The right has a well-publicized antisemitism problem. The GOP front-runner famously dined with antisemites Kanye West and Nick Fuentes. Various new right and alt-right gargoyles indulge anti-Jewish and anti-Israel rhetoric from their internet perches.
Those voices are grotesque, but the power of left-aligned academics and activists shouldn’t be underestimated. While groups like the Anti-Defamation League, Southern Poverty Law Center and the various elite media outlets that rely on them as authoritative sources, have covered right-wing antisemitism zealously, they have allowed the intellectual poison of anti-colonial and anti-oppressor ideology to go unchecked. This ideology takes it as a given that Jews, Zionists, Israelis — pick your label — are indeed “oppressors.” This framing is seductive for young people.
For instance, UC Berkeley political scientist Ron Hassner recently conducted a small survey of college students on issues related to Israel. Most students (86%) supported the popular chant “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.” But nearly half (47%) couldn’t name the river or the sea in the chant. Some guessed that the river was the Nile or Euphrates and that the sea was the Atlantic or Caribbean. Ten percent thought Yasser Arafat was the first prime minister of Israel.
It’s fine to condemn both sides (I do!). But the shock of decent liberals and progressives at the explosion of antisemitism in the wake of the Hamas attack is testament to the delinquency of the left-wing elites running academic and cultural institutions. When professors and students celebrate a pogrom and administrators find themselves tongue-tied about condemning murder or the harassment of Jews on their own campuses, the complacency becomes obvious.
https://www.newsweek.com/hamas-gen-z-river-sea-1853419
