ADL Rushes to Defend Campus Anti-Semites

By Sara Dogan on February 25, 2015

On Monday, the David Horowitz Freedom Center launched its new website,www.JewHatredonCampus.org and released a report detailing the “Ten Campuses with the Worst Anti-Semitic Activity.” Among them were schools like UCLA, Temple University, Vassar College, and San Diego State University.

The campuses selected for the Top Ten featured a near-constant barrage of anti-Jewish sentiment including anti-Semitic speakers, so-called “Apartheid weeks” that falsify Israel’s enviable record on human rights while ignoring the miserable record of the Palestinians and other Arab nations, threats of violence delivered both in-person and through social media, rallies to support convicted terrorists such as Rasmea Odeh, and other demonstrations resulting in a climate of fear and intimidation for Jewish students on these campuses.

The Top Ten list was picked up by over twenty papers and websites nationally, including the Orlando Sentinel, Baltimore Jewish Life, San Diego Jewish World, and The Algemeiner Journal.

While some of the papers covering the Top Ten list were sympathetic to the plight of students facing rampant anti-Semitism on their campuses, others dismissed the list out-of-hand, claiming that it mislabeled anti-Israel events as anti-Semitic. This is a false distinction. The anti-Israel events held by Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) and their many affiliates at campuses across the nation meet the U.S. State Department’s criteria for anti-Semitism: they deny the Jewish people their right to self-determination, hold Israel to a standard of conduct higher than that of any other nation, use anti-Semitic symbols such as swastikas to characterize Israel, hold Jews collectively responsible for the conduct of the state of Israel, and deny that Israel is a legitimate state.

Commenting on the crossover between criticism of Israel and anti-Semitism, the State Department stated in a recent report that “disproportionate criticism of the Jewish State and/or Israelis and demonizing them as barbaric, unprincipled, selfish, inhumane, etc. is anti-Semitic and has the effect of causing global audiences to associate those bad attributes with Jews in general.”

Even groups whose purported mission is to defend Jews against attack do not always acknowledge the extent of campus anti-Semitism and SJP’s role in perpetrating it. Tina Malka, the associate regional director of the San Diego chapter of the Anti-Defamation League was quoted as stating that SDSU’s inclusion on the Top Ten list was “unfair to the school.”

“It’s utterly ridiculous to call San Diego State University an anti-Semitic university,” she continued. “I don’t believe Jewish students on campus feel it’s an anti-Semitic environment.”

Recent anti-Semitic events at SDSU (which were cited in the report) include:

· The creation of a “Palestinian Solidarity Village” plastered with anti-Israel propaganda as part of a “Palestinian Solidarity Month.”

· The introduction of multiple resolutions to Boycott, Divest from and Sanction (BDS) Israel in SDSU’s student government.

· An event featuring Alison Weir, the founder and executive director of If America Knew, an organization which demonizes Israel. Weir has said that America’s support for Israel makes us an “accomplice to war crimes and an accessory to oppression.”

· A separate event with Greta Berlin, co-founder of the Free Gaza Movement, who recently tweeted a blatantly anti-Semitic video and has claimed that Americans give foreign aid to Israel in order “to occupy, kill, starve, humiliate and drive out a native population in favor of white European colonists.”

· SJP’s violation of the Student Code of Conduct by dropping leaflets from the top of several campus buildings mean to simulate an Israeli air strike.

Events such as these led Nirit Revzin, president of Aztecs for Israel, to write in a campus newspaper column: “I have been rejected numerous times in creating a dialogue toward progress or cooperating with Students for Justice in Palestine, as I have been told ‘SJP officers do not socialize with sympathizers of a brutal apartheid state.’”

Jew Hatred on Campus’s report comes in the wake of a new study issued jointly by the Brandeis Foundation and Trinity College which found that more than half of over 1,100 Jewish students surveyed across 55 campuses reported having been victim of or a witness to anti-Semitism on their campuses.

Yet, the ADL is determined to keep its head in the sand and dismiss the many documented incidents at SDSU with the claim that they do not indicate an “anti-Semitic environment.” It is time for the ADL and other mainstream Jewish organizations to take off their blinders, move beyond platitudes, and do the hard work on confronting the Jew-hatred in our midst.

Further Press Coverage of the Top Ten Anti-Semitic Campuses Report may be found below:

The Orlando Sentinel

https://www.orlandosentinel.com/features/religion/religion-world/os-top-10-antisemitic-colleges-20150224-post.html

UT-San Diego

https://www.utsandiego.com/news/2015/feb/24/sdsu-antisemitism-david-horowitz/

PJ Media

https://pjmedia.com/tatler/2015/02/24/over-50-of-jewish-college-students-encounter-anti-semitism-on-campus/

The Algemeiner Journal

https://www.algemeiner.com/2015/02/23/columbia-leads-list-of-americas-top-10-colleges-with-most-antisemitic-activity/

Baltimore Jewish Life

https://baltimorejewishlife.com/news/news-detail.php?SECTION_ID=2&ARTICLE_ID=57754

Snyder Talk