The Laws of Campus Culture War | Hacker News Reader

The Laws of Campus Culture War

nytimes.com

2 pointswolverine8765 comments

https://www.city-journal.org/article/how-dei-inspires-jew-ha... Campus DEI bureaucracies are stoking this hatred, too. In 2021, the Heritage Foundation’s Jay Greene (now a colleague at Do No Harm) looked at the Twitter feeds of nearly 750 DEI officials at 65 U.S. universities and found that 96 percent of their tweets about Israel were critical of the country or anti-Semitic. Many universities have all but muzzled their DEI departments in the past two weeks, doubtless fearing blowback from donors and the broader public. Yet no one should assume that silence suddenly means collegiate DEI departments stand with Israel.

> 96 percent of their tweets about Israel were critical of the country or anti-Semitic.

That "or" is doing a lot of work.

Interestingly, according to various surveys antisemitism is higher on the right of the political spectrum, but criticism of Israel is higher on the left.

If you wanted to give pundits on the right the benefit of the doubt, this means people they mix with that criticize Israel are very likely to be anti-Semitic as that overrides their political bias towards not criticising Israel.

Of course, more cynically, this makes equalising anti-Semitism and criticism of Israel a good political move for the right as it effectively neutralises one of their longstanding flaws. "Both sides are the same".

The main issue is that the Progressive Left views Jews as "privileged whites"—not a minority group with a history of persecution. Despite what you've written, and the various antisemitism surveys you quote but don't link, the past few weeks have shown (me) this (antisemitism, indifference to the state of Israel) is very much a Progressive Left issue. You may call out the Right for many things, and I'd join you—But this has got nothing to do with them.

See polling with some nice diagrams here:

https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2019/10/12/drawing-...

And yeah, if you consider criticism of Israel as de-facto anti-semitism, then the left is more "anti-semitic" by that measure. If you don't, then it's more balanced, with the conservatives having only a small lead (at least in the US)

We could reduce it to Anti-Zionism and Anti-Semitism Anyone chanting From the River to the Sea wants Palestine to rule from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea, meaning no Israel, meaning no Jewish state, no Zion.

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