When It Comes to Anti-Semitism, the Woke Are Fast Asleep https://mosaicmagazine.com/picks/politics-current-affairs/2020/06/when-it-comes-to-anti-semitism-the-woke-are-fast-asleep/

June 22, 2020 | Jonathan Marks
About the author: Jonathan Marks is professor and chair of politics at Ursinus College. A contributor to the Commentary blog, he has also written on higher education for InsideHigherEd, the Wall Street Journal, and the Weekly Standard.

Last week, the Washington Post published an in-depth article about a woman who appeared at a 2018 Halloween party—hosted by a Post columnist—wearing blackface. The subject of the article, who is not a public figure of any kind, was swiftly fired from her job. The same week, the comedian Chelsea Handler posted a video of a Louis Farrakhan speech on Instagram, subsequently shared by numerous other celebrities. Handler responded to the ensuing criticism by insisting that Farrakhan’s anti-Semitism might not be nice, but, in effect, it shouldn’t be held against him. While she eventually took down the video, she—unlike the partygoer—hasn’t been “cancelled.”

This double standard, whereby even a whiff of prejudice against some groups can lead to vicious censoriousness, whereas prejudice against Jews is given a pass, is what concerns Jonathan Marks when considering recent events at Florida State University, where the student-senate president Ahmad Daraldik appears to have created a website dedicated to the spurious and perverse claim that Israel harvests organs from Palestinians:

[A] student senate that quite recently, in an overwhelming vote, removed its [former] president over remarks he’d made in an online group chat—he’d stressed the incompatibility between his Catholicism [on the one hand] and queer and transgender politics on the other—voted to keep Daraldik in office. Perhaps they were motivated to do so by a letter, signed by numerous purportedly progressive organizations, that mentions Daraldik’s First Amendment rights, doesn’t mention the website, and pretends that Daraldik is the victim of a “smear campaign” to suppress legitimate criticism of Israel.

As a rule, I am not in favor of taking the extraordinary measure of removing someone from office over troubling remarks, even in student governments. Nor am I in favor of picking on young people who may well know better when they’re a little older. What we should object to and be concerned about is this: even in a time of heightened scrutiny of people’s utterances and actions, even in a time when admissions offers are being rescinded for racist social-media posts, anti-Semitism wins plaudits.

When it comes to anti-Semitism, the “woke” are fast asleep.

Read more on Commentary: https://www.commentarymagazine.com/jonathan-marks/selective-outrage-3/