Nothing shows just how low Western universities have sunk when even the Catholics are showing them up on anti-Semitism.
As Camille Paglia said a few years ago, ‘Our universities are a mess.’ That was before the universities become sinkholes of vicious anti-Semitism and before shocking testimonies by the presidents of Ivy League colleges Harvard, MIT and UPenn that were so appalling that even the Biden White House condemned them.
“It’s unbelievable that this needs to be said: calls for genocide are monstrous and antithetical to everything we represent as a country. Any statements that advocate for the systematic murder of Jews are dangerous and revolting – and we should all stand firmly against them, on the side of human dignity and the most basic values that unite us as Americans,” White House spokesperson Andrew Bates said in a statement Wednesday.
So, how does Columbia University respond to campus anti-Semitism? Kick out Jewish professors.
An outspoken Columbia University professor, who has accused the school of being a hotbed of antisemitism, has been temporarily banned from its campus.
Columbia, laughably, claims it ‘respects Shai Davidai’s right to free speech’, even as it sentences him to the re-education camp. His crime?
Davidai, a Columbia business professor who has been a fixture at protests, said in a phone interview that the school was referring to an Oct 7 event on campus commemorating the victims of last year’s Hamas attack on Israel […]
Davidai, who is Jewish, said he was at the Oct 7 memorial when pro-Palestinian protesters started circling it. He saw employees walking by, including Cas Holloway, Columbia’s chief operating officer, and started filming them to post the videos to social media, asking them why they were allowing the protests to happen.
Things are no better in Australia, where Jewish students are being violently driven off campuses by drooling anti-Semites.
In a rare bright spot on the blighted landscape of academia, Catholic schools are leading by example.
Catholic schools are vowing not to repeat the mistakes of Australian universities in “refusing to confront” anti-Semitic activity on campus, amid a renewed focus to “quash bigotry through education”.
CEO of Catholic Schools NSW Dallas McInerney said schools had chosen to “walk the other direction” to avoid the “utter failure” seen recently at universities amid an increase in “social-media fuelled” anti-Semitism among school-aged children.
Mr McInerney said Catholic schools had increased the number of shared events and inter-school visits between Jewish schools and Christian and Catholic schools, adding that “education is the best antidote to bigotry”.
This is a laudable and heartening move. Not least because Catholicism was sadly implicit for centuries in Europe’s long, deplorable history of religiously motivated anti-Semitism.
Catholic Schools jointly hosted a roundtable this week with the Special Envoy to Combat Anti-Semitism in Australia, Jillian Segal, and representatives from 3000 NSW schools, and the secretary of the Department of Education, Murat Dizdar. It heard that the increased prevalence of anti-Semitic events among school students had largely been fuelled by social media.
With all school sectors present, Mr McInerney said “we wanted to send a powerful message, and by inference, say to the universities, we’re not going to make your mistake”, adding that higher education institutions had been “either incapable of or refusing to confront anti-Semitic activity in their institutions”.
“We just cannot let our schools be the cultural flashpoint that the universities have become,” he said.
Mr McInerney also criticised activist teachers such as those who wore keffiyehs into the classroom, saying “education is not there to indoctrinate, it’s there to enlighten”.
If only our supposed bastions of intellectualism could show such moral clarity.
