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Monday, March 23, 2015

In Light of the Oklahoma Incident Is There a Double Standard When It Comes to Campus Anti-Semitism?

Hat tip Frontpage Magazine

Lindsay Schneider is a student at the University of Maryland who has penned the below article for Frontpage Magazine. He compares the recent action taken by University of Oklahoma president David Boren against white students who were caught on video singing a racist song on a bus with numerous cases of anti-Semitism, none of which have resulted in expulsions.

http://www.frontpagemag.com/2015/lindsay-schneider/jewish-university-students-and-double-standards/

This month, discredited former DePaul University professor Norman Finkelstein, an anti-Israel speaker who is himself Jewish, spoke this month at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. In his speech, he made a number of stupid comments. One of them was that Jews were using anti-Semitism as a "ploy" to deflect criticism of Israel. This is nothing new for Finkelstein. He has a long history of denying anti-Semitism among his pro-Palestinian allies.

But that is Finkelstein. He is a fool. Of more concern are university presidents and chancellors who fails to confront the threat out of fear of offending their Muslim students and the organizations like CAIR who support them.

With all due respect to the black students at Norman, Oklahoma, who were grievously hurt by that incident, anti-black racism is not the biggest problem of intolerance on university campuses. It is not even close. The biggest problem of intolerance on campus today is anti-Semitism. Yet another campus, State University of New York at Purchase has been visited by swastikas. It is a growing trend. There should be no difference as to whom the victim group is or the perpetrator group is.

David Horowitz himself experienced this double standard first hand in 2010 when he spoke at UC San Diego, and a female member of the Muslim Student Association expressed her support with a statement by the leader of Hezbollah that all Jews should gather in Israel so that the task of hunting them down would be easier. Later, she "clarified" her comment, and the administration declared the case closed. That was in stark contrast to the strong reaction from the same school the same year to the so-called Compton Cookout and the discovery of a noose in the library. The campus was turned upside down in a show of support for black students even though both incidents are still cloaked in mystery.

No group on campus should be singled out for harassment, discrimination or hate. The university has a responsibility to protect its students from that. It has a responsibility to be even-handed. Hate is hate. It does not belong on campus.

1 comment:

Siarlys Jenkins said...

Finkelstein was in Madison? First I've heard of it. Hasn't made much of a splash, except of course at Fousesquawk. I wonder if our good friend from UCI traveled to the midwest to call him "Norm."