DEI, Free Speech, and the Jews

 

         With the rapid spread of the Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) industry on campus, free speech principles have taken yet another hit in America.  Up until now, it has been little appreciated just how incompatible DEI rules are with the First Amendment, but events on campuses relating to the recent Israel-Hamas war have shined a light on the issue.

 

         The values embedded in the Bill of Rights of our Constitution begin with a presumption of equality.  EVERYBODY gets to say whatever they wish, everybody is protected from unreasonable searches, everybody gets to have a gun and defend himself, everybody gets to go to whichever church they desire, etc.  Further down the line, exceptions begin to appear: maybe felons don’t get to have guns, maybe pictures of children being sexually assaulted are not “free speech,” maybe the religion that practices ritual sacrifice of virgins doesn’t get the same deference as, say, Baptists.  But equality is where we start.

 

         DEI, however, starts not with equality, but with a hierarchy based on group victimhood. Muslims are at or near the top, then gays and transsexuals and blacks and people of color, and women and Hispanics and third-worlders, and so on.  At the bottom are white people and Jews (who are sort-of white and sort-of “colonizers”), and Asians who study hard and get perfect SAT scores.  The good people at the top of the scale can say or do whatever they want and it’s OK because they have been oppressed.  The whites and Jews and Asians can be silenced and ignored and beaten and have no right to even complain about it.  All rights flow from the accepted hierarchy of oppression.

 

         The reaction on American campuses to the October massacre of Israeli innocents is entirely derived from the DEI hierarchy, which is widely accepted at the most prestigious schools (e.g., Ivy League), in America.  Muslims, at the top of the list, are justified in doing ANYTHING to Jews because Jews are oppressors and scum and colonizers and sort-of white.  And that belief among the DEI-addled students would be just fine with the administrators and professors who run these places if the kids would just keep quiet about it.

 

But they can’t.  Not only do the leftists loudly blame Israelis for being massacred, they try to beat up Jewish students who object to it and they tear down posters of Israeli hostages the Jewish kids put up on campus.  If there were any respect for free speech and the First Amendment, Jewish students would at least be allowed to express their disapproval of the beheadings and torture, but any respect for the First Amendment is based in equality, and in the idea that anybody can speak, even Jews.  That idea is intolerable to anyone who has been indoctrinated with the tenets of DEI.

 

One problem that has arisen is that a lot of people who give a lot of money to these universities are Jewish, and they are now saying they don’t want to give any more money.  Presidents of universities have to answer to their boards and the board members want to know if the school is still going to get $100 million donations from this Jewish guy or that one.

 

The response to this from university presidents has been (almost) humorous.  They will NOT embrace equality and free speech because that would be incompatible with the DEI business.  They cannot conceive of Jews and white people having the same right to speak as Muslims and gays and others at the top of the pyramid.  Instead, their plan is to ban more speech, specifically antisemitic speech.  This is the scheme of Liz Magill, President of the University of Pennsylvania, which is currently experiencing a revolt by its most generous alumni.

 

I close with the letter I sent to the Philadelphia Inquirer about the problems at UPenn.

 

*

 

To the Editor:

 

    Penn will never get past its speech problems until it accepts its obligations under the First Amendment.

 

    The Foundation of Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) has put Penn on its list of America's 10 worst colleges for free speech.  Its national survey of students puts Penn second worst in the country (behind only Harvard), for suppression of student speech.  Yet President Liz Magill’s solution to Penn’s donor revolt is simply to add Jew-hatred to the list of things that cannot be expressed at Penn.

    The real solution is not complicated.  Allow people to say or chant whatever they want, no matter how loathsome or “threatening” it may be to the more delicate sensibilities on campus.  At the same time, anyone committing vandalism, real violence, or silencing of other speakers or speech should be expelled immediately and turned over to the cops. 

 

         *

 

Copyright2023MichaelKubacki

NEVER AGAIN

The Harvard/Harris poll of October 18 asked a representative sample of your fellow Americans this question:

 

“Do you think the Hamas killing of civilians in Israel can be justified by the grievances of Palestinians or is it not justified?”

 

It was widely reported that a large majority said the killings were NOT justified.  What was not so widely reported was disturbing, however.  The youngest respondents were evenly split on the question.  Half of young Americans from ages 18 to 34 believe that the grievances of Gazans justified burning Israelis alive, shooting entire families, killing babies, mowing down hundreds of concertgoers, raping and torturing and killing young women, and dragging hundreds of civilians away as hostages.

 

Think about the 18-34-year-olds you know.  What do they think and how did they get that way?  Half of them in America believe the savagery and the massacres of Israeli civilians can’t be condemned, that it was to be expected.  Some of them think it was worth celebrating.  Who the hell are these kids?

 

Here’s my theory on who they are.

 

They are not your 24-year-old haircutter at the Haircuttery.  They are not the carpenter’s assistant building your shed.  They are not the 30-year-old produce clerk putting oranges in the bin at your supermarket.  They are not the young woman with two kids who just got her GED and is trying to get a job as a cop.

 

They are the barrista with the gender-studies degree who just frapped you a frappuccino.  They are the Bernie Sanders fan who just graduated from Cornell and is trying to get into law school.  They are the Ed-School student who thinks 14-year-old carjackers just need a little understanding.  They are the recent BA in sociology who works as an intern in a diversity office.  They are the young women who think it’s great that trans-women beat actual girls in swimming.  They are the young man with $35K in student debt who delivers Uber food and has a BLM sign in his apartment window.

 

In other words, the young people who think it’s OK sometimes to cut babies heads off (if they’re Jewish babies), were taught that in school.  There’s no way normal young people think that unless they had it drilled into them in high school and college.

 

This indoctrination has been going on for decades, behind closed doors, disguised as “compassion” and “anti-colonialism” and “acknowledging white privilege” and “social justice” and “fairness.”  And now it has emerged, in 50% of our gen-whatevers, as tolerance for pure evil and a belief that there is some political grievance that can excuse the gleeful slaughter of innocents.

 

Who is to blame for what has been done to these young people, to turn them into moral monsters?  There is no lack of villains here, beginning with the leftist academics who erased any understanding of right and wrong in these children and replaced it with tribalism and identity politics and Jew-hatred.   But what of the rest of us who didn’t see it coming, or perhaps did sense there was a problem but didn’t understand it posed a threat to Western civilization?  Yes, I feel responsibility for this, a sense I could have done more, a sense I should have seen what was happening.

 

One group that must be called out as having dropped the ball is American Jews.  Sorry.  I know you’ve had a bad October, but a lot of this is on you.  “Never Again,” we were told over the years.  That was the slogan and the rallying cry.  Never again would endemic Jew-hatred be allowed to metastasize into another Holocaust.  “Never Again” meant “we got this.”  Jews accepted the duty to tell the world (and especially the children) about the evils of identitarianism and genocide, as well as the story of five thousand years in their homeland, from Judea to modern Israel.

 

And they failed.  They got distracted.  They were too busy.  And the result is that millions of young people in America know nothing about the horrors of genocide or the history of the Middle East.  In fact, they share the absurd belief the Israelis are colonizers in the land where Abraham and Moses walked.

 

There is really no excuse for this.  American Jews are well-represented in academia, and there were always political, cultural, and financial resources available to tell the story.  Yet they handed these ignorant young people over to the Herbert Marcuses and Angela Davises and Noam Chomskys of the world, and now look what we have.

 

For some reason, the focus of Jewish political attention in America has always been on the five hundred guys who live in shacks in Kentucky and Montana, who wear swastikas on their shirts on the weekends while they drink beer, shoot rats, and wonder why they don’t have girlfriends.  These idiots don’t run movie studios or television stations, and they don’t lecture at universities.  Occasionally they put up a sticker with a Star of David on a picture of a pig.  Once every five years, they march to celebrate a statue of a Confederate General everybody else had forgotten about.

 

 Nobody pays the slightest bit of attention to what these skinheads say, yet they have been the sole focus of the Abe-Foxman/anti-discrimination industry for decades.  Meanwhile, tens of thousands of Jewish Voice for Peace members show up to demonstrate for Hamas and Gazans and “Palestinians.”

 

With their own children marching in support of the slaughter of Israelis, will this finally be the moment when American Jews stop supporting, with money and votes, the people who hate them?  Is it finally time to abandon liberal Democrats, leftist academia, and the “progressive” agenda?

 

Bill and Hillary Clinton routinely referred to Jews as hebes and kikes, and yet both took 70% of the Jewish vote when they ran for president.  Barack Obama not only hates Jews, he hired people as top advisors who had long histories of Jew-hatred, and he personally treated the Israeli Prime Minister with contempt, but he somehow was rewarded with three-fourths of the Jewish vote in both of his elections.  Joe Biden cannot stop throwing billions of dollars at Iran, which uses it to fund Islamic terrorism on a number of fronts.  Eleven days after the slaughter of Israeli civilians, Biden sent $100 million in supplies to Gaza where the goods are  currently being diverted by Hamas for their own purposes.  If Biden is on the ballot again in 2024, will 77% of Jewish voters choose him, as they did in 2020?

 

This is now serious.  This is now a threat to our existence.  An America that cannot distinguish between good and evil will not survive.  All of us must help, but Jews in America bear a large responsibility to teach the world ethics and morality.  It’s a job that was originally given to them by God.   We forget sometimes, but it’s why they were “chosen.”    

 

Copyright2023MichaelKubacki