God, the prophet Isaiah taught, established the Jewish people as a “light to the nations.” The light of the people of Israel — of justice and mercy, of sober intelligence and hopeful faith — has always been that of freedom, shining amidst the darkness of tyranny.
When the light was first turned on, the nation that was in the deepest darkness was Egypt. The reliefs at Karnak depict the god-man Pharaoh—huge, archetypically impersonal, and rigid—looming menacingly over herds of humans. The Bible tells us that a Pharaoh solidified control of the land during the famine of Joseph’s time. The Israelites were later forced to make bricks under the Egyptian whip, while organized squads of workers quarried and transported enormous stones for obelisks and pyramids. The pharaonic machine spent enormous material and social capital on monumental buildings and luxurious jewelry intended to adorn the tombs of dead royalty.
Seeing that the Israelites had multiplied abundantly and “filled the earth,” the Egyptians imposed a death sentence on all their newborn males. But Moses freed his brothers from physical and spiritual bondage and led them to life in a new land. It is not just in theory that the people of Israel embrace life and freedom. They refused history’s offer of enslavement and death more times than anyone can count.
Like the ancient Egyptians, Islamists value death, especially that of the children of Israel. But Hamas’ barbarity on October 7 would have made the Pharaohs blush. Terrorists murdered unborn children, babies and children by beheading them, aborting them and cooking them alive. A civilizational darkness not seen since the Holocaust threatens once again to extinguish the light of the nations. Shamefully, some of this darkness emanates from academia, which has embraced an ideology from which it follows, as night follows day, that Jews must be assimilated — or eliminated.
After October 7, students gathered at universities across the United States to denounce Zionist “genocide,” hold vigils for Palestinian “martyrs,” and applaud Hamas’ efforts at “decolonization.” (Secondary school students also walked out of class to protest the Israeli military response.) Students and teachers at several schools also tore down posters of kidnapped Israelis. A Jewish student was beaten at Columbia, and Jewish students at Cooper Union had to take shelter in a library, away from a crowd chanting “Free Palestine!” And a Cornell student threatened to shoot, stab, rape and slit the throats of his Jewish classmates.
The Israelis, who adhere to strict ethical guidelines in combat (and who even embed lawyers in active military units to ensure compliance), are now considered by many in the West to be perpetrators of Nazi-like violence. This is a particularly obscene inversion of the truth, as Hamas’ atrocities in Israel evoked those of the Nazis against the Jews of Europe. The same applies to the charge that Hamas’s goal was “decolonization.” In fact, it is an imperialist faction within Islam — a Sunni and Shiite coalition, united in their hatred of Jews — that wishes to “colonize” Israel, exterminating a native people and swallowing up their small ancestral homeland.
How is it that, less than 80 years after Auschwitz, Jews are widely seen as agents of tyrannical domination? Anti-Semitic hostility, fueled by persistent theological anti-Semitism—the ancient Christian charge of deicide against the Jews—as well as European guilt over the Holocaust and Arab envy, is a large part of the answer.
But another part of the answer is indoctrination that presents itself as education. For years, many humanities and social science professors have embraced crude theories of identity politics that divide the world into victims and oppressors, locked in a zero-sum competition for power. These theories include “intersectionality,” which asserts that “axes of privilege, domination, and oppression” combine to marginalize certain social groups, and “decolonial theory,” which teaches that European modes of knowledge and power victimize indigenous peoples. A generation of graduates, especially from elite universities, have applied these ideas to government policy, basic education (where anti-Semitic curriculum modules are increasingly common), philanthropy, culture, and the media.
The recategorization of Jews as oppressors inevitably follows from the scapegoating logic of identity politics. According to this logic, oppressors achieve their “privilege” on the backs of the oppressed, who are passive, defenseless and miserable. This is how teachers and student activists see Palestinians. The Jews, on the other hand, are manifestly dynamic and prosperous. After the Holocaust, the surviving remnant of European Jewry rose from the ashes. Together with hundreds of thousands of Jews expelled from Arab nations after 1948, they built the State of Israel and made the desert flourish. Others took root and found success in the United States. How could these people be victims if they don’t act like it?
This is not everything. A document distributed by the sociology department at my former university explained that oppressors include those who are “white,” “European,” “credentialed,” “upper and upper middle class,” “Anglophone,” and “light, pale.” The majority of Jews in the United States meet all of these requirements. How could they not be oppressors if they fit the profile?
The same logic, of course, applies to non-Jews who tick the privilege boxes. As Lutheran pastor Martin Niemöller noted in his famous poetic confession “First They Came” [“Primeiro eles vieram buscar os…”], remaining silent in the face of murderous anti-Semitism is a highly fallible self-preservation strategy. No wonder Jews are considered the canary in the coal mine when it comes to detecting harmful ideological vapors. Perhaps LGBTQ supporters of Hamas, including the “Dyke Project” in the UK, should take note. Many others should do the same: the other day, on the train to London, I saw in huge letters painted on a building the words “Eat The Rich!” [“Devorem os ricos”]
According to intersectional theory, another indicator of privilege is “fertility.” After World War II, the birth rate in European displacement camps, filled with Jewish survivors, was the highest in the world. Jews have always loved life and dreamed of peace. Hamas skillfully used this dream against the Israelis, who were too eager to believe that they were entering a new period of normalized relations with the people of Gaza.
The light for the nations has multiplied a thousand times over the ages. The wisdom of the Hebrew Bible and the playful intellectual imagination of the Talmud have illuminated every field of moral, spiritual, intellectual, and creative endeavor in the West. And the vitality and miraculous resilience of the Jews have given hope to countless struggling and suffering individuals and peoples that one day justice will “roll like waters, like a mighty stream.” Are we really going to let this light be extinguished with the help of a hateful ideology that presents itself as intellectual enlightenment while darkening minds, bittering hearts and spreading rancor?
Jacob Howland is Dean of Intellectual Foundations at UATX [Universidade de Austin]. His latest book is ‘Glaucon’s Fate: History, Myth, and Character in Plato’s Republic’ [O Destino de Glauco: História, Mito e Caráter na República de Platão.]
©2023 City Journal. Published with permission. Original in English: The Genocidal Logic of Academic Ideology
#genocidal #logic #university #ideology #Article #Peoples #Gazette