What is the latest campus craziness?
And why do we care?
We care because university professors are teaching our young adults how to critically think (or at least they are supposed to) and university professors are very influential on students and can, either on purpose or inadvertently, skew and frame students’ perspectives and knowledge on any given topic.
The report I have for you today is, in my opinion, about professors purposefully editing and revising history and framing perspectives and opinions as educational content—all at the expense of Jews or Israel, or both.
According to The Floridan newspaper, an article by Javier Manjerres on April 5, 202, Florida International University, a private, high priced, high ranking university with a significant Jewish population among the student body, has a professor for a required course in the criminal justice degree program that is assigning anti-Semitic readings and written work…Jewish students have reported this to the newspaper in their shock of this course work.
Professor Ronald Morales’s “Terrorism and Homeland Security” (again a required course for criminal justice majors) includes the required textbook Terrorism and Homeland Security, 9th Edition by Jonathan R. White. In this textbook, Israel appears to be depicted essentially as “The Little Satan,” while Islamic terrorist groups like Hamas and Hezbollah are described as “health, social welfare, and education” organizations that only have a military wing to “resist” Israeli Defense Forces, or the IDF.
The book includes such quotes as, “The policies of Zionist is generally to turn Jewry in to (sic) a nation, where the emphasis is not only based on the race but the biblical myth of the promise and the territorial sense of the land,” as reported by one of Morales’ students.
And then students must write papers focusing on Zionist terrorism.
In another article last week, from JNS the Jewish News Service, reveals another disturbing evidence of off-the-rails professors teaching our college aged student to hate Israel and by default, propagate antisemitism for yet another generation. Moshe Philips’ article titled “Israel-bashing disguised as Jewish studies” reports that at Randolph Macon College in Virginia, which ranks among the top 150 small liberal arts colleges today, has history professor named Michael Fischbach whose latest essay took a spotlight in The American Jewish History Journal (published by the American Jewish Historical Society, a distinguished scholarly organization). This issue features heavily footnoted essays on topics like health-care workers on the Lower East Side in the early 1900s and the debate among Orthodox Jews over family planning in the 1950s. And among the documented and evidenced pieces is Michael Fischbach’s tirade against Israel, presented as a normal, scholarly book review.
According to Fischbach’s resume, he has a history of working with extremists, such as the pro-PLO Institute for Palestine Studies, and writing articles for the Journal of Palestine Studies, a viscously anti-Israel propaganda publication.
So we have two problems here:
1. the essay written by the professor is riddled with historical inaccuracies, omissions and spin. That makes me wonder what the students that go through his classes come out thinking and believing about Israel and its founding days and current circumstances.
2. we have the question of the Journal, that Mr. Philips seems more concerned about. Why did this Journal give such facetime and credibility to this Israel-bashing and unscholarly essay? Philips’ claim is that we should be outrage when a respected U.S. Jewish academic journal publishes a virulent attack on Israel disguised as scholarship. And he is right!
Philips concludes his article not angry at Fischbach, but at the editors of the Journal stating:
“They owe the American Jewish community—and the journal’s board of directors—an apology for violating their own scholarly standards—not to mention the rules of boundaries of good taste—by publishing Michael Fischbach’s vile attack on Israel.”
I bring these two of many examples to your attention so that professors, their mouthpieces, their pulpits and podiums and any outlet their tirades are tolerated on can be met with precise and reasoned rebuttal. I am not for censorship, but for open debate—a free market press for ideas and validity and value to said ideas.
Several other instances of universities hosting antisemitic speakers came across my desk this week, as well as events on campus of antisemitic attacks or hostilities on campuses.
Let remember that college campuses are incubators of thought and culture—therefore we are committed to doing what we can to influence truth among young people. Our scholarship program is one means to that end—one student at a time.
Shavua Tov, have a great week.