Hate at a Liberal Arts College and the People Who Do Not Speak

When people worry it's 1930s Germany again, this is what they have in mind

[Be sure to check out my new two-volume work, “Israel Breathes, World Condemns,” a collection of my writings over the past decade documenting and analyzing the transformation of academia into an antizionist, antisemitic hatefest: Vol I, “The Trajectory,” and Vol. II, “The Aftermath.” All proceeds will go to support Israel.]

“In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends” – MLK, Jr.

There is hate afoot, among us on this campus, and nobody is speaking. We say we are anti-racist, yet this hate is racism. We say we believe in inclusion, yet this hate is explicitly exclusive. We say we are an educational institution, yet this hate is indoctrinating propaganda that would make Goebbels proud.

And nobody says a word.

Connecticut College’s Hate Series continued this past week with its twelfth lecture, its thirteenth coming up next week. That’s thirteen lectures all saying pretty much the same thing, over and over: Israel bad, Israel very bad, Israel evil, Israel racist, Israel genocide, etc., with the occasional “Jewish supremacy” thrown in in case anyone misses the connection between hating Israel and hating Jews. For surely if Israeli evil is perpetrated in the name of “Jewish supremacy,” then any Jews who support Israel in any measure are themselves also Jewish supremacists? My goodness, that slick move is right out of the famous antisemitic forgery, Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the same antisemitic forgery that Hitler used to justify the Holocaust, that Hamas literally quotes to justify its own decades-long genocidal jihad campaign against not “Israelis” but the Jews—except that it’s happening right here on our campus, repeated again and again over thirteen lectures, and nobody says a word.

Just walk on by, nothing to see here folks while the Jews are repeatedly dehumanized, in the way the Nazis did to prepare the ground for their genocide.

One surely must wonder why this conflict merits so much sustained, single-minded, dare we say obsessive, attention. There are over 100 active military conflicts in the world right now, many of them orders of magnitude larger in terms of land mass involved, civilian casualties, human rights violations, and overall suffering. We’re talking about hundreds of thousands and millions dead, displaced, actively actually dying of starvation, in Syria, Sudan, Yemen, the Congo, Burkina Faso, 120,000 Armenians forcibly cleansed from Azerbaijan, 500,000 Afghanis forcibly expelled from Pakistan, the three-year Russia-Ukraine war which alone has claimed over one million casualties with many millions displaced, the ongoing Islamist campaign against Christians in Africa with its many thousands murdered, beheaded, raped, and literally enslaved, etc. In November Turkish bombing cut off electricity and water to a million Kurds.

Our campus, in response to these enormous global catastrophes? Crickets.

Apparently there’s neither need nor frankly time for Connecticut College students to learn about any of that because we must be inundated with thirteen speakers all portraying the tiny sliver of a Jewish state—itself the victim of a mass jihadi genocidal terrorist massacre, then having been attacked by over 31,000 missiles in an area just larger than Connecticut, from seven different active war fronts—as the epitome of all evil, as bad, very bad, racist, genocide, Jewish supremacy, etc., and its (mostly Jewish) civilians as deserving of being slaughtered, and all the more so for defending themselves in a conflict featuring a mere fraction of those other casualties. There ought to be a word for when people obsess like this about the Jews, not to mention apply malicious double standards to them. That word would probably also work for when people respond to a genocidal jihad campaign to mass slaughter Jews by condemning the Jews for defending themselves, thereby supporting the genocidal jihad campaign itself. Last I checked, supporting the mass murder of Jews counts as, well, hate, under pretty much any definition and pretty much anywhere, except, apparently, here.

All that would be concerning even if these lectures were disseminating the truth about Israel, but among the series’ most notable features is its collective affront to academic standards. Orwellianly calling itself an “educational” series—normally an extended, entirely one-sided presentation of a very complicated multifaceted matter would better be described as “propaganda” and “indoctrination”—the talks have been filled with so much misinformation, misrepresentations, half-truths and distortions, omissions of essential context and facts, and frankly outright lies that it’s downright embarrassing that they are permitted to occur at—much less have been actively supported by—an accredited institution of “higher education.” I dissected several of them in December here; I could do the same for every single one in the series did I not have many other professional obligations, such as teaching the classes I am hired to teach, that take up most of my time.

The most recent lecture, the twelfth, was perhaps the most offensive of them all, with its three-front assault on Israel, the Jewish people, and the truth. Bentham’s “nonsense on stilts” would be an appropriate description of Prof. Raz Segal’s talk were it not simply too glib to describe the blood libel of “Israeli genocide,” which is not merely defamatorily false but in fact dangerous, dehumanizing, and incentivizing of hatred and violence toward Jews everywhere. Again were there more time I would document line by line the misrepresentations, distortions, omissions, and outright lies; for those who actually care about truth, thorough debunkings of the “genocide” lie in general may be found here and here.

But here I’ll merely say this. If this is a “genocide,” it’s the first genocide in history where the people allegedly being genocided have had it within their power, from the very first day, to stop the genocide but chose not to, for sixteen months and counting, instead preferring to continue waging war. If this is a “genocide,” it’s the first genocide in history where even the “victims” themselves declare that their population increased during the “genocide.” It’s also the first genocide in history where the “victims” themselves call it a “victory,” and where well-fed, cleanly dressed gunmen celebrate their “victory” by emerging weekly from brand new fully fueled expensive vehicles, in front of enormous banners produced by expensive professional equipment, in front of an audience full of well-fed people holding plump babies and the latest iphones filming everything, and parade out by gunpoint emaciated prisoners whose families they slaughtered and whom they have been torturing for sixteen months, and the coffins of babies they have murdered, and proclaim that they (the gunmen) are the “victims” and the emaciated prisoners and dead babies in coffins are the “perpetrators.” And it’s the first “genocide” in history where the “victims” boast of the mass slaughter they perpetrated to start the war and repeatedly promise to do it again and again as soon as they are able.

And that’s just from the “victims”’ perspective. Yet one more piece of evidence of the utter corruption of the United Nations is that when its “Special Advisor on the Prevention of Genocide” (whom one expects to have some expertise on the subject) recently issued a guidance paper emphasizing the importance of “adhering to the correct usage of the term,” and then determined that Israel’s actions in Gaza did not constitute genocide given the actual meaning of the term, she was fired. This is not the place to go through the casualty statistics, which I have done elsewhere; suffice to say that the actual civilian:militant casualty ratio will likely turn out to be perhaps the lowest in all modern urban warfare, and this despite the unprecedently difficult conditions that include the extensive use of human shields by Hamas and its militarization of literally the entire Gaza Strip, thus indicating Israel’s devoted efforts to target combatants.

The one redeeming feature of Segal’s talk was that delicious moment in which he entirely destroyed his own argument without realizing it.

He quoted the figure that Israel had cumulatively dropped 87,000 tons of explosives on Gaza to date, the equivalent, he said, of “three atomic bombs.” His intention was to convey that Israel is bad, very bad, unrestrained, bombing everything in sight, thus genocidal, but the natural response to such astounding data would surely be to ask, “Three atomic bombs in that small area? But then why isn’t absolutely everyone in Gaza dead and every single building levelled?” In fact why are relatively so few dead, even if one accepts Hamas’s generally unreliable casualty figures?

The answer is as obvious as it is fatal to Segal’s entire argument.

It’s because Israel is doing its best to target carefully.

Which is the exact opposite of genocide.

Boom! one would say, if the issue wasn’t so deadly serious.

Similarly, the anonymous blogger Elder of Ziyon observes that that bombing figure comes out to 1.8 tons of explosives for every alleged fatality, which, if Israel intended to kill as many people as possible, is a stunningly inefficient, incompetent use of explosives. Then in a manner that would be whimsical if it also weren’t so deadly serious, he goes on to calculate how many people would likely be killed in Gaza had Israel dropped 87,000 tons not of bombs but of bricks, and did so indiscriminately in the urban areas where most of the explosives were dropped. Using data about population density, the weight and speed of bricks dropped from airplanes and the probabilities of such bricks causing fatal injuries, he concludes that about 225,000 people would likely die in such manner, nearly five times the official Gaza numbers for the same mass of high explosives!

So how could Israel drop so much explosive material and kill so few people? If Israel is targeting civilians (as the haters allege, and a genocide allegation requires) then it is failing beyond miserably. And even if Israel is only bombing indiscriminately (as the haters also allege, and a genocide allegation would alternatively require) then it has managed to kill far fewer people than indiscriminately dropping bricks would have done, at much less of the cost.

It's all really that stupid.

And really the entire talk was as ludicrous as this. Segal claimed that Israel bombs “everything, hospitals, schools, safe zones,” etc. Another clownish self-refutation, as that very assertion acknowledges that Israel establishes numerous safe zones and safe times in the first place, precisely in order to spare as many civilian lives as possible. As to why those zones might occasionally have been attacked, he simply omitted the fact that Hamas has literally militarized everything in Gaza, with hundreds of miles of military tunnels under nearly every building, actively using hospitals and schools for their military operations, regularly firing rockets from the safe zones, and so forth—thus turning them into legitimate military targets, by international law, by ordinary morality, and by common sense. What kind of scholar accuses Israel of bombing civilian targets while conveniently omitting the fact that those targets in fact had been militarized?

Not an honest one.

Indeed deliberate omissions do a lot of work for scholars like these. Like omitting the vast amount of counterevidence to his genocide claim, including Israel warning civilians by letters and by phone calls, moving civilians out of the way, setting up numerous field hospitals, facilitating 16 months of food and medical aid and fuel, and on and on. Like nearly every other speaker in this hate series Segal largely omitted the existence and actions of Hamas altogether, starting even with the subtitle of the talk, “Israel’s Attack on Gaza.” As Segal sees things, Israel just one day decided to up and attack Gaza, just waltz in there and destroy everything and kill everyone. That does sort of look like genocide when you leave out all the relevant facts, including, you know, that (a) Gaza started the war by invading and mass slaughtering and taking hundreds of hostages, (b) Gaza has persisted in fighting the war for the past sixteen months, refusing to release the hostages, (c) Gaza continues to fight it to this moment (ceasefire notwithstanding), and (d) Gaza rejected numerous ceasefire proposals along the way, all indicating that they are not particularly eager for the war to end. That sure looks like a two-way war to me. Bare minimum it is a “Gaza-Israel war” (Gaza first because they started it), or maybe even “Palestine-Israel war,” considering the active contributions of the Palestinian element in Judea-Samaria as well (or if you prefer, “West Bank”). But even that isn’t adequate, because Israel has actually been under attack on at least seven fronts, from Gaza, Judea-Samaria, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Yemen, and Iran itself, not to mention the enormous financial and logistical support of Qatar and Egypt. Perhaps the “Islamist War on the Jews”? Well, what’s in a name—other than an accurate conception of what is actually happening here?

Last I checked, aiming to produce “accurate conceptions” of things would be an important part of the mission of any “educational series” sponsored by an “educational institution” such as our own. “Israel’s Attack on Gaza” isn’t even trying to be that—and nobody says a word, when the very integrity of this institution is itself under assault.

The “genocide” allegation isn’t merely false, isn’t merely defamatory, isn’t merely antisemitic (see here). It is deliberately designed to delegitimize Jewish self-defense, to ensure that when an actually genocidal movement attacks the Jews, the Jews are not permitted to respond, not permitted to remove the genocidal threat literally from their midst, not permitted to rescue their hostages, all actions that literally every other country in the world would undertake in the same situation. It’s a neat trick: attack a Jew, then condemn him as the aggressor when he responds. Here it was: attempt to murder as many Jews as possible in a blatantly genocidal act, then condemn the Jews as “genocidal” when they respond. The “genocide” allegation is also active and dangerous incitement to hate and violence. To repeatedly, obsessively defame Israeli Jews as perpetrators of genocide, and accuse them of so perpetrating in the name of “Jewish supremacy”(!), is to mark them, and all those who support Israel, for persecution and violence. The massive worldwide uptick of harassment, ostracization, and outright violence against Jews in the past year, including in the U.S. and on many campuses, is no accident but a direct consequence of this global defamation hate campaign. Again, it is right out of the Nazi-Hamas playbook of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. That an “educational” series at an accredited college openly contributes to and amplifies such a campaign is shocking—and nobody here says a word.

Make no mistake. Even if these lectures were honest, fair, disseminating only truths, their obsessive incentivization of Jew-hate should be unacceptable on this campus. This campus would never stand for a thirteen-lecture series carefully and truthfully documenting (for example) the long history of Islamist terrorism and violence. How would the Muslim members of our community feel knowing the community around them was being inundated with one-sided information about homicidal jihadism across the globe, about the Islamist slaughter of Christians in Africa (just this week there is a report about Muslims beheading 70 Christians in the Congo), about the violence being promoted in mosques even in the United States as we speak? In fact it probably would not even stand for a single lecture fitting those descriptions. Nor would this campus stand for the same attacking any other identity group on this campus, BIPOC, LGBTQ+, etc.

And that is the case even if the lectures were honest and truthful! Imagine now they are filled with misrepresentations, distortions, omissions, and lies, all to the same hate-incentivizing end. Yet that is where we are, with a full thirteen-lecture series (and counting!) against the Jews. At least one faculty member (I hear) even offered their students extra credit to attend the recent lecture, despite it having nothing to do with their course, apparently going that extra mile to get as many students here to hate the Jews as possible.

This should not be acceptable.

It certainly is not advisable. With the current government crackdown on campus antisemitism do we want to draw that kind of attention to this campus? Isn’t it only a matter of time before someone files a legal complaint against this place? Maybe someone will forward this essay to the government?

I occasionally get calls from concerned parents of prospective (and current) students, Jewish and non-Jewish alike, who have heard worrisome things about the climate here. I heard from several families who refused to apply here this year because of the antisemitic “Jewish supremacy” letter so many faculty members shamefully signed in the spring (which I called out here). Given the financial crisis we keep hearing about, is it possibly in the interest of this college to allow, much less support, a hate series like this that doesn’t merely potentially but actually drives away prospective students?

Some 90 members of this community signed that vile letter in the spring. On the plus side, many people did not sign that letter. But you are all so silent on these issues. It seems to have fallen to me alone to call this out. You may not care much about the Jews, but if you care about fighting hate, if you care about our alleged values of fighting racism and promoting inclusion, if you care about academic integrity, and if you care about the spiritual and most of all financial well-being, and thus long-term existence, of this institution, it is time for you to speak up.