The Volokh Conspiracy
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Does a "More Honest" Discussion about Antisemitism on College Campuses Require an Honest and Unsanitized Account of October 7?
A recent blog post at AAUP's Academe is attracting notice for the way it characterizes the October 7 attack.
A recent post on the Academe blog, published by the American Association of University Professors, is attracting some notice--but perhaps not the sort of notice AAUP would prefer. The essay, "It's Not Too Late to Tell the Truth About Antisemitism on Campus" by Brooke Lober, Eli Meyerhoff, and Emily Schnieder, argues that claims of rampant antisemitism on college campuses are a variant of the "big lie" and "an effort to silence dissent and smear protesters."
Whether American college campuses have a serious antisemitism problem is a subject upon which reasonable people may disagree. There is also reasonable disagreement on when criticism of Israel is evidence of antisemitism, and many reasonable people are justifiably concerned that some universities have responded to anti-Israel protests with measures that unduly restrict free expression on college campuses.
What seems less reasonable is how the authors characterize the October 7 atrocities. Calling for a "more honest story about campus climate" that considers the "larger context" of the war in Gaza, they characterize October 7 as a "revolt" by "Palestinian militant groups" targeting "the infrastructure of occupation," and suggest that campus protest and activism did not arise until after Israel launched its offensive against Hamas in Gaza.
Here is the full passage:
A better model—and a more honest story about campus climate—would look at the larger context of the war and how it has increased tensions across the board. On October 7, 2023, Palestinian militant groups staged a revolt against the seventeen-year blockade. They attacked the infrastructure of occupation and kidnapped and killed Israelis, among others. As the US and Israeli media dehumanized Palestinian people and repeatedly characterized this politically motivated attack as "senseless violence" or motivated by "antisemitism," they paved the way for Israel's disproportionately harsh retaliation; unsurprisingly, harassment and violence toward Palestinians, Arabs, and Muslims ensued. Israel responded to the attack with a genocidal campaign, while marking their conquered territory with holy Jewish symbols and justifying their assault in the name of collective Jewish safety. It is this violent instrumentalization of Jewish identity, a longstanding project of the Israeli state, that has provoked renewed harassment of Jews around the world. [Emphasis added.]
It seems to me that if the aim is a "more honest" discussion about the campus climate and antisemitism--and the related threat to free expression on college campuses--it might help to provide a more honest and less sanitized description of what occurred on October 7.
