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The Link Between BDS and Jew-Hatred on Campus

(National Post-Canada) Barbara Kay - In a Feb. 25 Facebook post, McGill student Molly Harris recounted her experience in a mandatory, three-hour workshop on "oppression, privilege, consent and race" designed to create a "safe space" for fellow dorm students. Molly described an incident when, singled out negatively for being Jewish, she felt unsafe. The facilitator responded that Molly could feel victimized for being female, but "being Jewish didn't constitute grounds for systematic oppression." On campuses with an active anti-Zionist presence, like McGill, hatred of Israel has a trickledown effect into the general "social justice" agenda - feminism, Black Lives Matter, LGBT and others - which has hardened many progressives' hearts against all Jewish pain, and shamed Jewish students into suppressing or denying it. And so it has become commonplace even for Jewish students well-versed in their people's history to accept the mantle of "privilege" rather than insist that 60 years of success in North America isn't a patch on 3,000 years of exclusion, religious persecution, second-class status and wholesale massacre, not to mention ethnic cleansing from 94 countries (with the alleged sins of the only one from which they cannot be expelled the hysterical, single-focus obsession of "human rights" activism). Today's BDS campaigns are inherently Judeophobic, and denial of "safe spaces" to Jews when they are exposed to identity-based hostility is an inherently anti-Semitic impulse. Let's finally acknowledge that and deal with it as we would any other offensive manifestation of intolerance.
2016-03-25 00:00:00
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