Antisemitism has been on the rise in the West, especially since Israel has decided to turn Gaza into rubble after Hamas’ dastardly attack on October 7 that killed 1,400 Israelis and others. What’s more disturbing is the way some of the top university campuses in the West have become a den of Islamist activists and Hamas sympathisers, openly calling for the decimation of Israel and intimidating and bullying Jews studying there.
Though authorities, especially in the US, are said to be waking up to the extreme radicalisation on campuses, it seems to be a case of too little, too late. After all, antisemitism, often operating under the garb of anti-Israelism, has been a constant feature on top university campuses for a while now. Way back in 2007, Manfred Gerstenfeld, in his book Academics against Israel and the Jews, provided ample examples to showcase the rising forces of antisemitism on major American campuses such as Columbia and Harvard, and in Canadian, European, and Australian colleges and universities.
Over the next decade and a half, things have only worsened. The book, Anti-Zionism on Campus: The University, Free Speech and BDS, edited by Andrew Pessin and Doron S Ben-Atar in 2018, makes it obvious that “the new campus orthodoxy sees” Israel as “an apartheid regime founded on racism, genocide, ethnic cleansing, and colonialist imperialism”. Zionism, it believes, “can be neither defended nor corrected, because the very idea of a Jewish state in that region depends on the dispossession of others and because the concept of Jewish democracy is an offensive oxymoron that can only perpetuate the unjust and discriminatory status quo. Israel and Zionism are thus cast as illegitimate, incorrigible abominations”.
Those who are prone to linking rising antisemitism on Western campuses to the ongoing Israeli highhandedness in Gaza must understand that the former has not been a post October 8 phenomenon. The ongoing war in the Middle East has only brought the focus on the innate undercurrent of antisemitism operating in the West.
In May 2016, for instance, more than 50 anti-Israel protesters stormed an Israeli film screening at the University of California, Irvine. “The ten or so terrified students watching the film had to hold the doors to the room closed as the mob screamed anti-Israel and antisemitic chants and pounded, trying to get in.”
Pessin and Ben-Atar write how one female student “who had briefly stepped out of the classroom to call her mother” was “chased into a building where she came across a woman who helped her hide in an unlocked room”. The girl “hid in terror, crying on her cell phone to her mother who called the police while the protesters searched for (her)”.
Police finally arrived to remove the protesters and to escort the trapped students out of the screening room.
A similar incident took place in October that year at the University College London. Jews and Israel supporters were trapped there in a locked room by screaming protesters until the police rescued them. One can sense the institutionalisation of antisemitism on Western campuses from the fact that the UK police in 2016 had advised Jewish and pro-Israel students “to not publicly announce the locations of their events”.
What’s even more disturbing is the rainbow coalition these antisemitic forces have made with progressive, Left-wing, feminist, and ethnic minority groups, as well as Black Lives Matter and LGBTQ activists. (Ironically, in countries where the Islamists are in power, these very ‘progressive allies’ are the first to bear the brunt of jihadi fundamentalism.)
This has resulted in providing a social justice halo around the Islamist cause. The destruction of Israel has, thus, become synonymous with struggle against injustice and oppression. The river to the sea slogan is now a common rallying ground of both liberals and Islamists.
One can understand the vanishing middle ground from the BDS movement led by the Palestinian groups. BDS stands for the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions campaign against Israel. A look at the BDS connections point at its deep financial, material, and ideological connections with anti-Semitic, jihadi outfits, including the Muslim Brotherhood.
No wonder, despite its liberal, humanitarian pretensions, the BDS movement opposes the two-state solution, and thus the very existence of Israel. Consider, for example, the following statements by Omar Barghouti, founder of the BDS movement: “If the occupation (of 1967 lands) ends, would that end our call for BDS? No, it wouldn’t…. The Right of Return is something we cannot compromise on… I clearly do not buy into the two-state solution… If the refugees were to return, you would not have a two-state solution. You would have a Palestine next to a Palestine, rather than a Palestine next to Israel.”
The origin of the BDS movement can be traced to the United Nations World Conference against Racism, convened in Durban, South Africa, in 2001. Although mandated to address global concerns, the Durban conference moved to blatant antisemitism and Israel-bashing.
A dangerous turn for India
But it is here, the phenomenon takes a dangerous turn for India in general and Hindus in particular. For the uninitiated, it must be told that the Durban conference saw the first major initiative to put the caste system under the bracket of racism — a phenomenon that has in recent times become a big rallying point in the West to target new India.
The Afro-Dalit project, which was in a nascent stage at the time of the Durban conference, has come of age now, with vested interests pumping millions of dollars liberally to map India’s caste system onto the Western concept of race.
The idea gaining ground on Western campuses is that Black Americans are to their White counterparts what Dalits are to Brahmins — a development that Rajiv Malhotra and Vijaya Viswanathan talk about in detail in their book, Snakes in the Ganga: Breaking India 2.0.
The idea has been so mainstreamed in the American mindspace that TV host Oprah Winfrey today doesn’t mind talking about it and even propelling a book that discusses it with her star power into a bestseller list.
Even meritocracy of the Indian Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) institutions is being attacked by calling then to be the “structures of Brahminical patriarchy”, with one professor of anthropology at Harvard accusing Brahmins of being the “cultural capitalists” and IITs “their mechanism for the production of more upper caste engineers”.
The logic of meritocracy which the West and its institution would champion for so long, has suddenly been upended to target India and Indians (precisely because Indians through their sheer hard work are scripting one success story after another): Meritocracy has now become a Brahminical conspiracy to keep Dalits down and out!
Earlier this year, Seattle became the first US city to add caste to its anti-discrimination laws. Then, on September 28, 2023, Fresno became the second American city to prohibit discrimination based on caste by adding caste and indigeneity to its municipal code. Then, there was an attempt to bring a law in California to outlaw caste-based discrimination — a first for the American state. Thankfully, the endeavour failed, as Governor Gavin Newsom vetoed that bill on October 7.
But given the direction the US is moving, besides keeping in mind the hegemonistic control of anti-India forces on American intellectuals and campuses, the day won’t be too far when Indians in general and Hindus in particular find themselves besieged in America.
Are Indians following in the Israeli footsteps, and Hindus are in the process of becoming the new-age Jews of America, especially in the workplace and on its campuses?
Anti-Semitic rage was evident on American campuses two decades ago. But not much was done to curb it then. If Indians are not to go the same treacherous path, they need to act now. The threat facing them is clear and present.
And it’s the same anti-Semitic force, currently in action on US campuses and elsewhere, that also targets Hindus in America by joining hands with the progressive, Left-wing, feminist, and ethnic minority groups, as well as Black Lives Matter and LGBTQ activists. In the name of Palestine, they seek the decimation of Israel and Jews. And in the name of Hindutva, they work for the dismantling of India and Hinduism.
Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely that of the author. They do not necessarily reflect News18’s views.
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