The Late Unpleasantness at Rutgers

Rutgers has become a madhouse of antisemitism: “Rutgers University Residential Assistants Reject Mandatory Antisemitism Training Session,” by Dion J. Pierre, Algemeiner, September 4, 2024:

As The Algemeiner has previously reported, Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) has been a wellspring of antisemitic rhetoric at Rutgers. The group was one of dozens of SJP chapters that cheered Hamas’s Oct. 7 massacre across southern Israel, an attack that resulted in hundreds of civilian deaths and numerous rapes of Israeli women. As video footage of the terrorist group’s atrocities circled the web, Rutgers SJP shared on its Instagram pages memes that said “Glory to resistance” and “the clock started running when the majority of the Palestinian population was expelled from their land by Zionists during the Nakba.” It added, “You are watching an occupied people rise up against an apartheid nuclear power that has been occupying them and making their life unlivable since 1948.”

Since everyone was showing, over and over, scenes — some of them no doubt falsified images — of supposed atrocities committed on October 7, the SJP wanted to inform people that this incursion into Israel was the brave “resistance” of an outgunned people, reminding the world that has forgotten about the Palestinians that they are still there, still fighting against all odds, taking the fight to an Israeli army that has the most advanced and terrible weapons in the world, including nuclear weapons which, we have no doubt, it will someday drop on Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank. They burst out of their Gazan jail, and made straight for their jailers, traveling on any vehicle they had at hand — cars, trucks, motorcycles, paragliders — and by foot, too. They were fearless. These lion-hearted Palestinians attacked the Zionist soldiers straight on. And managed to kill more than a thousand of the enemy.

A milieu of extreme anti-Zionism at the school has resulted in at least one death threat against the life of a Jewish student since Oct. 7. In November, a local news outlet reported, freshman Matthew Skorny, 19, called for the murder of a fraternity member he identified as an Israeli, saying on the popular social media forum YikYak, “To all the pro-Palestinian ralliers [sic] … Go kill him.”

Oh, for god’s sake. This wasn’t a real threat. It was an expression of extreme dislike. Let’s not get our knickers in a twist over what a 19-year-old kid, just a freshman, says in a heated moment. Haven’t we all told someone “I’d like to kill you”? Of course we have.

Similar incidents at Rutgers have occured frequently. In the past few years, the school’s AEPi fraternity house has been vandalized three times. In one incident, in April 2022, on the last day of the Jewish holiday of Passover, a caravan of participants from a SJP rally drove there, shouting antisemitic slurs and spitting in the direction of fraternity members. Four days later, before Yom HaShoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day in Israel, the house was egged during a 24-hour reading of the names of Holocaust victims….

Oh, my goodness. Some shouting of unpleasantries. An egg or two thrown at a Jewish fraternity house. These are just college kids behaving badly. What is that compared to holding 2.3 million Gazans hostage for 76 years?

Of course, politicians will jump on this “antisemitism” bandwagon. It’s all the rage. Antisemitism supposedly showing up here, there, and everywhere. And just how much do you think AIPAC will be sending to the re-election campaigns of Virginia Foxx and her fellows on the House Committee on Education and the Workforce?

Yes, calling for support for Hamas may in some places be unpopular — though not, obviously, at Rutgers — but as Rutgers President Holloway has pointed out, Dr. Martin Luther King was unpopular in his time. So Yahya Sinwar and Martin Luther King have that in common. And come to think of it, Sinwar shares Dr. King’s belief that the “moral arc of the universe bends toward justice.”

Antisemitism is not a problem at Rutgers. There isn’t any. There is anti-Zionism, which is a different thing, and completely justified. And the main problem on campus is  anti-antisemitism, which students are being forced to study, when what they really need are courses in how to promote and support anti-Zionism. For Zionism is the most sinister and destructive force in the world today. Anyone who disagrees with that statement has no business teaching on an American campus today.