When the history of this period is written, the universities will be described as active participants in the Hamas Islamic attacks against Jews.
I remember an article written by Alan Dershowitz four decades ago. He described the yearly invitation by the Harvard Black Student Association (BSA) of a PLO member in order to take a jab at the Jews on campus. He described the event “like the annual Spring panty raid” that one could count on taking place so that the BSA could stick it to the Jews on campus.
Fast forward nearly half a century. Wake Forest University (sic) has allowed for a talk by a virulently anti-Israel professor on guess which date: October 7th. The university has approved Rabab Abdulhadi from San Francisco State University to give a talk entitled “One Year since al-Aqsa Flood: Reflections on a Year of Genocide and Resistance.” While there is opposition to the planned presentation, as of the time of this writing, the talk is still on.
One could stop reading this article and say, “Free Speech!” The concepts of free speech that are so central to the great American experiment are more important than being offended by a professor who revels in Jewish bloodshed and wrongly describes Israel’s military response as a genocide. I could accept this argument except for some glaring problems with it.
The first issue is that Wake Forest is a private institution. First Amendment protections do not extend to businesses and the like. Thus a private business owner is well within her right to have employees sign rules of employment that severely limit their right to speak. Harvard, for example, makes it clear that it does not tolerate any speech that hurts the feelings of others or may be construed as racist or threatening. If Wake Forest had wanted, it could argue that those who have claimed that the talk hurts Jews and potentially encourages threats to Jewish members of the community are correct and that the talk cannot go on.
The second point is that Wake Forest, like any woke university or corporation, would never tolerate a talk by any individual that attacked officially protected groups. If some pro-law enforcement official was invited by a Republican student group to give the talk, “George Floyd: One Less Black Criminal on the Streets of Minneapolis,” the university would cancel the talk before the posters went up. They would claim that black students felt threatened by the subject of the talk, and while the title is technically true, the circumstances of Floyd’s death makes him a pseudo-martyr in the eyes of the left-leaning administration, faculty and students. Do you think that Wake Forest would allow a talk on the need to arrest and reprogram trans students who try to compete in women’s sports? Do you think that they would give any legitimacy for a talk that pulls the rug out from under the trans nonsense? Of course not. Words are violence—unless they are directed at Jews. One must remember that professors and administrators poll well in excess of 90 percent pro-Democrats, with only minor variations from school to school and department to department.
And this double standard has been the basic failure of the universities for the past year. I have zero doubt that if the world had continued on October 7th of last year without the massive pogrom in southern Israel, the two of the three Stooges of women university heads who beclowned themselves in front of the U.S. Congress would still be in their positions. Their jobs are to turn their institutions into leftist DEI centers—and raise piles of money to keep the schools going. But the murder of Jews and the near immediate support of their faculties and students for the depraved killers smashed the tranquility of their cushy administrative jobs. They had to make decisions. They needed to restore order. They had to punish students and faculty for demanding the mass murder of Israelis and Jews: Intifada Revolution! From the River to the Sea! And instead they punted. They could not bring themselves to punish those with whom they ideologically agree. Their perverse and demented intersectional charts showed that white Jews are ALWAYS oppressors and brownish Palestinians are ALWAYS the oppressed. The students were coming out for the underdogs; how could they punish them? How could they curtail their non-existent First Amendment rights on campus? The fact that the students, faculty and administrators were supporting barbarians who burned families alive, raped and murdered countless Jewish women, and took into brutal captivity fellow American citizens meant nothing. Whites against browns? We’re with the browns, details be damned.
So the universities, after being called out for their Jew-only hatred fests, have now taken a new tack: to bury their heads in the sands. Harvard, my decrepit alma mater, and others have declared that they will not take any public positions on events going on in the world. They think that by hiding from the world they will save themselves from ridicule and lawsuits. The program will not last: once someone like Donald Trump has attacked a sacred cow of theirs like sending illegal aliens back home or barring guys with hairy armpits from competing with women, they will get their press offices working on official condemnations. The university administrators are frauds and the schools themselves are little different from Maoist indoctrination centers of yore—except much more expensive.
Wake Forest could cancel the talk from the antisemite of the month by simply reminding students that the university has a universal speech code that does not allow speech that threatens or potentially harms any member of the community. But only gays, illegals, trans, blacks, latinos and non-Jewish women enjoy such protections. Jews are white trash in the eyes of our leftist university administrators and professors—though they love their donation dollars. I hope that if re-elected, President Trump cuts off the federal funding for any school that tolerates antisemitism on campus. With their gravy train threatened, you will finally see universities protecting their Jewish students and professors with the same vigor that they protect other minority groups. It's either the First Amendment for all or for none. No more of this "attack the Jews but keep your hands off of other minority groups."
I am grateful that I went to college at a time when Jerry Falwell and Caspar Weinberger could still be invited to campus. I am even more grateful that our children have found educational opportunities that did not require the cesspools being passed off as institutions of higher education in the United States.