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Julio Levit Koldorf

Idiots on campus

(Wikimedia Commons)

The situations on campuses “in response to the war in Gaza” in combination with social media appears to be driving our society mad.

We are witnessing incredibly hostile crowds with very questionable intentions at our finest universities effectively supporting Hamas on the aftermath of the worst atrocity perpetrated against Jews since the Holocaust. The current reality of antisemitism is a far greater problem than we realized. We are seeing images of imbeciles from Harvard to Maastricht shouting for Jews to go back to Poland.

The response of universities has been both inadequate and hypocritical. Their policies around protests have clearly been violated for months, and it is precisely this double standard here that constitutes antisemitism.

More worrisome than specific ugly incidents is the fact that the universities administrations are condoning behavior that they simply would not tolerate if the objects of all this abuse had been anyone else. If these colleges had any number of people shouting that Blacks should go back to Africa or that trans people deserve to die, these students—to say nothing of the professors who support such things—would be immediately expelled, and this is clearly what should happen to the most uncivil actors here. All the individuals who have been threatening Jewish students on campuses with violence, simply because they are Jewish, should be expelled without question. Even if you believe that Israel is totally in the wrong, this does not justify the behavior we are experiencing.

China is doing something awful and worthy of protest: they are holding millions of Muslims in concentration camps, where they are reportedly subjected to torture, sterilization and forced labor. There are no protests for them, nobody cares—certainly no one in Cambridge, Amsterdam, Oxford or Maastricht. Let’s imagine how the universities would react if, in reaction at China’s abuse of their Muslim population, protesters started targeting other students on campus just because they happen to be ethnically Chinese or Chinese nationals. This would be immediately recognized as morally insane and there would be zero tolerance for it. But the analogy actually understates the perversity of what’s happening, because many of these students are not merely protesting injustice, cruelty and innocent death. Beyond harassing the wrong people, many of them are in fact supporting injustice, cruelty and innocent death.

Explicitly globalizing Intifada isn’t a peace statement, it’s a call for the indiscriminate murder of Jews.

Much of the financing of these so-called Palestine Solidarity organizations, just as the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement, can be tracked directly to the regime in Qatar or to the Muslim Brotherhood, of which Hamas is an offshoot—money trail recently exposed by the Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy. All these organizations are based on an ideology which is basically a fusion of Islamism and Nazism, with a specific genocidal intent. Qatar also owns the highly biased news organization Al Jazeera, which has the same journalistic integrity as Russia Today.

Anti-Jewish lies feeding Middle Eastern studies departments at western universities, and funded by Islamist theocrats and antisemites, have been tolerated far too long. The president of “Students for Justice in Palestine” wrote the following in response to the atrocities of October 7: “National liberation is near. Glory to our resistance, to our martyrs, and to our steadfast people.” […] “Resistance comes in all forms—armed struggle, general strikes and popular demonstrations. All of it is legitimate and all of it is necessary.” This was the immediate response in support of the massacre of families and the taking of children as hostages, before Israel did anything in response. It is the moral vision that inspired these campus protests directly funded by Islamist theocrats and indirectly by our taxpayers’ money.

Maastricht University is “prestigious” worldwide, a preferable academic international destination among expats for being one of the few Universities in Europe with English language curricula. Since October 7, however, Jewish students from around the world have been dealing with very hostile antisemitism in Maastricht University campuses, and with a governing body and teaching staff who mostly tend to look the other way. After the issue was brought to the attention of the media, diplomats and local authorities, Maastricht University has redoubled its hostility to Jews by enabling something not seen anywhere up until now. They have posted a PhD position on “PALESTINE SOLIDARITY” that anyone can easily find on LinkedIn. The description begins by blaming Israel for the war on Gaza in October 2023.

Dr. Faisal Hamadah and Dr. Eliza Steinbock, both self-declared postcolonial and transgender activists, are the promoters of this hallucination unprecedented in the European higher academic corpus.

The position entails a load of ridiculous, contradictory nonsense: it equates Palestinian terrorism with everything from freedom, justice, democracy, and decolonization of the Global South, to Black Lives Matter and the LGBTQ+ movement. Among the specifics of the position is an open call to support the BDS campaign as an organized demand in Europe. Regardless of the fact that BDS is globally proscribed for its recalcitrant antisemitism. The position’s vision and mission are a call to institute “Palestinian Studies” as legitimate field among European universities everywhere. For the winning candidate, Maastricht University is offering a teaching position in the faculty of Arts and Social Sciences and the acquisition of a European university teaching qualification. All this for the juicy salary of €3,539 gross monthly, paid for with Dutch taxpayer money.

A 1930’s like situation where Jews living in Netherlands are financing their own defamation, discrimination and institutionalized antisemitism.

Despite the fact that Netherlands has formally adopted the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of antisemitism—which puts the very legitimacy of Maastricht University in serious trouble—the academic authorities reacted beyond complete indifference and disinterest towards the safety of its Jewish students by not only fostering a judenfrei environment, but by “putting under review” all relations with the Jewish State.

Without ignoring the fair share of extreme right-wing derangement, the identitarian moral delusion that has duped the left, liberals and academics for years equates every conflict in the world to an oppressor-oppressed framed narrative. The blatant support to groups like Hamas, which represent the annihilation of everything these students and professors should value, deems self-evident the idiocy of anyone who could not figure out who the bad guys were on October 7. The support by hundreds of university professors of Hamas—which has made it its central aim to kill all Jews everywhere in the world—cause extraordinary and possibly irreparable damage to academic institutions such as these.

These are the same people who blamed the Charlie Hebdo cartoonists for having had the gall to get themselves murdered in Paris, or the teacher Samuel Paty who had the carelessness to let himself get beheaded on the street for the insolence of questioning the veracity of Muhammad’s doctrine. These imbeciles at elite institutions are the ones who defend genital mutilation and suicide bombing as some sort of indigenous wisdom, and of course the vilification of everything Jewish across-the-board as the voice of the oppressed.

About the Author
Dr. Julio Levit Koldorf holds a double PhD in Communication and Politics, he is a post-doc researcher on political antisemitism, at the University of Valencia and University of Zaragoza, Spain. He is a former vice president of Sepharad Aragon NG and has lectured around Europe. He has briefed Spain’s Justice Ministry and the European Commission against Racism and Intolerance on antisemitism.
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