Campus Wars
4:35 p.m.
University staff have gone far beyond criticism of Israel in recent weeks
by Laurel Duggan
Colombian students take part in a vigil honoring Israelis killed on October 7. Credit: Getty
The diversity, equity and inclusion sector has been rocked by several recent conflicts related to anti-Semitism. George Washington University postponed a diversity summit last week over concerns about the “current climate,” after a group of students projected messages on a campus building saying “glory to our martyrs,” “liberate Palestine from the river to the sea” and “GWU is complicit in the genocide in Gaza”. The University wrote that the postponement was related to campus safety as well as the “pain” felt by students.
Institutions across the country – and diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) departments in particular – appear to be facing the same problem. The advocacy group StopAntisemitism found in its 2022 report report that the majority of universities evaluated did not include Jews in their DEI programs.
Talk to Remove the herd, Cornell law professor William A. Jacobson claimed that at his university “opponents of Israel seek to racialize what is a religious and national conflict to form coalitions of ‘colored’ students against Israel and the “White” Jews. He suggested that this process has accelerated since the university announcement an anti-racist initiative in early June 2020, following the murder of George Floyd.
Cornell came under scrutiny after history professor Russell Rickford said he was “excited” about the Hamas attacks of October 7, and the FBI is currently investigate recent anti-Semitic threats made against its Jewish student center.
“I have seen no reaction from feminist and women’s rights groups, which significantly overlap with pro-Palestinian groups, to the use of rape and sexual abuse by Hamas, including the rape of dead Israeli women,” Jacobson said. “It may be old-fashioned hatred of Jews, but I think it’s more likely because ‘social justice’ movements on campuses, including at Cornell, have been conditioned by DEI’s obsession with race, which views Israeli Jews as so uniquely evil that resistance “by any means necessary is promoted, embraced and excused.”
In March, Tabia Lee discovered the extent to which the DEI industry targets certain viewpoints. Former faculty director of the Office of Equity, Social Justice and Multicultural Education at De Anza Community College in Cupertino, California, she was licensed from his position after welcoming Jewish speakers to campus to discuss anti-Semitism and the Holocaust, and attempting to organize a multi-faith heritage event.
“I witnessed anti-Semitism every week during my two years as a faculty director of “diversity, equity and inclusion,” she said. wrote in the New York Post this month. “DEI’s toxic ideology deliberately fuels hatred toward Israel and the Jewish people. Lee described the industry as “founded on the unshakable belief that the world is divided into two groups of people: the oppressors and the oppressed.” In this framework, “Jews are categorically placed in the category of oppressors, while Israel is called a ‘genocidal, settler-colonialist state'”, and “criticizing Israel and the Jewish people is not only acceptable but laudable.”
Last week, Sophia Hasenfus – head of diversity, equity and belonging at MIT – came under fire for liking a tweet claiming that Israel is guilty of genocide and has no right to exist. Meanwhile, the City University of New York (CUNY), which has been subject to multiple Title VI sanctions complaints for alleged anti-Semitic discrimination, hiring Saly Abd Alla, Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) supporter and former civil rights director of the Minnesota chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), as chief diversity officer in 2021.
The problem is not limited to academia: Google’s former head of diversity, Kamau Bobb, was moved in another department of the company in 2021 after a blog post in which he wrote that Jews have an “insatiable appetite for war” and an “insensitivity to the suffering (of) others” resurfaced.
The same year, a report of the conservative Heritage Foundation found widespread and excessive hostility toward Israel in the Twitter activities of DEI university staff. Tweets they wrote, shared or liked about Israel included numerous mentions of apartheid, colonialism, genocide and the targeting of children, according to the report. While Israel was mentioned three times as often as China, 96% of tweets about Israel were rated negative. The corresponding figure for tweets about China was 38%.
