Heritage Florida Jewish News - Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice

(JNS) — The curtain has finally been lifted on the raging antisemitism that has taken hold of college campuses over the course of decades. While it has festered ever since leftists, Marxists and other Jew-haters took over academia after their stint protesting the Vietnam War and other American transgressions, campus antisemitism is finally being covered by the media. Thus, it is now impossible to ignore.

Undeniably and inexplicably, the frequency and number of rabid, protesting Jew-haters on campuses is far greater since Hamas’s genocidal attack on Israel. It took the barbaric murder of 1,400 Jews—burning them alive, beheading children, cutting fetuses from pregnant women and raping women post-mortem—to release the kraken in its present untethered form.

But the haters’ tentacles have been growing for some time while college administrators enabled their audaciousness by either turning a blind eye or bending over backwards to explain away the hate as simply First Amendment-protected speech and academic freedom.

While colleges have spent millions of dollars hiring huge numbers of diversity, equity and inclusion officers who obsess over white privilege, systemic racism and LGBTQ+ issues, the one demographic not protected and afforded safe spaces is Jews—the most frequent victims of religious hate crimes in the country. Campuses are breeding grounds for antisemitism because it is considered protected speech. The Jews on the receiving end are regarded as nothing more than collateral damage.

Many of us have been working to address the burgeoning antisemitism on campus as we have witnessed astronomical numbers of attacks on Jewish students. We have faced an uphill battle with little support from our own community. Legacy Jewish organizations, until recently, generally looked on in silence. Until the Hamas invasion, Jewish philanthropists continued to endow their alma maters despite the multitude of antisemitic events from “eviction notices” to Israel Apartheid Walls. Pro-Israel and Jewish speakers on hundreds of universities across the country are regularly threatened and shouted down with no repercussions for the perpetrators of these clear violations of codes of conduct.

A common denominator is the presence of a Students for Justice in Palestine chapter with its Hamas origins and questionable funding. SJP and the Muslim Students Association chapters are cesspools of Jew-hatred hiding under anti-Israel claims of apartheid, genocide and occupation—all lies. But university administrators consider these lies free speech despite their incessant incitement to violence.

Worse still, those lies are disseminated in classrooms by Israel-hating professors who hide their agendas to brainwash generations of future antisemites under the auspices of academic freedom.

When did Nazi-style indoctrination become academic freedom? When did truth become something personal and malleable? When did history become something viewed through the eye of the beholder rather than fact-based instruction?

The Third Reich’s success began in academia, where German students were indoctrinated with Jew-hatred that quickly metastasized into the systematic extermination of six million Jews. If American Jews believed that the collapse of civilized society—such as the one in which European Jewry was carted off into cattle cars, concentration camps, gas chambers and mass graves—would not happen in their lifetime, they hopefully received a wake-up call. Not when Palestinian barbarians butchered, tortured, raped, beheaded and burned 1,400 Jews in Israel, but the next day when they looked out of their windows, turned on their televisions and walked down their streets watching Americans yelling “go back to the ovens” while their children attended classes with professors who shared that the Hamas atrocities were “exhilarating” to them.

Putting aside the moral degradation that we see among young Americans, the majority of whom believe that Hamas’ torture, rape, murder and kidnapping were justified, the question is what can be done to save these young minds who represent the future of America. Morality begins at home, but parents are paying upwards of $70,000 for the privilege of allowing their children to be brainwashed in a manner that is destroying the soul of the nation—and their own souls.

The solution is simple: Any student or faculty member who destroys property on campus, whether tearing down posters of kidnapped Israelis or ripping an Israeli flag from students’ hands and burning it, should be expelled. Any student chasing down fellow students, forcing them to barricade in a room for fear of attack, should be expelled. Any faculty member expressing support for terrorists should be fired. Every university with an SJP chapter should shut it down for its support of a designated terrorist organization. And President Donald Trump’s executive order protecting Jewish students from antisemitic attacks must be enforced by President Joe Biden’s Department of Education.

Until colleges protect Jewish students from violence, intimidation and fear, rather than ignoring their tears and pleas for safety, federal funds should cease, private donations should terminate and tenure, cushy jobs and large salaries should be revoked. Students should file lawsuits against any institution that does not protect them, enforce its code of conduct and provide a safe environment for learning.

“Go back to the ovens” is no longer in the rearview mirror. American Jews must stay “woke” because, like it or not, they are at war. They may not have sought it out, just like the Jews in southern Israel who lived for peace with their Palestinian neighbors in Gaza did not. But war will find them here, just as it did there, and they need to fight for their survival. What begins on campus doesn’t end there.