The campus of The University of Texas at Austin Last week, the student government of The University of Texas at Austin (UT Austin) unanimously approved A.R. 26, a motion intended to condemn recent anti-Semitic incidents in and around their campus. The assembly resolution, officially titled “In Support of Jewish Students at The University of Texas at Austin,” cites the recent incidents of “a center for Jewish student life at the…Texas [H]illel [being] vandalized…and a heavily anti-Semitic Facebook post [being] published to the University…Class of 2020 Facebook page” as the impetus for the resolution. Jonathon Dror, one of the authors of the resolution, told the student newspaper that “[s]everal Jewish students that I know don’t even feel comfortable wearing their (Star of David) necklace out or small things like that just to express their religion.” The resolution also comments upon the recent bomb threats to Jewish community centers nationwide and vandalism of Jewish cemeteries in the United States. UT Austin is home to over 3000 Jewish students. Previous incidents regarding BDS activity on campus have led to professors being publicly attacked, as well as speakers being disinvited from campus. These incidents, as well as harassment of Jewish students on campus, have harmed what A.R. 26 refers to as the “core values” of the University: learning, discovery, freedom, leadership, individual opportunity, and responsibility. Jason Taper, a Texas Hillel member, said in a recent interview with the Daily Texan that “[i]t is still – luckily – unacceptable to hate Jews at the University of Texas. That said, the people that are anti-Semites, the people that are vandals, the people that are phoning in these threats, [they] don’t care [that it is unacceptable]…so knowing that we have the community behind us really helps.” The students at UT Austin are the latest of those from many universities worldwide, who are working within their school’s systems and student governments to fight against anti-Semitism and the influence of the BDS movement. In August of 2016, Leipzig University in Germany saw a condemnation of the “anti-Semitic BDS campaign” by its student government. Various student governments in the US , have adopted resolutions condemning anti-Semitism on their own campuses and within America at large, and some have gone further – such as those at such as those at Indiana University, UCLA, Capital University, UC Berkeley, UCSC, and others – and have adopted the U.S. State Department’s Definition of Anti-Semitism. The Indiana University resolution, for example, cited the Marcus Policy, initiated by LDB President Kenneth L. Marcus in 2004 during his tenure at the Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights. This policy extended Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which protects students from discrimination based on their race, color, or national origin at federally funded post-secondary educational institutions, to protect Jewish students based on their ethnic or ancestral background. In order for universities to remain a bastion of academic integrity, free thought, and equal opportunity, these condemnations and individual actions must continue.
As a co-chair of the Women’s March protesting Donald Trump’s inauguration, Linda Sarsour – who is usually identified as a Palestinian-American progressive political activist – has recently attracted much sympathetic media attention, but also some criticism. Among the issues that critics of Sarsour brought up early on was her open support for BDS, i.e. the movement that singles out Israel as a target for boycott, divestment and sanction, and her stated preference for “a one-state solution that, experts agree, will not be a Jewish state because the larger population will be Palestinian.” While her Wikipedia page currently claims that Sarsour “supports Israel’s right to exist,” she quite obviously does not support Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state. Indeed, Sarsour once asserted [http://archive.is/D42dt]: “Nothing is creepier than Zionism;” she also suggested that Zionism is racism. “Denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination, and denying Israel the right to exist” is of course listed as an example for contemporary anti-Semitism in the US State Department definition of anti-Semitism. However, Sarsour has insisted that she is only “a critic of the State of Israel” and that she firmly opposes anti-Semitism. But given Sarsour’s declared revulsion against Zionism and her openly acknowledged preference for a so-called “one-state solution” that would transform the world’s only Jewish state into yet another Arab-Muslim majority state, it would clearly be more accurate to describe her not as a “critic,” but rather as an outright opponent of Israel’s existence as a Jewish state. Moreover, there is reason to suspect that Sarsour does not accept common definitions of anti-Semitism: she is listed (#73) among the people who signed on to the truly Orwellian definition of anti-Semitism that veteran anti-Israel activist Ali Abunimah published in fall 2012 on the basis of his preposterous view that Zionism is “one of the worst forms of anti-Semitism in existence today” and that support for Zionism “is not atonement for the Holocaust, but its continuation in spirit.” (more…)