Pro-Israel Lobby and Extremist Jews Seeking to Remake US Higher Education in a Facist Image: The Example of Harvard
Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju
It has now become a crime to criticize Israeli Palestinian policy if you are a US public figure or if you work in US education.
It has become dangerous, in those contexts, to reference Israel's paradoxical partial responsibility for the terrorism of Hamas.
People are urged, even compelled, to condemn Hamas' terrorism but must never criticize Israeli terrorism and it's genocidal bombardment of Gaza nor call for a ceasefire in that month long bombardment undertaken in response to Hamas' murderous attacks on Israeli civilians and soldiers and abduction of hostages on Oct. 7, 2023.
These are now the unwritten rules if you are UN Sec Gen, Harvard President or a public personality in the US, as events have shown in response to the efforts of those figures and the backlash in response from Israel and it's US supporters.
Do any of those things at your own risk.
This is the message being strongly communicated by the US pro-Israel lobby and by those Jews who have come together to urge Harvard take a hard stance against pro-Palestinian student groups at Harvard, these pro-Israel figures claiming they are decrying anti -Semitism at Harvard, equating criticism of Israel with anti-Semitism, one of the most volatile terms in Western society.
These are dangerous attitudes by pro-Israel groups who have refused to be mollified by Harvard repeatedly bending over backward to accommodate them.
They are abusing their power as donors to Harvard by escalating pressure on the university, trying to make it a Facist pro-Israel enclave.
The Harvard President has tried to accommodate them. The Harvard Rector has tried to accommodate them.
Yet these groups are insisting on remaking the institution in the image of their narrow world views even as the entire world outside Western governments cries out against the ongoing genocide by Israel in Gaza.
At this juncture, we should look back at Jewish history and re-examine claims of abuse of power by Jews as fuel for European anti-Semitism.
I'm not suggesting such claims are accurate. I'm not trying to blame the victim.
I'm suggesting that the current effort by pro-Israel Jews to shape US higher education in the image of their own partisanship plays into the hands of those who have alleged Jewish exceptionalism and group centred interests against the interests of communities to which they belong as justifications for anti-Semitism.
As it is, Israel has lost the war of public credibility across the world, even in the West.
The struggle to blunt the culture of multiplicity of perspectives at the core of Western higher education cannot succeed to the benefit of those institutions.
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