Benjamin Gladstone: "Anti-Semitism at My University"
10/02/2016
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An op-ed in the NYT by a Brown U. student with the great name Benjamin Gladstone (referencing the arch-rival Victorian prime ministers Benjamin Disraeli and William Gladstone; Benjamin Gladstone is kind of like Alexander Jefferson or John Fitzgerald Nixon):

Anti-Semitism at My University, Hidden in Plain Sight

Benjamin Gladstone

ON CAMPUS OCT. 1, 2016

Providence, R.I. — Last semester, a group came to Providence to speak against admitting Syrian refugees to this country. As the president of the Brown Coalition for Syria, I jumped into action with my peers to stage a counterdemonstration.

Gladstone doesn’t mention that the organization questioning bringing more Muslim refugees in is Americans for Peace and Tolerance, which is led by Dr. Charles Jacobs, who was named by The Forward as one of America’s top 50 Jewish leaders.

Gladstone explained to the Brown Daily Herald why he was protesting Jacobs’ protest:

After a vigil held on campus in December honoring those who have died in the Syrian civil war, Ben Gladstone ’18, a member of the Brown/RISD Hillel Community, said the issue strikes a particular chord for him.

“It was just a couple of decades ago that the U.S. government was associating Jews with a political ideology — communism — and using that as justification to condemn us to death,” Gladstone said. “To see that same U.S. government blocking another group from entering is a reminder that this country as a whole has not learned from the Holocaust.”

I assume that’s a reference to the Rosenberg spies, who were sentenced to death for stealing atomic bomb secrets for Stalin by Judge Irving Kaufman over six decades ago. Or maybe he’s arguing that the U.S. government was responsible for Hitler’s Holocaust because FDR was so anti-Communist. Or something …

In the NYT, Gladstone goes on:

But I quickly found myself cut out of the planning for this event: Other student groups were not willing to work with me because of my leadership roles in campus Jewish organizations.

That was neither the first nor the last time that I would be ostracized this way. Also last semester, anti-Zionists at Brown circulated a petition against a lecture by the transgender rights advocate Janet Mock because one of the sponsors was the Jewish campus group Hillel, even though the event was entirely unrelated to Israel or Zionism. Ms. Mock, who planned to talk about racism and transphobia, ultimately canceled. Anti-Zionist students would rather have no one speak on these issues than allow a Jewish group to participate in that conversation. …

As I pointed out last year in Taki’s Magazine in a column on the BDS movement, the growth of diversity on campus Is Bad for the Jews, or at least for Jewish student political activists.

I noticed this trend when a kid I vaguely knew was involved in a UCLA student government incident in which the Diverse student politicians grilled a Jewish activist student politician over whether she could be un-biased in a judicial position. The NYT splashed it all over its front page, although furiously spinning it by focusing on an unrepresentative Swiss coed to keep readers from understanding that this was part of a larger trend, the Diverse battling pro-Israel Jews, that has started on college campuses and will inevitably spread to the real world.

American white gentiles are probably the most pro-Semitic people in the world, so of course a policy of importing massive numbers of the Diverse increases anti-Semitism in America. The arithmetic isn’t all that complicated, but whether enough American Jews will eventually figure out that, in the view of the Diverse, they are in the same basket of deplorables with their white gentile American neighbors is a major question for our time.

There are, however, a lot of debating stratagems so Jews can reassure themselves that they aren’t as white as the Diverse assume, such as Benjamin Gladstone’s Flight from White theory:

Many of my fellow activists also perpetuate anti-Semitism by dismissing Jews of color, especially the Mizrahi and Sephardi

Like, say, the Sephardic Benjamin Disraeli, Queen Victoria’s favorite Prime Minister of Color …

majority of Israel’s Jewish population, descendants of refugees from Southwest Asia and North Africa. Ignoring the expulsion of 850,000 Mizrahi and Sephardi Jews from Arab and Muslim countries from 1948 to the early 1970s allows students to portray all Israelis as white and European and get away with making a “progressive” case for dismantling the Jewish state.

Even hummus has become politicized: Anti-Zionists at my school who demanded that cafeterias stop serving hummus produced by a company with Israeli ownership, also claimed that the product showed cultural appropriation even though Mizrahim and Sephardim have been eating Southwest Asian cuisine since long before the rise of organized Zionism.

In my experience, anti-Semites refuse to acknowledge Mizrahi and Sephardi Jews to minimize the history of oppression against Jews, and in doing so dismiss contemporary Jewish concerns.

Okay … My guess is that this hummus argument about why Jews shouldn’t be lumped in with whites as the Bad Guys is the kind of overly subtle argument that nice white gentiles will nod along to, but the Diverse not so much.

Is it really too much to ask American Jews to figure out that American white gentiles are your best friends in the whole world, and that the Diverse don’t see you as Fellow Victims? Instead, the Diverse see Jews, to the limited extent that the Diverse can distinguish Jews from other whites in general, as a particularly wealthy and powerful subdivision of the white people they are instructed over and over by American elite society to dislike. [Comment at Unz.com]

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