Reports that a Jewish candidate at University of California, Los Angeles’ student council was subjected to an anti-Semitic inquisition by fellow students have the media atwitter, and rightly so.
But there’s nothing new here. Anti-Semitism is just part of the anti-Western and anti-American animus that passes under the name of “multiculturalism,” and has been burning up campuses for decades now.
So the answer to the question why do UCLA students think they can openly discriminate against Jews is that such is the primordial soup in which they swim on campus. A better question is why Americans keep handing their sons and daughters over to this nihilistic form of cultural suicide. Only calling it out for what it is, rather than pretending it’s a one-off phenomenon, may force us to find a solution.
The “educators” at UCLA certainly would want you to think what happened is rare. The university’s chancellor Gene D. Block even trotted out the trite cliché that what transpired was a “teaching moment.” If this is what passes for teaching at UCLA, then the university is in even worse trouble.
Rachel Beyda was just seeking to move forward her nomination for the student council’s Judicial Board, which The New York Times describes as the equivalent of the council’s supreme court, at UCLA, when young would-be Torquemadas on the council went into action.
A YouTube video of the hearing and the written minutes show one of the members of the Undergraduate Association Council asking Beyda “Given that you are a Jewish student and very active in the Jewish community, how do you see yourself being able to maintain an unbiased view?”
Some students complained, rightly, that the libel of disloyalty has been used for centuries to oppress Jews. But the council went on to discuss the matter for over 40 minutes. Beyda lost the vote initially, but the Board later reversed itself and she was voted in.
The meeting took place on Feb. 10, but did not become an issue until March 5, when the Times published a story on the affair.
Beyda’s qualifications—she’s a second year economics major with a strong interest in law and who intends to go to law school—should have been all that was considered, but that’s not what’s been happening on campus for years.
Until not too long ago, universities used to teach that we’re all equal and have equal rights and that universal values transcend our membership in ethnolinguistic groups—the view upon which our democracy and civilization are founded, after all. But then some time in the previous two or three decades, 1960s radicals took over the teaching profession and began to teach the opposite: multiculturalism.
Multiculturalism teaches that members of different ethnic or gender groups (for there are now more than two) have a gnosis, a special insight that others don’t have, which is why they must have proportional representation throughout the different levels of society. But when you scratch the surface you quickly realize that, to paraphrase George Orwell, some groups are more equal than others.
As David Sacks and Peter Thiel masterfully described it in “The Diversity Myth,” whenever conflicts arise because of competing interests by different groups—as they inevitably will—multiculturalism will have outs and ins. The priorities of environmental extremist groups will always trump those of football fans or Greek fraternities, for example. The value system of the left is what will determine who wins and who loses.
Jews have been on the losing side for some time, both because they are now considered to have “privilege” and because it is de rigueur to see Israel as the oppressor of Palestinians. Israeli divestment movements are a rage on campuses.
The AMCHA Initiative, (amcha means “your people” in Hebrew) a group that investigates and documents anti-Semitic behavior at America’s colleges and universities, last year published a searing indictment of UCLA’s Gustav E. von Grunebaum Center for Near East Studies. It found “[s]ignificant anti-Semitic activity and anti-Israel bias” at its public events as well as a singling out of Israel for opprobrium from among all other Middle Eastern countries.
“A large majority of the invited speakers at the events have demonized Israel and promoted boycott and divestment. One-third have compared Jews to Nazis, and one-third have condoned terrorism,” said the report.
The indictment was so strong that the von Grunebaum Center lost its Department of Education Title VI funding after it came out. But UCLA’s authorities said nothing about it. “Not a word from the UCLA authorities,” AMCHA Initiative Co-founder Tammi Rossman-Benjamin said in an email this morning.
So don’t bet the farm that anyone at the UCLA faculty lounge learns anything from this latest “teaching moment.”
