Is the murder of Jews what “oppressed individuals resort to out of anger and frustration”? Sat May 29, 2021
Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical Left and Islamic terrorism. When Sultan Doughan signed a hateful letter falsely claiming that Israel and Zionism were based on Jewish Supremacy , a term popularized by Neo-Nazi leader David Duke, that ugly rhetoric wouldn’t have attracted much attention in an antisemitic time. except for one thing. Doughan is a Muslim postdoctoral associate at Boston University s Elie Wiesel Center for Jewish Studies. Her work at a center named after one of the most prominent writers about the Holocaust includes the “case of a German-Palestinian museum guide who lost her job over a controversy that was triggered by her comparing her own family’s traumatic past in the Nakba with Jewish experiences during the Holocaust.”
Recent weeks have seen the most severe global spike in antisemitism in recent memory. In the United States, synagogues have.
At Michigan State University, an antisemitism resolution was proposed and approved. But supporters were later told that student representatives had not read the resolution and that, without amendments, it would be vetoed. During two Zoom sessions, commentators (who demanded to remain anonymous for fear of “harassment”) excoriated the bill and its supporters. The resolution was then withdrawn.
At the University of Toronto, the Scarborough Campus Student Union rejected a motion from a Jewish group to revoke a previously adopted BDS resolution, and to submit future resolutions to the equity committee for review. An unnamed student objected, saying, “the solution is attempting yet again to silence Palestinian suffrage through imposing a blatant Zionist agenda.”
In a democracy worthy of the name, the mentally invalid are not judged. But in a true democracy, one is.
I expect Arab propagandists to spread such lies. I don’t expect the falsehoods to come from an academic center that was founded by a pro-Israel scholar, and is funded in part by donations from pro-Israel members of the Philadelphia-area Jewish community.
The April 20 program is responding to, in part, the ongoing debate over the definition of antisemitism that has been crafted by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA), and accepted by numerous governments and Jewish organizations around the world. Some left-wing academics, including Stern, object to the IHRA definition because it includes demonization of Israel as an example of antisemitism.