One of the biggest reasons that explains the explosion of anti-Jewish and anti-Israel sentiments on western university campuses is the vast amounts of money states like Qatar have bestowed on them for years. According to ISGAP, Qatar has even donated hundreds of millions of dollars to K-12 schools in the US "to promote Arabic" in ways that violate the terms under which foreign states may provide funding to schools.
The Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy (ISGAP) primarily investigates foreign, undisclosed funding at the university and K-12 levels, specifically looking at how this money influences curricula and campus culture.
ISGAP research regarding funding and K-12/elementary education involves the following key details:
The Choices Program: ISGAP published extensive investigations (including the Institutional Capture report) into the "Choices Program," a K-12 social studies curriculum development initiative formerly housed at Brown University's history department.
Undisclosed Foreign Funding: The research documents over $65 million invested in U.S. education over the last 17 years by Qatar Foundation International (QFI), with ISGAP's findings alleging that this money covertly shaped pedagogical materials without transparent disclosure to regulators or parents.
Content Concerns: ISGAP's findings outline that K-12 educational materials distributed to thousands of American schools exhibited anti-Israel bias, distorted historical events, and omitted Jewish and Christian history in the Middle East.Call for Investigation: ISGAP has called on U.S. federal agencies to investigate how foreign entities operate within American schools. Following ISGAP's initial reports, Brown University quietly discontinued the Choices Program, leading to increased congressional scrutiny over foreign influence in elementary and secondary education.
Brilliant analysis Pat. The academy, with its supercilious attitudes toward so-called truth, is corrupting the minds of the leaders of tomorrow. Watching this happen on North American campuses is more than heartbreaking…it heralds the end of Western morality as we’ve known it. Israel must prevail.
I think a rededication to critical thinking is the key to the future. If we do not teach young (and older) people how to discern fact from fiction in the new information environment, we are doomed. If we succeed in doing that, I think antisemitism and most of our other woes will be well on their way to defeat.
Pat, I think there is another piece to this puzzle.
The oppressor-versus-oppressed framework wasn't created to target Jews. It emerged from broader left-wing and socialist theories that divide the world into power structures, victims, and oppressors. The problem is that once that framework became dominant in universities, Israel was inevitably cast in the role of oppressor and Palestinians in the role of oppressed.
Then that worldview collided with Islamist movements that already hated Israel for their own reasons, and the alliance was complete.
Personally, I don't think most students arrive at these ideas through deep intellectual analysis. Quite the opposite. I've watched enough campus interviews to conclude that many simply don't know the history or the facts. They're repeating what they've been taught by professors, activists, social media, and institutions they trust.
When you see things like "Queers for Palestine," you're not witnessing careful geopolitical thinking. You're seeing the result of years of ideological conditioning.
People generally don't embrace ideas that contradict common sense unless authority figures they respect have convinced them those ideas are virtuous. That's why I think education is at the heart of this issue. If generations are taught a distorted version of the conflict, we shouldn't be surprised when they reach distorted conclusions.
I'm sure you're right ... but * if * people seek to go deeper and find "intellectual" reasoning for their conditioned responses, this is how they find it.
The Soviet Union's propaganda machine was cranking out "colonial theory" decades ago, at least as far back as the 1950s and 60s when it was courting African and Arab states and trying to demonize Israel for not becoming a Soviet satellite on the Eastern Mediterranean. Western academics really didn't start dining out on it as a way to attack Israel until Patrick Wolfe in the 2000s. Google AI is not correct in describing Wolfe as an Australian. He was a British born antizionist Jew who immigrated to Australia:
Ukrainian-born scholar of Soviet Antisemitism, Izabella Tabarovsky refers to how the colonizer slur is familiar to any former Soviet Union Jews who came of age in the 1970s-80s.
Lynne, that's very interesting, and I think you're right about the Soviet roots of much of this language.
Where I may differ slightly is that I don't think Zionism was ever the ultimate target. My impression is that the larger goal was always opposition to Western power, Western institutions, capitalism, and nationalism. Israel became a convenient target because it represented many of those things and was small enough to isolate and demonize.
In that sense, anti-Zionism became one front in a much larger ideological struggle. Israel wasn't necessarily the whole war. It was one of the battlefields.
What is remarkable is how successfully those ideas migrated from Soviet propaganda into Western universities, where many people now repeat them without having any idea where they originated.
The Soviet Union long had an antisemitic underbelly. It was apparent to my grandfather's cousin, a major figure in Canadian labour union organization in the 1930s and later a member of the Ontario legislature in the 1940s as the sole member of the Labour Progressives, a Communist front.
I agree that Israel's refusal to become a Soviet satellite and the USSR's desire to attract support among Arab states may not be the "larger goal", but not an insignificant one either, in the USSR's aim to be prevail over the US and its allies, enough so to invent a "discipline" Zionology, to oppose Zionism: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_anti-Zionism
Frederick, I agree with you. I only want to add that the turning point for the Soviet villification of Zionism, and hence Jews who supported Israel, was the triumph of Israel in the 6 day war. The U.S. became much more supportive of Israel at that time, realizing that Israel was militarily adept and perhaps, the Arab oil producing states were not as stable after the defeat.
Since the U.S. chose to side with Israel more than it had previously, and at least divided its support between the Arab oil states and Israel, the Soviet Union almost reflexively, as a cold war measure, dropped its support for Israel and opted to back the Arab countries. Many of the Arab states sent their young people, who were being groomed as future leaders, to universities or institutes of learning in the Soviet Union. One of these was the Iraqui writer and journalist, Jamal Hussein Ali, and before him, the future PLO leader, Mahmoud Abbas.
Sebastian, thank you for adding that. It adds another important layer to the story and helps explain how anti-Zionism evolved from a Cold War strategy into something much larger.
The Six-Day War was clearly a turning point. Once the Soviet Union decided that Israel was aligned with the West, its propaganda machine shifted gears, and the consequences of that decision are still with us today.
I also think your point about future Arab leaders being educated in Soviet institutions is fascinating. It shows how ideas don't just disappear. They get passed along, adapted, and eventually find new audiences.
Thank you for adding the historical context. It makes the picture much clearer.
Brilliant piece. I think we are surprised partly because we love studying, writing, learning and we do not want to accept the heartbreaking reality that the spaces that presumably stand for these endeavors are not quite what they claim to be. Where else should a person wanting to dedicate their life to higher education go? The same problem exists in the arts, but there it is a bit easier to understand, perhaps, because antisemitism does use the imagination a great deal, and so does art.
Orwell never fails to be interesting and insightful, and he wrote an article at the end of WWII on antisemitism in the UK. Yes, even after the war, there was still a lot of antisemitism in Britain. It should not surprise us that it has returned so strongly, and Muslim immigration has given it some added energy and irrationality. Orwell is wrong in his conclusion that it's mainly the result of nationalism. What makes antisemitism so unique is that the excuses for it are always changing, and Orwell does seem to recognize that. He also understands that it's common for people to say they are against antisemitism and still be antisemitic. European elites are often of this type.
it would be wonderful if the media did its job and pointed out that the emperor has no clothes. Unfortunately they are busy making commercials claiming they are "trustworthy" despite the evidence.
And yet, some of those same medieval blood libels persist, albeit in new forms. Jews aren’t killing Christian children to use their blood for matzot. Now, they’re killing innocent Palestinians to harvest their organs. New era, same old accusation.
Very good and true. Generally speaking, highly educated people, especially academics, are more susceptible to propaganda, radical ideas and the great illusions brought about by abstract thinking. We even see them cultivating their own special jargon that is a garden of abstraction, meaning that the garden is dry and withered. They have spent their entire lives cloistered away in a place where group think is common, exposure to real life is limited, and virtue signaling has become a way of life.
They are adept in the use of language, and this can fool people into thinking that this means they are smart, but that's not true. Surely some are smart, but the jargon and big words means only that they are good at learning to use jargon and big words.
The edifice they have built lends itself very well to the politicization of every subject they can lay their hands on. They wind up hiring people who think like themselves. The academy then gradually becomes a closed circle, a circle with nearly impermeable walls. Conformity rules. Everyone must be within that circle in order to be accepted.
It's funny how this so much resembles Islam which is also a closed circle. That may be at least in part the reason that the progressive left has allied itself with Islam. Antisemitism is within the closed circle.
Your comment about the adept use of language reminded me of my reading of Chomsky and Finkelstein ... these are the, ahem, intellectual heavyweights of the hate-Israel movement and their "scholarship" is overwhelmingly sophomoric, laughable. So some may be adept at language, but others are just jargon-y enough to trap pseudo-intellectuals.
This misuse of language has a long pedigree going back at least as far as the sophists. The admission offices of our elite universities certainly look for language skills among the applicants. This makes sense, and I have no quarrel with that. But those students who are accepted and then want to become academics are in some way self selected to fit into that closed circle. They are usually conformists who learn how to please the selection committee at every level. The non-conformists rarely want to live within an enclosed circle.
Are they intellectuals or pseudo-intellectuals? It seems to me that both can be within the circle of clever sophists. Genuine intellectuals, as Dostoevsky knew, are attracted to revolutionary or crackpot ideas. Dostoevsky himself was an antisemite. Ironic.
Dara Horn has a new definition of antisemitism that is worth exploring (you can listen to podcasts of interviews with her explaining her book that will be coming out soon: The Final Solution to the Jewish Question, a Love Story for the Living). It is a lie ("the big lie") used to gain or maintain power. The lie is "Jews are destroying what you value the most." The only variable throughout history is "what you value the most." Your comments in this article align with that definition. And who is trying to gain power in this version of antisemitism? Islamists/Jihadists. And the public, especially the left, is buying their propaganda. But it's really about Islamists/Jihadists gaining power, and by the time people wake up to that, it might be too late.
As a Sexuality Studies professor, researcher, and academic writer for 45 years (now retired) I can see a perfect analogy to what you describe. In the 19th century educated people and just plain decent people began to question whether women should have rights equal to those of men and whether homosexuals should be jailed or executed. If you look at the history of Psychology, you can see how it developed as a theory about why conventional male dominant/female submissive behavior was the only mentally healthy way to live and was necessary to society. Prior to that women had just been forced to submit to male authority and gay people had been punished for not procreating and playing their prescribed roles. But now those who rebelled against the gender laws were deemed sick and in need of treatment. This developed alongside a pseudo science that insisted that people who didn't conform to the binary gender norms were unnatural and diseased. Now they could be tortured without the torturers being seen as nasty, hateful people. Gay people could be given electric shocks to "cure them" and subjected to other tortures misrepresented as being for their own good. And the majority of lobotomies were performed on women who had failed to conform to their roles. As a college student in the early 1970s I saw many of the older professors struggling with the news that there are more than 2 biological sexes and the size of women's brains does not make them mentally inferior and that gay people are not mentally ill.
Well said. Depressing but accurate
One of the biggest reasons that explains the explosion of anti-Jewish and anti-Israel sentiments on western university campuses is the vast amounts of money states like Qatar have bestowed on them for years. According to ISGAP, Qatar has even donated hundreds of millions of dollars to K-12 schools in the US "to promote Arabic" in ways that violate the terms under which foreign states may provide funding to schools.
The Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy (ISGAP) primarily investigates foreign, undisclosed funding at the university and K-12 levels, specifically looking at how this money influences curricula and campus culture.
ISGAP research regarding funding and K-12/elementary education involves the following key details:
The Choices Program: ISGAP published extensive investigations (including the Institutional Capture report) into the "Choices Program," a K-12 social studies curriculum development initiative formerly housed at Brown University's history department.
Undisclosed Foreign Funding: The research documents over $65 million invested in U.S. education over the last 17 years by Qatar Foundation International (QFI), with ISGAP's findings alleging that this money covertly shaped pedagogical materials without transparent disclosure to regulators or parents.
Content Concerns: ISGAP's findings outline that K-12 educational materials distributed to thousands of American schools exhibited anti-Israel bias, distorted historical events, and omitted Jewish and Christian history in the Middle East.Call for Investigation: ISGAP has called on U.S. federal agencies to investigate how foreign entities operate within American schools. Following ISGAP's initial reports, Brown University quietly discontinued the Choices Program, leading to increased congressional scrutiny over foreign influence in elementary and secondary education.
Brilliant analysis Pat. The academy, with its supercilious attitudes toward so-called truth, is corrupting the minds of the leaders of tomorrow. Watching this happen on North American campuses is more than heartbreaking…it heralds the end of Western morality as we’ve known it. Israel must prevail.
I think a rededication to critical thinking is the key to the future. If we do not teach young (and older) people how to discern fact from fiction in the new information environment, we are doomed. If we succeed in doing that, I think antisemitism and most of our other woes will be well on their way to defeat.
Pat, I think there is another piece to this puzzle.
The oppressor-versus-oppressed framework wasn't created to target Jews. It emerged from broader left-wing and socialist theories that divide the world into power structures, victims, and oppressors. The problem is that once that framework became dominant in universities, Israel was inevitably cast in the role of oppressor and Palestinians in the role of oppressed.
Then that worldview collided with Islamist movements that already hated Israel for their own reasons, and the alliance was complete.
Personally, I don't think most students arrive at these ideas through deep intellectual analysis. Quite the opposite. I've watched enough campus interviews to conclude that many simply don't know the history or the facts. They're repeating what they've been taught by professors, activists, social media, and institutions they trust.
When you see things like "Queers for Palestine," you're not witnessing careful geopolitical thinking. You're seeing the result of years of ideological conditioning.
People generally don't embrace ideas that contradict common sense unless authority figures they respect have convinced them those ideas are virtuous. That's why I think education is at the heart of this issue. If generations are taught a distorted version of the conflict, we shouldn't be surprised when they reach distorted conclusions.
I'm sure you're right ... but * if * people seek to go deeper and find "intellectual" reasoning for their conditioned responses, this is how they find it.
The Soviet Union's propaganda machine was cranking out "colonial theory" decades ago, at least as far back as the 1950s and 60s when it was courting African and Arab states and trying to demonize Israel for not becoming a Soviet satellite on the Eastern Mediterranean. Western academics really didn't start dining out on it as a way to attack Israel until Patrick Wolfe in the 2000s. Google AI is not correct in describing Wolfe as an Australian. He was a British born antizionist Jew who immigrated to Australia:
Ukrainian-born scholar of Soviet Antisemitism, Izabella Tabarovsky refers to how the colonizer slur is familiar to any former Soviet Union Jews who came of age in the 1970s-80s.
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/arts-letters/articles/cult-of-antizionism-icsz
Lynne, that's very interesting, and I think you're right about the Soviet roots of much of this language.
Where I may differ slightly is that I don't think Zionism was ever the ultimate target. My impression is that the larger goal was always opposition to Western power, Western institutions, capitalism, and nationalism. Israel became a convenient target because it represented many of those things and was small enough to isolate and demonize.
In that sense, anti-Zionism became one front in a much larger ideological struggle. Israel wasn't necessarily the whole war. It was one of the battlefields.
What is remarkable is how successfully those ideas migrated from Soviet propaganda into Western universities, where many people now repeat them without having any idea where they originated.
The Soviet Union long had an antisemitic underbelly. It was apparent to my grandfather's cousin, a major figure in Canadian labour union organization in the 1930s and later a member of the Ontario legislature in the 1940s as the sole member of the Labour Progressives, a Communist front.
I agree that Israel's refusal to become a Soviet satellite and the USSR's desire to attract support among Arab states may not be the "larger goal", but not an insignificant one either, in the USSR's aim to be prevail over the US and its allies, enough so to invent a "discipline" Zionology, to oppose Zionism: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_anti-Zionism
Frederick, I agree with you. I only want to add that the turning point for the Soviet villification of Zionism, and hence Jews who supported Israel, was the triumph of Israel in the 6 day war. The U.S. became much more supportive of Israel at that time, realizing that Israel was militarily adept and perhaps, the Arab oil producing states were not as stable after the defeat.
Since the U.S. chose to side with Israel more than it had previously, and at least divided its support between the Arab oil states and Israel, the Soviet Union almost reflexively, as a cold war measure, dropped its support for Israel and opted to back the Arab countries. Many of the Arab states sent their young people, who were being groomed as future leaders, to universities or institutes of learning in the Soviet Union. One of these was the Iraqui writer and journalist, Jamal Hussein Ali, and before him, the future PLO leader, Mahmoud Abbas.
Sebastian, thank you for adding that. It adds another important layer to the story and helps explain how anti-Zionism evolved from a Cold War strategy into something much larger.
The Six-Day War was clearly a turning point. Once the Soviet Union decided that Israel was aligned with the West, its propaganda machine shifted gears, and the consequences of that decision are still with us today.
I also think your point about future Arab leaders being educated in Soviet institutions is fascinating. It shows how ideas don't just disappear. They get passed along, adapted, and eventually find new audiences.
Thank you for adding the historical context. It makes the picture much clearer.
Brilliant piece. I think we are surprised partly because we love studying, writing, learning and we do not want to accept the heartbreaking reality that the spaces that presumably stand for these endeavors are not quite what they claim to be. Where else should a person wanting to dedicate their life to higher education go? The same problem exists in the arts, but there it is a bit easier to understand, perhaps, because antisemitism does use the imagination a great deal, and so does art.
Orwell never fails to be interesting and insightful, and he wrote an article at the end of WWII on antisemitism in the UK. Yes, even after the war, there was still a lot of antisemitism in Britain. It should not surprise us that it has returned so strongly, and Muslim immigration has given it some added energy and irrationality. Orwell is wrong in his conclusion that it's mainly the result of nationalism. What makes antisemitism so unique is that the excuses for it are always changing, and Orwell does seem to recognize that. He also understands that it's common for people to say they are against antisemitism and still be antisemitic. European elites are often of this type.
https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwell/essays-and-other-works/antisemitism-in-britain/
it would be wonderful if the media did its job and pointed out that the emperor has no clothes. Unfortunately they are busy making commercials claiming they are "trustworthy" despite the evidence.
Agreed completely.
And yet, some of those same medieval blood libels persist, albeit in new forms. Jews aren’t killing Christian children to use their blood for matzot. Now, they’re killing innocent Palestinians to harvest their organs. New era, same old accusation.
Very good and true. Generally speaking, highly educated people, especially academics, are more susceptible to propaganda, radical ideas and the great illusions brought about by abstract thinking. We even see them cultivating their own special jargon that is a garden of abstraction, meaning that the garden is dry and withered. They have spent their entire lives cloistered away in a place where group think is common, exposure to real life is limited, and virtue signaling has become a way of life.
They are adept in the use of language, and this can fool people into thinking that this means they are smart, but that's not true. Surely some are smart, but the jargon and big words means only that they are good at learning to use jargon and big words.
The edifice they have built lends itself very well to the politicization of every subject they can lay their hands on. They wind up hiring people who think like themselves. The academy then gradually becomes a closed circle, a circle with nearly impermeable walls. Conformity rules. Everyone must be within that circle in order to be accepted.
It's funny how this so much resembles Islam which is also a closed circle. That may be at least in part the reason that the progressive left has allied itself with Islam. Antisemitism is within the closed circle.
Your comment about the adept use of language reminded me of my reading of Chomsky and Finkelstein ... these are the, ahem, intellectual heavyweights of the hate-Israel movement and their "scholarship" is overwhelmingly sophomoric, laughable. So some may be adept at language, but others are just jargon-y enough to trap pseudo-intellectuals.
This misuse of language has a long pedigree going back at least as far as the sophists. The admission offices of our elite universities certainly look for language skills among the applicants. This makes sense, and I have no quarrel with that. But those students who are accepted and then want to become academics are in some way self selected to fit into that closed circle. They are usually conformists who learn how to please the selection committee at every level. The non-conformists rarely want to live within an enclosed circle.
Are they intellectuals or pseudo-intellectuals? It seems to me that both can be within the circle of clever sophists. Genuine intellectuals, as Dostoevsky knew, are attracted to revolutionary or crackpot ideas. Dostoevsky himself was an antisemite. Ironic.
So true. I would suggest that Antisemitism is a form of hubris. Do you and your readers agree?
Dara Horn has a new definition of antisemitism that is worth exploring (you can listen to podcasts of interviews with her explaining her book that will be coming out soon: The Final Solution to the Jewish Question, a Love Story for the Living). It is a lie ("the big lie") used to gain or maintain power. The lie is "Jews are destroying what you value the most." The only variable throughout history is "what you value the most." Your comments in this article align with that definition. And who is trying to gain power in this version of antisemitism? Islamists/Jihadists. And the public, especially the left, is buying their propaganda. But it's really about Islamists/Jihadists gaining power, and by the time people wake up to that, it might be too late.
As a Sexuality Studies professor, researcher, and academic writer for 45 years (now retired) I can see a perfect analogy to what you describe. In the 19th century educated people and just plain decent people began to question whether women should have rights equal to those of men and whether homosexuals should be jailed or executed. If you look at the history of Psychology, you can see how it developed as a theory about why conventional male dominant/female submissive behavior was the only mentally healthy way to live and was necessary to society. Prior to that women had just been forced to submit to male authority and gay people had been punished for not procreating and playing their prescribed roles. But now those who rebelled against the gender laws were deemed sick and in need of treatment. This developed alongside a pseudo science that insisted that people who didn't conform to the binary gender norms were unnatural and diseased. Now they could be tortured without the torturers being seen as nasty, hateful people. Gay people could be given electric shocks to "cure them" and subjected to other tortures misrepresented as being for their own good. And the majority of lobotomies were performed on women who had failed to conform to their roles. As a college student in the early 1970s I saw many of the older professors struggling with the news that there are more than 2 biological sexes and the size of women's brains does not make them mentally inferior and that gay people are not mentally ill.