Mick Hartley

Some clues as to how young Americans have reached this point – like those in Philadelphia unashamedly celebrating the killing of Jews – can be found in the universties that teach this stuff.

Fathom has put together a Universities in Crisis series special issue – see Derek Spitz, wondering When did pogroms go progressive?, and Cary Nelson on Hamas enthusiast Lara Sheehi.

Here's David Litman – Glorifying Atrocities: The Case of Brown University:

Hamas gleefully livestreamed to the world its orgy of violence and cruelty against some 1,400 Israelis – including women, children, the elderly, the disabled, and even Holocaust survivors. Nearly 79 years after the liberation of Auschwitz, we’re once again seeing innocent Jews burned alive by believers of a genocidal ideology. And whereas many Germans at least had the sense to feign ignorance of the death camps next door, academics are now openly declaring atrocities against Jews as ‘exhilarating.’

How did we get to this point?

To illustrate, consider Brown University and its Center for Middle East Studies (CMES), which houses an endowed professorship in ‘Palestinian Studies.’

Far from a rigorous, scholarly study of Palestinian history or the region, what one finds at Brown’s CMES is an attempt to indoctrinate students in an all-encompassing ideology in which colonialism is the ultimate evil and the Jewish people and their history are synonymous with ‘colonialism.’ Violence, including terrorism, is justified as a legitimate measure against that evil.

It begins with pseudointellectual activists twisting Jewish history and identity into a conspiracy theory, not unlike how neo-Nazi ideology operates.

At Brown, it begins with students being taught that Jews aren’t a distinct people; they are either ‘Europeans’ or ‘Arabs.’ According to one Brown University professor, Ariella Azoulay, they can even be ‘Muslim Jews’ whose Muslim identity has been repressed by colonialism. Whatever Jews are, they are not really Jews, the messaging goes. It’s only a slightly more sophisticated version of the Khazar Jews conspiracy. The intended point is that Jews aren’t a legitimate people, let alone a nation, and therefore cannot have a right to self-determination. Jewish history is thus also erased. As one invited faculty speaker told students, Jewish history in the Land of Israel is nothing more than a ‘mythology.’

The logic proceeds, then, that if Jews are not actually a people, then their belief otherwise is based on a lie, a conspiracy. Sure enough, that is another message being delivered at Brown. Zionism isn’t a genuine belief; it is instead a cover for European colonialism.

And so it goes.

In one syllabus, Professor Beshara Doumani, who holds the endowed professorship in Palestinian Studies at Brown, told students that Israel’s creation is just ‘another tragic example of a global phenomenon of European capitalist expansion and imperial conquest that has devasted indigenous populations.’ In the words of another Brown University professor, Tony Bogues, rather than a movement for self-determination, Zionism is ‘a business of theft.’ The logic echoes that in Hitler’s Mein Kampf, which proclaimed that Zionists were trying to ‘slyly dupe the dumb Goyim’ to build a ‘central organization for their international world swindle…’ The Jews have duped the world into believing they’re a people so they could steal some land, goes Bogues’s logic….

Coming soon to a university near you.

Consider that the professor who taught a course this year on ‘Anti-Semitism, Racism, Anti-Zionism: Debates, Contexts, Stakes’ and was recorded in 2021 telling students that ‘Jewish mob[s],’ which he also refers to as ‘Kristallnacht mobs,’ were ‘thirsty for Palestinian blood.’ Combining a blood libel with Holocaust inversion is quite a feat of moral depravity. Somehow, that made him the perfect moral authority at Brown University to talk to students about antisemitism and anti-Zionism.