Jews, the West, and whether our species still deserves the description "human"

Clarity, decency, living together in a civilized manner, and any sense of reverence for a transcendent realm are all on the line

I won’t make this post’s focus the abrupt rise in Jew-hatred on post-American university campuses - and the weak-kneed at best response from school administrations - but a quick look at the latest developments on that front is a useful way to enter into my larger point.

Here’s what’s happening at Cornell:

Cornell University has canceled classes Friday to acknowledge the “extraordinary stress” its campus has been under as one of its students is accused of making violent antisemitic threats against Jewish people at the college, where unease over the Israel-Hamas war has been escalating for weeks.

A junior at the university, 21-year-old Patrick Dai, has been arrested and federally charged in connection with a series of online posts over the weekend which threatened to kill and harm Cornell’s Jewish students, New York prosecutors say.

Dai appeared in federal court Wednesday on a charge of making a threat using interstate commerce but did not enter a plea. He was remanded back into the custody of US marshals. His defense attorney, Gabrielle DiBella, declined to comment after the hearing.

Cornell will observe Friday as a community day “in recognition of the extraordinary stress of the past few weeks,” a university spokesperson told CNN.

The university will resume classes on Monday, Lindsey Knewstub, a spokesperson for Cornell, told CNN in a statement.

In addition to the online threats, the university also received a “concerning crime alert” on Wednesday, Cornell president Martha Pollack said in a statement. Though the alert was unsubstantiated, it “adds to the stress we are all feeling,” she wrote.

Hillary Clinton, for crying out loud, doesn’t pass the purity test of Columbia’s 2023 leftists:

Dozens of students walked out of a class taught by Hillary Clinton in New York on Wednesday in protest at their university’s alleged role in the “shaming” of pro-Palestinian demonstrators.

About 30 students were involved in the protest at Columbia University, where the former secretary of state and previous senator for the state was delivering a foreign policy lecture as part of her global affairs class.

The walkout followed an incident last week in which photographs of students who signed a declaration blaming Israel for the 7 October Hamas attacks were displayed on video screens on trucks parked near the university campus above the words “Columbia’s biggest antisemites”, the New York Times reported.

The photographs, according to the protesters, were lifted from a “secure and private” student portal at Columbia’s school of international and public affairs (Sipa).

The Hamas war on Israel is bringing into unprecedentedly sharp relief not only the fact that no other group in human history has brought up some people’s stuff like the Jews, but the larger context for that: a deep-seated desire to remove from the human equation an understanding that we are creatures subject to a creator.

True, civilizations other than the West have had reverence for the transcendent as an element of their distinctiveness, but without the kind of lodestar that necessitates God’s primacy. Yes, Islam is monotheistic and gives a nod to ancient Hebrew prophets, but consider the nihilism that has been routine in the way Islamic societies have actually operated.

A widely recognized way of formulating the West’s unique blessings has been to point to two cities - Athens and Jerusalem - as the sources of the reason and faith, respectively, that have defined the West. While it is true that we use that framing in mostly a figurative sense, in the case of Jerusalem, we are also referring to a city that’s still very much the steward of the faith component.

Why does the Arab world covet Jerusalem in its entirety?

I found the perspective of this writer, who grew up a Muslim in Egypt, edifying on that count:

Few are willing to say so openly, but in many intellectual, professional, and popular circles in the Middle East and the West, the idea of Palestinian national liberation has long been framed in terms that condone or necessitate the indiscriminate killing of Jews. For more unambiguous actors such as Hamas and the Islamic Republic of Iran, freeing Palestine simply means the total eradication of Israel without qualification. This is not a polemical point, but a basic reality and fact of our lives that demands scrutiny.

Consider the ideological milieu in which many Arabs and Muslims have been raised, including me. Growing up as a Muslim in Egypt, the concept of Palestine was never a geopolitical issue; it was a deeply ingrained part of our collective moral identity, the unifying element of both our religious and secular Arab nationalism. It was, and remains, a cause that resonated with us politically, socially, and spiritually, often approaching a fervor that defies rationality. This emotional charge, embedded in the political and religious narratives of much of the Arab Muslim world, has made rubbish of the idea that the Palestinian cause is merely based on anti-Zionism rather than antisemitism.

This milieu, however, is not in any way essential to what it means to be Arab or Muslim—it is a thoroughly modern phenomenon shaped largely by the influence of European revolutionary ideologies on Arab intellectuals and political activists. Among these imported systems of thought is a strain of revolutionary antisemitism that casts Jews as the eternal enemy not just of Arabs but of all human beings. Not every Arab or Muslim subscribes to these views, of course, but when fused with preexisting religious and cultural biases, they have infected almost every institution, pattern of thought, and aspect of life in the Arab Muslim world. Modern Arab political and religious literature is filled with the claim that Jews are hostis humani generis, the enemies of mankind—a classical European libel, and a French revolutionary cry.

The problems of this poisonous strain of thought are compounded by the concept that “freeing Palestine” is a species of resistance against foreign settler colonialists, a Fanonian revolution in which violence against civilians is defended as a legitimate means of achieving racial justice. The wholesale labeling of Israeli Jews—the vast majority of whom are refugees or descendants of refugees from Arab Muslim dictatorships and Soviet totalitarianism—as colonizers, settlers, and imperialists is in fact a type of collective ethnic punishment, nonsensical even on its own twisted terms, which recalls the medieval Christian denunciation of Jews as moral abominations, as a group and as individuals. You might have noticed in the last few days that those committed to liberating Palestine can’t seem to avoid the abject dehumanization of the Jews as a people—and that their aim is not for Palestinians to simply live in peace, dignity, and freedom alongside Israelis, but a state that is necessarily established upon the ruins of Israel. Hamas is explicit in its intention to murder the Jewish population of Israel and enslave any survivors; its partisans in the Middle East and the West are coyer on this point.

Islamists articulate the fantasy of Jewish eradication in the language of jihad, framed in eschatological terms, and imbued with a sense of divine justice and cosmic warfare—what Westerners would ordinarily recognize as a type of religious fascism. But while the Islamist version of this idea is potent for the purposes of mobilizing the impoverished and uneducated masses, the “left-wing” or secular version—couched in the language of Fanon and Karl Marx, of human emancipation, equality, anti-capitalism, and social justice—is the more effective means of mobilizing opinion among the Western intelligentsia. The point is that they are two sides of the same coin, the value of which is set in Jewish blood.

But here’s the dirty little secret: most of the Arab world regards Palestinians as a pain in the ass, useful only for being the instrument of agitation on the front line in Israel:

Historically, Arab states have cared about the Palestinians to the extent they could use them as a trump card by which to shame Israel and isolate it in the international community. That’s why 1.5 million Palestinians still live in refugee camps set up during and after the 1948 war. The Arab states maintain these camps—and their squalid living conditions—to pressure Israel into granting a “right of return,” where millions of Palestinians would flood the Jewish state, negating its Jewish majority, and therefore, Israel’s existence.

In 1952, former head of UNRWA, Sir Alexander Galloway, described the Arab states’ policy towards the Palestinian refugees, saying, “The Arab States do not want to solve the refugee problem. They want to keep it as an open sore . . . as a weapon against Israel. Arab leaders don’t give a damn whether the refugees live or die.”

If the Arab regimes can’t keep the Palestinians in camps, they have other ways of making sure they don’t integrate into their societies. In Lebanon, for example, Palestinians are banned from 39 professions, including areas of medicine, dentistry, pharmacy and law. In most Arab states, Palestinians are considered foreigners and are denied citizenship and all basic rights.

Arab states see the Palestinians as rabble-rousers who cause instability and even threaten the regimes that host them. Indeed, the Palestinians also have a history of violence in Arab countries. In Jordan, for example, the 1970-1971 Black September revolt saw the Palestinians try to overthrow the Jordanian government. The Jordanians responded by slaughtering an estimated 15,000 Palestinians and expelling the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), which then relocated to Lebanon.

When the Lebanese civil war erupted in 1975, the Palestinians fought alongside some of the Lebanese factions, contributing to widespread distruction by the conflict. The civil war was further exacerbated when Israeli forces invaded Lebanon in 1982 in response to repeated PLO attacks. Today, Hamas and its ally Hezbollah, both backed by Iran, are launching attacks on Israeli territory from southern Lebanon, potentially dragging that already beleaguered country into conflict with the Jewish state once again.

To tie together all that I’ve discussed here, I encourage you in the strongest manner possible to watch Leon Kass’s Herzl Prize address. The Herzl Prize is given to outstanding defenders of Jewish indispensability to the Western project by the Tikva Fund, a New York-based nonprofit. Kass is dean of the faculty at Shalem College, professor emeritus in the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago, and scholar emeritus at the American Enterprise Institute. His original area of expertise was bioethics. In his talk, he makes clear that what Israel and the Jewish faith introduced to the world was “an alternative to the ways of human life uninstructed.”

Left to our own devices, human beings set up societies that inevitably drift toward savagery. The current war in Israel is about the survival of the voice that proclaims the essentiality of a humble and reverent heart, a sense of awe before our Almighty creator, in human affairs.

The forces of darkness in the tunnels of Gaza and on American campuses aim to silence that voice.

Each side’s prospects for prevailing are playing out minute by minute right now.