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THE NEW ANTI-ANTISEMITISM
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Rick Perlstein
May 8, 2024
The American Prospect
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_ You know who has good reason to fear for their safety? People, many
of them Jews, getting pummeled by cops and fascists. People getting
high-powered rifles aimed at them from rooftops by agents of the state
told to be ready to shoot.... _
Pro-Israel counterprotesters hold Israeli flags on the edges of a
pro-Palestine encampment at Northeastern University in Boston, April
26, 2024., Vincent Ricci/Sopa Images/SIPA USA Via AP // The American
Prospect
No matter how much
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it off
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a certain curse of my career repeats: Every time protest signs bloom,
scribes seek my input for “historical parallels” pieces. _Isn’t
this just like in _Nixonland_ when …?_
My initial response is always the same: Maybe—but there will be time
to reflect on that later, and wouldn’t it be better to spend energy
figuring out what’s going on _now_?
I’ve never felt more that way than during these past several weeks.
Angry kids setting up tents on university quads, taking over
administration buildings, cops dragging them away: The more energy we
spend on baby boomer games of compare and contrast, the less we can
understand how, this time, the response to students protesting
Israel’s war on Gaza has taken shape as a pure product of the
interlocking derangements of the Trumpocene. I’m trying desperately
here to start _that_ conversation, because what we’re witness to
now has the potential to make Kent State on May 4, 1970, seem like a
spring picnic.
WANT HISTORICAL PARALLELS? Start with one from just two months ago
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a moral witness set himself on fire in front of the Israeli embassy in
Washington, and an officer of the law sought to subdue him with a gun
rather than trying to extinguish the fire.
Yes, there was plenty of terrible state violence again Vietnam
War–era campus protesters: Kent State; Jackson State; a military
helicopter belching tear gas at students kettled into Sproul Plaza and
a cop shooting dead a bystander during the “People’s Park” riot
at the University of California, Berkeley; and many more. But
escalating to a military response nearly immediately, at barely a
provocation or no provocation?—in the 1960s, that would have been
inconceivable.
You might have already stomached some of the videos of last week’s
most harrowing abuses. At the University of Wisconsin
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balding, bespectacled professor face down, two cops pinning his left
arm sharply behind his back, and a disabled professor getting her
dress torn and suffering internal damage from police strangulation.
The 65-year-old former head of Dartmouth’s Jewish studies program
who dared scream “What are you doing?” at cops being taken down
with a wrestling move that also left her with an arm wrenched behind
her back. Then a second cop arriving to keep her pinned as a third
looks on blithely, rifle at the ready. (She was suspended
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her trouble.) At Washington University in St. Louis, a 65-year-old
professor
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a Quaker, was told by his doctor he was “lucky to be alive” after
absorbing a flying tackle from a very large officer for the sin of
filming cops with his cellphone, then being dragged to a nearby patch
of grass, writhing, then to a police van, where he fell limp.
If mainstream news organizations would concentrate their formidable
resources at how this exact same script played out at diverse
institutions large and small, as if their administrators had all
attended the same continuing education seminar, instead of editors
assigning “they took over Hamilton Hall then, they took over
Hamilton Hall now” pieces, that, in my humble opinion, would be a
most welcome development.
THE PROVOCATIONS FOR THESE ASSAULTS are so much milder now than they
were in the 1960s that an administrator then who could peer 55 years
into the future would probably smirk. Students peacefully chanting
slogans on a single, specific issue, backed by easily realizable
demands? Pshaw.
At 1960s Cornell, the escalation that culminated in Black militants
holding the administration building with rifles began when a student
from the African American Society (AAS) stormed the university’s
president at a lectern as he pleaded that he couldn’t afford to
fully meet the African American Society’s demand to build an entire
new college where Black students would do hiring and determine the
curriculum themselves. The student lifted the president to his toes by
the collar. Another kid stood by with a four-foot length of
two-by-four, as audience members banged bongos in menacing rhythm.
Then, AAS provocateurs burned a cross on the lawn of a Black sorority
to “prove” the university was irremediably racist. At Kent State,
the National Guard had been called after students burned down the ROTC
building, cutting the hoses of the firefighters who arrived to put out
the blaze. That had been preceded, three weeks earlier, by a lecture
by Jerry Rubin to 1,500 where he declared, “The first part of the
Yippie program is to kill your parents. And I meant that quite
literally, because until you’re prepared to kill your parents,
you’re not ready to change this country.”
But to repeat: What is happening now, I believe, might be
far _more_ dangerous.
Why?
CONTRASTING SCENES from recent days:
* Students at the protest encampment at the University of Chicago
enjoyed a gorgeous twilight “Mimouna,” a rite celebrated by the
Maghrebi Jews of North Africa during Passover. Some wore kippahs,
others keffiyehs, some both. Muslim and Jewish prayer services are a
regular feature at this “Popular University for Gaza
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people are reported to be milling about, which features 24-hour food
service, lots of art, film screenings—a vibe like a jam band
festival camping area, only with more eight-syllable words.
* Two thousand miles away in Boston, the administration at
Northeastern University said they had no choice but to flood in the
campus police to take down an encampment because it “was infiltrated
by professional organizers with no affiliation to Northeastern,” and
it had descended into “virulent antisemitic slurs, including ‘Kill
the Jews.’” Then, however, the student newspaper
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footage demonstrating it was the _pro-Israel_ counter-demonstrators
who trollingly chanted that, to the pro-Palestinian side’s angry
boos. Similarly, at UCLA, it was pro-Israel ultranationalists who came
onto campus one night last week to attack the protesters’ encampment
and the protesters themselves, a story that the _Los Angeles
Times_ got right, but that the East Coast press managed to garble
completely by misstating who attacked whom.
Concerns for the “safety” of Jewish students has become a
rhetorical commonplace in elite discussions of campus politics these
days: “Jewish students of all political beliefs,” Theo Baker, son
of _New York Times_ superstar Peter Baker, tells us in _The
Atlantic_ in “The War at Stanford,” “have been given good
reason to fear for their safety. They’ve been followed, harassed,
and called derogatory racial epithets.”
It makes me feel like I’m losing my mind. You know who has good
reason to fear for their safety? People, many of them Jews, getting
pummeled by cops and fascists. People getting high-powered rifles
aimed at them from rooftops by agents of the state who surely have
been told by the people giving them orders to be ready to shoot
because of all the “dangerous” things that are going on amid those
protesters’ tents.
Sure, offensive things have happened to protesters. And that’s
awful. But when I told some Chicago neighbors about all the Judaism
going on down in Hyde Park, they were frankly shocked to hear it: They
watch _Morning Joe_, from which they got the impression that Jew-hate
was the overwhelming leitmotif of this whole protest thing.
It suggests one of those Talmudic puzzlements, or perhaps the setup
for a dad joke: How many Jews have to pray peacefully in a pro-peace
encampment (or alternatively, to cite a scene witnessed outside the
116th Street gate of Columbia University, how many black-hatted
ultra-Orthodox Jews
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to chant, “Anti-Zionism is not antisemitism”) for them to stop
being an antisemitic mob?
IT MIGHT HAVE BEEN ONE OF THE GOP’S most shameless political bunco
artists
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set this particular jank into motion. But by now it’s one of those
allegedly noble “bipartisan” convergences, like the Iraq War
authorization in 2002, or the writing of checks to criminal investment
banks in 2008-2009. “President Biden has stood against repugnant,
antisemitic smears and violent rhetoric his entire life … protests
must be peaceful and lawful,” ran a White House statement; it is
“unacceptable when Jewish students are targeted for being Jewish,”
said Chuck Schumer. “For many of Jewish descent, they do not feel
safe, and that is a real issue,” contributed the third-most powerful
House Democrat Pete Aguilar. And here is Wisconsin’s Republican
Assembly Speaker Robin Vos: “Thank you @uwchancellor for doing the
right thing by enforcing campus policies and standing up to the unruly
mob.”
In Madison, of course, the unruliest mob was the cops tackling
senior-citizen scholars. That is another of the oh-so-of-the-moment
qualities of this whole business: how easy it is to inject
truth-dissolving poison into public rhetoric, or get away with plain
old gaslighting—without which all this state violence could never
have maintained its political sanction.
Gaslighting like New York Mayor Eric Adams saying, “It is despicable
that schools would allow another country’s flag to fly in our
country,” referring to the Palestinian one. (Apparently, it happens
all the time at his City Hall.)
Gaslighting like Sen. Mitt Romney intoning that if “some wonder why
there was such overwhelming support for us to shut down potentially
TikTok,” just “look at the postings on TikTok and the number of
mentions of Palestine relative to other social media sites.”
(Relative to other social media platforms—_platforms_, Senator, we
call them _platforms_—TikTok is used by young people
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less likely to be IDF fans
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Gaslighting like Texas Gov. Greg Abbott’s. The thuggish response of
riot police to the protesters at the University of Texas was
supposedly because of all the rocks and guns they confiscated—except
that, according to one student
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the rocks were there to hold down the posters, and, well, no surprise:
UT is a “concealed-carry campus, so we were within our legal
rights.” Then, after that came Abbott’s executive order
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Texas public universities’ “free speech codes”—naming specific
words and phrases speakers would not be allowed to say.
Not to slight, amid this Orwellian catalog, those who are just plain
lying. As press critic
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historian
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Bunch points out
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campus of Ohio State in Columbus, one of several schools that let
snipers aim rifles at students, the administration first said
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snipers. “When presented with evidence, they admitted the truth.”
ANY HISTORICAL ACCOUNT OF HOW this madness presently comes to pass
might start, not in the 1960s, but with a pattern so ancient it’s
practically more archaeological than historical: the claim of outside
agitators.
Administrators say their bucolic campus had been “infiltrated by
professional organizers with no affiliate to Northeastern.” Mayor
Adams’s people emit a now-infamous series of gaffes about fearsome
chains like ones the Sharks and Jets might fight with in _West Side
Story_, or vague insinuations that a retired fourth grade teacher
from Florida
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in to Columbia’s encampment for an hour was a Hezbollah cat’s-paw,
or the inexplicable presence at a university of … a textbook
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David Axelrod insinuated, “It will be interesting to learn how many
of those arrested in Hamilton Hall at Columbia are actually
students.” As I co-wrote with fellow historian Richard Kreitner
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the height of the Black Lives Matter protests, the insistence that all
would be copacetic but for irritations introduced by “outside
agitators” is a favorite alibi of stompers on the aspirations of the
weak and vulnerable in all times and places. It is how they explain
away the responses to injustices native to their own institutions.
Our thumbnail analysis might move next, not to the Age of Aquarius,
but to that of Harry S. Truman.
William F. Buckley’s argument in _God and Man at Yale: The
Superstitions of “Academic Freedom”_ (1951) was that commie pagan
professors shouldn’t decide how universities teach; that should be
up to the conservative boards of trustees. This exemplified the
conservative movement’s later wars of attrition against all manner
of institutions comprising the institutional base of liberalism
itself. It’s been working particularly well at Indiana University,
where trustees hired a president who has proven so compliant to
right-wing demands on things like previous protest policies and
graduate student organization that 93 percent of faculty
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that they didn’t want her to be president any more.
Then came the Gaza protest, and a welcome opportunity to show those
commies who was boss: President Pamela Whitten cracked down
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a fledgling protest by invoking a rule passed practically in secret
only moments before the protest began—a rule that authorized
officers “with sniper capabilities” to deploy on the
university’s rooftops.
And now this. Buckley’s spiritual children are nothing if not
opportunistic:
WASHINGTON (AP) — House Republicans on Tuesday announced an
investigation into the federal funding for universities
where students have protested
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Israel-Hamas war … Several House committees will be tasked with a
wide probe that ultimately threatens to withhold federal research
grants and other government support to the universities, placing
another pressure point on campus administrators who are struggling to
manage pro-Palestinian encampments, allegations of discrimination
against Jewish students and questions of how they are integrating free
speech and campus safety.”
THE ACTUAL EXAMPLES OF ALLEGED JEW-HATRED that have been adduced are
so threadbare. A protest leader arrays the bodies of protesters
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human shield against those who’ve shown up to oppose their protest.
One cries—at a protest leader who, for all we know, just as well
might be Jewish—“We didn’t say a word! My friend had a Jewish
star necklace! All the sudden we’re surrounded, they’ve been
circling us, they’re threatening us.”
I mean, think about it: Do we complain when strikers who put up a
picket don’t let anti-union activists join the line of march?
Surely, one can find worse examples of actual bigotry and abuse. But
as I pointed out recently to _The New York Times_, “When you’re
talking about college students, you are talking about people who are
barely out of childhood.” Here, the wisdom of John Lennon concerning
the idiocies of his own time remains imperishable: If you go carrying
pictures of Chairman Mao (or Hassan Nasrallah, I suppose), you ain’t
gonna make it with anyone anyhow.
But giving offense is not enough to send police to aim rifles at them
from roofs. Which is, alas, Orwellian in an even more frightening way.
For by now, the broad coalition led by our president’s opposition to
“repugnant, antisemitic smears and violent rhetoric” has come to
include _actual_ outside agitators, brandishing American and Israeli
flags, shouting, “I hope they rape you
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“Let’s rape the women!
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That was at UCLA, where, not to put too fine a point on it, taking
advantage of a rare absence of police presence or any sort of security
except for the flimsy plywood boards demonstrators deployed as shields
to protect their perimeter, fashy thugs crying things like “No place
in the world for you!” started going after them with flying karate
kicks, sticks, and tear gas. Quite the thing, listening to the BBC,
and hearing an incredulous reporter who couldn’t quite believe the
tear gas canisters hadn’t been opened by cops.
But there were no cops; not for more than two hours, according
to this report
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Until, eventually, a company of police arrived to break up the
encampment, in the requisite riot gear, brandishing machine guns.
Arrived, that is to say, on the side of the fascists, doing what the
fascists had hoped to do themselves.
The chancellor said the encampment was a “provocation” to
violence. Southern sheriffs used to say the same thing about civil
rights demonstrations. Which now seems somewhat the position of the
leadership class of the Democratic Party, too. In order to “protect
Jews.” In effect, discouraging political speech against a war
enacted by a veritable fascist government thousands of miles away, and
doing so in a way that serially humiliates the president of the United
States.
So sure, worry about the kids; I believe the children are our future
and all that. But worry about the grown-ups more.
And only connect.
Last week, I noted a creepy viral right-wing blog post about how
“the Democrats have crossed the bridge into unabashed Nazism.” I
promised to follow up with more detail. So how have the Democrats,
according to this, turned into Nazis? By making “certain that behind
the scenes the Biden Administration does not waiver in taking all
steps necessary to prevent Israel from permanently destroying
Hamas.”
The sort of people who wrap themselves in flags and bust up protests
think _you_ are the Nazi, fellow Democrat. _Even if_ you think the
IDF has no choice but to do what they are doing: Trumpies don’t make
distinctions like that among the “enemy.” So the war will go on
yet more viciously, no matter what Joe Biden says; many more people,
lots of them Jews, very, very anguished, will protest lots more.
It’s right easy to start a moral panic in America, and few among any
class of people are immune to panic’s charms. Some of the panicked
are dangerous lunatics. Others are allegedly responsible people,
acting under the color of law.
You want a historical parallel? Here is the only one I’ve got. Moral
panics, and their attendant derangement of truth—say, when force of
arms is deployed to protect one side from those who supposedly say
they want to kill them, even though it’s actually the side that
supposedly needs the protection who said it—have started very bad
outbreaks of violence throughout history. I have a hard time seeing
how this one, backed as it is by so many powerful institutions of so
many different descriptions, uniting so many alleged ideological
differences—folding in so many weapons and ill tempers, with so few
voices talking sense—ends peacefully.
_[RICK PERLSTEIN is the author of a four-volume series on the history
of America’s political and cultural divisions, and the rise of
conservatism, from the 1950s to the election of Ronald Reagan. He
lives in Chicago.]_
_Read the original article at Prospect.org
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