BDS on campus: When does ‘anti-Israel’ become anti-Semitic?
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Those incidents followed a student senate debate over an Israel divestment resolution in February. The bill passed on a second vote, after failing in a first round.
“The night of the first vote, one of the pro-divestment students got up and shouted ‘Long live the intifada’ and stormed out of the room,” Kadisha recalled. “That was extremely disturbing.”
After the resolution passed, more than 150 current and former faculty members and researchers signed an open letter condemning the “single-minded ferocity” of the divest-from-Israel campaign on their campus. Its goal, the letter claimed, “wasn’t to open up discussion on these complex matters but to dictate simple, outright excoriation.”
Steven Zipperstein, a Stanford professor of Jewish culture and history, helped craft the letter, saying that the tenor of the campus debate on Israel was worrying.
“I understand why Israeli politics would enrage,” he said in March. “I’m enraged by many of the politics in Israel. But the fact that outrage against Israeli politics is the one issue that captured more attention at Stanford than any other political issue in the last 30 years, as stated by our president — that’s bizarre.”
Something bad is happening on American campuses, and it’s not unrelated to the anti-Israel boycott, divestment, and sanctions movement. A survey by the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law found that 54 percent of Jewish college students experienced or witnessed anti-Semitism on their campuses during the 2013-14 school year, including incidents of harassment, violence or a “hostile environment.”
http://jstandard.com/content/item/bds_on_campus/33279
Why are college campus progressives obsessed with Israel? is it Antisemitism? I think some of it is, but I think that many liberal student groups have been infiltrated by non-progressive foreign students who obsess about Israel to the exclusion of all other issues. Something similar happens at local college mosques, the foreign students, particularly from KSA tend to dominate the mosque activities and political bent to the dismay of local Muslims. Imam Hassan Qazwini talks about this phenomena in his book American Crescent.
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