Harvard University alumna Dara Horn published a very interesting article in The Atlantic last month talking about the climate on elite campuses, the subject of congressional hearings:
The problem was not that Jewish students on American university campuses didn’t want free speech, or that they didn’t want to hear criticism of Israel. Instead, they didn’t want people vandalizing Jewish student organizations’ buildings, or breaking or urinating on the buildings’ windows. They didn’t want people tearing their mezuzahs down from their dorm-room doors. They didn’t want their college instructors spouting anti-Semitic lies and humiliating them in class. They didn’t want their posters defaced with Hitler caricatures, or their dorm windows plastered with F**K JEWS. They didn’t want people punching them in the face, or beating them with a stick, or threatening them with death for being Jewish. At world-class American colleges and universities, all of this happened and more. . . .
In Congress, all three university presidents offered some version of the platitudes that “Hatred comes from ignorance” and “Education is the answer.” But if hatred comes from ignorance, why were America’s best universities full of this very specific ignorance? And why were so many people trying to justify it, explain it away, or even deny it? . . .
Shortly after the [October 7] attacks, a Cornell professor publicly proclaimed the barbarity “exhilarating” and “energizing,” while a Columbia professor called it “awesome” and an “achievement.” Comparable praise percolated through America’s top universities, coming from students and faculty alike. On campuses around the country, students began gathering regularly to chant “There is only one solution: intifada revolution!”—a reference to a suicide-bombing campaign in Israel a generation ago that maimed and murdered well over 1,000 Jews. (If there is only one solution, perhaps one could call it the Final Solution.)
Students took these rallies inside libraries and other campus buildings. They vandalized university property with such slogans as “Zionism = Genocide,” “New Intifada,” and “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free”—referring to a geographic area that encompasses the entirety of the state of Israel, where half the world’s Jews live. . . . On some campuses, the exhilaration escalated into death threats and physical assaults against Jewish students. When a Jewish Tulane University student tried to stop an anti-Israel protester near campus from burning an Israeli flag, protesters attacked him and other Jewish students, breaking one student’s nose. . . .
Many public and private institutions have invested enormously in recent years in attempts to defang bigotry; ours is an era in which even sneaker companies feel obliged to publicly denounce hate. But diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives have proved to be no match for anti-Semitism, for a clear reason: the durable idea of anti-Semitism as justice.
DEI efforts are designed to combat the effects of social prejudice by insisting on equity: Some people in our society have too much power and too much privilege, and are overrepresented, so justice requires leveling the playing field. But anti-Semitism isn’t primarily a social prejudice. It is a conspiracy theory: the big lie that Jews are supervillains manipulating others. The righteous fight for justice therefore does not require protecting Jews as a vulnerable minority. Instead it requires taking Jews down. . . .
Missed it by that much, as Maxwell Smart used to say.
“Diversity, equity and inclusion” programs — and the justification of such programs as necessary for “leveling the playing field” in the name “justice” — represent a simplistic misunderstanding of how the world operates, a misunderstanding directly related to the conflict between Israel and Hamas. Ronald Reagan once famously described this worldview: “We have so many people who can’t see a fat man standing beside a thin one without coming to the conclusion the fat man got that way by taking advantage of the thin one.” Exactly so.
The Left believes that inequality is synonymous with injustice. Insofar as you have a nickel’s more net worth than your neighbor, this disparity proves that you are oppressing him. You may laugh at this as silly hyperbole, but it is the essence of the belief system that justifies DEI programs at universities, and which also justifies people claiming that Israel is guilty of “genocide” in Gaza. How unfair it is — an injustice! — that Israel should be a wealthy nation while Gaza is poor, and how unfair it is that Israel has a powerful military with which to punish Hamas.
Viewed through the warped lenses of leftist thinking, nations that win wars are always oppressors and those who lose wars are always victims — unless, however, the winners are Communists, in which case how dare you speak of “victims” you capitalist swine! The Left’s formulaic conceptions of “justice” are always premised on the idea that successful people have somehow succeeded at the expense of others, and therefore failure is proof of victimhood. If the average annual income of Group A is X, while the income of Group B is X-minus-1, then Group B has been cheated out of its “fair share,” according to the Left.
The disparity between Jews in Israel and Arabs in Gaza (the essential casus belli of the October 7 Hamas attacks) may have a long history and involve many different factors, but the motives of Hamas terrorism are really just the same sort of whiny demand for “fairness” that grown-ups learn to expect from any five-year-old who’s been told “no.”
For nearly 40 years, the beef was the Israeli occupation of Gaza. So in 2005, Israel announced it was pulling out of Gaza, removing its settlements: “Here, you can have it. No more occupation.” The Palestinians could have turned Gaza into a luxury seaside resort community, but they’re Palestinians, you see. Success is not in their DNA; failure is the essence of their national character. The residents of Gaza promptly elected Hamas as their governing party and turned Gaza into a hive of terrorism, a base for launching attacks against Israel, which happened routinely — although the world at large seldom took notice — up until the big attack on October 7, which could not be ignored, and which led to Israel finally determining to destroy Hamas.
Dara Horn, bless her heart, cannot let go of her leftist conceptions of “justice,” even when these ideas are used as justification for Jew-hating. She speaks of DEI programs as necessary to “combat the effects of social prejudice,” without bothering to interrogate that premise.
What does “social prejudice” mean, and does such prejudice suffice as the all-purpose explanation for disparities and conflicts between various groups on the campus of Harvard or anywhere else? How much does it matter, in terms of an individual’s success and happiness in life, whether he is an object of “social prejudice”? Isn’t it better — as a matter of education, which is after all what Harvard is supposed to be good at — to teach young people to cope effectively with whatever disadvantages they may suffer, than to fill them with resentment and self-pity by lecturing them about how oppressed they are? Dara Horn has apparently never given much thought to this aspect of what’s gone wrong at her alma mater, and why? Because conservatives are, and have been for many years, persona non grata at Harvard and other Ivy League schools.
The Ivy League is Decadent and Depraved, as I have often remarked, and the reason for this depravity is simply that the Left has taken control and implemented a regime of ideological conformity, so that these campuses have become echo chambers, where never is heard a dissenting word. Occasionally, someone with faculty tenure will deviate from the Gospel of Social Justice — Amy Wax at Penn Law, for example — but these isolated heretics are swiftly purged or marginalized, since disagreement is now classified as “hate.” Because these schools now consider political indoctrination to be their primary objective, they must ensure that students are never confronted by any criticism of the Official Ideology.
The perverse idea of a world controlled by mechanisms of oppression, where victimhood is given prestige by demands for “social justice,” is now deeply rooted on elite campuses because of the political conformity that the Left has imposed not only in universities, but also in K-12 public education. If conservatives are effectively banned from university faculties, and if school teachers must obtain university degrees as credential for employment, it is predictable that the same political beliefs which prevail at Harvard will inform the curriculum and pedagogy in every public school classroom. It was perhaps not predictable that this process would ultimately result in college students chanting Hamas slogans and terrorizing Jews on campus, but now that this result has been achieved, we ought to be honest about how and why it happened.
Dara Horn and other liberal Jews are learning a bitter lesson, but many of them refuse to acknowledge how their basic worldview — their doctrinaire devotion to “social justice” — is implicated in the frightening rise of anti-Semitism at Harvard and other elite universities. Joe Biden is now pandering to Hamas because he’s afraid of losing support among Palestinians in Michigan. Can any Jew be so blind as to not see what this omen portends for the future? “The Corbynization of the Democratic Party” is too far along to be stopped now. At some point, this process will lead Jews to . . . Well, an exodus, so to speak. You can either support Israel, or you can be a Democrat. You can’t do both. And something similar could be said for the Ivy League and other elite universities. These institutions face a choice. They can either stop suppressing conservative dissent, or else they’ll be swallowed up entirely by the kind of politically motivated hatred that now expresses itself with murderous slogans borrowed from Hamas and Hezbollah. Ironic isn’t it? “Progressives” claim to be so intellectually and morally superior to the rest of us and yet, whenever they attain control anywhere — in academia, in Hollywood, in government — the results are always a disaster. Harvard University is now more anti-Semitic than a Klan rally, and it’s all because of progressives and their “social justice” ideology.
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