Columbia University Library

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Between the kangaroo court show trials of Donald Trump, the continued persecution of the J6 political prisoners, whose fates (and most likely ours too) are tied to his, and the constant barrage of depredations that are tearing this country apart, it’s way too easy to become inured and numbed by it all. Yet, the explosion of virulent and increasingly violent anti-Semitism across college campuses nationwide is something that even with all of the aforementioned I just cannot fathom, let alone accept. It hits way too close to home for me for a couple of reasons. First and foremost, my being a Jew and the son of a Holocaust survivor. But worst of all, scenes reminiscent of what happened nearly 100 years ago in Germany are being played out in New York City, arguably the most Jewish city on the planet outside of Israel post–World War II. The New York City that I was born and raised in. Except that New York City, for a host of reasons, like the prewar Eastern Europe chronicled through the lens of Roman Vishniac, is now a vanished world.

What is happening at Columbia and NYU, and I fear soon to hit (if it hasn’t hit already) my alma mater Brooklyn College, is the nail in the coffin. Looking back, even a place like NYC that is so identified with Jews, liberalism, and multiethnic communities living cheek to jowl and even intermingled was never immune to racial and ethnic tensions. In fact, human nature made those tensions inevitable. Most infamous was Al Sharpton’s inflammatory rhetoric that set Crown Heights ablaze in 1991 and Freddy’s Fashion Mart four years later in Harlem. Both incidents involved the blood libeling of Jews for imaginary crimes against blacks. Despite the horror Sharpton wrought, we all managed to greater or lesser extents to put it behind us in order to live and let live. Rose-colored glasses? Perhaps.

Nevertheless, ten years after that, with the ruins of the World Trade Center still smoldering, the Al Sharptons of this world, both black and white, blamed Israel and spread the insane lie that Jews were warned ahead of time to stay away from the buildings on 9/11/01. Still, decent, sane folks outnumbered the crazies, and life went on as before. On the surface, anyway.

On that day, what should have been obvious to anyone with eyes to see was the true, bloody nature of Islam. Instead, America and much of the world set their gaze directly on their navels. The cries of “What did we do to make them so angry as to want to do this to us?” came from far and wide. Most disappointingly from our own government, in the form of George W. Bush declaring that we weren’t at war with Islam. Of course, most vociferously from the more radical corners of the Democrat Party that have always had a hate on for Israel along with America itself. Worst and loudest of all from America’s colleges and universities.

Yet 23 years on, it’s stunning to me how so many people, most dishearteningly my fellow Jews, are shocked—SHOCKED!—at why this sudden eruption of campus Jew-hatred in the wake of the savage 10/7 Hamas attack on Israel happened. Of course, it’s neither shocking nor stunning nor sudden when all of the signs taken in context with actual history have been in one’s face for decades.

I guess the perfect illustration of the dichotomy of being book smart, intellectual, worldly, etc. with that of woefully lacking in plain old common sense comes from none other than the estimable Alan Dershowitz:

Dershowitz expressed profound disappointment in his party’s failure to address the pro-Palestine demonstrations at Columbia University that have been ongoing since last Wednesday.

“We’re hearing nothing from Democrats. We are hearing nothing from Chuck Schumer,” Dershowitz explained. “We’re hearing nothing really direct from [sham] President Biden. He made a very disappointing statement. In the same breath, he talked about the demonstrators in passing and he said, ‘but you have to understand the Palestinian situation.’ No, you don’t have to understand the Palestinian situation. When people are calling for rape and murder and beheading. The Democrats are an extraordinary disappointment.”

“I am no longer presumptively voting for Democrats,” he added. “I’m gonna vote for whoever is the best candidate, that may include Democrats, but I have no loyalty anymore to the party.”

Dershowitz criticized college admissions practices and Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) policies, which he argued have contributed to the recent issues observed at prestigious universities.

“Many of the students [protesting] today are unqualified students,” Dershowitz said. “They were admitted because of DEI. They were admitted because Qatar and other Arab countries are paying for foreign students. These are not the best and the brightest students, they are the loudest students, but they’re certainly not students who are looking out for the best interests of America.”

Oh, counselor, with all due respect, get your head out of your rectal orifice and wake the hell up! You haven’t heard from Schumer? Not even two weeks ago he and most of the party, that despite what you say you still bitterly cling to, attempted to foment a color revolution to overthrow the Netanyahu government during wartime. And as for your railing against unqualified students from Muslim countries infiltrating academia, you completely disregard the capture of American academia by our own native-born terrorists with doctorates and tenure whose mission is the brainwashing of America’s youth to hate and overthrow this country. The loudest voices at these near pogroms are those.

Forget Israel and Jews for a moment. Since at least the end of World War II, American colleges and universities have been focused on dismantling this nation, its culture, Western civilization, and Judeo-Christianity, erasing the accomplishments of 1,000 years of human development achieved slowly and painfully at times and taking us back to what will be the darkest of dark ages. And that rot can be found now in pre-K through high schools.

To not have seen the likes of Edward Said, Rashid Khalidi, Theodore Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, William Ayers, Ward Churchill, and thousands upon thousands just like them, less well-known but no less infamous for the raping of the American mind, is to have been willfully blind. While I’m loath to criticize someone as prominent as Dershowitz for saying generally what needs to be said at this time, which of course should be encouraged, my castigation stands. Unless and until you deprogram yourself from no doubt decades of propaganda that you’ve been stewing in that Democrats are the good guys, who are for the downtrodden and the little guy, and Republicans are the Nazis, better you should just keep quiet. All the equivocation you spout in a desperate attempt to preserve the fictitious image about a party and political movement that you idolized and dedicated yourself is an exercise in radioactive turd-polishing.

Give it up. Let it go.

And ditto for multibillionaire Robert Kraft opening his eyes as to what all his multimillion dollars of donations to Columbia has bought.

Kraft, 82, called for academics with secure jobs at the Ivy League school to be held accountable for incendiary remarks and lectures that some argue have indoctrinated students to hate Israel.

“We have professors who, instead of teaching how to think, are trying to tell our young people what they should think,” the billionaire former Columbia University donor told Fox News host Sean Hannity. “I think one of the biggest problems that we have to do something about is really tenure at these universities,” Kraft added. “Where people can do things and don’t have accountability.”…

Kraft said he was dismayed by the level of antisemitism he’s witnessed on college campuses since Oct. 7, 2023.

“I never thought I’d see what’s going on in America, what’s happening right now, and it really pains me to see it,” he said.

Really? I seem to recall Robert Kraft being a team owner about the time that a Brillo-headed scrub named Colin Kaepernick got a whole bunch of players around the league to take a knee during the playing of “The Star-Spangled Banner.” In all fairness, I don’t know what his reaction to that was, and I’d like to give him the benefit of the doubt that he was equally disgusted. But what did the coaches and the owners do back then? IIRC, not a whole hell of a lot to discourage that behavior.

I thought Kraft and his ilk were savvy businessmen. Perhaps the image of the ivy-covered walls of academia got him bamboozled, but look what’s been going on with his and his colleagues’ money in his own business, right under his nose.

The left-wing nonprofit that bailed out anti-Israel protesters who blocked bridges and highways across the country last week was a multi-year partner of the NFL’s “Inspire Change program” whose work is still promoted on the NFL’s website.

Community Justice Exchange set up a “bail and legal defense fund” for those arrested during last week’s A15 protests. The protests targeted major airports, highways, and bridges in dozens of U.S. cities including San Francisco, Chicago, New York City, and Philadelphia. Their explicit goal was to disrupt economic “choke points” to maximize financial disruption, as explained on their website.

The partnership appears to have since lapsed—the nonprofit wasn’t on the list of grantees announced in May 2023. The NFL’s “Inspire Change” website lists Community Justice Exchange under “Previous Grant Recipients” and still includes a link to the group’s website.

The NFL’s promotion of the left-wing group underscores the extent to which anti-Israel groups have been propped up by major donors and institutions in the United States. Community Justice Exchange is also a project of the Tides Center—a left-wing dark money network funded by George Soros and other prominent liberal billionaires like Pierre Omidyar. The Tides Center serves as a hub for a variety of left-wing groups, channeling substantial funds from affluent donors and functioning as a “fiscal sponsor,” enabling them to sidestep IRS registration.

To paraphrase Robert Frost, the rot is ugly, dark and deep. And if you’ve decided to return to watching the NFL just because Kaepernick has vanished from the scene, you’re stupid.

While Sen. Josh Hawley has called on Joey Sponge-Brain Sh*ts-Pants to activate the National Guard to ensure the protection of Jewish students at Columbia U, Eric Adams, the mayor of the completely rotten apple, belched up this hideous equivocation:

But I also look back to Little Rock, AR, and what it meant for African Americans to be escorted on campuses because they were afraid for their lives. And that is what I see when I see Jewish students going through this at this moment. There is no place for hate in this city. I don’t care if it’s antisemitism, Islamophobia, anti-Sikhism. We don’t have a place for that, and I don’t want to be, and I won’t be the mayor where you have to take off your hijab, your yarmulke, or your turban when you enter a place of higher education or use our transportation system or walk our streets.

The pathetic attempt to both condemn the assault on Jews, and downplaying it with false equivocations of virtually nonexistent Islamophobia and anti-Sikhism, to try and preserve the votes of those instigating the pogroms, is disgusting. But it’s typical. Funny he brings up Little Rock because it was the Democrat Party that instigated a Civil War to preserve slavery, that created the KKK as a terrorist organization to intimidate freed black slaves, that instituted Jim Crow laws to keep them down, that opposed civil rights legislation and created a gigantic welfare state that has committed genocide against blacks and kept them as virtual slaves to Big Government. And he has the unmitigated gall to invoke Little Rock?

Speaking of Rashid Khalidi, as bad as Eric Adams was, Barack Obama desecrated the Passover holiday by equating “Palestinians” with Jews in bondage to Pharaoh. That was the thrust of his Passover message.

I’ve asserted that as a nation, we are arguably more divided now than we were in 1860, on the eve of the Civil War. Today the divide is no longer about two sides disagreeing about an issue or issues, even ones as existentially serious as slavery. It’s about one side’s hatred of the nation it allegedly is a part of, and its obsession with destroying it, and the other side that seeks its preservation.

Are we willing to do whatever is necessary to preserve our freedom? The other side has clearly demonstrated what it is willing to do to take it away. That requires self-preservation “by any means necessary.”

It is a sad state of affairs that owing to 100 years of the overturning of the Constitution because of the will to power of several generations of our so-called elites, as well as the societal dissolution that has erased morality and ethics of not only the aforementioned but at far too many of our erstwhile fellow citizens, we must now fundamentally re-transform America. Either back to the way it was or to some other state wherein those who destroyed it in the first place are never, ever in a position to do it again.

As Allen Ludden or Bert Convy might say, the password is Revolution. And like seeing New York City “fundamentally transformed” into Nuremberg-on-the-Hudson, contemplating such a thing is also unfathomable. So far.