Douglas Murray comments on the current climate at universities, where student protestors use aggressive and sometimes violent methods to silence speakers, and an individual’s opinions can be dismissed on the basis of his “privilege”:
For years, American and Canadian students have played around with a new form of morality in education. It is based not on a traditional concept of searching for truth or investigating and analyzing ideas, but rather on the concept that the veracity of an opinion can be discerned by the person uttering it. In this way, a considerable number of people have apparently decided that a variety of “privileges” exist that make some speakers vital to listen to and others unnecessary, unless they agree to mouth a set of pre-ordained platitudes. This concept, coupled with the idea that minorities require special protection from speech, has now finally delivered the moral breakdown that was always waiting for it. . . .
When you consistently break down a society along racial and sectarian lines for short-term political and personal gain, there is bound to be a group that must in the end lose out. That group may just turn out to be a minority as well.
Sure enough, [recently] some pamphlets turned up on the campus of the University of Illinois at Chicago. Like so many leaflets before them, these talked about the scourge of “privilege.” And who did these pamphlets identify as the people with the most privilege? Why, the Jews, of course. Or, as the pamphlets put it, “Ending white privilege . . . starts with ending Jewish privilege.”
As with the Occupy Wall Street movement a few years ago, which also ended up with anti-Semitism at its core, who could seriously not have seen that this would be where all this would end? At present, the people who preach tolerance in the United States and Canada are turning out to be the least tolerant. And the people who complain of discrimination turn out to be opening the door to practitioners of the oldest discrimination of all.
Read more on Gatestone: https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/10144/campus-minority-priorities