The pro-Hamas hysteria seen on campus in recent weeks has its roots in the anti-whiteness studies academia has embraced, writes scholar Heather Mac Donald for Spiked.
What’s more, she argues, campus antisemitism “will not stop until the university is transformed and the Democratic Party rejects identity politics.”
Headlined “Biden can’t be trusted to take on anti-Semitism,” Mac Donald also flags in the May 15 op-ed how the federal government under President Joe Biden has embraced the same rotten ideologies that have wreaked havoc on colleges and universities.
“Pro-Hamas hysteria is the foreseeable outcome of a belief system dominant not only in academia, but also in Biden’s own administration – a belief system in which the West is damned as ‘systemically racist’, and the world divided between ‘marginalised groups’ and the white, male, heterosexual power structure that oppresses them,” Mac Donald wrote, adding:
The stunningly incoherent alliances that have sprung up since the 7 October terror attacks on Israel can only be understood in the context of academic theory. Queers and radical feminists for Palestine would seem to be logical impossibilities but for the dominance of such concepts as anti-whiteness and intersectionality. A sampling of Columbia University’s anti-whiteness offerings includes an ‘uprooting whiteness’ group, ‘deconstructing whiteness’ workshops and an ‘unlearning whiteness’ research award from the dean. Other colleges no doubt provide a similar menu.
According to the university worldview, whites and the West (the two categories are interchangeable) are responsible for everything wrong with the world, from inequality to poverty. ‘Persons of colour’ are the antidote. Heterosexuality and maleness are subcategories of whiteness, against which the intersectional coalition of queers, radical feminists and members of the Global South must mobilise. Israel today is hated as the embodiment of Western civilisation. Its modernity and economic success in a region where both are largely absent mark it out as hegemonic and illegitimate.
Of course, the ‘enemy of my enemy’ logic only works in one direction. Queers may be for Palestine, but despite their common nemesis, it is unlikely that Palestine is for queers. …
Students do not need to have taken a course in ethnic studies or postcolonial theory to have imbibed the intersectional anti-whiteness now manifest in the pro-Hamas uprisings. The majority of courses in the humanities and soft social sciences now approach their subject matter through an anti-Western lens. Subtexts of racism and imperialism are sought and found everywhere. Vilifying Israel as the settler-colonial state par excellence is the natural result of this reflexive hostility to all things Western.
Read the entire piece on Spiked.
Editor’s note: Heather Mac Donald is a member of The College Fix advisory board.
MORE: Someone destroyed our pro-Israel display in five hours. It will not silence us.
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