The New School for Social Research plans to host a panel this evening titled “Anti-Semitism and the Struggle for Justice”; participants include the Palestinian-American activist Linda Sarsour (infamous for such comments as “nothing is creepier than Zionism”) and two representatives of Jewish Voice for Peace, an organization dedicated to anti-Israel propagandizing. At the same time, the panel includes no speakers with a record of opposing anti-Semitism or defending the Jewish state, or of representing any political orientation outside the far left. Phyllis Chesler, herself an alumna of the New School, comments:

The description of the panel tells us: “Anti-Semitism is harmful and real. But when anti-Semitism is redefined as criticism of Israel, critics of Israeli policy become accused and targeted more than the growing far-right. Join us for a discussion on how to combat anti-Semitism today.”

More targeted than the far-right? . . . Words almost fail me [reading the organizers’] self-serving bid for victim status: they themselves are the aggressors who maliciously conflate anti-Semitism, which they practice, with “criticism of Israel,” as if the all-powerful Jewish Lobby is now threatening to shut down even the most innocent “criticism” of its actions. The canard is so transparent that it’s amazing to think that educated people believe it. But being educated has never proved to be a bar against being anti-Semitic, or being a camp follower or appeaser of haters. . . .

It is ironic: even as charges of “appropriation” are leveled at men who write about women, whites who write about non-whites, non-gays who write about gays—the single exception is that of allowing a non-Jew like Sarsour to hold forth in an academic setting as an “expert” on a subject about which she knows absolutely nothing.

The New School panel is political theater, meant to intimidate, appease, and entertain, not to educate. It is possible because hatred of Jews is in fashion on the left these days, and because academics are in denial about Islamist violence, whether it targets Jews, women, gays, or other minorities. Therefore, they seek to appease such violence by siding with it against permissible scapegoats, beginning with the Jews and Israel. Academics who should have more nuanced views of geopolitical conflicts instead view the jihadist aggressors as “victims” and their true victims . . . as perpetrators.

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.