it not okay to identify them? Are they guaranteed anonymity? Aren’t they in a public place? Isn’t this what the left has been doing for ages?
The current turmoil on campus as well as the reaction of college administrators brings to mind the late 60s and what happened at Cornell. I’ve written about that many times before, mostly quoting the work of Thomas Sowell and Allan Bloom. Bloom included a long section about the subject in his 1987 book The Closing of the American Mind. Please note the book’s subtitle: “How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today’s Students.” It’s only gotten worse since then, but the trends were already well established.
I’ve got plenty of posts on the subject of what happened at Cornell. But I think for now I’ll just link to and quote from this article written in 2009 by Tevi Troy. A few excerpts:
The student protests of four decades ago were not, of course, limited to Cornell. Outbreaks no less serious (and in several cases far more so) occurred at many other elite universities. A similar story line can be discerned in each case: student radicalism, often with racial overtones, spills into violence and tests the resolve of the university’s administrators, who quickly fail the test, cave to pressure to change the curriculum or other practices, and set a lasting precedent for the subordination of academic freedom to an extreme political agenda. In each case, too, the error was only exacerbated with time, with both the students’ violence and the administrations’ weakness now celebrated in ways that continue to harm the American academy.
The basic elements were there: threats and violence from a protected identity group, and the collusion and/or cowardice of faculty and administrators. It’s gotten worse, but it was bad enough then and it was over fifty years ago. The administrators and professors who were caving back then were not baby boomers or younger; they were of previous generations. For example, James A. Perkins, who was president of Cornell at the time, had been born in 1911. No boomer he.
So, why did they cave? Let’s look again at Perkins as well as the faculty of Cornell [emphasis mine]:
The number of black students at Cornell had been steadily growing during the 1960s, thanks in particular to the efforts of the university’s administration. When James A. Perkins became Cornell’s president in 1963, only about 25 of the school’s 11,000 students were black. Perkins, a Quaker who had been chairman of the board of the United Negro College Fund, solicited a $250,000 grant from the Rockefeller Foundation to help bring in promising black students. After the program proved successful, Perkins established the Committee on Special Education Projects to further intensify recruiting. By 1969, Cornell had 250 black students in a student body that, because of the baby boom, had reached 14,000.
But despite the efforts of the president and faculty to attract and integrate them, many black students at Cornell felt alienated from the student body and hostile to the administration. In 1966, a group of black students created the Afro-American Society. Strongly influenced by the national Black Power movement, the AAS sought to increase black students’ autonomy and change Cornell’s curriculum to suit its views, rather than pursue integration. …
In 1968, a group of AAS members disrupted the class of Father Michael McPhelin, a visiting economics professor from the Philippines who had criticized the economic-development policies of a number of African nations. Without addressing McPhelin’s criticism on the merits, the AAS tried to intimidate him into recanting. The students first tried to read a letter criticizing him in class—without showing it to him first—but he refused to allow it. Then they attempted to take over the class, and he resisted. McPhelin complained to the chairman of the economics department, who, instead of punishing the offending students, praised them for their activism. By the end of the year, McPhelin had left Cornell and, as Tarcov saw it, a pattern had been established: “The disruption of a class, seizure of a department office and chairman, and the threatened and actual use of force had gone unpunished and had even received the sympathy and admiration of liberals and administrators for the moral convictions manifested.”
Here’s what happened to Sowell:
Similarly, in the summer of 1968, Thomas Sowell, a black economics professor in his first academic position, tried to eject a disruptive black student from his course, only to find his decision overruled by the same chairman who had undercut McPhelin. In his memoir recounting his time at Cornell, Sowell reports that he was called a “man from Mars” for refusing to join any of the mass discussions or small-group intrigues that dominated the campus. Unhappy at Cornell, Sowell tendered his resignation.
And then:
In December 1968, black students demanding a separate curriculum turned over vending machines, brandished fake guns on campus, and marched on the tables of a student dining hall during a meal. The administration’s weak response to these disruptions invited greater ones.
Sure enough, these began in the winter of 1969. In February, a symposium about South Africa took place on campus. President Perkins agreed to appear and discuss the university’s investments in that country, of which many student activists disapproved. While Perkins was speaking, a black sophomore named Gary Patton climbed on stage and grabbed him by the collar. The crowd of 800 students let out a collective gasp as Perkins whispered ineffectually to Patton, “You better let go of me!” Ex-student Larry Dickson then pointed a large wooden plank at the head of Lowell George, Cornell’s supervisor of public safety, who had moved to defend Perkins. AAS members in the audience beat bongo drums as Patton continued to hold and threaten Perkins. After a few moments, Patton let go and Perkins rushed off the stage, but the New York Times ran a front-page story on the incident, and it was soon clear that Cornell was on the verge of an explosion.
I could keep quoting the article, but suffice to say the situation just got worse and worse. You also can read the relevant part of Allan Bloom’s book, or Sowell’s own account.
We can see how these events and attitudes have come to fruition now in the reaction of the universities to the Jew-haters on their campuses. They are protected groups, much like the violent black students of yesteryear, and the Jews are not. The current university presidents are selected for cowardice, compliance, wokeness, and the ability to spout lawyerly apparatchik lingo that carefully refuses to condemn even the worst excesses.
