In a recent issue of its official publication, the University and College Union (UCU)—the UK’s major professional organization for faculty and graduate students at institutions of higher learning—called on its members to join in next January’s observance of Holocaust Memorial Day. The statement included a long list of victims of the Nazis, including trade unionists, Communists, homosexuals, prostitutes, and “non-Jewish Poles.” Absent from the list were Jews, Polish or otherwise. Incidentally, the UCU in 2011 endorsed a cultural and academic boycott of Israel. Edward Alexander comments:

The late [historian] Lucy Dawidowicz once referred . . . to the widespread practice of stealing the Holocaust from its European Jewish victims by a host of groups who not only hate but also envy Jews for having been destroyed. “How dare the Jews,” she seemed to hear them complaining, “monopolize all that beautiful Holocaust suffering which other aggrieved groups would very much like to share, ex post facto, with them.” . . .

The most determined, sustained, and dangerous attempt to steal the Holocaust from its Jewish victims was begun by the Soviet Union and the Arab world after the 1967 war, and soon became, as it remains today, one of the most lethal weapons deployed against the land and people of Israel. Making Jews into metaphors proved the prelude to making Zionism into the new Nazism, the Israelis into the new Nazis, and the Palestinian Arabs into the Jews. . . .

When the predictable barrage of complaint arrived, the editors [of the UCU journal] blamed a “drafting” error for the indelicate omission of the only group selected by the Nazi regime for total annihilation. But which is more revealing of the lower depths of British academia, the conscious lie or the unconscious one?

While it is commendable that administrators of several universities finally called upon police to crack down on violent and disruptive anti-Israel protests, the actions they have taken may be insufficient. At Columbia, demonstrators reestablished their encampment on the main quad after it had been cleared by the police, and the university seems reluctant to use force again. The school also decided to hold classes remotely until the end of the semester. Such moves, whatever their merits, do nothing to fix the factors that allowed campuses to become hotbeds of pro-Hamas activism in the first place. The editors of National Review examine how things go to this point:

Since the 10/7 massacre, Columbia’s Jewish students have been forced to endure routine calls for their execution. It shouldn’t have taken the slaughter, rape, and brutalization of Israeli Jews to expose chants like “Globalize the intifada” and “Death to the Zionist state” as calls for violence, but the university refused to intervene on behalf of its besieged students. When an Israeli student was beaten with a stick outside Columbia’s library, it occasioned little soul-searching from faculty. Indeed, it served only as the impetus to establish an “Anti-Semitism Task Force,” which subsequently expressed “serious concerns” about the university’s commitment to enforcing its codes of conduct against anti-Semitic violators.

But little was done. Indeed, as late as last month the school served as host to speakers who praised the 10/7 attacks and even “hijacking airplanes” as “important tactics that the Palestinian resistance have engaged in.”

The school’s lackadaisical approach created a permission structure to menace and harass Jewish students, and that’s what happened. . . . Now is the time finally to do something about this kind of harassment and associated acts of trespass and disorder. Yale did the right thing when police cleared out an encampment [on Monday]. But Columbia remains a daily reminder of what happens when freaks and haters are allowed to impose their will on campus.