06/11/2004: "Anti-Semitism: the new "in" thing on campus"

Michael Totten of TechCentralStation offers an excellent commentary based on a chilling article from the East Bay Express entitled "The Berkeley Intifada. The Express article begins this way:

On the day after September 11, Micki Weinberg walked to the UC Berkeley campus still in shock. At the entrance to campus, facing Telegraph Avenue, huge sheets of blank paper were spread out as an impromptu memorial on which students, faculty, and other passersby were invited to write comments. Glad to have found such a forum, Weinberg scanned the inscriptions. Then he saw one, large and clear, that stopped him dead in his tracks:

"It's the Jews, stupid."

Totten's article included this quote from a San Francisco State student:

"I cannot fully express what it feels like to have to walk across campus daily, past maps of the Middle East that do not include Israel, past posters of cans of soup with labels on them of drops of blood and dead babies, labeled "canned Palestinian children meat, slaughtered according to Jewish rites under American license," past poster after poster calling out "Zionism=Racism" and "Jews=Nazis"...This is the Weimar Republic with brown shirts it cannot control. This is the casual introduction of the medieval blood libel and virulent hatred smeared around our campus in a manner so ordinary that it hardly excites concern..."

Totten comments:

Skinheads, white supremacists, neo-Nazis, and Klansman aren't behind this, as would have been expected before Al Qaeda crashed airplanes into our buildings. Palestinian nationalism is the hot new cause for the cool kids, and the new (or is it old?) anti-Semitism is the handiwork of the far-left and their radical campus friends from the Middle East.

Most of the students who promote a free Palestine don't hate Jews, whatever they think of Israeli counter-terrorism. But they put up with hate in the ranks all the same. Even the more radical and racist Palestinian activists are "allies" in the campus cause du jour.

Meanwhile, Daniel Pipes, an articulate opponent of radical Islam and its armed terrorist factions actually was called a racist and worse at his campus speech in Berkeley, as the East Bay Express article reports. Mr. Pipes, who wisely said "militant Islam is the problem and moderate Islam is the solution," is hardly an Islamophobe or a racist. It's just a back-alley libel against a historian of the Middle East because he doesn't toe the radical leftist line.

This is what Political Correctness has become. Mere opponents are falsely denounced as "racists" while virulently racist allies are given a pass by the very same people.

Scary times on campus. Read the Express article especially, and feel the hair stand up on the back of your neck.