Mick Hartley

David Bernstein lists six examples of "Israel Derangement Syndrome". The second concerns Oberlin, where the activities of BDS and pro-Palestinian activists are reportedly raising concerns about the anti-Semitic climate in the college. He links to a post by William Jacobson, which gives more detail:

In the winter of 2013, racist, anti-Semitic and anti-gay flyers were posted around campus, leading to a cancelling of classes and college-wide teach-ins and meetings. The campus hysteria was such that a student claimed to see someone in a Klan robe walking on campus at night.

It was national news. But it turned out that the posters were placed by a progressive white student seeking to troll the community into discussing racism, and the person in a Klan robe likely was just a student walking wrapped in a blanket to provide warmth from the cold. The anti-Semitic postings, that included a swastika in place of a Jewish star on the Israeli flag, received relatively little focus.

No matter, the racism hoax stirred Oberlin into action. Not to look at what it is that causes a progressive white student to feel the need to create the appearance of racism so the community can talk about racism. Or what causes a progressive student to use a flyer from a known anti-Semitic website (“Jew Watch”) as a means of criticizing Israel.

Instead, the college used the incident as an opportunity to impose even more aggressive multi-cultural education requirements on students, faculty and staff.

That same spring, the Oberlin student government became one of the first to pass an anti-Israel divestment resolution brought by Oberlin Students for a Free Palestine. (The Board of Trustees later rejected the resolution.)

SFP’s agenda includes “intersectionality,” discussed above, in which Israel is tied to unrelated problems of non-whites in the United States in order to build an anti-Israel coalition. Co-opting the Black Lives Matter and other movements is the key focus of the boycott movement in the U.S. One example at Oberlin was how SFP compared Israel’s security barrier (what SFP calls the Apartheid Wall) to the wall on the U.S.-Mexican border in order to portray Israel as anti-Hispanic. Another event tied Israel to Ferguson and the Michael Brown shooting.

That group is very active on campus sponsoring a continuous series of events meant to portray Israel as a pariah and Apartheid state.

The list goes on. But perhaps the most astonishing part comes when Jacobson cites a Facebook post by a recent alumna:

I don’t want to make it seem like i hated my time at oberlin. it was a mixed bag and i got a great education and was blessed to learn from amazing professors. But i think being out of that environment has given me a chance to breathe and process everything that i learned/ encountered/ unlearned at oberlin. i learned about the historical context of anti black racism and its current manifestations and through that learning process was able to better frame and identify my own community’s struggle. However i quickly learned that process was to be kept personal and did not blend into the campus atmosphere or the collective fight for justice at oberlin. Because at oberlin, and indeed in the US overall, Jews are viewed as white and privileged (sometimes even above the avg white privilege, since yaknow, were all superrich and stuff) therefore our struggle does not intersect with other forms of racism and bigotry and ignorance that are so tenaciously fought against on campus. As a part of my processing and letting go of the pain I experienced, I will list a few memorable antisemitic moments/incidents here-
Obies feel free to read. But this is actually intended for all my friends and family outside of that circle…

1. The multiple times the Holocaust was referred to as “white on white crime” by my POC peers and hip white Jewish peers, (erasing the fact that ashkenazi jews were NOT seen as white and were being killed in the name of eugenics and white purity and also erasing the fact that blacks, Roma, and north african Jews were also killed in the camps.)

2. That time a Jewish person made a comment on fb saying “the only reason people care about the Holocaust is because it happened to white people” and got tons of likes from white and POC friends alike (Erasing the fact that the western world only decided to care a few decades after the fact, when it wasnt as fresh, and theyd had the time to really work out the details of how they were going to frame it and make it look like the US were the heroes liberating the camps after the US government knew what was being planned by Hitler, knew waht happening while it was happening, and did nothing. Not to mention sending Jewish immigrants trying to escape before the war broke out back to Europe to die in the gas chambers.) This is just one example of Jewish obies stepping all over their ancestors memory in order to climb the white-ally-social-ladder-of-justice-and-excellence i cannot understand it as anything other than self hatred masked by love of “the other”…

There's much more. But that dismissal of the Holocaust as "white on white crime” is a jaw-dropper. Has it really come to this?