The campus wars against the Jews
With an entire globe from which to choose, they pinpoint the
Jews — only the Jews. The one country in the world with a Jewish
majority.
Rabbi Prof. Dov Fischer
It is rather a challenging time these days for committed, devoted Jewish college students on liberal American campuses. They don’t know how to fight, seem only to defend and feel frightened, and their life experiences in being “nice” have left them utterly unprepared for the vicious Jew-hating, even Nazi-like, campaigning against them and Israel they have encountered in college.
The
academic campaign against Israel is Nazi-like. It is led by Arab
Muslims, often backed by self-hating Jewish leftist stooges, most of
whom — truly — are not even halakhic Jews. In today’s America, as many as 40 percent of people who present as “Jews” are not Jews.
In the anti-Israel camps, they predominate. Simply put, a Jew is
someone born to a Jewish mother and therefore automatically Jewish or
someone who converts to the Judaism of the Torah — conversion comprising
both the Written Law and the Oral Law
— a Judaism that includes kosher food and Sabbath observance. That
definition has been the only definition of a Jew for more than 3,300
years. Anyone not born to a Jewish mother or otherwise born to a
maternal line where the first “Jewish” matron actually “converted”
without assuming the lifestyle of a kosher kitchen, Sabbath observance,
and the like is not Jewish. Thus, for example, despite her fancy certificate when she “converted” to marry playwright Arthur Miller, Marilyn Monroe was never Jewish.
So the “good news” is that most “Jews” who oppose Israel are not even Jews in the first place.
Twenty years ago, a leading Arab Muslim Jew-hater, Omar Barghouti, proposed a “BDS” program to boycott Israel, divest from corporations dealing with Israel, and to sanction Israel. The BDS campaign has failed miserably. More investors now put their money into Israel than ever before — billions and billions. They will continue doing so because Israel is an amazing investment vehicle, a start-up free-and- democratic nation with a uniquely educated and motivated population. But on American “progressive” woke liberal-arts college campuses, students are brain-fed radical-left Intersectionalist garbage. For example, we know they have no idea what
Americais. They are fed falsified “1619 Project” history instead of true American history. They have no idea how Communism has murdered hundreds of millions. They don’t know about the blood shed brutally by Mao, Pol Pot, Stalin, Castro. Even what little they know about Hitler is mostly perverted from the truth.
That
is how AOC, a standard-bearer for the Campus Ignorant, can compare the
security agents on our southern border to German Nazis and can compare
our shelters for the Undocumented, where Americans feed them and clothe
them and even assure they have ample baby formula, to Dachau and
Auschwitz.
Ironically, many of these “progressive”
anti-Israel college students actually are more Nazi-like than they
realize. Remember: Not all Nazis murdered Jews with their hands or by
building gas chambers or crematoria. Most Nazis simply voted quietly for
Hitler and lined the streets cheering while Hitler’s motorcades drove
by. Yet they, too, were Nazis. They were the ones who gave him power to
destroy.
The Woke on America’s campuses today, as
did Hitler’s minions, single out the Jews for BDS. They can’t boycott
Arab Muslim countries because those dictatorships don’t produce anything
meaningful. But college kids could boycott China, right? China
is a hateful totalitarian dictatorship, the source of the Wuhan virus
we call COVID, torturer of Uighur Muslims, suppressor of Hong Kong. If
they sincerely cared about freedom and human rights, college kids could
boycott Nike sports shoes, Apple iPhones, and all devices made in China,
right? But they don’t.
Instead, like Hitler, with an
entire globe from which to choose, they pinpoint the Jews — only the
Jews. The one and only country in the world with a Jewish majority. That
is their extent of foreign affairs activism. They try to mask their
anti-Semitism by saying they are “only anti-Israel and anti-Zionist, not
anti-Jewish.”
Understand with crystal clarity:
Israel and Zionism are core to Judaism. You cannot be “against
anti-Semitism” but also against Israel and Zionism. It’s not either-or.
It’s both-and. Anyone against Israel and Zionism by definition is
anti-Semitic. Period. Open the Bible. Abraham was a Zionist. So
was Isaac. And Jacob. And Moses. And Joshua. And the Judges. And Kings
Saul, David, Solomon, and all the Biblical kings. And the Prophets
Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and all the Biblical prophets. And all the
rabbis of the Talmud. And Maimonides. And Yehudah Halevi. Zionism is at
Judaism’s core.
Yes, you can be against a particular government
in Israel, just as American patriots can oppose Biden’s miserable
policies and utter incompetence in America. Those political preferences
can align with deep loving attitudes towards America. Indeed, love for
America can inform opposition to those whose foolish policies would
destroy her greatness. In the same way, it is OK to oppose a Benjamin
(“Bibi”) Netanyahu or Naftali Bennett government.
So a person can love Israel, yet despise its government. But that is not what “BDS” is.
BDS is a Nazi-like ideology that says the one Jewish-majority country
in the world uniquely deserves to be boycotted, divested, sanctioned.
None others. Not Cuba. Not Venezuela. Not Qatar, Yemen, Saudi Arabia.
Not China. Not Russia.
And the thing is, Israel is
a nation of goodness. Arab Muslims have full equal rights in Israel.
The present governing coalition there exists because an Arab Muslim
party gives them the determining majority. There is an Arab Muslim on
Israel’s Supreme Court. (How many in America?) Israel pays families a
“child allowance” to encourage parents to have more kids. Guess what? Israel pays that same bounty to Arab Muslim Israelis to have more kids, too. Apartheid? Arab Muslims receive all the same benefits that Jews do in Israel.
By
contrast, for those searching for Mideast apartheid, Saudi Arabia has
no synagogues. It also has no Jews. Almost no Christians or churches
either. Arab Muslim countries expelled their 800,000 Jews and
confiscated all their property in the 1940’s and 1950’s when Israel was
born. Those Jews fled mostly to Israel. That is why, despite the Big Lie
among the Woke, Israel’s demography is majority dark-skinned Sephardic,
not Caucasian Ashkenazic.
Arab Muslim countries are
virtually universally racist and bigoted. They truly are
one-religion-only despotic lands. There are no Jewish parties in Qatar,
Yemen, and those other lands. Even in the part of Judea and Samaria now
called the “Palestine Authority,” the only Jews are those who abandoned
their Judaism and married Arab Muslims there. Otherwise, pure apartheid.
A Jew is not allowed to purchase land there. Any Arab who secretly
offers to sell land to a Jew gets executed. Apartheid, pure and simple.
Certain
student governments on certain woke liberal-arts colleges target Israel
and only Israel. Consider: They call for bans of Sabra hummus, an American-Canadian chick-peas joint-venture company based in Astoria, Queens with factories in Southern California, Virginia, and Queens. Yet they are boycotted. Why? Their name. Sabra — the nickname for Israelis. So, since the hummus is “Israel-style,” i.e. kosher Mideast style, it is Sabra. So boycott them.
Even
as these ignoramuses on campuses vote to boycott Israel, all their
administrations respond by asserting there will be no boycotts nor
divestments.
But what about the committed Jews on campus? What about their voices? Their pro-Israel activism?
Their
problem is that they do not know how to fight. At best, they defend.
They react. They never seize the offensive. It is painfully pathetic to
watch.
Except for American football, there is no
sport where players conceivably can win merely by playing defense. In
baseball, you can score only on offense. Likewise, in basketball and
hockey. Even in American football, although you theoretically can win
solely by scoring defensively — with “pick six” interception returns,
recovering fumbles in the other team’s end zone, and scoring safeties —
that is no prescription for success. Ultimately, you cannot win unless you go on the offensive.
Jews grow up, being taught to be nice. “Be nice, Marvin. Be nice, Seymour. Be nice, Sidney.”
Well,
to win on college campuses, no one is going to beat these Nazis and
their self-hating pseudo-Jewish quislings merely by being “nice.”
Rather, the squeaky wheel gets the oil, not the whining tire. Jews on
campus need to fight. They need to fight hard and to take the fight to
the Jew-haters, not just wait for the campus Nazis to attack. Don’t wait
for BDS resolutions to oppose. Instead, demand your own BDS initiatives
against China. Demand BDS against despotic apartheid Muslim countries.
Investigate and expose anti-Israel professors who violate campus rules
by posting against Israel on official campus web sites. Until cancel
culture is abandoned, why not demand canceling them?
And, for G-d’s sake, stop whining!
Adapted by the writer for Arutz Sheva from a version of this article that first appeared here in The American Spectato
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