American Universities Heading In The Wrong Direction

The Washington Free Beacon posted an article yesterday about the increase in anti-Semitic incidents on the campuses of American colleges.

The article reports:

Anti-Semitism on U.S. college campuses spiked in 2015, with 302 incidents against Jewish students recorded at 109 schools in 28 states, according to a new report warning that the rise of anti-Israel organizations is fueling hatred and making many campuses unsafe for Jews.

The array of incidents were recorded at many universities and often included Nazi imagery, slurs calling Jews “evil,” and calls for Jews be murdered, according to a report published by the AMCHA Initiative, an organization that seeks to protect Jewish students.

The organization created an online database that logs in real time reports of new anti-Semitic incidents at colleges across the nation. Several anti-Semitic incidents have been recorded in the first month of 2016.

According to the AMCHA website:

AMCHA – The code word that helped survivors identify fellow Jews in war ravaged Europe now stands for another kind of support system. Established in 1987 by a group of Holocaust survivors and devoted mental health professionals, AMCHA set out to create a framework for mutual aid,memory processing and grief resolution.  Now, close to three decades later, AMCHA provides a full range of psychological and social services to Holocaust survivors and their families and continues to be a home and safe place for them to unburden their hearts and share their stories with others.

Anti-Semitism has been a problem on American college campuses for a while. In June of 2012, I posted an article about anti-Semitism at colleges in America. The article deals with a presentation by Professor Tammi Rossman-Benjamin of the University of California Santa Cruz.

In that article, I reported:

Professor Rossman-Benjamin pointed out that there are two basic forms of anti-Semitism on our college campuses–the bullying, intimidation, and name-calling directed at individual Jewish students and the attempt (often supported by professors) to delegitimize Israel. The second sometimes takes the form of petitions that universities divest themselves of any investments in Israel.

One of the sources of the anti-Israel and anti-Jewish sentiment is a group called the Muslim Students’ Association (a group with ties to the Muslim Brotherhood).

The article at the Washington Free Beacon concludes:

At least 15 college campuses—including George Washington University, the University of Maryland, and Tufts University—had incidences of anti-Semitic graffiti, including swastikas and anti-Semitic slurs.

“Jews—the root of all evil” was written on a wall in the Brooklyn College campus library, the report found.

Other incidents across the country include mezuzahs being vandalized, swastikas being scrawled on school buildings, and convicted terrorists being invited to speak on campus.

At Towson University, one vandal repeatedly went across campus writing, “Hitler was right” and “with Jews you lose.”

Similarly, a the University of California at Berkeley, “Zionists should be sent to the gas chamber” was found “etched on school property,” according to the report.

Leila Beckwith, an AMCHA co-founder and professor emeritus at the University of California at Los Angeles, warned that college officials often dismiss discrimination against Jews.

“Anti-Semitism, what many of us thought only a decade or so ago was a sad part of our history, continues to rear its ugly head on campuses from coast to coast,” Beckwith said in a statement. “What those of us that monitor cases on a regular basis know is today’s anti-Semitism not only includes swastikas and historical anti-Jewish slang.”

The presentation by Professor Rossman-Benjamin took place in a synagogue. After the presentation a group of people were standing around discussing what they had just heard. One person in the audience who was Jewish mentioned to me that her daughter had encountered anti-Semitism and anti-Israel sentiment at the college she attended in a major metropolitan area. She commented sadly that she wished she had sent her daughter to a Christian college, where she felt her daughter would have been treated better. While I am glad that the woman understood that most Christian colleges are not anti-Semitic and support Israel, I am saddened that many American campuses are teaching and allowing the racism that is anti-Semitism.