(RNS) — In the past week, something strange has occurred on our nation’s campuses.
At Columbia, Harvard, Yale, UCLA, Berkeley and other campuses, anti-Israel protesters have been removing their kaffiyehs and setting aside their “boycott Israel!” placards.
Instead, they are chanting: “Hey, hey, ho, ho, it was time for Assad to go!”
Protesters are holding up photographs of the hundreds of thousands of victims of the Assad regime in Syria. There are public recitations of the names of the dead. They are chanting: “Assad, Assad, you could not hide. What you did was genocide!”
In Middle Eastern studies programs all over the country, professors are giving lectures on how the Assad regime favored the Alawite sect over every other group in Syria. They are raising their fists toward their classroom ceilings, loudly and fervently denouncing such policies as “apartheid.”
On television stations all over America, Syrian refugees who were forced to flee their country are referring to their experiences as “ethnic cleansing.”
That pile of fantasies was inspired by my friend and colleague Rabbi Phil Cohen.
Except, he hastens to add: It didn’t happen.
It turned out to have been a dream from which he awakened.
In fact, some demonstrators actually came out in support of the fallen Syrian regime — and, of course, Hamas.
Let’s talk about double standards.
The extreme left hastens to accuse the Jewish state of any number of moral and policy failures — ethnic cleansing, genocide, settler colonialism, apartheid. It uses those terms sloppily and/or without historical context and/or just inaccurately. More than that, Israel’s hyper-critics aerobically jump to accuse Israel of all of those crimes and utterly ignore the crimes of other countries that are far worse.
Leon Wieseltier writes:
“Genocide” has become the term with which to describe the atrocity of which one most disapproves. There certainly are genocides in the world now — the Uyghurs most notably — but the left never marches for them. It never marched for Syria, either. An encampment on campus for the Rohingya? Not a prayer. Scores of thousands dead Sudanese? It appears that you have to be fighting Israelis or Jews for progressives to bestir themselves on your behalf.
But, it is clear the extreme left keeps two sets of moral books — one for Israel, and the other for the rest of the world.
As Adam Kirsch writes in his new book, “On Settler Colonialism: Ideology, Violence, and Justice“:
Why is Russia the largest country in the world by land area? Why does India have the world’s third-largest Muslim population? Why is English spoken, not just in former parts of the British Empire, but in the British Isles themselves? The answer is: invasion and settlement — the replacement of one people and culture by another … Every people that occupies a territory took it from another people, who took it from someone else.
Which applies, by the way, to Arab history as well. Muhammad initiated those conquests in the seventh century CE. Look at a map, and you will see how extensive and how thorough they were.
I keep thinking about other countries and their failings.
- Remember England’s brutal occupation of Northern Ireland? Remember the many acts of terror that were perpetrated by the Irish Republican Army? None of those terror attacks contained demands that English people do not deserve to live, or that England should be dismantled. Neither were there boycotts of, say, the Stones or any other British rock band.
- Remember China’s conquest of Tibet and its persecution of Tibetan monks? (Leon W. mentioned the Uyghurs). I somehow failed to hear the cries for the erasure of China. The Uyghurs are a Muslim people. Apparently, there is only one country in the world that is not permitted to have tensions with a Muslim people. Guess which one.
- Remember Russia’s persecution and occupation of who knows how many peoples, and its war against Ukraine? No college professor is giving lectures on how Russia should disappear.
- South Africa was the home of apartheid. No one ever said South Africa has no right to exist.
- The United States fought a long and horrific war in Vietnam and Iraq and Afghanistan and … America continues to deal with persistent terrible and tragic racial problems. No one is saying America has no place in the community of nations.
Every country has flaws, but only one country’s flaws condemn it to the fantasy of international death. No other country in the world lives with an imagined asterisk after its name. No other country in the world lives with the constant question as to whether it should even exist.
That country happens to be the Jewish state.
More than 30 years ago, the late Philip Roth wrote (in “Operation Shylock”): “In the modern world, the Jew has perpetually been on trial; still today the Jew is on trial, in the person of the Israeli.”
If campuses have been silent about Syria and the huge pile of human rights violations that are happening all over the world; and if the only country that is subject to such micro-management of its many, well-documented and publicly protested flaws is Israel, and if Israel’s critics take an inordinate amount of glee in calling out those flaws …
If you persistently ignore other international human rights situations and you hyper-ventilate about those that emanate from Israel …
If the only country you want erased from the map, without any consideration as to where its refugees might go; if that country just happens to be the Jewish state, where, within a few decades, the largest population of Jews will live …
Yes, you might be an antisemite.
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