What is Missing from the Columbia University Antisemitism Report

JVL Introduction

Students at Columbia University were amongst the most active in organising against American support for the Gaza Genocide. The University management failed to protect the students’ right to protest against a historic crime. They conceded to pressure from Israel supporting donors and valued cash more highly than their own students. Possibly worse, they did not defend their University from the rabid attempts of Republican politicians to use misrepresentations of  the students’ action to undermine universities as spaces for independent and critical thought. Columbia’s surrender, as one of America’s most prestigious universities, makes the whole sector vulnerable to censorship and purges.

One of their concessions was to set up a taskforce on antisemitism, not wrong in itself, but they appointed three joint chairs, none with a record of studying the complex issues around antisemitism. This article describes the outcome of that decision showing the reports lack of rigour and critical, or any, probing of the accounts presented to it. The report did not distinguish between clearly unacceptable behaviour and incidents that some Jewish students may have been upset by but were legitimate political acts. Rather than increasing understanding of how to manage the tensions generated by Israel’s actions, it topped up the fuel tank of the most repressive elements in American society and encouraged those most fervent in their defence of crimes against International Humanitarian Law.

Forward’s Antisemitism Notebook is very different from the outpourings of Britain’s self-styled Campaign Against Antisemitism. It is aware that antisemitism is real and dangerous but also that much that is called antisemitism is either ambiguous or is clearly mislabelled in an attempt to suppress pro-Palestinian speech and writing. You can subscribe to receive emails of each bulletin from the Notebook.

MC

This article was originally published by Forward Antisemitism Notebook on Wed 4 Sep 2024. Read the original here.