The ‘toleration’ of antisemitism today
Albert Einstein was forced to leave Germany in 1933 after the Nazi’s took over universities. He ended up pursuing his remarkable work at Princeton University.
One wonders what he would have made of the rampant antisemitism and antizionism on American campuses masquerading as free speech, and the enthusiastic if not sycophantic support for a terrorist organisation whose charter openly calls for the murder of Jews.
It is of course a bitter irony, that these bastions of free-thinking, of liberalism and of tolerance have been hijacked by a fundamentally anti-liberal, anti-democratic ideology. An ideology that abhors freedom of expression or dissent, that has summarily executed gay people, that murders Jews and that advocates rape, child and octogenarian murder as ‘resistance’. Hamas.
The chants today calling for intifada, and the steady refrain of “from the river to the sea echo a similar ideology – the very one that forced Professor Einstein to cross the Atlantic.
The similarities do not end there sadly.
At around the time Einstein was packing up, Peter Drucker, an Austrian economist, was then a lecturer at Frankfurt University. He had this to say at the time.
“Frankfurt was the first university the Nazis tackled, precisely because it was the most self-confidently liberal of major German universities, with a faculty that prided itself on its allegiance to scholarship, freedom of conscience, and democracy. The Nazis knew that control of Frankfurt University would mean control of German academia. And so did everyone at the university.”
What was the tipping point for Nazi success? Toleration. You push, you meet no resistance. You push a bit more, still none. You push and push, and you get away with it. And before you know it, the tolerance of dehumanisation reaches its peak.
That is why Jews are looking on in horror at events at Columbia and other US universities and watching the spread to European Universities with dread. Because we know where this story ends. We have been here before.
For voicing our concerns, we are accused of hyperbole, sensationalism, and of trying to stymie free speech.
I ask, since when did advocating for the complete destruction of a UN member state become free-speech? When did active and open support for the actions of a proscribed terrorist organisation become tolerated?
You would have to be exceedingly naive not to see what is happening here. And the vast majority of people – especially our intellectual and academic classes – are anything but naive.
The answer is that a calculus has been made. The war in Gaza and ensuing antizionism, in the vast majority of cases a flimsy fig leaf covering antisemitism – including old tropes of child killing and the blood libel – is being tolerated because academia has chosen to tolerate it.
One wonders what these universities would have done after 9/11 if protesters had taken over Universities calling for more plane hijackings and crashings? Or if the KKK organised a rally that called on ‘all niggers to go home to Africa’? Or if protesters were calling for the murder of gays, lesbians and transgender people?
I simply cannot believe that such actions would be tolerated.
Let me be clear, tolerance and respect for a plurality of opinion is the mark of healthy society.
But toleration can also spell its disaster. If hate speech and support for terrorism is tolerated and given free rein to fester it is utterly poisonous to our society.
If we allow those whose values that are so completely at odds with ours free rein to operate and spread their ideology in our places of learning, in the bastions of our democracy, we forfeit the very values that we hold so dear to their immediate benefit.
We cannot and must not ‘tolerate’ antisemitism, no matter how difficult the repercussions are.
Einstein, that most academic of academics, the man to whom the word genius is most attributed to, knew then what was at stake: “the world is a dangerous place to live, not because of the people who are evil, but because of the people who don’t do anything about it,” he said.
The protests are starting to mushroom in Europe now. In Ghent here in Belgium, there will be one. Doubtless chants effectively calling for the death of Jews will be heard. Will they be tolerated? We hope not. But we are not hopeful.
Rabbi Menachem Margolin is the Chairman of the European Jewish Association, that represents hundreds of Jewish communities across the continent
