The tragic thing is that this silly and intemperate comment, blind to the suffering of the Palestinians, masks a very real problem for Jewish students and faculty, which forms part of their everyday lives. I've know one Jewish professor hounded by an anti-Semitic campaign out of her job (fortunately she found a better one at another college, but the other side of the country). I've seen students make comments in class that are at least as bad as anything Trump has said about Muslims. There are many thought-provoking, reasoned articles on this problem, such as this one: http://hurryupharry.org/2015/12/06/whispering-in-the-lift-on-the-lse-and-anti-semitism/. As we saw a few days ago with the quote from Goldsmiths Feminist and LGBTQ Societies over Maryam Namazie, the problem with ideological certainty about who is oppressed and who is not is that some kinds of people get thrown under the bus. In that case, it was atheists and secularists. In this case, it's Jews.
@ Swede
Since when are leftist students not studying at college, but INFILTRATING college campuses?
When I did my first degree, I knew one full-time Trotskyist organizer on campus (he tried, unsuccessfully, to recruit me) and two students whose duties for their respective communist groups were so onerous that one dropped out and the other failed to graduate. It may be different now or in your country.
Israel is an apartheid state, worse perhaps even than South Africa was.
Well, apartheid South Africa was a country where Africans could vote and were always represented in parliament there were no pass laws or Group Areas Act, there were African professors, ambassadors, businessmen, media producers, on national sports teams; heck, there was even once an African president. The border guard was traditionally African and zealously loyal.
Oh, wait... None of that was true. None of these rights were enjoyed by non-whites in apartheid South Africa. All of it, however, is true of Palestinians. Yet Israel is more of an apartheid state than South Africa. Ignorance or malice? Does it matter? You, who have never been in a war, can, from the safety of a country that has not seen war for 200 years, can pontificate on the Israel/Palestine situation where people on both sides have faced the prospect of sudden death for as long as most people can remember. War has the effect of brutalizing people; you don't become a moral paragon because you're occupied, nor because Europeans murdered your grandparents.
This has nothing to do with religion or ethnicity, but with power, oppression and occupation.
The old excuses are the best. The fact that Jewish students and faculty feel isolated and afraid is nothing to do with the fact that they see themselves surrounded by vocal, hostile groups who don't care that Jew A has never been to Israel, that Jew B cares about Israel because that is where a large part of her family live, or that Jew C doesn't like what is happening there but is not prepared to seek the approval of people that will only accept him if he prostitutes his status "as a Jew" to condemn Zionism (and just how offensive would it be for them to ask a student to condemn jihadi groups prior to approval just because she happens to be Muslim?) No, let's forget that Jews are, after LGBTQ people, more likely than anyone else per capita to be the victims of hate crime. Let's forget that nobody asks the Jewish people, shopkeepers, business owners about their views on the Israel/Palestine question when they get attacked and their property trashed every time there is a flare-up there. Remember, it's only a way of diverting attention from the oppression and occupation by a group of whites-traditionally-hated-in-Europe (despite the fact that most Jews are of local, Middle Eastern and North African origin) of the indigenous people (despite the fact that many have their origins in exactly the same places in the Middle East and North Africa).
You can be anti-Israel, without being anti-Jewish.
Indeed you can, but you can also be both and many are. Sometimes, Swede, you stray near the line.
