Anti-Semitic mobs thrive on old campus hatreds

‘Our moral outrage students and academics are aquiver with hatred of the world’s only Jewish state. Their universities take money from Arab states that outlaw gay relationships, host Confucius Institutes financed by a government that tolerates no dissent at all.’ Above, Johannes Leak’s cartoon on Tuesday.

If, as seems likely, Israel is preparing to move against the Hamas battalions in Rafah, then we can expect a major escalation of hatred, intolerance and unreason on our university campuses.

If the Rafah operation goes ahead, the entire moral responsibility will rest with the terror group Hamas. For the release of 33 innocent Israeli hostages, Hamas could have a six-week ceasefire that could well become a permanent ceasefire.

Instead, Hamas has become truly a kind of nihilist death cult. It engineered and apparently wants to continue the needless death and suffering of Palestinian civilians because it judges, probably rightly, that the whole operation in Gaza is doing tremendous long-term damage to Israel internationally.

Hamas says it won’t agree on a ceasefire unless Israel withdraws totally and permanently from Gaza. That’s an impossible demand because Israeli forces must be able to move back into Gaza when they see preparations for new iterations of the October 7 atrocities. Hamas has promised to repeat the October 7 atrocities again and again.

But of course it’s futile to try to get facts and reason into the debates on our campuses. It’s one of the most dismal ironies of our civilisational moment that universities – once a supreme locus in our culture of reason, debate, learning, inquiry, civility and depth – are now frequently anti-intellectual and a source of hatred and prejudice. Universities have become institutions that incidentally do good work but that put a huge amount of their effort into plainly destructive ends.

The widespread intellectual and moral corruption of our universities is one of the most alarming signs of deep sickness in our society.

Members of the Australian Palestinian community shout slogans at the Palestinian Protest Campsite at University of Sydney.

The universities contribute institutionally to the current madness in several ways. Their leaders are institutionally cowardly. These institutions will throw you on to the street for contesting elements of climate change alarmism, send you on a re-education course if you use the wrong pronoun for someone, get you into mighty trouble if you express the view that a racially segregated study space is not the best way to fight racism.

They will offer students trigger warnings lest they be upset by the prose of Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird or even Jane Austen.

But shouting demonstrators harassing Jewish students; screaming for intifada that has meant murderous campaigns against Jewish people, not only in Israel; declaring that Israel is a terror state; calling for Palestine to be free “from the river to the sea”, which can only mean the destruction of the Jewish state; even staff and students supporting Hamas itself, an outfit proscribed as a terrorist organisation under Australian law – that’s all fine because these lions of campus administration have suddenly discovered that, when faced with a violent enemy, they believe in free speech after all.

The great anti-communist academic Frank Knopfelmacher, a collection of whose writings has just been published, once told me the collective noun for vice-chancellors was “a lack of principles”.

People pray at an encampment at University Yard at George Washington University.

In the US, college administrators have been shamed into requesting police action to end pro-Palestinian encampments with their blatantly anti-Semitic overtones. This may have something to do with how badly these demonstrations are affecting Joe Biden politically and contributing to the possibility of Donald Trump winning the presidency in November. Biden changes his positions entirely according to political convenience. He and Kamala Harris gave a degree of support to the defund the police movement and demonstrations in 2020. They were able to portray much of the civic violence of that period as chaos caused by Trump.

But, combined with his failure on illegal immigration, Biden will suffer tremendously if this campus disorder continues. Middle America hates it. At the same time the hard left, and especially the profoundly ill-educated young people who wouldn’t know which river and which sea they were chanting about but love the idea and romance of faux social revolution, can’t bear Biden’s qualified support for Israel nor his qualified support for law and order.

On this occasion Biden could lose support on both his left and right.

But universities have contributed to this crisis in a much more direct and profound way. And that is through allowing, over decades now, many of their humanities courses to be invaded by critical theory, neo-Marxism and toxic identity politics.

For a long time, Western universities, including Australian universities, have been teaching that our societies are essentially and uniquely evil, that we are colonial, racist, sexist etc.

I was an undergraduate at Sydney University in the mid-1970s and came to the considered conclusion that the courses I was taking were junk. In a human geography class a lecturer informed us that the shining example of “praxis” was China’s Chairman Mao. Even then I knew that Mao Zedong was directly responsible for the deaths of tens of millions of innocent Chinese. How could he be lauded by this lecturer?

In economics, I got to choose between political economy and mainstream economics. Political economy was dominated by pretty crude Marxism. I took classes there because they required no work. As long as in essays you proclaimed how unjust society was, you’d get at least a credit. It was easy but a complete waste of time. Mainstream economics had taken refuge from Marxism in almost pure mathematics. That’s not as objectionable as Marxism but it doesn’t describe reality very well either.

The only possible use of such a university education was to get a credential. Educationally, intellectually, morally, it was utterly worthless.

Pro-Palestinian demonstrators use a large Palestinian flag to block the doors to Bell Hall as they rally on the campus of George Washington University.

Many, perhaps most, university humanities and social sciences subjects have been captured by critical theory. Critical theory reduces everything to a shoddy analysis of power structures. It has destroyed much of the joy of studying literature. A friend, a little younger than me, told me he switched from literature, his first love, to philosophy. In literature it didn’t matter whether he was studying Austen or a restaurant menu, it was the same old fifth-rate power analysis, analysis of the allegedly hidden power structure behind the text.

Universities in many cases have thus abandoned the substance and truth of the subjects they allegedly teach. Critical theory is frequently festooned with Marxoid scripturalism and endless self-referential footnoting. But it’s not a complicated intellectual discipline. Really it’s a simplistic conspiracy theory that absolves universities from the hard but rewarding work of exploring human culture in all its richness.

Instead, like all conspiracy theories, it reduces human experience to a simple formula that assigns heroes and villains, in this case on an identity politics basis.

Our moral outrage students and academics are aquiver with hatred of the world’s only Jewish state. Their universities take money from Arab states that outlaw gay relationships, host Confucius Institutes financed by a government that tolerates no dissent at all. But in critical theory, Chinese and Arabs aren’t villains.

Critical theory, this monstrous engine of hatred, is profoundly anti-intellectual, which is perhaps why it thrives at contemporary Western universities, including ours.