One of the most troubling developments on modern American campuses has been the movement away from intelligent dialogue on matters of difference and toward the use of threats, intimidation, and suppression of free speech. The tactic is a rejection of the traditional American ideals of tolerance and free exchange of ideas and represents an embrace of the tactic of dehumanizing one's opponents by depriving them of their right to express opinions in an atmosphere free of fear.
It manifests itself on campus against both students and faculty who fail to pay suitable obeisance to the prophets of climate change catastrophe or who doubt the orthodoxies promoted by the proselytizers of Darwinian evolution, but in its ugliest form it discloses itself as a virulent, hateful anti-semitism as this video shows:
The sort of conduct displayed by the "anti-zionists" on this video would not be tolerated on campus were it, say, neo-nazis demonstrating against civil rights of minorities or even Jews demonstrating against Palestinian terrorism. Nor would a professor who created a climate of intimidation in a classroom go unpunished were the discomfort produced in the course of addressing any other issue.
If Nazis or Jews were conducting themselves like the thugs in the video the nation would be rightly horrified and the universities would be expelling the culprits as fast as they could identify them. Yet, Palestinians and their sympathizers are given tacit permission to permeate the campus with their hate and intolerance with impunity. Why?
As one of the speakers in the video points out, serious human rights violations are occurring all across the globe, often at the hands of Muslims, but the extent of the concern of campus activists at these horrors amounts to little more than a yawn. Why is it Israel and Jews that somehow manages to elicit paroxysms of bigotry and ugliness among students and how long will these be tolerated before university administrators put some steel in their spines and bring them to a stop?
