Think antisemitism can’t rise here? Elite college heads spouting ‘context’ show it can | Opinion

How could this be happening here? I thought. Then I remembered. It has happened here.

It happened two years before Pearl Harbor plunged our nation into World War II, the bloodiest carnage in human history. Tens of millions perished from combat, bombings, and concentration camps. Many who died were innocent civilians.

In a 1939 Nazi rally at Madison Square Garden, a robust crowd of 20,000 gathered to foment antisemitic hate. A Jewish protestor stormed the stage to stop the speaker, but he was quickly subdued by guards and severely beaten. In a chilling moment, a squad of American Nazi Youth standing behind the stage watched with excitement. One of the boys even gleefully bounced around, applauding the violence.

For those who think this can’t happen again, it has happened again. Not at Madison Square Garden but at the elite educational institutions of Harvard University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Pennsylvania.

A recent congressional committee hearing called the presidents of those institutions to account for the rise of antisemitic rallies at their universities, where some of the rhetoric called for death to Israel.

Rep. Elise Stefanik, R-New York, asked each the question: “Does calling for the genocide of Jews violate your school’s code of conduct?”

MIT’s Sally Kornbluth, suppressing a smirk, explained that the answer to the question was “context dependent.”

Wait, what? Seriously, she said that?

She seriously did.

So, how did we get here?

Harvard’s President Claudine Gay provides a clue. Following her congressional testimony, she said in an interview that what she should have done was return to “my guiding truth … that calls for genocide … will not go unchallenged.”

Not truth in any absolute sense. My truth.

With that relativistic understanding of right and wrong, any belief is as valid as another. “Genocide is intolerable” is as credible as “genocide is acceptable.” Depending on the “context.”

In what context is gang rape acceptable? Under what circumstances are torture and beheadings to be tolerated? Kidnappings of school-aged children, toddlers, 10-month-old babies?

All of that was documented in Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack on Israel. And yet, almost half of Americans ages 18-24 side with Hamas over Israel.

The leadership of the Nazi party in America created an environment that gave rise not only to violence but also to the next generation of haters who celebrated the violence.

At universities, leadership has the responsibility to make the environment on campus safe for their students. In the name of free speech, however, the leaders of MIT, Harvard and Penn didn’t make a safe space for their Jewish students. Instead, they allowed a space for hate to forge words that inflicted blunt-force trauma on some of those students.

Jewish college students are frightened. So are Palestinians who live here. Three young men were shot in Vermont while visiting relatives. They were walking down a sidewalk, speaking English and Arabic, each wearing a black-and-white checked Palestinian scarf.

Clearly and unequivocally a hate crime, independent of context.

All of this begs the question: What is happening here, in America, and now, in 2023?

Chuck Colson answered that question 34-years-ago in his book, “Against the Night: Living in the New Dark Ages.”

“We face a crisis in Western culture, and it presents the greatest threat to civilization since the barbarians invaded Rome,” he wrote. “Today in the West, particularly in America, the new barbarians are all around us. They are not hairy Goths and Vandals, swilling fermented brew and ravishing maidens; they are not Huns and Visigoths storming over our borders or scaling our city walls. No, this time the invaders have come from within.”

This story was originally published December 14, 2023 at 6:25 AM with the headline "Think antisemitism can’t rise here? Elite college heads spouting ‘context’ show it can | Opinion."