On February 1, State Department official Kara McDonald announced that the Biden administration “embraces and champions the working definition” of anti-Semitism established by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance. The Jewish community widely applauded the announcement, which comes at a time when anti-Semitic delusions continue to be normalized in American politics and culture.
David Baddiel’s Jews Don’t Count is a short, sharp attack on ‘progressive’ attitudes towards anti-Semitism. As such, it makes for a compelling polemic.
As Baddiel characterises them, progressives are a broadly left-leaning coalition who ‘define themselves as being on the right side of history’. You can find them on the one-time Corbynista wing of the Labour Party, or hash-tagging their support for Black Lives Matter, or maybe penning op-eds for the Guardian. They are not necessarily ‘classically left-wing’, as Baddiel puts it, given many are none too concerned with economics and the interests of ‘the working man’. Rather, they are interested in fighting what is best thought of as a cultural battle, promoting the ‘right’ attitudes and, above all, tackling all forms of prejudice.
All except one, that is.
Public schools in California are already the ethnically diverse in the United States, but in 2016, then Gov. Jerry Brown (D-CA) signed a law that mandated schools in the Golden State create a new ethnic studies program.
The first draft of the Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum was released years later, and contains language and omissions that have startled some in the education sphere.
“The goal is achieved! No more Jews at German universities,” the leading Nazi student newspaper, Die Bewegung, triumphantly proclaimed in 1938.
Of course, nothing like it could ever happen again. Except something like it is happening again — now, and in Britain. According to a report published this week by David Collier, a British researcher, some UK universities are now virtually Judenfrei: free of Jews.
This is a chilling indictment not just of British academia but of a liberal democratic society that has tolerated, often through ignorance or complacency, a wave of discrimination against Jews that has swept through the universities over recent decades. From these halls of learning antisemitism has spread out, driving and empowering what is now a solid movement that threatens Jews in various parts of society and has led to many of them leaving. This is not just in Britain. Collier characterises academia as “the epicentre of global antisemitism”.
And how they further the dark purpose of the BDS movement.
While the pandemic greatly disrupted campus activities in 2020, the student governments of at least three universities managed to focus their efforts to pass BDS resolutions, bills that asked their respective universities to divest from holdings of companies doing business with Israel.
An anti-Israel activist is knocking on doors for Team Biden in Georgia—even though the president-elect has spurned her for espousing anti-Semitic views.
Linda Sarsour, a leftist anti-Israel activist, said in a “Vote-a-thon” Facebook Live event Sunday that she had temporarily relocated to Georgia, where she will be knocking on doors and attempting to turn out the vote for Democratic Senate candidates Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock.
The deputy leader of the British Labour Party, Angela Rayner, has threatened that thousands of members could be expelled from the party an effort to purge anti-Semitism from their ranks.
On Sunday, Mrs Rayner told members of the party that Labour has to “get real” about anti-Semitism after a Jewish member was forced to leave a constituency party meeting in Nottingham due to a “hostile” environment as some pushed for a restoration of the whip to former leader Jeremy Corbyn.
