James Kirchick, on the cult of BDS, and the continuing encouragement of antisemitic zealots who are hijacking American academia:
At first glance, the news that former CIA agent Valerie Plame has been invited to speak at Smith College on the topic of “Social Media and U.S. Foreign Policy” is laughable. Plame’s once-active Twitter account has been silent since September 24, the day she offered a mealy-mouthed apology for retweeting an article with the headline “America’s Jews are Driving America’s Wars” to her 50,000 followers. Plame initially defended as “provocative, but thoughtful” a piece which called for publicly identifying “those American Jews who lack any shred of integrity” like “a warning label on a bottle of rat poison.” Next at the Kahn Liberal Arts Institute? Harvey Weinstein on gender equality, Richard Spencer on American race relations, and Donald Trump on Social Media and U.S. Foreign Policy.
The invitation to the disgraced ex-CIA agent, however, speaks to something more serious, which is the way in which the Boycott Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel is finding an institutional home in American academia. Only in an environment where it has become banal to exclude the world’s sole Jewish state would no one bat an eye at welcoming a blatant anti-Semite like Valerie Plame to address a roomful of young impressionable minds. A perverse consequence of the laudable progressive desire to be inclusive – which, taken to an extreme, has resulted in “safe spaces” for every conceivable minority group – is the exclusion of Jews at the behest of rejectionist Muslim voices who reject wholesale the existence of a Jewish state.
For a particularly egregious example of where things could be headed, consider Rutgers, the state university of New Jersey. There, a trifecta of anti-Semitism scandals has engulfed the campus. First, there is Michael Chikindas, the professor of food science who has turned his Facebook page into a digital Der Stürmer and claims that Judaism is “the most racist religion in the world.” He’s joined by Jasbir Puar, a women’s studies professor who in the past claimed that Israel harvests Palestinian organs and whose latest peer-reviewed book, The Right to Maim, argues that the Israeli Defense Force’s “purportedly humanitarian practice of sparing death” is actually part of an ingenious strategy “to control” Palestinians. (Such outward benignity is not unlike the Jewish State’s LGBT-friendly policies, the ulterior motive of which, Puar argues, is the “homonationalist” “pinkwashining” of occupation. Those Jews can’t do anything right). Finally, Rutgers has brought into its taxpayer-funded employ a career Syrian diplomat named Mazen Adi, who, in his position as legal adviser at his country’s mission to the United Nations, echoed Puar’s claim that “international gangs led by some Israeli officials are now trafficking children’s organs....
And so, in a world in which all of the above inanity is becoming normalized, why wouldn’t a top-tier liberal arts college host a lecture on the use of social media by someone whose own use of social media is distinguished solely by its anti-Semitic incitement? It makes perfect sense.
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