Anti-Semitism Goes PC

Well, it's springtime on campus--that time of year where any excuse to sit outside will do. And lo, like clockwork this week, college students across the country got out their Frisbees and their politics.
The must-have opinion of the season is on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. As Colin Powell traveled to the Middle East, students became fire-breathing little activists again. You get one guess which side the loudest ones are on.

The University of California at Berkeley, that bastion of sun-kissed young adults with a chip on their shoulder, was among the first to stomp the grass. Earlier this month, a sit-in for Palestinian statehood on the ramps of an interstate snarled traffic badly enough to need intervention by the California Highway Patrol.

On Tuesday at the University of Michigan, protestors paraded through the campus bound and gagged. One, out in his skivvies, explained via a signboard that "I am one of tens of Palestinians who were asked to strip naked by the Israeli Army, lie on their stomachs and then taken to an unknown location." (Yes, tens.)

All told, students as some 30 universities across the country--from the University of Nebraska to Georgetown to Rutgers--are expressing their solidarity with the group of people who usually send college-age kids out to self-detonate near as many Israelis as possible.

A game of tiddlywinks can spark a campus protest in many places, so the fact that students are out now is no big deal. But two aspects of the recent dispatches from higher education have set the issue apart. One is that much of the standard-issue sloganeering seems grossly out of tune. The other is that for one of the first times since political correctness first washed over campuses in the '80s, the other side is out in force too.

Most of the tactics on display are recycled from every other protest movement we've seen in modern times--from Vietnam right up through the antisweatshop brigade. Berkeley students this week even demanded that the school chancellor stop investing university resources in companies like General Electric that do business with Israel à la the 1986 apartheid divestment.

The problem is that most of these parallels just don't work anymore. At a time when Americans now willingly arrive at the airport hours before flights to comply with new security measures, the outrage of University of Michigan undergrads at similar measures in Israel doesn't really resonate. That's the campus where students today are confronted on the way to the library with campus activists running mock "Israeli checkpoints" and demanding to see their school ID.

The University of Michigan, one presumes by all available statistics, is teeming with some of the brightest young minds in the country. But someone might point out to the kids that this isn't exactly the kind of stuff that gets you sent to the Human Rights Tribunal.

Still, there are plenty of new acronyms on campus now supporting the Palestinian cause, and this too is part of the issue. At many institutions, anti-Semitism has long been one of the handful of dirty words like racism, sexism and homophobia--conjuring up discussions of hate speech and images of pogroms.

For the most part, Jewish students and their groups have played into this, holding the requisite sit-ins in college centers to commemorate the Holocaust--an act that demeans the atrocity by putting it on par with "Take Back the Night." Jewish groups like Hillel have tried to find common ground with groups like the Black Student Union by playing up the fact that they are victims too.

The coming clash on campus seems destined to be played out as a contest to determine who wins the prize as the biggest victim. The whole thing is tedious, not to mention confusing for college students and their nascent herd-like politics. Some Jewish students, so accustomed to being among the cheerful bands expressing outrage against oppression are so confused by the latest turn of events that they have in fact joined the Justice for Palestinians groups condemning Israel's "occupation" of Palestinian land. From Brown University comes the heart-melting story of a Jew and a Palestinian joining hands to . . . condemn Israel.

For their part, Palestinian groups have been keen to draw a moral equivalence between recent Israeli actions and the Holocaust. A West Coast student recently called the situation, "exactly like the ghettos that were created by Poland and Germany in the 1930s and '40s."

But beyond the usual angry sputtering and name-calling, there are some signs for concern. The Jewish student center at Berkeley recently had a window smashed and "F---ing Jews" scrawled on the garbage cans. Students coming out of synagogues got egged. And worse, near the Berkeley campus, two Orthodox Jewish men were attacked.

If it sounds an awful lot like what's been happening in Europe, that's because it is. In the ivory towers of American academia, as in Paris, Rome and Madrid, the workaday fascination with hating America and its foreign policy has been transferred to one of its allies. That's not good news for Israel. But for the moment Ariel Sharon has more important things to worry about.