The diversity, equity and inclusion industry has been dented by several recent antisemitism disputes, writes Laurel Duggan in UnHerd, as activists put Jews and Israel in the ‘white oppressor’ category and justify all forms of ‘resistance’ against them. Here’s an excerpt.
George Washington University postponed a diversity summit last week over concerns about the “current climate”, after a student group projected messages onto a campus building reading “glory to our martyrs”, “free Palestine from the river to the sea” and “GWU is complicit in genocide in Gaza”. The university wrote that the postponement was related to campus safety as well as the “pain” felt by students.
Institutions across the country — and diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) departments in particular — appear to be reckoning with the same problem. The advocacy group StopAntisemitism found in its 2022 report that the majority of universities it evaluated did not include Jews in their DEI programs.
Speaking to UnHerd, Cornell Law Professor William A. Jacobson claimed that at his university “opponents of Israel seek to racialise what is a religious and national conflict to put together coalitions of students ‘of colour’ versus ‘white’ Israel and Jews”. He suggested that this process has accelerated since the university announced an anti-racism initiative in early June 2020, following the killing of George Floyd.
Cornell came under scrutiny after history professor Russell Rickford said he was “exhilarated” by the October 7th Hamas attacks, and the FBI is currently investigating recent antisemitic threats made against its Jewish student centre.
“I’ve not seen any response from feminist and women’s rights groups, which overlap significantly with the pro-Palestinian groups, to the use of rape and sexual abuse by Hamas, including rape of dead Israeli women,” Jacobson said. “It may be old fashioned Jew-hatred, but I think more likely it is because campus ‘social justice’ movements, including at Cornell, have been conditioned by the DEI obsession with race to view Israeli Jews as so uniquely evil that resistance ‘by any means necessary’ is promoted, embraced, and excused.”
In March, Tabia Lee found out the extent of the DEI industry’s targeting of certain viewpoints. A former faculty director for the Office of Equity, Social Justice, and Multicultural Education at De Anza Community College in Cupertino, California, she was fired from her position after hosting Jewish speakers on campus to discuss antisemitism and the Holocaust, and attempting to host a multifaith heritage event.
“I saw antisemitism on a weekly basis in my two years as a faculty ‘diversity, equity and inclusion’ director,” she wrote in the New York Post this month. “Toxic DEI ideology deliberately stokes hatred toward Israel and the Jewish people.” Lee characterised the industry as “built on the unshakeable belief that the world is divided into two groups of people: the oppressors and the oppressed.” Within this, “Jews are categorically placed in the oppressor category, while Israel is branded a ‘genocidal, settler, colonialist state’”, and “criticising Israel and the Jewish people is not only acceptable but praiseworthy.”
Worth reading in full.
To join in with the discussion please make a donation to The Daily Sceptic.
Profanity and abuse will be removed and may lead to a permanent ban.
“built on the unshakeable belief that the world is divided into two groups of people: the oppressors and the oppressed.” Within this, “Jews are categorically placed in the oppressor category, while Israel is branded a ‘genocidal, settler, colonialist state’”, and “criticising Israel and the Jewish people is not only acceptable but praiseworthy.”
I fully agree.
What do you agree with? That Jews are placed in the oppressor category, or that they should be placed in the oppressor category? Please clarify. The former is descriptive and unfortunately true, while the latter is normative and utterly morally repugnant.
I’ve been supporting the Palestinians for many decades and nothing has changed my mind.
Hamas are just one element of the Axis of Resistance against the occupying army of Israel.
If Hamas were totally destroyed someone else would take their place.
Palestinians in vast numbers support their liberation from the brutal apartheid Israel.
Resistance fighters have always committed atrocities against their occupiers.
The occupiers in this instance own governments around the world, own the banking system, own Hollywood and own the media so they can manipulate the narrative.
40 beheaded babies was a downright lie as were many other “reported” instances.
The number of deaths is more important than the nature of the deaths.
Israel has killed far more Palestinians than the other way round.
Palestinians have tried non-violent resistance in the past but were met with Israeli aggression killing hundreds.
Israel in the past 3 weeks have killed 9,000+ most of whom were women and children compared to the 1,400 Israelis who died many of whom were IDF soldiers. Also, many who died were killed by crossfire at the music festival, at the Kibbutz and elsewhere. Mainly due to the Israeli Hannibal Doctrine where they kill as many Hamas fighters as possible regardless of the welfare of any hostages or civilians. This included firing a tank round into a kibbutz house killing Hamas fighters AND hostages.
Supporting the plight of Palestinians doesn’t make one an anti-Semite or hold a “repugnant” view.
Shock.
Another pro Israeli anti Gaza on this oh so fair and balanced site.
Thanks for the anti narratives re Covid/Death Vax/Ukraine/ Zero carbon etc., but much more of this and I’m done.
FFS think, or are you all pro Israeli Muslim haters per se?
The answer thus far would appear to be yes.
Shocking.
I think we should be working on the basis of what is in British interests.
The ethnic cleansing of the indigenous population of Palestine is not in our interests. Neither is a wider war in the Middle East. Therefore we should oppose the racial supremacists currently running Israel.
No, don’t go..especially not on account of idiotic articles like this…
I’m more..keep giving them the rope..because they’re doing a fantastic job of making sure people see they are entitled pompous assholes….….they really aren’t helping the cause…
How many articles about DEI have we ripped to shreds on here because they are obviously a crack-pot idea…?..
but lo and behold if we can fit another anti-Semitic story in, we’ll give it some legitimacy…wouldn’t want it to go to waste…
If they think these kind of articles where we are all supposed to feel sorry because some (always posh) people are having a breakdown (darling) because they fear some supposed existential unknown threat..
while thousands of kids are actually being pulverised and killed every day, day after day…they really don’t get it….…they actually come across as callous buggers with not a scrap of compassion…
Let them keep going with this patronising abstract propaganda..it’s just turning people off…
Kettle, pot and black are 3 words that spring to mind. Do you have any compassion for the 1,400 civilians killed on 7th October?
Any civilian deaths are regrettable, but if you were any Israeli citizen what would you want your government to do?
Hamas knew full well what the response to their atrocity would be, therefore in carrying it out they have shown zero concern for the inevitable civilian casualties that happen when they place military targets in heavily built up areas.
If they cared about ordinary Palestinians they could of based themselves in the West Bank where there’s far more space to keep military targets away from civilians, but no they’re cowards who hide behind women and children.
How many members of Hamas are actually Palestinians rather than foreign fighters doing what they see as their vile antisemitic religious duty?
Oh bugger off with your racist nonsense and collective guilt crap..it’s never going to make me lose my sense of compassion or my knowledge of wrong and right…… I have said….in fact pretty much everybody in the world has said what happened on October 7th was barbaric and horrible..
..it was..and I have said it often and unreservedly…
What you have to explain is how in less than a month…ten thousands deaths, possibly twenty in the next couple of weeks is acceptable because of that?
What you are really saying is only the October 7th lives matter..and any amount of civilian lives of Palestinian people is irrelevant…
..everyone hears that message loud and clear..and trust me they don’t think it’s being ‘compassionate’…
Collective punishment is, quite rightly, an illegal act within the rules of International Law…and I have said from the beginning I expect Israel to follow those rules of war…I expect their behaviour to be better than the others..I don’t expect them to behave worse than terrorists….
and I would expect it if I was an Israeli…millions of Jews think the same..please don’t think you talk for them all…
You can have sympathy only for the Israeli hostages..but don’t tell other people that their compassion is missing when only one of the two of us can spread that to innocent children being blown to bits for something they didn’t commit and have no control over…..and definitely don’t deserve….…..they are also the victims here..and you are putting the blame on them…that’s not compassionate, that’s the opposite…
Oh dear. That really is the most ignorant comment I’ve read here and it was already a low bar. You’ve heard of Jenin right? Yes, Hamas are Palestinians. That’s why they fight for a land they still believe is theirs, just as the Jews fight after thousands of years, for land they believe is theirs. Of course, you’d say nothing if someone stole land and a home you’d lived in. And according to you, you’d be a coward for trying to get it back. I can only assume you are very young.
“1,400 civilians killed”???????
Israel in the past 3 weeks have killed 9,000+ most of whom were women and children compared to the 1,400 Israelis who died many of whom were IDF soldiers. Also, many who died were killed by crossfire at the music festival, at the Kibbutz and elsewhere. Mainly due to the Israeli Hannibal Doctrine where they kill as many Hamas fighters as possible regardless of the welfare of any hostages or civilians. This included firing a tank round into a kibbutz house killing Hamas fighters AND hostages.
Good lord no. But I do have a problem with Islam as it is now. And international law supports the actions Israel is taking to defend itself after the slaughter of the innocents. That Hamas are happy to use their people as a human shield makes no difference, I am afraid. Maybe it would be in their interests NOT to elect terrorists to govern them?
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/10/27/international-law-backs-israels-right-to-defend-itself/
Well at least they use their own people as human shields.
Unlike –
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2005/oct/07/israel
And I’m sure that international law supporting Israel’s position is ample consolation to the thousands of innocents being slaughtered on both sides.
Impossible to understand this as a political issue.
It’s a spiritual battle.
DEI hates families, mums, dads, parents rights to bring up their children. It seeks to destroy and pervert the definition of male and female, corrupt our infants, as well as criminalising the Judeo-Christian culture upon which British prosperity was built.
Like cancer, it infests every arm of government, big commerce, education and media.
As clearly demonstrated in the comments on the DS Israel articles, its proponents can’t hold an argument and hate truth, facts and testimony because it is based on a lie.
Simply, DEI, as with Jew/Israel hatred is plain evil. It is of the same spirit, not merely an idea or philosophy.
Expose. Oppose. Disrupt. Destroy.
No room for sightseers, this is a war on our way of life.
“Judeo-Christian”
Anybody who uses that term is working for the enemy.
European civilisation is Christo-Pagan.
Jews have historically sided with Muslims against Christians, as today Jewish Israel sides with Muslim Azerbaijan against Christian Armenia.
Don’t wish to be picky, but British prosperity was built on piracy and colonialism.
Colonialism is a nonsense term invented by lefties born long after decolonisation came to an end. It’s somewhat similar to the righties’ nonsense term statism. Like all empires of past and present¹ the British empire was conquered. That’s so banal that it doesn’t even need to be mentioned.
¹ Still existing example of this kind of state would be the USA, Russia, China and India, to name the largest.
The people writing these articles have an antisemitism problem and it is that they believe it would the mark of a tactical genius to label any opposition to their positions as antisemitism. This is as wrong¹ as it is tiresome and just dilutes the term into complete meaninglessness.
¹ Antisemitism was a political movement, mostly in Germany and Austria, in the 19th and early 20th century whose members were opposed to the so-called Jewis emancipation, the granting of full citizen’s right to Jews, which had occurred in the course of the Napoleonic wars out of state self-interest: The more citizens a state had, the more people were liable to serve as conscripts in the armed forces. Hostility between Jews and Arabs in particular and – more generally – between Jews and Muslims is a much newer phenomenon and one with entirely different causes, principally the military successes of the state of Israel in the middle-east over its Arabic enemies. People who lost a succession of wars are usually not friendly disposed towards those who conquered them afterwards.
Insightful piece about the stark contrast in cultures, by an American woman who was held captive in Afghanistan by her ‘Jekyll and Hyde’, Islamist husband;
”Without warning, he expected me to live in purdah, in a polygamous family, which included my mother-in-law, the first of three wives, a woman who tried to force me to convert me to Islam and who then tried to kill me.
Airport officials had removed my American passport, (“a mere formality, Madam”), and I found myself back in the 10th century with no exit out.
I learned the hard way that the Islamic East and the Judeo-Christian West really are very different.
Long before the Taliban came to town, women in burqas were forced to sit at the back of the bus and were rudely pushed to the back of the shopping line when any man, usually a male servant, came to make his purchases.
I was horrified by this and by child marriage, polygamy, purdah, burqas, hijab, the mistreatment of servants, and rumored honor killings. When I said so, my Afghan family mocked me as an “hysterical” American overreaction to what was a normal and perfectly acceptable way of life.
It was for them, but not for me, and not for anyone who had grown up in America, the land of libraries and liberty.
I nearly died there. However, I got out and lived to tell the tale. It was a story that no one wanted to hear.
Today, too many Westerners still refuse to understand that Islam has, once again, become Islamism; that jihad does not mean a spiritual “shaking off,” but means killing the infidels and doing so in the creatively demonic ways perfected by the PLO, Al-Qaeda, ISIS, the Taliban, Hezbollah, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and Hamas. Islamism = jihad terrorism. Jihad Islamism, as funded by Iran and Qatar, and by Soros and the Rockefeller Brothers.”
https://www.newenglishreview.org/when-will-progressive-westerners-accept-the-fact-that-not-all-people-and-all-cultures-are-the-same/
I learned the hard way that the Islamic East and the Judeo-Christian West really are very different.
The Christan parts of the world were decidedly anti-jewish for the largest part of their history. Traditionally, Christians/ the Christian Church would accuse Jews of having murdered Jesus. The Judeo-Christian West is a fable invented after the second world war. To this date, orthodox Jews insist in maintaining a strict separation from non-Jews, to the point that they must not eat using the same set of eating utensils as these.
Orthodox Jews don’t try and impose their beliefs or way of life on everyone else, so in this case there’s nothing wrong with ‘live and let live’.
This clearly isn’t the case with many millions of muslims who clearly represent a threat to what’s left of Western civilization after left wing wokesters have hollowed it out from within.
That’s besides the point, which was about the fiction of a judeo-christian culture.
Here we go with the raping dead Israeli women trope. Hamas has two goals: To keep the plight of Palestinians in the news (this means sending rockets into Israel knowing the response will not be proportionate and the world will remember the Palestinians for a week or two) and hostages for prisoner swaps. They removed the destruction of Israel from their Charter in 2006 (even says this on UK Gov website) in order to get elected. Netanyahu encouraged Hamas move into politics as he believed is would divide the Palestinian cause. Pumping up the rhetoric only fans the flames – we need sane voices, not more hysterics. It was bad enough what happened in Israel on Oct 7, heightening the horror helps no-one.
Wearing mine with pride.
https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/266448192339?chn=ps&_trkparms=ispr%3D1&amdata=enc%3A1h5WgWVQgQoGVEvKr6UzcOw87&norover=1&mkevt=1&mkrid=710-134428-41853-0&mkcid=2&mkscid=101&itemid=266448192339&targetid=1647205088320&device=c&mktype=pla&googleloc=1006886&poi=&campaignid=17206177401&mkgroupid=136851690655&rlsatarget=pla-1647205088320&abcId=9300866&merchantid=118946284
Given the Daily Sceptic was set up to fight and ridicule the Covid pantomime – the jackbooted assault on our lives, the junk science festival, the grooming, the groupthink, the lies, the looting, the jab damage, the manipulation, the fear mongering, I don’t know how anyone on here can also be defending Islam.
Are you not on the DS because you are sick of oppressive, freedom crushing ideologies and control agendas that bully and manipulate people through groupthink and fear? Isn’t that what Islam fundamentally is, Hamas just being the tip of one of the many spears?
Islam might be described as ‘the religion of peace’ but only if you strictly obey its doctrines. See how much peace you enjoy when you’re accused of insulting the Prophet or making a loose charcoal sketch of him. Or if you suddenly decide to become a ‘non-believer’ or a Christian. Or you’re a Muslim woman and you try to leave the house in 40 degree heat wearing anything other than a heavy jet black burqa or niqab plus full nylon table cloth. Or you’re a young mother who’s randomly accused of adultery by your jealous neighbours, dragged off then buried up to your shoulders in soil and stoned to death (with a handy leaflet for the crowd stipulating a medium-ish size rock so as to prolong the agony for as long as possible). Or you’re gay and you just want to be accepted into society without being beaten to a pulp or shown the roof terrace. Or you’re a Yorkshire schoolboy who accidentally scuffs a copy of a 6th century book containing the musings of a 53 year old man who married a 9 year old child and you have to flee into hiding for your own safety. Or you’re a popular Parisian cartoonist and you draw a picture of this ‘prophet’ and in return get machine gunned to death outside your office in broad daylight.
Despite all the theories about globalist influence on these atrocities etc, which of course could also be true, they could be exploiting Islam for their own ends – nothing, repeat nothing takes away from the fact that Hamas are a murderous ideological death cult that want Israel and Jews permanently wiped off the map. This is literally the religious bottom line. And for Western so-called ‘liberal’ apologists to maintain that if only Israel would stop retaliating, Hamas would suddenly turn into a giant yoga practicing Moby is absurd self-indulgent Guardianista bullshit.
Whether these attacks on Israel were background funded by our Covidian globalist cartel and the gangsters in the White House to further provoke a highly lucrative Middle Eastern conflict is a definite possibility but I don’t see it this time. Some people on here claim this attack was an inside job to strengthen and embolden Netanyahus fading popularity, but why would you fund and allow a massacre that made you look like a galactic fuckwit who didn’t have the first clue about protecting his people? Way to show strong leadership.. This argument doesn’t make any sense.
Israel for all its careless heavy handedness, corruption and faults are an integrated largely tolerant, largely democratic, forward thinking modern society. Hamas are a disastrous combo of Tony Soprano and medieval death cult. But the craziest thing is if you disregard their beliefs, Israelis and Palestinians are more or less the same people.
Israel are not an apartheid state. To accuse them of that is to completely cheapen the horrendous things that happened in South Africa from1948 to 1991. Neither are they committing genocide. To accuse them of that is to render the term genocide utterly meaningless and to insult every victim of genocide in history. Israel have Arabs working as doctors, lawyers, police, firemen, bus drivers, shop workers, office workers, in the government and even in the army. They have Arab political parties that sit in parliament that Arabs can vote for.
So for people to try and pretend Israel is some kind of 1950’s Alabama with ‘No Arabs, No dogs’ signs on every shop is a self-indulgent western BBC fantasy that in propaganda terms Hamas can’t get enough of.
Palestine has been given more than $8.5 billion over the years by the UAE, Qatar, Kuwait and others that could have easily been spent on housing, hospitals, schools, food, infrastructure but instead Hamas spent it on weapons – demonstrating exactly how much they care about their people over their agenda.
Being neither Jewish or Arab I have no skin in this game but I can see that there is no moral equivalence here. Hamas’s goal is the extermination of Jews. Full stop.
So how long before this goal properly extends to the UK and starts including Infidels and ‘non-believers’ too? Given the current state of our streets in London and the support these hyper-entitled blood thirsty narcissists are getting from the Met Police and the victimhood narrative they are being constantly fed by our Establishment media, this terrifying prospect could be here sooner than we think.
Wonderful piece of satire, I loved the – “Israel for all its careless heavy handedness”.
Priceless.
As I said, I have no skin in this game and it’s truly and unimaginably awful for the people involved. But I can smell a great deal of elephant shit in this room. Would you care to address the Islamic death cult that wants to wipe Israel and the Jews from the face of the Earth? Or are you going to ‘dead me’ with vapid sarcasm again?