Remember Captain Obvious, the character in the Hotels.com TV commercial from a few years ago? His shtick was to sound very authoritative, telling us what we obviously already knew.
He came to mind this past week when I read two very authoritative reports, one from Amnesty International and one from Columbia University
Columbia’s Task Force on Antisemitism released its fourth and final report about the anti-Israelism and antisemitism at the school.
About the university’s Middle East Studies department, it found every professor is an Israel hater. Obviously, the days of Rabbi Arthur Hertzberg, teaching a graduate seminar on Zionism at Columbia, are long gone.
The task force found repeated instances of students who were singled out for “their real or perceived ties to Israel.”
One Israeli student, an IDF veteran, was called an “occupier” and a “murderer.” The task force said it “heard from students who felt they had to avoid identifying themselves as Jewish or Israeli in classes, in order to avoid the possibility of being scapegoated.”
Some instructors, according to the report, even cancelled classes so their students could participate in the anti-Israel protests that swept the campus.
The antisemitism didn’t confine itself to Columbia’s main campus on Morningside Heights. Uptown, at the Mailman School of Public Health, the task force reported on one teacher who told hundreds of new students, “three of the school’s major donors, who were Jewish, had made their gifts with the aim of ‘laundering blood money.’”
That is raw, unrefined Jew hatred.
The report also described disturbing incidents of antisemitism in areas far from any Middle East topic.
It found “An introductory class on astronomy began with a unit on ‘Astronomy in Palestine,’ in which, as the class’s syllabus
put it, ‘as we watch genocide unfold in Gaza, it is important to tell the story of Palestinians outside of being the subjects of a military occupation.’”
A student told the task force “in a class on feminism, the professor opened the first session by announcing it had been 100 days since Israel began waging war on Gaza.”
The report also found instances of anti-Israel speech in “a class on photography, a class on architecture, a class on nonprofit management, a class on film, a music humanities class, and a Spanish class.” Can you believe this?
Clearly, anti-Israelism and antisemitism at Columbia was and still is, deep, depraved and diabolical.
The sad thing is, there is no quick way to ameliorate the hate. In many cases, those putrid professors have tenure and they’re not going anywhere. Columbia is going to have to hire lots of new profs to even begin to offset those antisemites.
There was another big, flashy report that emerged this week and it too landed in my inbox with a thunderous, DUH!
Amnesty International, that great advocacy group for human rights around the world, that vaunted NGO that says it exists to call out “torture” and “war crimes”, the organization that has accused Israel of genocide, came to a startling conclusion.
Amnesty International is now comfortable reporting that “crimes committed by Hamas and other Palestinian armed groups during their attacks on October 7, 2023, and against those they seized and held hostage…amount to crimes against humanity.”
Yes, Amnesty International has now confirmed Israelis were murdered, tortured, raped and forced into captivity.
The eyewitness accounts in the report of the atrocities perpetrated on October 7th and the abuse the hostages endured in Hamas hell, are vivid and excruciatingly painful to read.
But those of us who’ve been paying attention to what took place on October 7th and afterward won’t be particularly surprised about any of it. And not for nothing, AI issued the report more than two years after the slaughter.
For sure, there is a healthy dose of “Captain Obvious” in the Amnesty International and in the Columbia reports. But they do one important thing. They shine a bright public light on the truth. And in today’s world where reality is regularly redefined, where facts are fungible and where history is ignored, that’s not a completely trivial thing.
Now, when protesters deny the massacres and rapes of October 7th, when professors celebrate terrorist atrocities and deploy antisemitic tropes, here’s the obvious thing for a person armed with the indisputable truth to do: Hold up these two reports and shove their hate right back in their ugly faces.
Palestinians outside of being the subjects of a military occupation.” A student reported that
during a vocabulary exercise in an introductory Arabic class, the teacher proposed this
sentence: “The Zionist lobby is the most supportive of Joe Biden.” A student told us in a
class on feminism, the professor opened the first session by announcing it had been 100
days since Israel began waging war on Gaza. We heard similar reports, where harsh
condemnations of Israel were made a central element of classes in ways that blindsided
Jewish and Israeli students, in a class on photography, a class on architecture, a class on
nonprofit management, a class on film, a music humanities class, and a Spanish class. We
have heard some graduate students urged each other to “teach for Palestine” in their
classes on a wide variety of subjects.
We share their outrage.