A Crisis of Criticism

By Chris Menahan – Information Liberation

The Israel Lobby group StandWithUs on Tuesday shared a new feature-length film hyping “campus antisemitism” as a five-alarm fire that can only be fixed with censorship and laws against antisemitism.

The film, titled “Blind Spot – An Eye-Opening Film About Campus Antisemitism,” was funded by “The Mitzi Project” — which CauseIQ reveals was funded in turn by the Goldman Sachs Philanthropy Fund.

The film features Jewish students telling various stories detailing the alleged antisemitism they say they experienced at their schools.

One of the first stories features Jewish students at George Washington University lamenting how a drunk freshman girl was caught joking to a friend on Snapchat about how “we’re gonna f—ing bomb Israel, bro!”

They present her joke as an actual threat.

The young woman was doxed by Jewish activist groups and then investigated and intimated by the school but they couldn’t do anything to her as her comments were free speech protected by the First Amendment.

Moving on to UC Berkeley, they had another Jewish student tell the story of how he attended a pro-Palestine protest on campus that hurt his feelings so much that he “went back home” and “started crying.”

A Jewish student who attends Friends Seminary, a Quaker day school in New York, told a story about how when he was in 9th grade “there were swastikas drawn in the [school] bathroom.”

He also lamented how a teacher at his school once “did a Nazi salute in a classroom.”

The filmmakers left out that it was a joke from an ethnically Jewish teacher whose story was prominently featured in New York Times Magazine.

The student also complained about an “anti-Semitic” musician being invited by “friends” to perform at the school (the musician was Jewish saxophonist Gilad Atzmon).

The most interesting part of the film was when they highlighted how Israel Lobby-aligned groups in America are now taking campus “student leaders” on AIPAC-junket-style trips to Israel.

The solution they present to solve this alleged anti-Semitism crisis is to demand all schools adopt the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s “working definition” of “anti-Semitism” and use Title VI to silence criticism of Jews/Israel as discriminatory hate speech (what else!).

As I reported last month, the Trump administration took up Title VI complaints from Kenneth L. Marcus’ lawfare group the Brandeis Center and the Anti-Defamation League against Yale University, University of Massachusetts Amherst and Scripps College (Marcus is featured in the clip above).

The ridiculousness of the complaints of antisemitism in this film ironically make clear there is no antisemitism crisis in this country, what there is is a Crisis of Criticism — which the Israel Lobby wants shut down by any means necessary.

The Trump administration is now rounding up foreign-born critics of Israel to cheers from the ADL and Jewish activists are openly discussing how they want to find ways to have Americans rounded up next.