A New Strategy on Campus: Blame the Jews
In a riveting and sad New York Times op-ed, Blake Flayton, a student at George Washington University and a “gay abortion rights advocate and environmentalist,” explained why his fellow progressives call him a “baby killer” and “apartheid enabler.” Like 95 percent of Jews, according to Gallup, the op-ed’s author has a “favorable” view of Israel.
George Washington University has been in the news lately for a blatant kind of anti-Semitism. A “pro-Palestinian” student was captured on video, saying, “We’re going to f**king bomb Israel, bro. F**k out of here, Jewish pieces of s**t.” The student, who says she was intoxicated, has apologized profusely and claimed she didn’t “even know why I said that.” I take her at her word. But the line between “Zionist” and “Jew” can be thin in anti-Israel discourse. In vino veritas.
It remains only to note that blaming the Jewish state for every species of injustice is a feature of the campus anti-Israel movement, not an anomaly. At the City University of New York in 2015, multiple Students for Justice in Palestine chapters signed a statement against CUNY’s “Zionist administration.” The topics? High tuition and low wages for campus workers. Jewish Voice for Peace has since 2017 been running a “Deadly Exchange” campaign, the core of which is that Israel is responsible for police violence against blacks in America. The strategy is clear enough: if you blame the Jews—sorry, “Zionism”—for everyone’s ills, you can draw more allies into your movement.
Anti-Semitism, you see, is a potent political strategy. It’s even more potent when student governments ignore Jewish students and condemn, as the student Senate at the University of Illinois-Urbana Champaign did recently, the “equation of anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism.” Four hundred Jewish students, including the lone Jew in the Senate, walked out.
https://www.commentarymagazine.com/anti-semitism/a-new-strategy-on-campus-blame-the-jews/
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