POUGHKEEPSIE, N.Y. (JTA) — At many colleges and universities today, Jewish students are often pitted against students of color when it comes to Israel.
In my three years at Vassar College, I have been told – by a Jewish student leader, no less – that supporting Israel is tantamount to supporting oppression. I have watched Jewish friends bullied into silence by aggressive anti-Israel activists who call the Jews racists. I have seen many anti-Semitic comments from fellow students on social media. Although I have had many good experiences at Vassar and have made many friends, it can be uncomfortable to be Jewish here, especially if one supports Israel.
But nothing prepared me for the mob mentality that prevailed here on March 6, when Vassar’s student government, the Vassar Student Association,
voted 15-7 to endorse the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement, or BDS, against Israel.
Other than members of Vassar’s J Street U chapter, which offered an alternative resolution endorsing a two-state solution and calling for the creation of a student committee to educate the campus about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict – a resolution overwhelmingly rejected by the student association — few showed up to oppose BDS.
They did not stay away because they were busy or because Vassar lacks anti-BDS students. They stayed away because they were afraid of pro-BDS students who have, over the past two years, pursued an aggressive campaign of intimidation at Vassar.
BDS supporters have picketed a class that was to travel to Israel and the West Bank, tweeted a Nazi cartoon, sold T-shirts
celebrating a gun-toting Palestinian hijacker and sought to deny funding to J Street U to attend a conference sponsored by Haaretz.
Perhaps most damaging of all, they have divided the campus by portraying the territorial conflict between Israel and the Palestinians as a case of white colonialists oppressing people of color. Few charges on college campuses today are as incendiary as calling someone a racist, and BDS supporters routinely direct it at their opponents, regardless of their political inclinations.
The behavior of BDS supporters at the March 6 vote was typical. One after another, members of groups representing students of color stood up to denounce Israel for oppressing people of color. One student from Vassar’s Multiracial/Biracial Student Alliance claimed supporting BDS was necessary to support the “black and Arab population of Gaza.”
Those who attempted to challenge the resolution’s intellectual basis were mocked.
“Jesus Christ,” exclaimed a pro-BDS student in response to a question about the resolution’s claim that BDS is based in intersectional feminism.
“Does that question even have to be answered?” sneered another.
Most disturbingly, students who raised concerns about the effects of the unending BDS campaign on Vassar’s Jewish community were heckled and laughed at. One Jewish student talked about how the BDS campaign had invoked every anxiety nightmare she had ever had. She was crying as she spoke. Pro-BDS students laughed at her.
Religious minority groups were pitted against one another as well. When a Jewish member of the student association’s council reminded the gallery that Jewish students at Vassar had suffered the most during the BDS campaign, a pro-BDS student responded that Jews on campus had a Jewish studies program and a rabbi, as if her concerns hardly mattered. Muslim students, this BDS supporter argued, lacked an imam and similar classes.
Another Jewish student talked about Israel’s founding in the wake of the Holocaust. He was immediately accused of using the Holocaust as a political tool to justify the “genocide” of another people. The diminishment of the Holocaust has become routine at Vassar. Many students here think of the Holocaust as an event that affected white victims rather than people of color, and they argue that it therefore receives too much attention compared to other atrocities.
At the meeting’s conclusion, one non-Jewish council member
said she felt “very complicit in the anti-Semitism that was occurring tonight.” Some, at least, feel shame about what happened on March 6.
Pro-BDS students do not constitute a majority at Vassar. They accomplish things by being highly aggressive, highly vocal and highly organized. And they bully opponents into silence by accusing them of racism, as they did on March 6.
It is time that Vassar students and professors who, one hopes, reject tactics like these, stand up and reject the divisiveness that BDS has brought to Vassar and so many other campuses. Vassar students, particularly its Jewish students who have suffered the most during this debate, deserve to feel safe, and they deserve not to have their identities and their fears dismissed by those with an extreme political agenda.
—
Jason Storch is a junior at Vassar College who serves as co-president of the local Chabad center and treasurer of the Vassar Jewish Union.
Let me inject this... According to the United States State Department the Definiation of Anti Semitism is defind as:
With this Defination Vassar should remove the students, disbanned the clubs and organizations, fire the Professors and Teachers who preach this. Close down the Muslim Students association, and deport those who are no longer students with student VISAs. Time to take control.
The "Protocols of the Elders of Zion," the most notorious and most successful work of modern
anti-Semitism, draws on popular anti-Semitic notions which have their roots in medieval Europe from the time of the
Crusades. The
libels that the Jews used blood of Christian children for the
Feast of Passover, poisoned the wells and spread the plague were pretexts for the wholesale destruction of Jewish communities throughout
Europe. Tales were circulated among the masses of secret rabbinical conferences whose aim was to subjugate and exterminate the Christians, and motifs like these are found in early antisemitic literature.
The conceptual inspiration for the Protocols can be traced back to the time of the
French Revolution at the end of the 18th century. At that time, a French Jesuit named Abbe Barruel, representing reactionary elements opposed to the revolution, published in 1797 a treatise blaming the Revolution on a secret conspiracy operating through the Order of Freemasons. Barruel's idea was nonsense, since the French nobility at the time was heavily Masonic, but he was influenced by a Scottish mathematician named Robison who was opposed to the Masons. In his treatise, Barruel did not himself blame the Jews, who were emancipated as a result of the Revolution. However, in 1806, Barruel circulated a forged letter, probably sent to him by members of the state police opposed to Napoleon Bonaparte's liberal policy toward the Jews, calling attention to the alleged part of the Jews in the conspiracy he had earlier attributed to the Masons. This myth of an international Jewish conspiracy reappeared later on in 19th century
Europe in places such as
Germany and
Poland.
The direct predecessor of the Protocols can be found in the pamphlet "Dialogues in Hell Between Machiavelli and Montesquieu," published by the nonJewish French satirist Maurice Joly in 1864. In his "Dialogues," which make no mention of the Jews, Joly attacked the political ambitions of the emperor Napoleon III using the imagery of a diabolical plot in Hell. The "Dialogues" were caught by the French authorities soon after their publication and Joly was tried and sentenced to prison for his pamphlet.
Joly's "Dialogues," while intended as a political satire, soon fell into the hands of a German anti-Semite named Hermann Goedsche writing under the name os Sir John Retcliffe. Goedsche was a postal clerk and a spy for the Prussian secret police. He had been forced to leave the postal work due to his part in forging evidence in the prosecution against the Democratic leader Benedict Waldeck in 1849. Goedsche adapted Joly's "Dialogues" into a mythical tale of a Jewish conspiracy as part of a series of novels entitled "Biarritz," which appeared in 1868. In a chapter called "The Jewish Cemetery in
Prague and the Council of Representatives of the Twelve Tribes of Israel," he spins the fantasy of a secret centennial rabbinical conference which meets at midnight and whose purpose is to review the past hundred years and to make plans for the next century.
Goedsche's plagiary of Joly's "Dialogues" soon found its way to
Russia. It was translated into Russian in 1872, and a consolidation of the "council of representatives" under the name "Rabbi's Speech" appeared in Russian in 1891. These works no doubt furnished the Russian secret police (Okhrana) with a means with which to strengthen the position of the weak
Czar Nicholas II and discredit the reforms of the liberals who sympathized with the Jews. During the
Dreyfus case of 18931895, agents of the Okhrana in Paris redacted the earlier works of Joly and Goedsche into a new edition which they called the "Protocols of the Elders of Zion." The manuscript of the Protocols was brought to
Russia in 1895 and was printed privately in 1897.
The Protocols did not become public until 1905, when Russia's defeat in the Russo-Japanese War was followed by the Revolution in the same year, leading to the promulgation of a constitution and institution of the Duma. In the wake of these events, the reactionary "Union of the Russian Nation" or Black Hundreds organization sought to incite popular feeling against the Jews, who they blamed for the Revolution and the Constitution. To this end they used the Protocols, which was first published in a public edition by the mystic priest Sergius Nilus in 1905. The Protocols were part of a propaganda campaign that accompanied the pogroms of 1905 inspired by the Okhrana. A variant text of the Protocols was published by George Butmi in 1906 and again in 1907. The edition of 1906 was found among the Czar's collection, even though he had already recognized the work as a forgery. In his later editions, Nilus claimed that the Protocols had been read secretly at the
First Zionist Congress at
Basle in 1897, while Butmi, in his edition, wrote that they had no connection with the new
Zionist movement, but, rather, were part of the Masonic conspiracy.
In the civil war following the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, the reactionary White Armies made extensive use of the Protocols to incite widespread slaughters of Jews. At the same time, Russian emigrants brought the Protocols to western Europe, where the Nilus edition served as the basis for many translations, starting in 1920. Just after its appearance in
London in 1920, Lucien Wolf exposed the Protocols as a plagiary of the earlier work of Joly and Goedsche, in a pamphlet of the Jewish Board of Deputies. The following year, in 1921, the story of the forgery was published in a series of articles in the
London Times by Philip Grave, the paper's correspondent in Constantinople.
A whole book documenting the forgery was also published in the same year in the
United States by Herman Bernstein (
The Truth About "The Protocols of Zion." Reprinted with an introduction by Norman Cohn. NY: Ktav Publishing House, 1971). Nevertheless, the Protocols continued to circulate widely. They were even sponsored by
Henry Ford in the
United States until 1927, and formed an important part of the Nazis' justification of genocide of the Jews in the
Holocaust.
http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/anti-semitism/protocols.html
