How Anti-Western Education Excuses Antisemitism

As we witness for more than a year the surge of antisemitism on university campuses across the United States, what is so startling about it is that despite the existence of anti-Zionist views on many campuses for decades, most Jewish families and kids generally saw their university experience as one of the most positive things of American life. The fact that that reality has changed so dramatically since October 7, 2023 is one of the most disturbing and superficially surprising developments both in the history of American education and in the experience of American Jews.

How did all this come about? I would argue that the most instructive answer to that question came in a book by a British journalist, Douglas Murray, that was written about two years before the October 7th massacre. Titled “The War on the West,” Murray presents a detailed and in-depth description of a new way of thinking in academic, religious and cultural circles which saw the entire history of the Western world as the greatest source of evil in the world and irredeemable. It is this framework that Murray delineates in detail, which helps explain the post-10/7 perverse emergence of vicious delegitimization of the Jewish state and the worst explosion of antisemitism since the Holocaust.

Murray argued that a vicious hatred of anything representing the West has become the greatest evil facing mankind; and, if you adopt this mindset, no good at all could come out of anything seen as Western.

With this framework, it is easy to see how the massacre of 1,200 Israelis in the most brutal way, including documented rape of women, was seen as a defensible action and, in some spaces, an event worthy of celebration.

In many ways, the moment during this year that most captured how topsy turvy this world had become was the Congressional testimony of the three university presidents on the question of the eruption of antisemitism on campuses across the U.S.  

Congresswoman Elise Stefanik tried to probe from the presidents of Penn, Harvard and MIT, about why, in a world where punishments were meted out for the smallest microaggressions, assaults and the safety of Jewish students were largely being ignored. Trying to understand the mentality of these university administrators, she posed what should have been an easy question: Do calls for the genocide of Jews on your campuses constitute bullying or harassment?  The now infamous responses, which played a role in the resignation of two of the presidents was “it’s a context-dependent decision.”

While the criticism of the university presidents was strong, it too often focused on the wrong thing. They were condemned for presenting lawyer-like answers to what should have been an unequivocal yes. That suggests that they were merely trying to pacify both sides rather than actually believing in what they said.

In fact, consistent with Murray’s thesis that anything associated with the West is guilty of racism, imperialism and pure evil, the fact that calls for genocide against Jews are not always seen as antisemitism, clearly implies that some such calls have a certain justification because Zionists – i.e. Jews – are seen as the representatives of the West in the Middle East, and therefore are deserving of extreme behavior exhibited towards them. In other words, what took place on and after October 7 may have some merit for the alleged evil Israel and Zionists have done.

Just like it is legitimate to have different views on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but illegitimate to see the massacre of October 7 as anything but one of the great horrors against the Jewish people; so, too, it is legitimate to take care in protecting free speech on campus but completely illegitimate to deny that assaults, both verbal and physical, on Jewish students have no antisemitism associated with them.

It also explains how a liberal democracy like Israel, which protects minorities, can still be condemned, while those who reject such values, including Hamas, are often supported because everything is seen through the prism of the guilt of the West.

None of which is to say that there is no room for criticism of the West. Yet the extreme view of the West as responsible for most of the world’s evils has generated such a distorted and ugly view of things, including the demonization of Israel to the point of defending the wholesale massacre of Jews. This all leads to a world where attacks on Jewish students are legitimized because Jews are presented as the main defenders of the Zionist state.

What to do about it?

There is a need to return to serious education, which does not ignore the flaws in the history of the West, but that recognizes the many contributions Western values and standards have made towards a better world, as well as for problematic aspects of other societies. Israel would then be seen as an imperfect society with democratic values and instincts that still has work to do, as opposed to the monstrous, evil entity that it is falsely portrayed as.