Antisemitism in America

American higher education’s scandalous embrace of antisemitism

Fatima Mohammed: the face of antisemitism at CCNY Law

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Here’s a thought experiment for you. Let‘s say that I led off a Substack article with this statement: May every Palestinian nationalist burn in the hottest pit of hell.

What would people think?

Why, they’d judge me to be a hateful bigot, a disgusting racist and a rotten excuse for a human being. And they’d be right, of course. But substitute Zionist for Palestinian nationalist and guess what? I might have qualified as a graduation speaker at City College of New York Law School’s 2023 commencement!

Fatima Mohammed, a member of the law school’s graduating class and a “student activist” was so honored on May 12, being selected by her fellow students to speak at commencement. She’s one of those ingrate immigrants in the style of that blight on the American body politic, Representative Ilhan Omar, who has similar issues with Jews. Mohammed’s speech was replete with antisemitic slurs, leavened by the usual far-left rants against capitalism, white supremacy, the patriarchy, the “fascist NYPD and military,” etc.

Though young, Mohammed has compiled a long and vile record of antisemitism. She is a member of Students for Justice in Palestine CUNY, a group that calls for “the full decolonization of all illegally held Palestinian lands.” For that read “cleansing Palestine of Jews from the river to the sea,” i.e. genocide. Hilariously, Mohammed and her comrades denounce Israel as a fascist state that practices apartheid in the style of South Africa’s defunct white minority government.

If you imagine that CUNY deplored Mohammed’s jeremiad, allow me to disabuse you. The dean of the law school, one Sudha Setty, applauded her speech. (You will not be surprised to learn that Dean Setty is an advocate of “social-justice lawyering.”) Then a law school representative piously informed the New York Post that “Members of the Class of 2023 selected student speakers who offered congratulatory remarks and their own individual perspectives on advocating for social justice. As with all such commencement remarks, they reflect the voices of those individuals.”

Get that: calling for genocide = “advocating for social justice.”

Only when the backlash against Mohammed and the college became too strident to ignore did the CCNY Board of Trustees get around to condemning her remarks as hate speech. Better late than never, I suppose. But why was she permitted to speak in the first place?

One might dismiss Mohammed as a head case, but the sad fact of the matter is that her ideology has gone mainstream on university campuses across the country. As elaborated by the postmodern Left, that ideology is a theory of everything. Zionism, capitalism, imperialism, white supremacy, racism, misogyny, transphobia, etc. are all manifestations of the same existential evil. Thus the fight against one is the fight against all. Thus revolutionary violence is virtuous. Thus the extermination of the Jewish state is justified on grounds of “social justice.” It’s the caricature of the Eternal Jew, updated for the twenty-first century.

In some ways the antisemitism of the Left echos that of the natcon Right, for instance in its claims that US foreign policy is manipulated by Israel, and that American Jews have divided loyalties. But there’s much more. In his magisterial history of modernity, Modern Times, Paul Johnson noted that once ideology supplanted religion, the demand for demons surged. Satan was no longer enough. Whole groups were demonized and marked down for destruction. For the Left it was the bourgeoisie, a class; for the Right it was various national groups, especially the Jews.

The all-inclusive ideology of the postmodern Left has produced an elaborate demonology, in which the Jews occupy a prominent niche as colonial exploiters, white supremacists and fascists. Zionism is abominated; Israel is reviled as an “apartheid state.” The long, complex conflict between the Arabs and the Jews over the title to Palestine is reduced to a puerile morality play.

To date, the main victims of this revolutionary narrative have been Jews on campus: faculty, students, visitors. By virtue of their group identity, they’re burdened with the blame for all that the comrades revile. And the comrades on campus are particularly strident.

In every generation, much is made of the vitality, idealism, and superior wisdom of Youth. That there’s nothing much to this narrative may be verified by glancing back at the role played by Youth—university students in particular—in the rise of German National Socialism. Young people are by nature conformist, dogmatic, intolerant, brimming with self-regard. Exposure to an ideology—Nazism, say, or the New Left of the Sixties—maximizes these vices. It is not surprising, therefore, that the antisemitism of the Left manifests itself so vividly in higher education. The professoriate—indeed, the whole campus culture—is monolithically Left and transmits its ideology to the student body. Not every student becomes an activist, but enough do to make life miserable for dissenters and those belonging to demonized groups, such as heterosexual white males and Jews.

The case of Lara Sheehi is illustrative. A professor of psychology at George Washington University, she is in the habit of larding her lectures with anti-Israeli and anti-Jewish comments, e.g. telling a student that “It’s not your fault you were born in Israel.” A Title VI complaint filed with the Department of Education by a group of Jewish students alleges that in the fall 2022 semester, when they complained to the university administration about her classroom behavior, the professor retaliated against them with accusations of racism and disciplinary action. She also urged other students to shame and isolate them based on their Jewish identity and spread slanderous lies about them among the psychology department faculty.

Characteristically the GWU administration tried to weasel out of its responsibilities, declaring that while it opposes antisemitism, it also respects academic freedom. Good to know!

Some may say that the facts of this case are in dispute or that the aggrieved Jewish students are exaggerating, perhaps lying. But Professor Sheehi’s Twitter presence offers convincing evidence that she’s just as heinous as they say she is. Pardon me for providing this sample:

"Destroy Zionism and commit to land back, then we’ll take you seriously you fucking genocidal fucks. Fuck you." (Tweet directed at the Israel Defense Forces.)

With faculty members like that, and student activists like Fatima Mohammed, it’s no wonder that American college campuses have become profoundly unsafe spaces for Jews. And it’s all justified by the dismal ideological obsessions of the postmodern Left, from “antiracism” to “smashing capitalism.”

Oh, and the fact that Mohammed’s screed was delivered to an audience of law school graduates reminded me of this historical tidbit: Of the fifteen participants in the Wannsee Conference, nine were lawyers.