Reflections on “The University’s Jihad Against Israel & Jews”

I first came across Richard Cravatts in an articlehe wrote for Pajamas Media on November 19, 2010, describing York University in Toronto as “a cesspool of anti-Semitic, pro-Palestinian activism.” York is notorious in Canada as one of its most prominent Jew-bashing institutions, taking its cue from larger and more prestigious universities like UC Irvine and Berkeley that promote, in Cravatts’ words, “slanted scholarship for jihad.” Genocidal Liberalismexpands Cravatts’ investigative sweep to encompass the entire malign phenomenon of antisemitism cum anti-Zionism that has corrupted the moral integrity and academic rectitude of the American liberal professoriate.

Cravatts doesn’t pull his punches, relentlessly anatomizing the pedagogic bias currently in place, which is neo-Marxist in its orientation and undeniably anti-Jewish in its expression. “In the campus war against Israel, a new rhetoric has evolved.” The university, he charges, is by and large no longer “a place where civility and reasoned scholarly discourse normally occurs,” given the “gradual ratcheting up of the level of acrimony against Israel and Zionism” and the Left’s insistence that such criticism, no matter how incendiary or libelous, “is no more than political commentary on the Jewish state.” He furnishes a near- interminable list of “strident anti-Israel initiatives” that mar the intellectual life of the “liberal” and “humanistic” university, including academic boycotts of Israeli professors, the fostering of vociferous and occasionally violence-prone anti-Zionist and anti-Jewish Muslim student groups on campus, the furthering of divestment and disinvestment from Israeli companies and companies doing business with them, and the shutting down of pro-Israel speakers.

Cravatts points to an influential 1965 essay by Herbert Marcuse entitled Repressive Tolerance, which planted the seed of political and epistemic subversion in the fertile soil of American academia. “Purporting to endorse freedom of expression for all,” Cravatts writes, the essay instead reserved “that right, in actual practice, only to favored groups.” The program “could only be accomplished…by favoring ‘partisan’ speech to promote ‘progressive’ or revolutionary change,” which would be, in Marcuse’s phrase, “intolerant toward the protagonists of the repressive status quo.” By the latter, Marcuse meant classical liberal thought with its emphasis on tradition, individual autonomy, civic responsibility and limited government. Our contemporary Marcusians have learned their lesson well. In this way, the door was opened for the delivery of mendacious doctrines from post-colonial fanatics and postmodern destabilizers like Edward Said and Michel Foucault who have done so much damage to the principles of intellectual honesty and objective study on which the university is presumably founded.

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