The College Fix

Authors compare conservative ‘propaganda’ about antisemitism to ‘Nazi party’

The Oct. 7, 2023, terrorist attacks by Hamas against Israel were a “revolt,” and claims of antisemitism on campus are not true, a recent blog published by the American Association of University Professors states.

Claims of a “so-called culture of antisemitism” on campus are “a big lie … being used to justify an all-out war on US universities,” states the Academe blog titled “It’s Not Too Late to Tell the Truth About Antisemitism on Campus.”

Authors Brooke Lober, Eli Meyerhoff, and Emily Schneider stated that they are Jewish academics who have spent years teaching on college campuses, meaning if there were a culture of antisemitism on campus, they would have experienced it.

“But we have observed no such thing. Instead, defenders of Israel have spread a lie to distract from and crush dissent over Israel’s genocide of Palestinians,” they wrote, adding it is necessary to “look at the larger context of the war” to get an accurate picture of the climate on college campuses.

Offering this context, they opined:

On October 7, 2023, Palestinian militant groups staged a revolt against the seventeen-year blockade. They attacked the infrastructure of occupation and kidnapped and killed Israelis, among others. As the US and Israeli media dehumanized Palestinian people and repeatedly characterized this politically motivated attack as “senseless violence” or motivated by “antisemitism,” they paved the way for Israel’s disproportionately harsh retaliation; unsurprisingly, harassment and violence toward Palestinians, Arabs, and Muslims ensued. Israel responded to the attack with a genocidal campaign, while marking their conquered territory with holy Jewish symbols and justifying their assault in the name of collective Jewish safety. It is this violent instrumentalization of Jewish identity, a longstanding project of the Israeli state, that has provoked renewed harassment of Jews around the world.

However, President Donald Trump and conservatives are “destroying higher education” as they ignore this broader context and exploit baseless accusations of antisemitism to “silence” pro-Palestinian activists, the authors argued.

They accused conservatives of stoking tensions on campus by “cloaking … commitments to racism under the guise of fighting antisemitism.”

The authors compared this “political propaganda” to “the Nazi Party’s propagation of a lie about an international Jewish conspiracy instigating World War I.”

The Right’s “propaganda” highlights the harassment of pro-Israel Jewish students while ignoring that of “Palestinian, Arab, Muslim, and Jewish students who are protesting Israel’s genocide.”

In addition, the “big lie” has led researchers to lose their jobs and subjected a growing list of immigrants to potential deportation, the authors stated. 

The authors also accused pro-Israel advocates of “align[ing] themselves with the forces of repression,” adding that “Resistance to such forces is not about the hatred of Jews.”

Meanwhile, the Trump administration has launched investigations into several universities accused of antisemitism. In March, a federal antisemitism task force announced it plans to visit 10 college campuses to assess whether they need “remedial action,” The College Fix previously reported.

MORE: Top universities ‘refused’ to stop antisemitism, house report says

IMAGE CREDIT AND CAPTION: A ‘Stand with Palestine’ protest in front of the CUNY grad center; Syndi Pilar/Shutterstock

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