Why the Social Justice Warriors Hate Israel

Confronting Anti-Israel Prejudice

A fellow named Jordan Holmer has the courage (or perhaps merely the chutzpah) to challenge the Palestinian lobby on campus. On Twitter, he has taken exception to a fake wall (called an “Apartheid Wall”) erected on campus by Students for Justice in Palestine. His tweets are included below:

Why @MarquetteU allows anti-Semites to demonstrate in center of campus is beyond me pic.twitter.com/fGiuhRMTpr

— Jordan Holmer (@kybldmstr) April 14, 2016

I feel for every Jewish student on campus today #SJPisHate

— Jordan Holmer (@kybldmstr) April 14, 2016

I bet if it was an image of a KKK cross burning Marquette would jump into action pretty fast

— Jordan Holmer (@kybldmstr) April 14, 2016

It is long past time that somebody challenged the Palestinian lobby on campus. Their motto, shown on the wall, is “From the River to the Sea, Palestine Will be Free.” Although they deny it, the slogan calls for the end of the State of Israel. The graphic below shows it: the map does not show a two state solution. It shows a single state, which would be dominated by Palestinians. Jews, if allowed to remain, would be a persecuted minority.


Palestinians don’t like the wall Israel has built because it has ended suicide bomber attacks. Again, they won’t admit that.

The Palestinian lobby on campus has been pandered to and petted by campus bureaucrats and leftist faculty. Firmly on their side have been the Center for Gender and Sexualities Studies and the organizations that sponsored “Israeli Apartheid Week,” including the Office of International Studies, Campus Ministry, and the Office of Intercultural Engagement. So it is good to see some opposition.

This is not to say we agree with Holmer on everything. He believes the wall should not have been allowed by Marquette. We think that if Students for Justice in Palestine got the proper approval from Student Affairs, they have a right to their demonstration.

What we would like to see is a counter demonstration. But some push back on Twitter is a start.

Going International: Marquette Makes Jerusalem Post

An article on intolerance on American campuses, focusing especially on anti-Israel activism, mentions several instances of censorship and silencing of non-leftist views:

Not by accident is the most leftist dominated segment of American life also that in which free speech is least protected. Kirsten Powers (a Democrat) has written a new book called The Silencing: How the Left is Killing Free Speech. Much of that book is devoted to American universities where left-wing students, administrators and faculty have sent the message that “anyone [who] strays off the leftist script... might find themselves investigated, harassed, ostracized, even expelled” because their speech has given offense.

Nearly 60% of the colleges and universities in America have campus speech codes that dramatically restrict, if not obliterate, freedom of speech. One, for instance, bars students from “offending... a member of the university community.”

Fordham University prohibits using email to “insult.” Offense and insult are determined by the ones so offended. Numerous universities have instituted “trigger warnings” on course content to warn students that course material may cause them distress by challenging their worldview.

Janet Napolitano, chancellor of the University of California system, the nation’s largest, recently instituted seminars for deans and department chairs to guide them in things that should no longer be said because they constitute “micro-aggressions,” defined as “brief, subtle verbal or non-verbal exchanges that send denigrating message to the recipient because of his or her group membership.”

Included are such statements as “America is a land of opportunity”; “I believe that the most qualified person should get the job”; “America is a melting-pot” and “affirmative action is racist.”

Each of these “suggestions” seeks to impose a particular societal vision and/or foreclose societal debate. They constitute a liberal version of the Gulag’s reeducation centers. Objections to the first two statements are based on a desire to portray America as so racist that individual talent and hard work are virtually irrelevant and it is impossible to speak of a hirings based on merit. “America is a melting-pot” is objectionable, because it prefers the traditional view of America as an affirmational society bound together by certain common ideas over the multicultural vision of a balkanized society based on ethnic, racial and sexual identities. The view that non-colorblind admissions and hiring is inherently racist is one side of a long-standing debate, and it just happens to be the view adopted by the US Supreme Court of late.

A group of Scholars of Color recently disrupted a class at UCLA, charging that the tenured professor had committed “micro-aggressions” against them. Example: The professor changed one student’s capitalization of “indigenous” to lower case, and thus disrespected her ideological point of view. Were the students punished for disrupting a class? No. The 79-year-old professor was instructed to stay off the graduate campus for a year, and UCLA commissioned an “Independent Investigative Report on Acts of Bias and Discrimination Involving Faculty.”

At Marquette University, a Jesuit school, Prof. John McAdams was stripped of tenure and fired for a blog post, in which he criticized by name a graduate teaching assistant who had told a student that he could not defend the traditional Catholic teaching on same-gender marriage in class because it might offend other students.

McAdams wrote that the graduate student had used “a tactic typical among liberals now.

Opinions with which they disagree are not merely wrong and are not to be argued against on their merits, but are deemed ‘offensive’ and need to be shut up.”

His firing proved how right he was and how effective those tactics have proven.

Of course, part and parcel of this intolerant leftism is hostility toward Israel.

Not all offense is equal. Jewish students live in a hostile environment, which can at times be genuinely frightening, on many campuses across America. Last summer, Boston police had to protect pro-Israel students over three successive days from pro-Palestinian mobs shouting “Jews back to Birkenau.” Over 50% of Jewish students report that they have personally experienced or witnessed anti-Semitism.

No one, it seems, is particularly concerned about aggressions – micro or otherwise – against them, even though Jew hatred is not exactly an unknown phenomenon throughout history.

On about 200 campuses, there are annual Israel Apartheid Week rallies calling for the destruction of the State of Israel. Many of the events are formally sponsored by academic departments and promoted by professors on their emails.

Ruth Wisse, in “Anti-Semitism Goes to School” (in the May Mosaic) describes how a group of pro-Palestinian student groups demanded that candidates for student government at UCLA and Berkeley sign a pledge that they will not participate in trips to Israel organized by groups like AIPAC or Aish International’s Hasbara Fellowships. Most candidates refused to sign, but the student government president did.

While expressing discomfort with the pledge, UCLA’s Jewish chancellor declined to go further on the grounds that promotion of the pledge is a form of free speech. When it comes to leftists, minorities and those otherwise easily offended, the subjective hurt of those offended trumps free speech; when it comes to insult and intimidation of Jewish students, however, the value of campus free inquiry and speech is suddenly rediscovered.

As Wisse puts it, “Institutions that enforce ‘sensitivity training’ to ensure toleration for gays, blacks and other minorities may inadvertently be bringing some of these groups together in common hostility to Jews as the only campus minority against whom hostility is condoned.”

Jews, for a few decades after the Holocaust, had the status of a politically correct victim group, toward whom liberals were sympathetic. But that era is gone.

Why is this? First, because Israel is an ally of the United States, and liberals and leftists, not liking America, instinctively dislike America’s allies also.

Secondly, liberals and leftists pride themselves on being champions of the world’s victims. Jews, and the state of Israel, have not played the part of victim. Jews have succeeded splendidly in American society, and Israel has not only prospered as a free society, it has decisively beaten off Arab attacks. Not the sort of place that can be portrayed as victimized.

Thus we have the (happily) unsuccessful attempt on the Marquette campus to divest from companies doing business with Israel. Some flavor of this campaign can by seen in the Twitter feed of Students for Justice in Palestine.

But the anti-Israel campaign has been supported by several official units of Marquette.

Archbishop Brought to Campus by Marquette is Anti-Israel Crackpot

He was part of “Israeli Apartheid Week:” a Greek Orthodox Archbishop named Sebastia Atallah Hanna.

He was featured in two events:  A “Soup With Substance” at noon this past Wednesday, and a  “keynote address” at an evening event on the same day.

Some indication of his opinions can be found in any article on the  Al-Alam website:

A top Palestinian Christian cleric in Israel has likened crimes committed by foreign-backed insurgents in Syria to the Israeli regime’s racist policies and practices in the occupied land, describing them two sides of the same racist coin. Addressing a group of Arab students at Haifa University on Friday, Greek Orthodox Archbishop of Sebastia Atallah Hanna further restated his support for Syria in the face of the foreign-backed war targeting it, SANA reported.

Archbishop Hanna went on to emphasize that it has become clear that the terrorist groups in Syria are an extension of Zionism and serve its racist projects and suspicious agendas in the region.

The Palestinian cleric further vowed to continue defending the causes of his native land, underlining that Muslims and Christians will remain united in defending the holy sites, including the Al-Aqsa Mosque.

He also condemned the Israeli regime’s racist practices against Palestinians.

Hanna then stressed that the targeting of Christians in the Middle East and dividing Arab communities into conflicting sects only serves the Israeli regime and allows it to implement its plots for the region.

The Archbishop also asserted that just as terrorists failed in Syria and elsewhere, they will fail to undermine the Christians’ determination to remain in the Middle East, and that the Israeli regime will also fail to fragment and weaken the Palestinian people.

If Palestinian students want to bring in speaker to bash Israel, we think that is pretty much their prerogative (although it reflects badly on their judgment).

Unfortunately, this incendiary cleric was  supported and sponsored by Marquette officials.

In the first place, the Campus Ministry organizes and schedules Soup with Substance.

In the second place, the Office of International Education paid the Archbishop’s travel expenses to come to Marquette.

We find it odd that the Campus Ministry, which should be working for reconciliation among adversaries everywhere, would sponsor a speaker who demonizes one side in the Arab/Israeli conflict.

And bizarre theories about how “terrorist groups in Syria are an extension of Zionism” and Israeli “plots” are a bit odd coming from an office of Marquette.  Terrorist groups in Syria are Islamic militants, and hate Israel more than Hanna does!

This is yet another example of the insular and parochial political correctness that suffuses the Marquette bureaucracy.  When there is push back, and when Marquette gets wide and negative public attention, top officials will back off (as happened with Femsex).  But the bureaucrats remain in place, with the same politically correct attitudes, and the same culture that thinks calling Israel an “apartheid state” or a “racist state” is something that deserves official Marquette support.

Terence Miller, Director of the Office of International Studies failed to return our phone call asking for comment. Gerry Fischer, who schedules Soup With Substance for the Campus Ministry, was not immediately available for comment.