The Patriot Post® · Harvard's Anti-Semitism Task Force Disaster
About a month ago, this author reported on Harvard’s dubious nomination of Derek Penslar as co-chair of the anti-Semitism task force, which also addresses “Islamophobia.” The critique of his appointment at the time was that Penslar was clearly biased against the Jewish people living in their ancestral homeland. Moreover, in another one of his writings, he stated that the “veins of hatred run through Jewish civilization.” It’s not too much to assert that this particular co-chair may not be an appropriate choice for an anti-Semitism task force.
Lo and behold, this seems to be exactly the case. Over the weekend, business professor Raffaella Sadun abruptly resigned as the other co-chair for this task force. She is the second to take such an action. The first was Rabbi David Wolpe, who objected to the very framework under which the task force was operating. The oppressor/oppressed dynamic placed Jews in general and Israel in particular as the evil oppressor and Hamas and the Palestinians as the oppressed.
Sadun allegedly resigned because no one on the task force was interested in actually addressing the very real and dangerous Jew hatred that infests Harvard’s campus — from its academic staff all the way to its students. In other words, the task force is content to do nothing, just as Harvard was initially intent on leaving Claudine Gay in place as Harvard’s president even after she testified before Congress that calls for genocide against Israel were only subject to disciplinary action based on the “context.”
In doubling down on a harmful Racial Marxism idea that puts Palestinians as the oppressed people and Israel as the oppressor, Harvard has flipped good and evil on its head. Interestingly, Noah Feldman, a professor at Harvard Law School, recently wrote in Time magazine: “In each iteration, antisemitism reflects the ideological preoccupations of the moment. In antisemitic discourse, Jews are always made to exemplify what a given group of people considers to be the worst feature of the social order in which they live. … Because antisemitic ideology isn’t accountable to real-life facts, its content can be altered and changed as a society’s worries and moral judgments shift. Antisemitism’s capacity to keep its familiar character while also channeling new fears is what confers its stunning capacity to reinvent itself.”
This very apt summation of the anti-Semitism problem on American college campuses should give reasonable people pause about sending their children to be indoctrinated in this new form of evil disguised as social justice.
Harvard represents what was once considered the very best in U.S. academia and has deservedly gotten a lot of criticism for its Racial Marxism and moral equivalence that’s blinding it from protecting its students. However, it’s hardly the only school that has this problem.
UC Berkeley had an event on its campus in which Jewish students invited an IDF soldier to speak. The students were forced to flee as a mob of protesters made up of professors and other students broke windows and threatened them.
Columbia University, which also has had incident after incident of anti-Jewish, anti-Israel protests and intimidation, has now given a professorship to a man who is openly pro-Hamas, pro-Hezbollah, and pro-Palestinian Islamic Jihad. Islamic scholar Mohamed Abdou joined the staff on January 16, and to give you an idea about who Abdou is as a professor, The Washington Free Beacon reports: “Abdou teaches a weekly class on ‘Decolonial-Queerness & Abolition,’ where his students discuss ‘transnational feminist discourses’ and ‘queer of color critiques.’ The self-described ‘Muslim anarchist’ has also emerged as a friend to Columbia’s anti-Israel community.”
If this is the state of our elite universities, run mainly by the radical Left, then one is left asking the American Jewish community: Why are you still voting for this?