On December 5th, three presidents of prestigious Ivy League schools— Claudine Gay of Harvard University, Elizabeth Magill of the University of Pennsylvania, and Sally Kornbluth of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology— traveled to Washington to testify at the House Committee on Education and the Workforce on the plague of antisemitism sweeping their campuses. Chairwoman Virginia Foxx issued a challenge to the trio: “Do you have the courage to truly confront and condemn the ideology driving antisemitism?” Their responses to this and other lines of questioning did not go well.
In each case, Gay, Magill, and Kornbluth dispensed almost identical canned remarks. They seemed nonplussed by words hurled by students and faculty that called for the genocide of the Israeli people. It depends upon “context,” they chorused. Congresswoman Elise Stefanik, herself a Harvard graduate, pointed out the utterly moral vacuousness of their testimony. The tempest caused by Congressional hearing has already claimed a casualty. Under pressure from donors, Elizabeth Magill resigned in disgrace.
Juliana Pilon, Senior Fellow, The Alexander Hamilton Institute for the Study of Western Civilization, provides essential historical context of her own for the moral rot on campus. In “Anti-Zionism and the Bolshevik Jihad” in the December 7th issue of Law & Liberty, Dr. Pilon recounts how we got from there to here. “Why would Islamist Jihadists and leftwing progressives,” stated Dr. Pilon, “make common cause concerning Israel and the Jews?” The answer lies in the realm of purposeful ideology that links the Jihadists with the progressives. “[T]he savviest among them form coalitions,” she observed, “to be dissolved when circumstances change.”
To the cultural Marxists and other radicals who say that we are all ideological, nothing can be further from the truth. Ideology insulates itself from criticism; it does not control for facts. It persuades that oppression (as opposed to measured repression) is everywhere and implies a theory of liberation. Against whom and what prove changeable as the needs of a group or a class change.
“No ideology,” remarked Dr. Pilon, “has persisted longer than Jew-hatred, or anti-Judaism, now generally known as antisemitism. . .. Jews have been mistrusted and persecuted ever since being expelled from their homeland by the Romans in 70 AD, who destroyed the Second Temple of Jerusalem.” But adapting Marxism to Jihadism began with a vengeance in the 1920s.
Joseph Stalin had the bogus Protocols of the Elders of Zion republished. After World War II, the KGB had them translated for Western European consumption, and they found their way into the Middle East. “‘Designed by the KGB and overseen by chief Communist Party ideologues, …. [it] succeeded at emptying Zionism of its meaning as a national liberation movement of the Jewish people and associating it instead with racism, fascism, Nazism, genocide, imperialism, colonialism, militarism, and apartheid.’”
“Progressives, using postmodernist jargon, have managed to insinuate radicalism deep into the American cultural mainstream,” stated Dr. Pilon. “It is reminiscent of Communist propaganda.” Both the survival of Israel and the United States depends how effectively the good citizens among us respond.
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