The silence among campus leaders amid hostile anti-Israel protests on campuses over the last week have proven one thing: administrators who constantly claim it’s their priority to make their campuses a safe space for all students are liars.
More precisely, they only care about making their campuses a safe space for black, Latino and Native American students. When it comes to Jewish and Israel-supporting students, they’re indifferent at best and hostile at worst.
Whenever a major event occurs in the nation or across the globe, campus presidents and DEI deans are quick to fire off memos that bemoan and handwring about the incident.
For example, after Donald Trump was elected president in 2016, administrators across the nation assured students their campuses would be safe spaces despite a Republican in the White House. After George Floyd was killed, students’ inboxes were filled with claims that America is a horrible, wretched, racist place, and given assurances their campuses would be safe, supportive cocoons amid the chaos. In the aftermath of the Charlottesville and Jan. 6 protests, DEI deans were quick to seize on the opportunity to pen missives to whine, play victim, and offer counseling.
However, in the aftermath of terrorist attacks against Israel, in which 1,100 people — civilians, including children who were butchered, women who were raped, and families who were gunned down inside their homes — crickets. No emails pledging support. No condemnations of the horrific evils perpetrated against the only Democratic nation in the Middle East.
The campus leaders who have put out statements recently offered only milquetoast responses that tip-toe around the issue and fail to condemn terrorism and the calls for the Hamas-backed annihilation of the Jewish race.
Less than a week after the attacks, dozens of campuses hosted aggressive, rabid pro-Palestinian student protests on campuses celebrating the terrorist attacks, again with nary a peep from campus leaders. Now, finally, these university officials care about free speech.
Writing in City Journal, Abigail Shrier put it this way: “With the rare exception of the University of Florida, fortunate to be led by former United States Senator Ben Sasse, university presidents met these student loyalty pledges to Hamas and celebrations of the massacre with silence. Or with a refusal to wade into the issue. Or with gutless word salads that invariably failed to condemn the student groups, much less punish their members.”
Shrier pointed out the pro-Palestinian student rallies effectively support the genocide of Jews.
“Allowing students to rally in support of Hamas is more akin to allowing a Ku Klux Klan demonstration on campus, in the days after white supremacists had killed African Americans. What would Harvard do in that situation? It’s a ludicrous thought experiment on its face: We know precisely what Harvard would do, and how swiftly they would condemn the rallies, shut them down, punish the students involved, and rush to safeguard the lives of black students on campus,” Shrier wrote.
But take a look at what happened at the University of Wisconsin Madison, for example. It refused to condemn pro-Hamas demonstrators who chanted “glory to the murders.”
This isn’t about free speech, this is about the selective outrage and deep hypocrisy campus leaders have shown in the last week.
“DEI bureaucracies are hotbeds of antisemitism,” wrote Adam Novak for the Daily Signal. “Heritage scholar Jay Greene looked at tweets by DEI staff at colleges and universities and found that they ‘pay a disproportionately high amount of attention to Israel and nearly always attack Israel.'”
“In fact, 96% of their tweets or retweets about Israel were critical of the Jewish state. In contrast, 62% of their tweets about China (which is currently carrying out a genocide against its minority Uyghur Muslim population) were positive,” Novak wrote. “In other words, instead of fighting antisemitism on campuses to make them more ‘inclusive,’ DEI staff are fueling hostility toward Jews. And now, we’re seeing the results.”
IMAGE: NBC News screenshot
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