Members of the Buffalo Jewish Community and their friends turned out in large numbers on the evening of May 17, 2006, at the Jewish Community Center to learn about the resurgence of anti-Semitism on campuses. Shocking as it is to us, as we lead our quiet lives in Buffalo at the start of the 21st century, the old hatreds are rising from the muck. As the evening clearly demonstrated, our students are the ones being targeted.
Entitled “Tolerating Intolerance: Hate Speech on Campus,” the event began with a screening of a documentary (by the organization Stand With Us) showing virulent, sometimes violent, anti-Israeli events at California universities and at Concordia University in Montreal. Afterward, Rich Kellman of Channel 2 moderated three speakers, each of whom gave his or her own reflections on anti-Israeli events. Ms. Adrienne Crandall reported on an event at Buffalo State College, Dr. Richard Laub on one at Daemen College, and I on the Norman Finkelstein hate speech at UB two years ago.
I began my own remarks by asking what the significance of this event was after two years. I stressed that the central point was not that Jewish students felt intimidated. UB is tolerant and peaceful; there have been few ripples for students as far as I know. The point rather is that when professors espouse hatred, and then other faculty members are too polite to express outrage, then the message to students is that ethnic hatred is just another acceptable viewpoint.
Here are just two of Finkelstein’s ideas: that Jews conspired to create a Holocaust literature to make profits and oppress Palestinians; and that Israelis are trying to turn themselves into an Aryan race. When faculty members in our UB English department sponsor and warmly introduce this sort of speaker (and do not later repudiate him), these professors of literature are acceding to the slander of a literature, a literature of suffering no less. When UB professors publish, as three do, in Counterpunch-an electronic journal that gives voice to accusations that Israel was responsible for 9/11 destruction of the World Trade Centers-then they are in effect giving legitimacy to bigoted conspiracy theories meant to foment hatred.
Claims that Israelis want to become Nazis, accusations that Israelis secretly bombed the trade centers and then fled–these are not “perspectives,” as UB’s in-house apologists might claim. They are malicious lies. Obtruding on the capacity to see, they become the opposite of perspective: they block and distort perspective. The danger is not the short term one that Jewish students will be offended or intimidated, but rather that, when professors don’t raise their voice in response, anti-Semitic slanders and annihilationist bigotry (the active desire to see Israel destroyed) becomes acceptable fare at the university.
