Fine People On Both Sides

Two days ago, a Federal District Court judge(1) issued a preliminary injunction against the University of California ordering the university from "knowingly allowing or facilitating the exclusion of Jewish students from ordinarily available portions of UCLA’s programs, activities, and campus areas."

Here's the opening paragraph of the Court's ruling:

In the year 2024, in the United States of America, in the State of California, in the City of Los Angeles, Jewish students were excluded from portions of the UCLA campus because they refused to denounce their faith. This fact is so unimaginable and so abhorrent to our constitutional guarantee of religious freedom that it bears repeating, Jewish students were excluded from portions of the UCLA campus because they refused to denounce their faith. UCLA does not dispute this. Instead, UCLA claims that it has no responsibility to protect the religious freedom of its Jewish students because the exclusion was engineered by third-party protesters. But under constitutional principles, UCLA may not allow services to some students when UCLA knows that other students are excluded on religious grounds, regardless of who engineered the exclusion. 

While the University of California argued, in effect, that there were fine people on both sides(2) of this issue, that is not really what the university thinks and teaches.  It teaches that Jews, or at least Jews who refuse to publicly disavow Israel, are oppressors, and therefore bad.  Here's how you can tell - how do you think the University of California would react to a protest encampment that blocked access to campus buildings to blacks, Muslims, or gay people? Yeah, we all know, don't we?  Yet, since last fall, so many universities have acted just like UCLA.  

I wrote last October that all of this was predictable:

It is the natural outcome of the ideology preached by many of our leading institutions, not just some small cadre of crazed Leftists.  Whether called Woke, Critical Race Theory, Black Lives Matter, Social Justice, Equity, Systemic Racism, DIE (Division, Intolerance & Exclusion), Intersectionality, Anti-Fascism etc, or justifying the murder of Israelis because they are "Zionist settler-colonialists", it all springs from the same set of ideas designed to divide us and deny our common humanity

In that piece I wrote of my disappointment in mainstream Jewish groups for their failure to take on directly this racist ideology.  Unfortunately, not much has changed on that front. 

Those Jewish organizations who had been collaborating with the DEI crowd seem to have decided to maintain that course of action.  In an interview with the Jewish Insider, ADL CEO Jonathan Greenblatt once again tells us he sees nothing wrong with DEI, other than Jews not being included:

We’re going to judge these institutions based on not what they say but what they do. And so whether it’s how they update and expand their DEI programming, whether it’s how they apply consequences to student organizations like Jewish Voice for Peace or Students for Justice in Palestine, that seriously violate their codes of conduct and target and intimidate and threaten Jewish students, whether it’s ensuring that those Jewish kids or Israeli kids don’t experience discrimination. 

And so, DEI is here, and, you know, at ADL we believe that diversity education is really important. We live in the most heterodox, multicultural society in the world. Understanding your peers, your colleagues, your employees — understanding them, knowing their histories, ensuring that you can approach the issues from a more informed perspective, I think that makes you a better peer or a better manager or a better leader. You are able to demonstrate empathy. But if DEI perpetuates not diversity, equity, inclusion, but the exclusion of Jews and Israelis, we have a problem. So my hope would be that we will see the change that will ensure that Jewish people are going to be treated it with decency that are treated fairly and that are treated in the same manner as all others.

The problem of Greenblatt's position can be best seen in this tweet:

It's critical for any push for diversity in any industry to be inclusive of Jews. If your project of inclusion perpetuates the exclusion of Jews, you are failing. So, we applaud the many celebrities for their courage in standing up, speaking out and writing to @TheAcademy to… pic.twitter.com/lbOPuP9TrQ

— Jonathan Greenblatt (@JGreenblattADL) January 10, 2024

The tweet links to this article, in which well-off Jews demand inclusion in the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts & Sciences Representation & Inclusion Standards promulgated in 2020 in the midst of the George Floyd hysteria.

Here's another example that occurred in September 2023, predating the October 7 attack.  The American Jewish Committee (AJC) joined a lawsuit against the Santa Ana Unified School District because it inserted antisemitic material into its mandated Ethnic Studies course.  So far, so good.  But the article goes on to quote the AJC Chief Legal Officer saying:

"Done right, ethnic studies prepare students to live in an increasingly diverse society.  Done wrong, they can be divisive and discriminatory."

The futility of this is evidenced by how Harvard defanged its antisemitism advisory task force by naming Professor Derek Penslar as co-chair, ensuring it would be a puppet of the administration.  While much attention has focused on Penslar's issues with Israel, the real problem is that he is a hard-core DEI advocate.  His role is to provide some window-dressing designed to do the minimum possible to address antisemitism and keep Jewish donors happy while failing to address the core issue of DEI, from which the campus hostility to Jews springs from.  Little noticed is that at the same time Harvard announced formation of a task force on Islamophobia.  The idea is to create an equivalence between a virulent outbreak of antisemitism with a non-outbreak of Islamophobia.  These things are not alike but Harvard will do its best to play its Jewish donors for fools.

DEI, or whatever you want to call this radical and incoherent ideology that seeks the destruction of an American society based on equality and respect for the rights of individuals under the law, is incompatible with the existence of the Jewish community in the United States.  It can't be "done right" by including Jews.  By definition, DEI divides society into the Oppressed and the Oppressors.  Being, in most fields, the most disproportionately successful group in America, means that, in the eyes of DEI proponents, that Jews must be part of the conspiracy to maintain White Supremacy and, are therefore, Oppressors.  Jews cannot be successful because of their efforts or merit because, according to DEI, there is no such thing as objective merit and the only explanation for the success of an Oppressor is systemic racism.

DEI is a threat to America, its citizens, and its future, and it on that basis that Jewish groups should be opposing its existence on behalf of every American.  By trying to gain admission to the ranks of the Oppressed, Jewish organizations are abandoning tens of millions of their fellow citizens to the real oppressors, the proponents of DEI.  It will also be a failed strategy, as whatever lip service is given to inclusion, the reality will be far different, as we've seen at Harvard. What is needed is a non-partisan Jewish organization focused solely on the elimination of DEI concepts from American life.

This is the reality of DEI and what settler-colonialism means.  It is not limited to Israel.  As the professor below states, "the goal is to dismantle the settler project that is the United States" because "the U.S. is the greatest predator empire that has ever existed".  A few years ago, I would have dismissed such talk as just crazy campus stuff, but since 2020 we've discovered the incredible power this set of beliefs holds, not just in academia, but across most of our elite institutions and within the Biden administration, which has issued two detailed Executive Orders requiring DEI concepts to be embedded throughout the federal bureaucracy and into all rulemaking processes and regulations.

The speaker is Professor Melanie Yazzie of the University of Minnesota, whose biography states:

She writes and teaches about a range of topics, including Navajo/American Indian history; (neo)liberalism; settler colonialism; Indigenous feminisms; Native American studies; social movements; urban Native experience; political ecology; queer Indigenous studies; biopolitics; water; media; Marxism; and theories of policing and the state. (3)

pic.twitter.com/glgwZpLmmD

— Alpha News (@AlphaNewsMN) December 21, 2023

Yazzie has been helped along the way by the academic and foundation networks backing the effort to instill race essentialism into our society.  She was the recipient of a Ford Foundation Diversity Predoctoral Fellowship; Andrew W Mellon Dissertation Fellowship; and University of California Postdoctoral Fellowship.  Yazzie's career path does not happen by accident; these institutions are deliberately fomenting hatred and divisiveness.  These people mean what they say and must be taken seriously.  Don't believe it?  In April 2022, a communist, anti-colonialist, black activist attempted to assassinate a Jewish mayoral candidate in Louisville, Kentucky.  Though he fired four shots, he fortunately did not succeed.  Didn't hear about it?  No surprise, even in the media outlets that bothered to report it as a one-day story, most avoided mention of the background of the shooter.   No need to start a national conversation about that!

I highly recommend reading this recent essay, "DEI and Antisemitism: Bred in the Bone", by Suzanna Sherry of Vanderbilt Law School on the clear and present danger presented by DEI:

DEI’s inherent antisemitism thus rests in part on its inability to explain Jewish success without resorting to antisemitic stereotypes. But DEI beliefs also have an even more direct link to antisemitism. In short, to attack meritocracy and to attribute disparities entirely to racism – as the DEI movement does – is to argue that Jewish success is undeserved, a patently antisemitic conclusion. And if Jewish success is undeserved, Jews are fair game for attacks. So it is not a coincidence that antisemitism and antisemitic violence were rising sharply among those on the far left even before the Hamas massacre.

None of this should be surprising. DEI and critical race theory are essentially a rejection of, and attack on, the principles of rationality, objectivity, and individualism (as opposed to tribalism, now called identity politics) that underlay the European Enlightenment and, ultimately, formed the backbone of American democracy. And historically, antiliberal attacks on the Enlightenment and on the norms of objectivity have long been associated with antisemitism. French counter-revolutionists in the eighteenth century, German antiliberals in nineteenth, and Nazi theorists in the twentieth rejected rationality in favor of orthodoxy, and blamed Jews for undermining or resisting that orthodoxy.

The takeover of universities by DEI is also the most dangerous aspect of progressivism. As one historian notes, German academic support for antisemitism and Nazism was pervasive and effective in the years leading up to Hitler’s final solution: “Non-Jewish German academia did not just follow Hitler down the path to hell. It led the way.”

Regarding the lack of responsiveness from many Jewish organizations, Sherry quotes from a 2020 article written by Bari Weiss:

[W]hen I try to discuss [progressive antisemitism] with many Jews in leadership
positions, what I face is either boomer-esque entitlement—a sense that the way the world
worked for them must be the way it will always work—or outright resistance. Oh please,
wokeness isn’t important anywhere but in silly Twitter microclimates. When you explain
that no, in fact, this ideology has taken over universities, publishing houses, the media,
museums and is now making quick work of corporate America, you hit another
roadblock: Isn’t this just righting some historical injustices? What could go wrong? You
then have to explain what could go wrong—what is already going wrong—is that it is
ruining the lives of regular, good people, and the more institutions and companies fall
prey to it, the more lives it will ruin. 

Too many of these organizations and Jewish, and many other, liberals still see DEI as just a bit more aggressive type of social justice initiative, like the Civil Rights Movement, and fail to understand that DEI is a repudiation of the tenets of the Civil Rights Movement, and of liberalism itself.  Liberalism was able to resist anti-liberalism from the Right, but has succumbed to anti-liberalism from the Left.  If liberalism is to be salvaged, it is necessary to face into the reality of what is happening in America.

Twenty seven years ago, Professor Sherry, along with fellow professor Dan Farber, wrote Beyond All Reason: The Radical Assault on Truth in American Law, which I read several years ago, warning of the dangers of critical race theory and its inherent antisemitism. She concludes her recent essay with these words, referring to that book, "Nobody listened. I hope Jews are listening now."

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(1) Mark Scarsi was appointed by President Trump and will also be the judge hearing the Hunter Biden criminal tax case. 

(2) "Fine people on both sides" is, of course, a reference to President Trump's 2017 remarks at a press conference held after the violence at Charlottesville.  In media mythology it is described as Trump's refusal to condemn neo-nazis and white nationalists.  It's also a staple of Democratic campaigns; in May 2024 I watched it used in a Biden-Harris campaign commercial in Arizona and, even within the past few days, the Harris campaign has tweeted the claim.  The problem is that the claim is false, as I discovered upon seeing a transcript of Trump's remarks two years later.  Even as cynical as I had become about the press, I assumed the frequently reported words and their context was accurate.  Instead, it was a carefully constructed lie.  The transcript revealed that after making the "fine people" remark, Trump twice added he has not referring to neo-nazis and white nationalists, adding after the second reference that "they are bad people".  It's clear from the transcript that his remark about fine people was regarding the arguments over whether the statute should be removed, and that is an accurate (and fine) statement.

(3)  Most of these are not even real things.