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U.S. Colleges Teaching Hate: American Miseducation (Documentary)
2024-02-01 (285)
In October last year, when Hamas attacked Israel, a new form of violent antisemitism instantly exploded onto American streets.
This newest strain of the oldest hatred comes not from far-right extremists, but from students and faculty at America’s most vaunted centers of learning.
In American Miseducation, Free Press correspondent Olivia Reingold travels to America’s most elite colleges—from UPenn to Columbia—to find the origins of campus antisemitism and to ask how the smartest people in the country became the source of so much hate.
American Miseducation was made possible through our partnership with the Jack Miller Center for Teaching America’s Founding Principles and History—a nonprofit organization building a movement of civic educators to reach the next generation with the principles of freedom, tolerance, and human dignity that lie at the heart of the American political tradition.
Credits: The Free Press @thefreepress
Video Transcription:
Okay, so I've probably been to over a dozen
of these rallies so far, and I have never
seen it this crazy this early on.
This protest was one of hundreds of pro
palestinian marches that have broken out around the
country since Hamas's attack on Israel last year.
On October 7, terrorists raped and tortured civilians,
murdered 1200 people, and took 250 hostages.
Many protesters are calling for an end
to Israel's ongoing counterfessive in Gaza.
But increasingly, the message is not one of peace.
It's one of revolution and violence against the state
of Israel and anyone who supports what revolution is.
The people versus government.
That's all you need to know.
The people versus the government.
Not black people, not Palestinians, everybody.
The people versus the government.
Israel came onto their land and colonized it.
I'm struck by how many
people are using academic language.
He's just like colonized and colonizer.
I have a degree from Columbia University and history in
war and say radical ideas from the ivory tower have
made their way into mass protests on the streets and
put a new twist on an old prejudice.
We decided to go to the source to
visit the institutions that originated this language and
ask how it has come to define protesters'understanding
of the Israel Palestine conflict.
The struggle of imperialism and colonialism is intersection,
and nobody's free until we are all free.
Political action on campus
often reflects national movement.
In recent years, college students have demonstrated
for Black Lives Matter, the Metoo movement,
and calls for trans rights.
But when pro palestinian rallies kicked off around
the country this fall, we heard from students
who said things on campus felt different.
My jewish sisters and brothers and I are on
the receiving end of death threats from our peers.
Won't touch him.
Radical progressive politics were metastasizing
into open anti semitism overnight.
The very people who had spent years demanding
safe spaces and complaining about microaggressions
transformed into free speech absolutists. Shut up.
Free Palestine vote.
What happened?
The rhetoric, both from students and faculty
leaders, has been deeply worrying for.
The University of Pennsylvania, one of the
most selective schools in the world, faces
some of the strongest criticism.
Last year, the college hosted several anti semitic
speakers at a festival on palestinian literature.
The event featured Mark Lamont Hill, who was fired by
CNN for calling for the destruction of Israel, and maybe most
notably, Roger Waters, the really wacky former Pink Floyd
vocalist who's publicly used anti jewish slurs, desecrated
the memoryof Anne Frank, and has dressed up as a Nazi
and floated a pig balloon with a Star of David
at many of his concerts.
And when activists across the country began
tearing down posters of israeli hostages.
Why are you tearing them down?
The Penn campus was no exception.
Every single one is a flyer that was ripped down.
You can see the remnants of
them, like literally all over.
Eyal Yakobi is a Penn senior tracking
the uptick in anti semitic incidents.
This is where the swastika was found,
spray painted in a spray booth.
It was in here, I believe, in the spray booth.
I don't know where.
In the past month at Penn, there's been six
different physical incidents of jew hatred, whether it be
a swastik or whether it be a jewish fraternity
house being vandalized with Jews or Nazis.
Since October 7, AoL has been eating
meals at the campus hallel, where jewish
students have been sharing their experiences.
I'm sure a lot of you woke up on October eigth
and realized that there had been a terrorist attack in Israel.
And when did you first started to notice
that maybe other people on campus weren't perceiving
it as an act of terrorism?
It must have been 11:30 a.m.
Was pen against the occupation, organizing
a rally for the next day.
Literally wall Hamas.
Terrorists were still in Kibutzim.
And that's when I kind of realized that
we have members in the community who actively
want to defend it and justify it.
That was really eye opening.
The reason why I even got involved with speaking out
about any of this was because at one of therallies, my
Hebrew and Judaica advisor, that Israel desecrates the
memory of those who died in the Holocaust.
Israel is the epitome of anti semitism.
My grandfather survived the Holocaust and his
father and his brother were murdered.
And I just was standing there and
I'm like, who is this woman?
My great grandfather who was
killed, his name was Israel.
You don't think he would have been
proud of the state of Israel?
In the aftermath of October 7, students were
surprised to find their own professors speaking out
in support of the murderous attack.
A UC Davis assistant professor is under fire tonight
for things they posted on social media platform x.
One group of people we have easy access
to in the US is all these zionist
journalists who spread propaganda and misinformation.
They have houses with addresses.
Kids in school, they can fear their
bosses, but they should fear us more.
At the end of the post, a
knife, an axe, and blood emojis.
Mika Tosker described Israelis Jews as
pigs, savages, and irredeemable excrement.
Stanford University has suspended a lecturer following
accusations that he directed jewish students in
his class to stand in the corner
and described Israelis as colonizers.
Hamas has shifted the balance of power.
Hamas has punctured the illusion of invincibility.
It was exhilarating.
It was energized.
The only criminal thing is stellar colonialism.
It is completely not acceptable for a professor
at Columbia to call what Chumas did something
worthy of jubilation and awe, of stunning victory.
I think that antisemitism plays some role
in explaining what's been happening on campus
and how administrators have been responding.
Political scientist Yasha Monk writes about the
history of identity politics on college campuses.
The new ideology about race and gender and
sexual orientation that's become so influential in our
society as a whole, in particular on college
campuses, gives you a few basic conceptual categories
to understand the world.
The first is that it'll split the world into
whites and people of color and think that that
is really the key distinction that explains the contemporary
United States, but also other parts of the world.
The second is to distinguish between
dominant people and particular colonizers and
the dominated of the colonists.
Now, if you apply all of that to
the very complicated situation in Israel Palestine, it
suddenly looks deceptively simple, and it's impossible for
those oppressed people to do anything bad, anything
unjust towards their oppressors.
And so suddenly you can reconceptualize something like the
terrible, gruesome Hamas massacre on October 7 as a
form of righteous resistance against white colonials.
Glory to the murders.
Glory to the murders.
The problem for me is with what campus
culture becomes if a few activists are dominated.
So it's enough for a relatively small percentage of students
to want to intimidate people who support as well, or
to intimidate anybody who happens to be jewish.
For that to become a very unpleasant atmosphere.
I'm heading to Cooper Union now.
There have been reports that jewish
students are locked in the library.
I believe they are there for safety
reasons, and there are reports circulating.
Security feel outnumbered.
Several jewish students who wished to
remain anonymous recounted their experience in
the library that afternoon.
So a bunch of us went into the library.
Security or some teachers locked the door because
they heard people coming, and then they were
shouting, like, free tie sign, pre tie sign.
We all heard the loudest banging on
metal doors, floors shaking, walls shaking.
We all ran from our seats once
they were banging on the library. Let us in. Let us in.
Let us in.
It was very scary.
I definitely feel hatred towards me.
I've never been scared like that, because I
realized if they came in, then there was
nothing I could do to stop them.
A lawyer for the jewish students held
a press conference the following day.
We have been retained by a number of the
students who were impacted by yesterday's horrific events.
Students felt afraid for their safety.
They feared for their lives.
This is unacceptable in New York City.
This is unacceptable anywhere in the United States.
This is fake news.
You are supporting.
While some students disputed the threat posed to
jewish students, tensions were reaching a breaking point.
The rally was here, too, though. Right here?
Yes and yes.
Here to the right.
The very next day, at Tulane University
in Louisiana, threats turned to violence.
They were trying to burn an israeli
flag, and a student jumped out.
And the first instinct that he had
was to try and save the flag.
And as he was saving it, one of
the kids hit the person with the flag.
All hell broke loose after that.
One had a megaphone.
He whacked one of our friends, broke his nose.
There was punches thrown.
There was blood on the ground.
Just escalated very fast.
Tell me what happened next. Okay.
Yeah, someone just pretty much went
up to me and hit me.
She seems to come for you. Yeah.
I just stood on the pro Israel side.
I had no israeli flag.
It was because I was jewish.
I was surprised that this could happen on a university
in the United States, that people could be calling for
my genocide, and also that someone just came up to
me and assaulted me just for being jewish.
Despite a more than threefold increase in antisemitic
incidents after October 7, some influential voices claim
that the real threat is to the speech
of antiisrael students and faculty.
I don't see any rise of antisemitism.
I see a rise of antizionism.
The two things are very different.
They're not the same.
Colombia professor Mahmood Mamdani is one of many
faculty members who signed an open letter supporting
the right of pro Palestine students to protest.
So this is the letter, and you're one of the signees.
A lot of it has to do with
protecting the free speech rights of Palestine supporters.
We need to create an arena
which is more inclusive than exclusive.
The university should not just be an arena
for supporters of the state of Israel.
Do you think that jewish students feel
terrified to express pro Israel sentiments, though?
I mean, I can't speak in such generalities as
jewish students, but I can tell you that the
jewish students in my class are not scared.
I went here, I went to the journalism school,
and in my experience, I mean, this was a
campus in which misgendering people was violence.
I just am surprised that there would be
a tolerance for antisemitism when there's so much
intolerance towards other kinds of hatred.
Well, look, you have to prove that there
is tolerance for anti semitism, but if a
speaker is anti semitic, they should still be.
They should be confronted.
We're not going to ask people to produce their
transcripts, vet them and say, okay, you can talk.
You cannot talk. Come on.
It's a place for debate.
I mean, this is not a police station.
It's not a police state.
We don't decide what speech is
acceptable, what speech is not acceptable.
I think Columbia often has, though.
It's time to change.
Mondani made no public statement when fire named
his college the worst in the US for
free speech in 2022, nor when hundreds of
students disrupted campus republican events in 2017.
Students say administration rules make hosting
major conservative speakers practically impossible.
It's selective, their social justice advocacy.
I have friends that marched against the
abortion decision when the Metoo movement happened.
These were students, women and men alike, that
came out in unequivocal support, with unequivocal and
unwavering belief in the women that came forward.
But when the rape victims are jews, they want proof.
People were protesting before Israel retaliated,
and they're screaming, globalized the antifata
from the river to the sea.
We don't want no two state.
We want all of it.
These are calls for the erasure of
Israel and of Jews from the land.
And these are your classmates, right?
That's what's like.
It's gut wrenching.
I have people who I was friends with, whose friendships
and relationships I valued, seeking to contextualize what
Hamas did to thousands of jews on October 7.
I'm seeing attempts to contextualize and
justify the massacre of jews.
Jewish students have learned that there isn't a,
quote, safe space for them on campus like
there is for other minority groups.
When college presidents were called to
testify before Congress in December, their
institutional policies were made clear.
Does calling for the genocide of Jews violate Penn's code
of conduct when it comes to bullying and harassment?
Yes or no?
It is a context dependent decision, congresswoman.
It can be, depending on the context.
I've heard chance, which can be
anti semitic, depending on the context.
When calling for the elimination of the jewish
people, again, it depends on the context.
The presidents of UPenn and Harvard, both of
which are now being sued by students for, quote,
pervasive anti Semitism, resigned when their apparently
indifferent testimony drew public outrage.
But their attitude reflected a common one.
On campus, protesters largely denied that there
is significant anti Semitism in their movement.
But in DC, at the largest pro palestinian
rally, to date, what I heard was revealing. Biden.
Biden.
You can't hide.
It's not their land. It's our land.
And they're killing them.
And they tell him, either you go live in
a desert so they can take that land.
They said, no, we're not leaving our country.
One guy, he was just walking. They pushed him.
He's arabian.
They pushed him.
Who's they? Jewish. Is that.
We don't like to use the
term when we're talking about Israel.
We don't like to use the term Jews.
We like to use the term Zion.
Wait, can I ask you, but can I ask you.
You did use the word Jews, so can I ask you why?
Tell me about that.
Because they're the one who came in 1948.
That's how we know as the Jews.
While college students might know better than
to say jew instead of zionist, data
reveals how they actually feel.
Among 18 to 24 year olds, 67% believe that Jews,
quote, are oppressors and should be treated as oppressors.
It is, of course, legitimate to criticize
the policies of the state of Israel.
And I have done so many times in my own life.
You start to get into more complicated waters
when you single out the only jewish state
in the world in ways that don't seem
to apply when you're talking about other countries.
And we've simply learned that the socially
respectable way to express that is to
say, oh, no, hang on a second.
Nowadays, we don't say the Jews.
We say the Zionists.
What happens on campus doesn't stay on campus.
No peace on stolen land.
An extreme ideology, once written off as
fringe, has exploded onto the street.
I will not condemn the palestinian people
fighting against over 75 years of colonialism
and genocide by any means necessary.
Israel murdered their own people on October 7,
and its followers are targeting Jews everywhere.
We all live on campus now.
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