Kristallnacht comes to America

Heather Mac Donald puts the finger on who invited it.

From Patch, unsettling but hardly unexpected news:

An Upper East Side restaurant specializing in kosher food was the latest target of vandals, who smashed the eatery's windows on Wednesday morning, according to reports.

On Wednesday, NYC Council Member Julie Menin stated that Rothschild TLV, located on Lexington Avenue and 78th Street, was one of two Upper East Side businesses vandalized in the last 24 hours.

Photos posted on the social media platform X, formerly known as Twitter, show that the restaurant's front window was smashed.

"TLV Rothschild is still under investigation and there is no indication of a hate crime at this time," Menin said.

Here’s the “no indication,” exactly one paragraph down:

"The window happened last night," restaurant chef Guy Kairi told The New York Post. "There were people passing by yesterday saying bad things, things like, 'No wonder this place is empty, free Palestine.'"

The restaurant's name was inspired by Rothschild Boulevard in Tel Aviv. "Our luxurious, upscale restaurant is on New York's Lexington Avenue but will give you a feeling that you are indeed in Tel Aviv with an extra added dash of Manhattan," the restaurant's website states.

How did it come to this? One might cast an eye a bit further north in Manhattan to Columbia University, home of rampant (and rampantly coddled) anti-Semitism. But that’s not it; Columbia is less the cause and more the consequence of something much bigger. Heather Mac Donald explains what’s actually going on with insight and punch I can’t hope to equal.

On 7 May, Joe Biden condemned the ‘anti-Semitic posters’, the ‘slogans calling for the annihilation of Israel’ and the ‘rationalising’ of 7 October on colleges across the US. Such practices ‘must stop’, he said in a speech marking the annual Days of Remembrance ceremony at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Yet where does the US president think that campus anti-Semitism comes from?

If I remember correctly, Biden gave this speech about 24 hours before he announced that he would strangle off the supply of weapons Israel needs to win the war for its survival. But, ya know, Biden’s support for Israel is “ironclad.”

I dealt with dozens of criminal defendants — smack dealers, mob enforcers — whose devotion to truth was sterling by comparison.

Pro-Hamas hysteria is the foreseeable outcome of a belief system dominant not only in academia, but also in Biden’s own administration – a belief system in which the West is damned as ‘systemically racist’, and the world divided between ‘marginalised groups’ and the white, male, heterosexual power structure that oppresses them. Campus anti-Semitism will not stop until the university is transformed and the Democratic Party rejects identity politics.

If you needed two sentences to sum up the actual state of play in academia and politics, you just read them.

The stunningly incoherent alliances that have sprung up since the 7 October terror attacks on Israel can only be understood in the context of academic theory. Queers and radical feminists for Palestine would seem to be logical impossibilities but for the dominance of such concepts as anti-whiteness and intersectionality. A sampling of Columbia University’s anti-whiteness offerings includes an ‘uprooting whiteness’ group, ‘deconstructing whiteness’ workshops and an ‘unlearning whiteness’ research award from the dean. Other colleges no doubt provide a similar menu.

“Queers for Palestine” has to be the most bizarre sign I’ve in a long while — bizarre in a really sick sort of way. Gays can live in peace and safety in the United States and Israel, but get thrown off rooftops in Hamas-controlled Palestine.

According to the university worldview, whites and the West (the two categories are interchangeable) are responsible for everything wrong with the world, from inequality to poverty. ‘Persons of colour’ are the antidote. Heterosexuality and maleness are subcategories of whiteness, against which the intersectional coalition of queers, radical feminists and members of the Global South must mobilise. Israel today is hated as the embodiment of Western civilisation. Its modernity and economic success in a region where both are largely absent mark it out as hegemonic and illegitimate.

If you thought the anti-white and anti-Semitic (and anti-Asian while we’re at it) college admission policies overturned in the Harvard and UNC cases were well-intentioned programs, think again. For some they were, yes. For others, now bolder in showing themselves, they were part of a less visible but more sinister agenda. As Ms. Mac Donald puts it:

What is being called anti-Semitism on college campuses today has little to do with traditional anti-Semitism. Had the university not taken its anti-white, anti-Western turn in the 1980s, students who know nothing of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion would not be baying for ‘intifada’. The exception comes from Muslim and black students, whose anti-Semitism has longer and more conventional roots. Today’s campus anti-Semitism also has nothing to do with the genteel WASP anti-Semitism of the 1950s, which saw Jews as unclubbable outsiders. The problem with Jews today, in the eyes of the campus anti-Zionists, is that they are the consummate insiders in a civilisation inimical to the interests of the so-called subaltern.

The truth of it is that the Democratic Party has, for decades, been incubating anti-Semitism and playing footsie with those, like Louis Farrakhan, who called Judaism a “gutter religion,” then spent weeks lying about it, see this NYT article from 40 years ago. But bad (and revealing) as this was, I guess it was better than Farrakhan’s pal, Democratic rain-maker “Reverend” Jesse Jackson, who settled merely for calling New York “Hymietown,” as I noted in my post a while back. (To be fair, Jackson apologized, also after lying about it for weeks)).

Students do not need to have taken a course in ethnic studies or postcolonial theory to have imbibed the intersectional anti-whiteness now manifest in the pro-Hamas uprisings. The majority of courses in the humanities and soft social sciences now approach their subject matter through an anti-Western lens. Subtexts of racism and imperialism are sought and found everywhere. Vilifying Israel as the settler-colonial state par excellence is the natural result of this reflexive hostility to all things Western.

Many of the faculty who are defending the illegal encampments and pro-terrorist sloganeering in the name of free speech are two-faced. They were, at best, nowhere to be seen when universities were imposing ‘diversity’ loyalty oaths on prospective hires, when dissenters from campus orthodoxies were being exorcised and when apologists for left-wing censorship developed the specious distinction between free speech and hate speech. Now they are arguing that the university must not suppress expressions that others find hurtful because free speech is such an important value. The real reason that they are defending the pro-Hamas agitation is that they agree with it.

And that’s the nub of it. The current, if amazingly sudden, academic love affair with “free speech” is a cover. The reason professors, faculty and administrators are staging and supporting these love-ins for Hamas is perfectly straightforward. They agree with it.

These administrators’ verbal paralysis after the 7 October slaughter was rarely due to a principled commitment to institutional neutrality. These were the same presidents and provosts, after all, who had expounded at length about America’s ‘systemic racism’ during the Black Lives Matter protests / riots. Yet they held their fire after the Hamas massacre out of fear of offending their left-wing base or, in the case of many a diversity bureaucrat, out of sympathy with the impulse behind it.

Just be thankful that none of these administrators has been named Secretary of Education — although if Biden wins in November, get ready for who gloms on to these fat Cabinet jobs the day after the election.

Every word of Ms. Mac Donald’s brilliant essay is worth your time. Especially telling is her conclusion.

Biden received plaudits for his Days of Remembrance speech last week. But the performance was an exercise in hypocrisy. Campus anti-Semitism is the outgrowth of fundamental academic and Democratic commitments. Universities will not cure themselves unless they revamp their curricula and hire traditional scholars, rather than robotic practitioners of critical theory and activist wannabes. The ‘anti-Semitism training’ that administrators are proposing in the hope of extinguishing donor rebellions is a diversionary tactic. One can’t train one’s way out of a worldview that is baked into academic personnel and the courses they teach, even if adding to the diversity, equity and inclusion portfolio were not a patently counterproductive idea.

As long as the Democratic Party and its presidential standard-bearer remain committed to the narrative of white privilege and racial inequity, hatred of Israel and rationalisations for terrorism will be reliable products of the American left. No presidential speech will change that fact.