From sea to shining sea, the campus Jew-haters still run free.
That was very apparent this past week. So-called pro-Palestinian protesters invaded and heavily vandalized an engineering building on the campus of the University of Washington in Seattle. Estimated damage? Upwards of a million dollars. The alleged justification? The brand new building was financed by Boeing, and Boeing sells weaponry to Israel.
On the East Coast, the anarchists were back Wednesday on the campus of Columbia University. About a hundred of them occupied Butler Library, blocking students from studying for their finals. They defaced walls and roughed up campus security personnel.
Props to Columbia’s acting president Claire Shipman for taking swift action and calling in the NYPD to clear them out and haul them away. She’s already suspended 65 students and banned 33 alumni and non-affiliates from campus for their roles in the takeover.
Shipman also did a good social media PR job, outrightly condemning the takeover and vandalism and not being mealy mouthed about it. I guess it really helps, performance-wise, when the university prez is a former network news correspondent.
So, about these campus low lives… They are clearly anti-American and anti-Jewish. They openly call for the destruction of our system of government and of our way of life. Okay, got it.
I’m not trying to dismiss the seriousness of what they continue to do or how disruptive they continue to be. But, at least to me, they have become predictable and charicaturish. Everyone has seen their shtick over and over. Watching them is like watching a bad TV reality show. It’s formulaic and rehearsed and most of the time you can guess how it’s going to end.
The disrupters think they are oh so smart, when they are demonstrably oh so stupid.
They’ve played right into the hands of the eager beaver visa-checkers at the US State Department, who are dying for the chance to send them back from whence they came. The protesters are also making it easy for smart university administrators to disown them.
And that’s what happened this past week on Capitol Hill as a House committee revived its hearings probing campus antisemitism. For the most part, if you take out the head of Haverford College, the non-Ivy League college presidents who were questioned this time, talked the talk and said they mostly walk the walk combatting anti-Israelism and antisemitism on their campuses.
Here’s what the university presidents and provosts are now thinking: Should I continue to allow these lunk-heads to overrun my campus and risk losing millions and millions of dollars of federal money? Uh, let me think for a second. Show me the money!
So, let the campus anarchists burn themselves out, be arrested, deported, suspended and expelled. They all have it coming. They don’t scare me anymore.
BTW, neither do the elitists on the Pulitzer Prize board, who this past week awarded a Palestinian journalist one of the prestigious prizes, although she’s an Israel hater and disparaged the Israeli victims of October 7th.
But this past week, there was one, down home, anti-Jewish incident that did scare the hell out of me. It wasn’t on a college campus, or on a street in Brooklyn, or on a podcast. It was at a sports bar in Philadelphia.
The bar is owned by Barstool Sports. At that bar, when you order bottle service, you are offered a letter board where you can create a short message, like Party Time or Let’s go Eagles, or whatever.
But a Temple University student had the letters arranged to spell out Fuck the Jews. The waitresses at the bar dutifully held it up and the student proudly posted it on his Instagram feed.
I don’t want to get into the whole saga of Barstool’s founder Dave Portnoy and his response to what happened in his bar. You can watch it here if you want, but send your kids out of the room when you do. His angry rant is replete with f-bombs.
Here’s the part that sent chills down my spine. It’s bad enough that some hateful college kid made an F the Jews sign. He’s a sniveling, pampered coward who can’t take ownership for his own misdeed. I’ll just lump him in with his clueless college compadres that bang drums, chant violent slogans like hypnotized zombies and wrap their faces as if they were going to a Hamas Halloween party.
What I’m most disturbed about are the bar waitresses who held up the sign. They didn’t blink an eye. They thought it was okay. F the Jews! Sure, how many bottles can I get you?
What occurred in that Philadelphia bar shows me that antisemitism in the United States has become totally normalized. It’s no longer taboo. It’s okay to hate on Jews in the open, at a sports bar, in the City of Brotherly Love, just like it’s okay for social media stars to spew antisemitic tropes we thought no enlightened society would still tolerate. Just like it’s okay for big time university presidents to put Jew hatred on their campuses “in context.” Just like it’s okay, as I wrote about last week, for Harvard’s DEI department to tell a Jewish student what is and what is not antisemitic hate speech.
It’s now okay for even bar waitresses to hold up a sign, albeit composed by someone else, that says, F the Jews.
The drinks may be on them, but I’m afraid the bad joke is on us.