You read that headline right.
The devil that concerns me here is not Anna Wintour, the Prada-clad czarina of the fashion industry. Rather, it’s Joseph Stalin, who used the Soviet mouthpiece Pravda to make antisemitism the official state policy in the USSR. Under Stalin’s control, Pravda cast Jews as a “terrorist group” that committed “monstrous crimes” at the behest of Western “agents” who conspired to subvert the USSR’s communist regime.
Stalin died before he could purge the Soviet Union of those “anthropoid beasts,” but his brand of Jew-hatred has bewitched a new generation of antisemites who aim to purge our nation of what a Chicago professor has called “irredeemable excrement.”
Today’s protesters might know that, like Stalin, they are following Karl Marx’s directive to plot “vengeance against hated individuals or public buildings which have acquired hateful memories.”
What they do not know is that, in 1947, Stalin’s delegation to the United Nations voted yes to the UN resolution that divided Palestine between Jewish refugees and the Palestinians. What they do not know is that Stalin became anti-Zionist only when he saw that Israel would not become a Marxist pawn and saw that anti-Zionism would play well with the Arab League, which had rejected the UN resolution — and chosen instead to fight a losing war with the new state of Israel.
No amount of hard evidence will disarm young Stalinists who chant “Death to Israel” and “Death to America,” but students who join protests as a means of “belonging” are ripe for reform. If you have access to the hangers-on, you might use the summer to trace their brand of antisemitism to its Soviet roots and let them know, gently, that behind every Jew-hating “comrade” is a Marxist agenda.
You might open with a reminder that Russian dictators have a long history of echoing Marx, who dubbed Jews “hucksters” and note that in 1975, the USSR invented new charges against the prospering Israelis. Under pressure from the USSR, the United Nations passed a resolution linking Zionism to “neo-colonialism, foreign occupation … apartheid, and racial discrimination.” In 1991, the UN rescinded Resolution 3379, but the charges have outlived the fall of the Soviet Union — and ensnared two generations of American professors.
Students whose professors denounce Israel’s “foreign occupation” and condone Hamas’s “resistance” should know that it was a Palestinian-American professor who made denouncing Israel the “Next Big Thing” in American universities.
With the publication of his 1978 tract “Orientalism,” Columbia professor Edward Said claimed “Palestinian resistance is not terrorism; it is a legitimate struggle for justice and freedom” against Israel and its Western allies.
Forty-seven years later, 100 Columbia University professors would make headlines echoing Said’s mantra, calling Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack on Israel a “military response” to an “occupying power” and setting the stage for protesters nationwide.
While Said was busy exporting born-again Marxism to universities nationwide, a more insidious plot was taking shape in Philadelphia. In October 1993, the FBI wiretapped a meeting of Hamas officials who were discussing ways to sabotage the Oslo Peace Accords, which had recognized Israel’s right to exist and confined the Palestinians to the West Bank and Gaza. Three years later the agreement collapsed, and Hamas resumed their mission to rain down terror on Israelis.
Hamas’ other mission that day involved enlisting American-born activists to set up a network of Hamas apologists and financiers in the U.S. The success of that mission is on full display now — in our streets, parks and universities. An anonymous Palestinian reporter has even admitted what Israel’s supporters have known for decades: “It would appear that many of Palestine’s supporters are more comfortable when Palestinians are perceived as mere passive victims of Israel’s colonial rule.”
Victimhood has served the Palestinians well, but reasonable students will see that their comrades have become victims of the same ploy the Soviets used in the Middle East after World War II. They cast themselves as a champion of the oppressed and cast Israel and its allies as the evil oppressors.
Reasonable students will disown that myth, and they might even discover that the real villains on the world’s stage are the teachers who affirm it.