David Horowitz: It’s kind of obvious the Jews are the canaries in the mine. The canaries were taken by miners, as you know, into the mines, and when the canary died you knew there was gas in the mine and you better get out. So the Jews are there to identify the threat. I’ve been saying this for decades and now, of course, they’re up to Christians and slaughtering Christians, but this is also true on our campuses. Why is there an epidemic of Jew hatred on our campuses? It’s because our campuses are the political base of the left, faculty and students, and therefore they are supporters of the jihadist terror. The campuses are probably as important as a domestic supporter of Islamic terror as the mosques. There are two organizations on campus that are spearheading this epidemic of anti-Semitism, which is focused on attacks on Israel. You’re all familiar with it, but Ami Horowitz shows you what people think on campuses.
The Muslim Brotherhood is behind both of the organizations. The two organizations are the Muslim Students Association, which is a recruitment organization for the Muslim Brotherhood and, thanks to the administrators and the multi-cultural and politically correct ideology that is the dominant ideology on campuses, the Muslim Students Association is a magnet that attracts almost all Muslim students. They have the support of the administrations. They’re financed. The Muslim Students Association is the oldest domestic front for the Muslim Brotherhood in America, and it’s a recruitment organization. And in the present situation on campuses, organizations like Hillel seek partnerships with the Muslim Students Association because they pretend to be a religious and cultural organization, but it is a recruitment organization for the Brotherhood.
I ran an ad, which oddly was accepted at Ohio State. It’s very hard for us to buy space in campus newspapers because there is what I have called the “Unholy Alliance.” The left and the Muslim jihadists are in a tacit alliance, which is why they’re able to get so far. But the ad had 12 former presidents of the Muslim Students Association, who had gone on to high level-careers in al-Qaeda and other terrorist organizations. The most famous one is Anwar al-Awlaki who was the head of the al-Qaeda in Yemen and was killed in a drone strike. Al-Awlaki was the president of the Muslim Students Association at Colorado State and it’s no accident that he was the president. As I say, they’re recruitment organizations. How many know the name Huma Abedin? Huma Abedin, who is a Muslim Brotherhood operative and was running the Muslim Affairs desk of the State Department and is Hillary’s right hand, was also on the board of the Muslim Students Association. There are innocents in the MSA, but the MSA is not innocent. It stages Israeli Apartheid Weeks, which demonize the state of Israel and are basically propaganda that Israel should be destroyed.
The other organization is Students for Justice in Palestine and it has interchangeable leaders and members with the MSA, but it’s a much more politically active organization that doesn’t pretend to be a cultural organization. Its sole purpose is to call for the elimination of the state of Israel and it is responsible for a lot of these incidents. So the Center has launched a campaign. We have a website called “Jew Hatred on Campus,” and we launched the campaign to take on Students for Justice in Palestine and get them declared a hate group and have their campus privileges removed. Right now they are funded by the universities, and if you’re a recognized student organization you can hold events and so forth. They are the spearhead also of all the BDS resolutions on campuses across the country, and the University of California is one of the worst, in all of its campuses. It’s hard to select. UC Irvine is a hateful place, UC Davis, UC Santa Cruz, UCLA, etc.
So although this movement is focused right now on Students for Justice in Palestine, its real agenda is to take on the jihad in America, which nobody else really is doing. So we had two campaigns, one is a guerrilla campaign, where overnight there appeared on 50 or 60 campuses large posters of Students for Justice in Palestine, and they would show a 3-year-old with a suicide belt on and the other terrorists surrounding him, and then it had #JewHatred. And this was done silently and anonymously so it really put a little fear into Students for Justice in Palestine. Of course they tore down the posters, but it was reported all over the country, and the universities, of course, were not at all concerned that SJP is a hate group, which it is. It violates the sacred rules on campus like diversity, which is respect for the other. The UC system actually has a principles of community under which everything that SJP does and stands for is forbidden, but they’re a privileged group and they’re a supported group.
So when these posters appeared, instead of the campus saying, “Oh, we better enforce our rules,” they had the campus police call me. There was such a brouhaha that somebody had to take responsibility, so I took responsibility. Not that I put up a poster or even knew who had put up the posters, because we have to protect the people on campus because there’ll be retribution. Anyway, they called me, and, actually, the police officer was a conservative Jew, which made my life easier. He was very sympathetic. I said I’m not going to cooperate with this. You guys should be investigating the SJP. The other thing we did was we put out a press release of the ten most anti-Semitic campuses. And people love lists, so I get asked why were these the ten? Well, any campus that has an SJP on it is going to be an anti-Semitic campus because that’s what they do. They go around, they make checkpoints on the campus and stop students and harass them. They put these “apartheid walls” to pretend that Israel is an apartheid state, which is so they can destroy Israel. That’s the idea.
I spoke during one of these weeks at UC San Diego, another horror place. There was a gigantic wall they put up. There are several colleges there and with all their sponsorships, they got like $40,000.00 to put on this hate week against Jews. And on that wall there were maps that say Palestine in 1947 and it’s all green, which is Islam. And then in ’48, the Jews, there’s a white splotch, and so forth. Of course there was no state of Palestine in 1947. The Palestine Symphony Orchestra was of Jews. Palestine wasn’t created in the mind of these people until 1964 when the PLO was created. At that time it was just Arabs. Anyways, that’s not important. Then there’s also a reverent tribute to Sheikh Yassin, who was the founder of Hamas and responsible for the murders of 393 Jews because they were Jews.
So we put out this press release and it was picked up by newspaper sites that are visited by 100 million people. So we got the word out. It was across the news, and one of the poster campaigns — just to show you the way this works — was at Glendale Community College. And they had a long article about it and the article quoted me saying that SJP is a hate group and its campus privileges should be removed, but it also had the picture of the poster. And that’s all we need. What we are trying to do is to change the conversation, if you can call it a conversation. Right now or until we entered this campaign, the conversation on campuses is, is Israel apartheid state? They’ll say it’s an apartheid state, defenders of Israel will say it’s not an apartheid state. They’ll say Israel occupies Arab lands. These are two Hitlerian-dimension lies. Israel does not occupy any Arab lands, but that’s the conversation. When that’s the conversation, we’ve lost. Every Jewish organization on campus accepts this as the conversation and opposes us for trying to change it. When we say SJP is a hate group, that changes the conversation. The conversation then becomes are they a hate group? Do they support terror? That’s the conversation we want. What this is in little is what the Senate tries to do in big, and I wish we had a larger voice because Republicans and conservatives don’t seem to get this message. When you attack, you define what the conversation is going to be about and you put your opponent on the defensive. There’s a book I wrote that a lot of you have out there called “Take No Prisoners.” That’s the idea. Attack. And that’s what we’re doing on campus.
Now I unfortunately have to go to a meeting, so I’m going to turn this podium over to Elisha Krauss, who is the Director of Grassroots Initiatives for Truth Revolt, which is conducting this campaign. We are going to follow this with poster campaigns. We’re going to hold teach-ins in April, all of which are designed to change that conversation, to put our enemies on the defensive and not to be on the defensive all the time. Any of you who are involved with Jewish organizations that have a campus outreach should be raising this with them. I failed. I mean, I’ve argued with rabbis, I’ve argued with the Philadelphia region head of Hillel. He’s a smart guy and has a very accurate assessment of what’s going on in the Middle East. Nothing I would quarrel with. But when it comes to the campus, he doesn’t want us to say negative things about the Muslim Brotherhood on campus, MSA, or Students for Justice in Palestine. The idea is you say the wonderful things that Israel has done. Wonderful innovations. But if people are saying that you stole somebody’s land and you’re oppressing them and you’re killing children, a medical invention is not going to counter that.
Unfortunately, politics is very dirty warfare. Very dirty. Conservatives generally don’t have the stomach for it. Negative advertising works. That’s how Obama got elected. Negative ads, negative campaign. So we want to put the negative on them and by making the conversation about their negatives, it takes attention away from us. Elisha was the producer for Sean Hannity’s radio show before she came to work with us and she is familiar with everything that we’re doing on the campuses, so I will turn it over to Elisha.
Elisha Krauss: Thank you. That was a very generous applause for just taking over for David, and I don’t think I’ll be able to fill his shoes, but I shall try. I think we’re going to give each of the gentlemen at the table an opportunity to kind of speak to the topic of this conversation today about anti-Semitism on campus and what you have observed and what you’re experiencing and what can be done about it. So each of you have about seven minutes to just open up with your comments here. Who wants to start?
Richard Cravatts: All right. Thank you. Some of you may be familiar with Melanie Phillips’ wonderful book, “The World Turned Upside Down,” in which she bemoans in her native England the giving in to multi-culturalism and the Islamic tide that’s taking over Britain and how she is fearful for the giving up of the values of the West that that represents to her. And in the context of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, she also talks about the fact that the world has been turned upside down in our understanding of recent history so that in our lifetimes things that happened in Israel and with the Palestinians have been so turned around and turned on their heads that lies have become the truth and that, as she calls it, we’re experiencing a dialogue of the demented. And nowhere is that more apparent than on campuses, where the demonization and libels and slanders against the Jewish State have turned into this false narrative which has been seized by Students for Justice in Palestine, as David was just mentioning, the Muslim Student Association, left-wing faculty, Jewish groups like Jewish Voice for Peace and others, who have embraced the narrative of the perennial victimized Palestinian at the hands of the Nazi-like evil, oppressive Jewish apartheid regime of Israel.
And so that narrative has become very intriguing and attractive to naïve, well-intentioned, but mistaken, students who feel that they’re doing something good on behalf of the Palestinians by questioning what’s happening to Israel. Unfortunately, the campaign for Palestinian self-affirmation has become a pretense of sorts, because the real ambition of the enemies of Israel, as you probably have guessed, is not to create a Palestinian state. I’m not sure many people actually care about the Palestinians and their statehood, and in fact no one would be paying attention to them if they were the Kurds, for example, if it was not the Jewish State that was impeding them from having statehood.
So the Palestinians are used as an ideological club to beat on the head of Israel, and on campuses, being pro-Palestinian unfortunately has come to mean being anti-Israel. Being pro-Israel on campuses, as David mentioned, means being pro-Israel so that when pro-Israel students have a pro-Israel event, they eat hummus, sing folk songs and talk about medical inventions and the great state of the economy in Israel. When the Palestinians talk about the Palestinian state, they don’t talk about ending violence within their own culture or getting rid of the cult of death which manifests itself in kindergartens and summer camps where kids are taught to be martyrs for the Palestinian cause. They talk about the evils and insidiousness of Israel, about it being a racist “apartheid state,” about it being the colonial oppressor of an indigenous people, about it erecting an “apartheid wall,” not a wall, a security barrier to protect Jews from being slaughtered, but an “apartheid wall,” as if Jews are trying to keep colored Arabs out of white European Jewish neighborhoods. That’s the concept of the “apartheid wall.” That’s why the enemies of Israel on campuses are so eager and concerned with affixing the “apartheid” label on Israel even though they know it’s not true, even though we all know there’s no apartheid in Israel. It’s a very compelling, easy trope, which positions Israel not only as an illegal occupier of Arab land, but as a racist group.
I have a few slides that I wanted to show you to give you a flavor for the rhetoric surrounding the argument on campus. You see here a poster for Israel Apartheid Week. This is from a Canadian campus. I think this poster sums up precisely what I’m talking about about the demonization of Israel, about a new narrative about how Israel is perceived. Israel in this poster is an inhuman militaristic faceless aggressor, arbitrarily murdering an innocent Arab child. That’s the medieval blood libel against Jews. The Jews used to be accused of killing Christian babies for their blood to make matzo. That same trope, that classic anti-Semitic trope, is now reborn in the Arab world and on campuses where Jews in the body of Israel are accused of randomly and bloodthirstingly murdering Arab innocent children. Look at the child holding a teddy bear, completely innocent of any fault. Never committed any terrorism. Never rejected statehood in 1937, in 1947, in 1967, in 2000, in 2005 and on other occasions. There’s no complicity or responsibility on behalf of the Palestinians. All the evil aggression, militarism and barbarism is pointed to Israel. And it’s summed up in this poster. Even the wall around it looks like a concentration camp. So the other trope that you’re going to see in the subsequent slides which I’m going to show you is that Israel has now become the new Nazi on earth.
My colleague Richard Landis calls this “moral sadism.” The idea that you would call Israel of all countries Nazi-like — and this is a trend that’s not only contributed to by Palestinian groups and Muslim Student Association, but also academics like Joseph Massad at Columbia and Middle Eastern Studies professors and others who are trying to equate the behavior of Israel with the behavior of the Third Reich. I teach marketing and in marketing we talk about branding. Branding is trying to give your product — and countries are products as well and are branded quite aggressively in the conventional ways that cereal is or other products — we try to give a brand an image that our consumers will think of and be attracted to. This is the brand image that Israel would like to be known for and it probably reflects most of what we think about when we think about Israel. This is the image, however, that most people have of Israel, and particularly on campuses, and this is the narrative that has been created by the enemies of Israel on campus by radical professors like the Walts and Mearsheimers of the world, by Sarah Schulman, who wrote that op-ed piece in the New York Times on pink-washing, which accused Israel, even though it has a wonderful record on gay rights, why did they have a wonderful record? Well, according to her and the New York Times, which published this ridiculous piece of pseudo-scholarship, the only reason they have a good record on gay rights is because they’re trying to hide their crimes of being an apartheid, racist state. So even when Israel does something that’s a positive, the enemies of Israel turn it into a negative.
There was a graduate student at Hebrew University who wrote a thesis, a Jewish woman wrote a master’s thesis, and she found that the Israeli Army, the IDF, had an unbelievably low incidence of rape within their ranks of Arab women. Rape of the women of the enemy. That’s another thing you would say, well, that’s very laudable and we should be thankful for that. No. What was her thesis? Her thesis was that the reason there’s a low incidence of rape is because Israeli soldiers are so racist they won’t even lower themselves to rape Arab women. She won a prize at Hebrew University for writing this thesis at their center. This shows you how faculty and administrators, and not only students, have become complicit in this narrative which makes Israel the rogue state in the world.
The great humanitarian and Member of Parliament Irwin Cutler I think summed up very concisely what part of the problem is. He said in the 20th century the worst accusation you could make against someone or some entity was calling them racist. And in the 20th century where did racism most manifest itself? In Nazism and in apartheid. Well, isn’t it interesting that of all places on earth now who is regularly called racist and apartheid? Israel. So Israel has become the new Nazi. Well, why is that effective for our enemies? Because if Israel is the new Nazi, who on earth would not want to stand up and destroy Nazism again? If Israel is so morally corrupt and demonic and barbaric that they’re acting like Nazis, who among us would ever feel proud enough or reasonable enough to stand up in their defense?
So I’m going to stop now and let my colleagues here have a few words. I usually speak for three hours with no questions, but I’m not going to do that today. But I did want to talk about one thing, and you see that I quoted David here. This idea of social justice permeates campuses now. Brandeis University has social justice as part of the mission of the university itself, that students not only should learn and try to become educated, but they should have a commitment to helping others. So the name Students for Justice in Palestine sounds very compelling and positive. But Students for Justice in Palestine are only looking for justice for Palestinians. It’s at the expense of Israel, not two states living side by side in peace. That is not the ambition of the enemies of Israel or Students for Justice in Palestine. Their ambition is students only with justice for Palestinians because the underdog is considered to be entitled to take over and replace the man, the establishment, the stronger party. Just like the Occupy movement didn’t want to make everybody rich, they wanted to take away the stuff of the rich and give it to the poor. They wanted the 1 percent to suffer and be replaced by the 99 percent. Same concept with Students for Justice in Palestine. So students, well-meaning, well-intentioned students are caught up in this idea that they’re doing something positive for the Palestinians against the racist Israelis, and that’s the reason why, to our bewilderment, we see students getting involved in this campaign to demonize and eventually destroy Israel. Thank you.
Elliott Hamilton: So I go to the Claremont Colleges in Southern California, and for the last four years I’ve been highly active in the pro-Israel community or as I refer to it, the Zionist community, and I’m not afraid to use the word “Zionist.” This year has been a very, very problematic year for the Jewish community in Claremont. I’m part of the Alpha Epsilon Pi fraternity, the international Jewish fraternity, and I’m proud of it because there is no fraternity in the United States or the world that stands up for the Jewish people better than AE Pi, and what happened this year was that one of my brothers, who had just spent his last semester and his summer in the state of Israel, came back and said I’m going to dedicate myself to being a very proud Jewish student and be a very proud Zionist. And what he did was that he took this beautiful Mezuzah that his father had bought him in the old city of Jerusalem and he put it on his door post. The same time he got this massive Israeli flag, beautiful Israeli flag, and he hung it up right by his first-story window in his room. Around September 19th, which was on a Friday, it was about two weeks after school started, somebody had the audacity to pry the metal screen right at his window and snatch the Israeli flag from the outside in. And then three days later, someone took his Mezuzah. So right here what we saw was an act of potential anti-Zionism. One could argue that their hatred of Israel allowed them to steal a flag and then it manifested itself into this despicable, deplorable Jew hatred that decided to fester itself on our campus.
So as a result of that, rather than being defensive and wanting to retaliate, my fraternity decided one thing. If one person is going to have the audacity to steal one Mezuzah off of our door post, how did they feel about taking down 30. And we hung up 30 Mezuzot within the Claremont Colleges to say this anti-Semitism is not going to scare us into submission. And that is exactly what we did. However, since then, two Mezuzot have been torn down from our door posts. The administrations of one of the colleges has been very positive in supporting us and making us well aware that if they find the culprits of these hate crimes, they will be brought to justice. But that’s not the end of it.
As president of Claremont Students for Israel, which is a CAMERA-sponsored group, we ended up posting fliers all around the campus marketing our event for Noam Bedein, who is the director of the Sderot Media Center, who is charged with informing people about the miserable traumatic lives of Israeli civilians mostly in the south of Israel next to the Gaza border and the vast majority of Israelis over this past summer during Operation Protective Edge. And all of a sudden there was a posting on this anonymous social media platform known as Yik Yak, which is catered to college students and the feed itself only comes from kids within that vicinity, within a 10-mile radius. And someone said that they had purposely taken down my fliers and threw them away. And what happened was that as a result of it, one of my board members wrote on Yik Yak, to tear down fliers of a Jewish organization is uncalled for. You may disagree with their stances, but you’ve got an open Claremont forum to make your voice heard. No need to silence others. The response, someone anonymously said, “looks like it’s time to fire up the ovens.” Not too long after that, messages of “heil Hitler” came through this feed. Same with “Jews protect their gold better than they protect their children.” “All the Jews went back to their money caves to sleep.” And as of Wednesday, somebody had written, “Baruch atah adonai, blessed be you the Lord and Israel. Amen.”
This is a cancer, festering, metastasizing on our campus. And we still do not know who is responsible for this. If we find them, they will be brought to justice. But while we’re doing that, there have been some victories. This year Claremont Students for Israel dedicated itself to not wanting to be apologetic. We didn’t want to be sorry for calling ourselves Zionists. We didn’t want to be sorry that we support Israel’s right to exist and its obligation to defend itself. We are not going to apologize that the Jewish state legally exists in the land of Israel and that we’re going to defend Israel’s commitment to peace. But what we’ve done, to do so, is call out organizations that either manifest in Jew hatred or will remain compliant to it.
I ended up bringing a speaker by the name of Dumisani Washington who is the Diversity Outreach Coordinator for Christians United for Israel, an amazing organization, I might add. And he started his own organization known as the Institute for Black Solidarity with Israel. And he explained in his lecture that Martin Luther King, Jr. and the civil rights movement did not only champion Zionism and unapologetically defend the state of Israel, but he also had dreams for the Arab populations that they could be risen up from the economic ladder so that they can no longer need scapegoats to blame for their illiteracy, disease and their lack of education. And in his lecture he said there’s an organization on campus known as Students for Justice in Palestine that claims that they care about justice for the Palestinians. Yet I would be so surprised that SJP talked about the apartheid conditions of Palestinian refugees within Lebanon. The Palestinian citizens within Jordan are also facing persecution, and they’re about somewhere between 60 to 80 percent of the population. We hear nothing about how Basha Al-Assad is butchering Palestinian refugees within Syria in his genocidal war. We don’t hear about Hamas who uses its children as cannon fodder while teaching them that death is their most exalted wish and that they should spend their lives hiding behind rockets or killing themselves in the name of Allah.
You don’t talk about Mahmoud Abbas and how he steals billions of dollars in aid from his own people, prevents them from acquiring the economic stability and the economic empowerment that can get them out of this horrible situation. All Students for Justice in Palestine does is blacklist the Jewish State and only the Jewish State. This is an organization that does not stand for justice for Palestinians. This is an organization that is dedicated to making Jewish students on campus feel like they’re nothing. Like they should be ashamed to be who they are. And at this event we called them out. SJP decided to yell at Pastor Washington and he just said two words: You lie. The fact of the matter is that if the Jewish community does not recognize that when someone is attacking you, you don’t wait for the punch to come at you when you get bruised over this. If someone’s going to strike you, you block the strike and then you counter. If we do not recognize that this is the only way we’re going to combat this organization, then all we’re going to do is keep going backwards. We’re just going to keep allowing this organization to boss us around, to make us feel unsafe and to make us feel like we’re subhuman.
And as long as we continue this fight, and as long as we continue to be on the attack, and as long as students like the ones that I work alongside every day to ensure that the Jewish community feels safe, exists on campus unapologetically, this organization has no standing. So let’s hope that in the weeks to come when SJP tries to bring this apartheid wall onto my campus that they will be faced with the humiliating force that is the pro-Israel community.
Edwin Black: So those were two very, very stirring presentations by my two colleagues. I’m so happy that they made their points as they did. So I take the historic long view and I combined that with the fact that I do about 200 appearances a year on various topics, mainly Israel, Shoah, Arab involvement with the Nazis, international law, and many of them are on campuses. Most of them are on campuses, and I try to go into the belly of the beast. I go to the most rejectionist and anti-Semitic and fractious of the campuses. And I’ve been able to combine all of my experiences and my 48 years of study of history to bring you the following information.
First of all, the term that is being applied to this form of anti-Semitism, “Jew hatred,” is the correct term. I’m not using it. I’m using the old term, “anti-Semitism,” but the new term, the more appropriate term, is “Jew hatred” because that’s exactly what it is. You should also understand that most of the genocides that I have studied in my 11 books and 48 years of research going back 200 years of genocide and massacre, begin and get their impetus on the campus. So here I’m talking about the genocide against Native Americans, I’m talking about the genocide of the Turks against the Armenians, the genocide of Hitler against the Jews, even to a large extent the 100-day genocide in Rwanda, which had a lot of its fiery sparks at the University of Kigali. Now, why do these genocides begin or get their impetus or get developed on the campus? It’s because they begin with hatred and then they wrap themselves in some form of elevating philosophy like race science or eugenics or in this case political science, social justice, and they try to make it like it isn’t actually ordinary racism. It’s something that is worthy, that is lofty. And so we have seen this throughout history, especially when we look at the Jewish experience.
Now, this is a different type of a Jew hatred. This is not like the Klan. I got one of my starts in the Nazi march against Skokie. In those instances, the Jew haters look like Jew haters and they act like a bunch of thugs. This process is vastly more subtle. This process is vastly more elongated. This process has got you outgunned, outplanned and outnumbered. It works this way. They will spend, the Jew hatred groups who mask themselves as anti-Zionist, who actually are anti-Jewish as has been amply displayed here, actually plan a year or two in advance. First they’ll run for office, maybe six months in advance, maybe a year in advance. Then they’ll get into positions of academic power within the student government. And slowly they will amass a majority within the voting body. And this is done systematically, progressively, thoughtfully. And then they will slowly change the Constitution and they will slowly change the rules, and all of a sudden kids who go to Israel are barred from participating. All of a sudden the votes can take place on Rosh Hashanah, on Yom Kippur. All of a sudden the key debates take place on Shabbat. And this is all done systemically and it’s been enabled by academics, the teachers, the professors, who are coming in from a position of Jew hatred and using their status as guiding lights to help propel this movement against the Jews and against the Jews on campus.
There’s another dimension to it. Not only do they want to assail Israel as the leading edge of Jewish identity and then they’ll get the Jews themselves, they also are adept at recruiting Jews to their own cause. And so the plan is to drive a wedge between the Jews and Israel. Drive a wedge between the Jews and themselves. Drive a wedge between the Jews and their history. And they use two terms of social justice to make this happen, to roil this. One is “apartheid.” False statement. Two is “occupation.” False statement. Now, yesterday we heard about all these guys who want to do all their guerrilla tactics, reduce it down to 8 seconds, make little cute videos, put out posters. That’s all great. And they said that what we don’t need any more is these old farts with all the facts in the background and everything else. I’m actually the old fart with all the facts in the background. And when I go to these schools, typically I have to show them how false their narrative is. I do it to their face. I usually pick out the Number 1 antagonist. First thing I say is this, and remember it, everybody: Narrative means edited history. And as soon as you hear the word narrative, you know you’re being suckered. Remember the audience is 12 percent love us, 12 percent hate us, and the rest is all on the fence. That’s who the 12 percent who hate us are working for, the ones who are on the fence, because they’re trying to step by step remove the barriers, the verbal barriers, the physical barriers, the political barriers to Jew hatred.
Now, there are a number of reasons why the Jews themselves are participating in this activity. One, of course, is the fact that things have been good for a couple years, allegedly good. You know, in the 20th century people came out of World War I, and after World War I they came out of the Depression, and after the Depression they came out of World War II and the Holocaust. And now they’re basically coming out of their smart phone. And it’s easy for them to deny what is happening all around them. So one of the things you do is you stand up before a crowd like I do and I say, “How many here believe that Israel is illegally occupying the land?” They all raise their hand. Then I go to the guy who’s waving his hand the most and I said, “In violation of international law, right?” Says, “Yes.” And I say, “Which one?” And they don’t know. And the students begin to see they don’t know. And then I begin to talk about the fact that we’re living in the age of misinformation. Hate requires misinformation, dehumanization and of course funding in order to survive, so everybody here can just write down three things, please. Ottoman Land Registration Act, 1858. Write it down. That’s April 28th, 1858 to you. Treaty of San Remo, March 24th, 1920, Article 6 and Article 4 designating the Zionist organization to settle on those lands. And then of course the Treaty of San Remo, which created a Jewish homeland under international law accepted by 59 countries, gets reinvigorated, absorbed and reenlivened by the UN Charter, specifically Article 80. Write that down.
And then when I go into these groups, I find the single most agitational guy. I’ve already been given his emails through my investigative process. I’ve already seen what he’s written, what he plans to do before he does it. I ask him to read it out loud, what the international law says. And then I show it up on the Internet so everyone can see it. And then I explain that we’re living in is the age of misinformation where the loudest lie and the longest lie validates what Goebbels said: If you tell a lie long enough and loud enough, it will become truth. And when you embarrass them with the facts on their own turf and you show that what they’re saying is wrong, when you say that they talk about the “Palestinians” — and then I say, you know that the word “Palestinian” meant “Jewish Zionist” until the ’60s? The Jewish Agency for Palestine, the Palestinian Brigade, the British document. When you lay out the bare facts of the lies, and then you turn to your cell phone and you get messages from students saying, what do you want to do when people don’t want to be educated as they did when I was a Guilford College, the Quaker college, a couple of months ago? You see that there’s a lot of work to be done.
We need knowledge, we need tactics and we also need to understand that this is being funded by taxpayers. Remember, every one of these universities is functioning with a 501(c)(3). Every million dollars that goes into a 501(c)(3) is supported 40 to 60 percent by ordinary taxpayers in the form of an indirect subsidy. Every 501(c)(3) is everybody’s business whether it’s the Red Cross or Guilford College and the Students for Justice in Palestine. We don’t just need more historians like Edwin Black. We need more lawyers. We need more people to understand that the electronic infrastructure of the college is being used for hate speech. Go after that. We need to understand that these are credentialed schools, accreditation. Go after their accreditation. How good a job is Guilford doing in international relations? They claim to be experts on Israel. When I went to campus no one even knew what the San Remo Convention was. I had people who thought it was a mineral water.
Elisha Krauss: And so a question that I have is what can we do to stir up not just Jewish students but Christian students and maybe peaceful Muslims on campus to recognize that if it is a true justice issue, it should be about justice for both sides, and recruit those people to the pro-Israel Zionist side?
Elliott Hamilton: So one of my really good friends is Frank Lunds, and one thing that he told me was that the best way to go about it is really start hitting them right where everyone else goes about it. You talk about this idea as a Jewish student, as a Zionist, that you care about the Palestinians. You care about the Israelis. You don’t want to see this animosity between both peoples. We want to live in peace. We don’t know what the solution’s going to be for peace and with the Palestinian governments as they are as the kleptocratic, genocidal, Jew-hating scum that they are. It’s going to be difficult to figure out who the real peace partner is and unfortunately you have to really sympathize and say, yes, the Palestinian Arabs have it horribly. They live under apartheid conditions in the Arab world. They live under horrible conditions under Hamas and the PLO. And as a matter of fact, a lot of Palestinian Arabs would want to move to Israel because they would have better chances at a better livelihood. They’ll have elections, they’ll be able to speak out against the Israeli government, when in the areas controlled by the PA, they won’t be able to do that. You have to sympathize with this idea that we care about human rights and social justice. We care about all these issues that are coming about with the Palestinian people, and then we just turn it around on SJP and say what have you done to defend the Palestinian people when you’re going out there putting up divestment resolutions to try to get Palestinian Arabs out of a job?
I was just in Ariel not too long ago and I saw rows and rows of factories being shut down because of all these issues surrounding BDS and the lack of support that they’re getting from their government. Not far from Ariel there is a Palestinian Arab-controlled village, city, and what happened was that those Palestinian Arabs from those PA-controlled lands would travel to Israel, park their cars and work in those factories at higher wages so that they can get healthcare, so that they can get all of these benefits that they most likely wouldn’t get in PA-controlled areas. So if you’re going to claim that BDS is going to be supporting the Palestinians, prove it. And I would love to see empirical evidence on that because at this point I haven’t seen anything. All I’ve seen is that the Students for Justice in Palestine, or as I refer to them as Students for Jewish Persecution, doesn’t really care about the Palestinians and they’re just a fraudulent group. We have to call that out.
Edwin Black: All right. Yeah, we have to call them out, we have to stand up. We have to speak truth to power. When they claim we’re violating the Fourth Geneva Convention, Article 49, do as I do, carry it in your pocket and read them the first sentence, which says that the occupied power or the power will not forcibly transfer its citizens in or out. And no one is forcibly transferring their citizens into Sodastream by opening up a bus stop and a cafeteria with a mosque on site and paying people four to five times. You have to actually talk to them on their own level. You have to call them out, just as this guy said, and I think you need to take legal measures. I think we need to talk about intentional infliction of emotional distress. I think we need to talk about interference. I think we need to challenge accreditation. I think we need more donors to start thinking about what they’re donating to. Okay? This is very, very important. Don’t underestimate the power of one donor or one donor talking to other donors and making a difference. I have seen it happen in school after school and so has my colleague here, Richard Cravatts.
I would say that the Students for Justice in Palestine caught the Jewish community off guard. We’re too nice, including me. We’re too respectful, including me. We’re totally asleep at the switch, and now we’re just beginning to wake up and understanding that we have to call them out. They will call anyone a racist. They called me a racist two hours after I was invited as an honored guest of the Winston Salem Urban League to speak on social justice, and just after recently I got the Drum Major for Justice Award from North Carolina Central University. It doesn’t matter. It’s just a tactic and you need to call them out and you need to find your lawyers and your donor friends.
Richard Cravatts: We encounter significant pushback on campuses. There’s an enormous double standard on campuses today from the administration which is irrespective of what the students and faculty are doing with their activism. There’s a double standard of free speech on campuses today where protected groups, Muslim students, gay students, Hispanic students, other protected minorities or perceived minority groups, are coddled by administrators who are afraid that their feelings are going to be hurt, that they’re going to complain. So that Students for Justice in Palestine have been very smart about the fact that when David Horowitz or Robert Spencer or Daniel Pipes or even Michael Oren, you know, the gentile, articulate Michael Oren, comes to a campus, they’re immediately denounced as Islamophobes, that they’re speaking hate speech, and just as David told you last week when those posters were released, they were starting to be talked about as hate crimes for telling the truth because it was hurting the feelings of a protected class on campus of Muslim students. Jews have never been perceived to be needing of protection or deserving of protection.
I’m on the Board of Directors of the Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under the Law. Ken Marcus, when he was at the Department of Education, reclassified the understanding of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 that under the spirit and intent of that law, Jews would now be a protected class. So we are going to administrators now on campuses and saying to them, you’re allowing hostile climates to be created on your campuses with the student activism that is demeaning and intimidating Jewish students. We’re holding you criminally liable. You could lose government funding. That’s using a stick and not a carrot and that may be effective. And as Edwin said, withholding of donor funds is another way that administrators pay attention. It’s an important thing.
Moderator: We want to try to get to a couple of audience questions.
Audience Member: For Mr. Black, it’s probably difficult to determine and to measure, but have you seen evidence of success in your appearances on campuses in terms of converting attitudes?
Edwin Black: First of all, of the hundreds of events that I have done over the years, I’ve only been obstructed twice, once very minimally with a staged walkout in a rabid anti-Zionist school called Guilford, and once in Southern California at one of the California universities where they decided I would not be allowed to speak about the Arab-Nazi alliance and the Holocaust and the Farhud. I have to tell you the honest truth. When I speak to these guys, it’s a total game changer. Our own community leaders, our own activists, our own professors, our own defenders lack the knowledge, the talking points, the intellectual goods, the big perspective, the big picture to merely point out the complete lie and fiction of everything that’s going on. And when I talk to these guys, they change their minds and those — there’s always one who is so angry about learning. This happened to me in San Francisco a couple days ago. They’re so angry about learning that their narrative is false that they just get angry and walk out of the room. I am changing the points of view and all of you can change the conversation. Just learn the facts. I realize that Ben Shapiro and his pals want to do the right thing with the short, pithy video, StandWithUs does it, bless them. But you also need a couple of old farts like me to come in with the knowledge set to show that we’re living in the age of misinformation, these are Goebbels-like lies. We need to turn them on their head and try to recapture that part of the 78 percent that can still be recaptured.
Audience Member: Yeah. Passionate. Thank you. I have wondered all my life why the Jewish religious students, the Hillel chapters, the involved Jewish students on campus, the Democratic Jewish Students for Liberty, how can those people, those young people, have anything to gain by getting on the side of or getting in cahoots with the SJP or Muslim Students Association? And yet there are millions of incidents of that all over the country. You’ve seen it yourself. I grew up in a Jewish neighborhood, I thought I knew the psyche until this moment. I don’t get it.
Edwin Black: Okay. Then I’ll yield. I can only tell you looking at history that the German Jews tried to deny what was going around until the trains came. I could tell you that the Iraqi Jews denied it for 2,700 years. And I can tell you now that the problem is comfort. When it comes to telling you who is a Jew, that will not be your decision, that will be the decision of your accuser. And we need to make sure that Jewish groups, especially Hillel — Hillel, Hillel, Hillel — reforms. And that’s way harder than it is to say because of the structure of Hillel as Richard Cravatts knows.
Elliott Hamilton: So I agree 100 percent. I think that the issue with Jewish students on campus is that they don’t necessarily want to believe that there are people out there who still possess this same amount of vile hatred as those who sent us all into gas chambers. And I think that is ignorance, and I believe that because we don’t have enough pride in our identity, because we don’t have enough pride in being Zionist, because we don’t have pride in the fact that after over 2,000 years of us being kicked out of our land that we legally got our rights back to settle in the land that we belong in, there is an absence of that pride. There’s an absence of that, the regurgitation of this proud history that we are a part of, and we focus so much on what’s happening around us and trying to get along with people and whatnot than actually looking internally and saying what is going on with us. What is happening to our people? What is happening to the Jewish State?
And the way that I look at it is that the more that Jewish students and Jewish administrators and Jewish organizations start paying attention and saying that this cancer is not going away and that the only way that you’re going to get rid of this cancer is that you get the chemo treatment necessary to weed it out, that it’s just going to fester more so. I look to Menachem Begin, who’s a personal hero of mine, he ended up saying the world may not necessarily like the fighting Jew, but the world will have to take account of him. And I think at this point that until the Jewish community starts realizing that like the Maccabees did against the Seleucid Empire and the Hellenized Jews that we needed to fight back in order for us to maintain our place in this world, to maintain our existence, and to maintain our self-determination, that this is going to perpetuate further and I encourage all Jewish organizations to say enough is enough, never again, make it a mandate, fight back and make sure the SJP doesn’t have a foothold on our campuses anymore.
Richard Cravatts: With regards to Hillel, Hillel has been a problem of late. You know that they have a new national director, Eric Fingerhut, who is on our team. The problem with Hillel is that each executive director of individual Hillels can establish their own personal mission. So on some campuses there has been an attempt to introduce what they’re calling “Open Hillel.” What is Open Hillel? Hillels that ascribe to this Open Hillel philosophy feel that they shouldn’t be too Jewish, that they erase Judaism from Hillel and invite into Hillel for conversations members of Students for Justice Palestine and other people in the dialogue, as if letting the enemy in the tent was somehow going to lead to some reasonable solution. Well, the national director feels that this is in violation of Hillel’s mission and the reason Hillel raises so much money from Jewish donors for its going-forward success is that they believe it has an obligation and a mission to defend Judaism and Israel, and that the idea of having an Open Hillel, where you’re inviting the enemies into your tent, is antithetical to what Hillel should represent. So this is a struggle that we deal with all the time on individual campuses. It’s a betrayal, and part of the other problem on a personal Jewish level for J-Streeters and Jewish Voice for Peace and others is that some Jews don’t want to be painted with the black brush that Israel in their minds causes them to be. That they’re ashamed of the existence of Israel. That they don’t want Israel to make them hated as a Jew. So they distance themselves from it.
Moderator: Okay. We’re going to have to end it there. Thank you, panel, thank you very much.
