On Wednesday, 16 April 2025 at 11:08:31 UTC+2 Oluwatoyin Adepoju wrote:
One of the great challenges of Western history is that of attitudes to the Jews.They were one of the most persecuted groups in European history in a history marked by such epochal events as their expulsion from Spain and the German Nazi created Holocaust, claiming six million Jews and decimating once thriving Jewish communities in Europe,leaving behind intergenerational traumas.The Jews have been among the most successful ethnicities in the world, as represented by the roll call of world shaping figures emerging from their ranks, the best known to me being Albert Einstein, Sigmund Freud and Karl Marx.Discriminated against in employment in Europe, one account goes, they became money lenders, eventually amassing wealth so huge they could lend to monarchs, it is said, the Rotschilds being one example of a great Jewish banking family.Adam Hayes' " The Rothschild Family: A Legacy of Banking and Influence" is a moving read on financial genius incubated by a family dynasty strategic to European history.The US has been the most welcoming place for the Jews after their dispersal through the Roman invasion centuries ago, I understand.They have achieved great wealth and after an initial period of quotas on Jewish students in universities, they have established their presence in higher education and other aspects of national life.Their influence on US foreign policy is particularly potent, with every government of every party since the US became perhaps the first country to recognize Israel in its controversial 1948 founding giving staunch support to Israel, the country founded for Jews in the Middle East after centuries of statelessness, an achievement in which such wealthy Jews as the Rotschilds played a strategic role.The support of Europe has also been steadfast, possibly recognizing in Israel a cultural ally, in contrast to their Arab neighbours, and a people to whom Europe, particularly Germany, seems to see itself as owing a debt for their suffering in European history.But, has the politicization of the Jewish success in the US not become a problem?"Now that the triumphant march has entered the last street corners, remember, O dancers, the thunder among the clouds, the lightning beneath the earth" the Nigerian poet Christopher Okigbo warned in Labyrinths, possibly responding to the various political crisis in the country in the mid 1960s, ultimately erupting in civil war.A triumphalism is sweeping Jewish related issues in the US. A dangerous triumphalism. Wealthy Jewish donors,led by Bill Ackman, were prominent in compelling govt browbeating, even humiliation, of Presidents of some of the most prestigious US universities, leading to resignations of some of them, the most prominent being Harvard's Claudine Gay, all beceause they did not condemn to the satisfaction of those donors the Hamas attack on Israel killing 1,195 people and abducting about 250 and the Presidents were described by the donors as not doing enough to address anti-semitism.It is taboo for such figures as US University Presidents to reference the the context of which the attack took place, that being the brutal Israeli occupation of Gaza, following the exiling of a good no of the population in the founding of Israel or the monumental savagery of the Israeli counter offensive which has rendered Gaza almost unlivable, destroyed almost all its infrastructure and severally displaced its people, in a combined air and land military offensive, and recurrent blockades of aid, that has so far claimed more than 50,000 men, women and children in Gaza even as Israeli settlers and army are brutally occupying more land in the other Palestinian home the West Bank, where there is no armed resistance to Israel,thereby dis enabling claims of self defense invoked to justify the anti Palestinian Gaza genocideCurrent US President Donald Trump is using the same strategy as those donors in seeking to reshape US higher education, particularly its most elite universities, in the image of a conservatives political vision in which h the govt controls the universities, enforcing on them it's own brand of thought control, of approved thinking and behaviour, to which they must conform or continue to suffer the fallout of withdrawal of huge amounts of funding from the govt.Trump is also using claims of trying to correct anti -semitism as one of his justifications, even as he cancels the visas of students who have protested in support of Palestine, that being part of a broader push to discourage the presence of foreign students in the US, particularly at the most elite universities, revoking visas over a range of normally minor issues or for no stated reason.Is this the kind of thing protection of Jews should be associated with?Responding to the ousting of Claudine Gay through the influence of wealthy donors, Robert Reich, a Jew and former US secretary of labor, professor of public policy at the University of California at Berkeley, stated -" As a Jew, I also cannot help but worry that the actions of these donors – many of them Jewish, many from Wall Street – could fuel the very antisemitism they claim to oppose, based on the age-old stereotype of wealthy Jewish bankers controlling the world".( " Powerful donors managed to push out Harvard's Claudine Gay. But at what cost" Guardian UK, 3rd Jan. 2024
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