Columbia University Celebrates Anti-Semitism

Last week, Malaysia’s ninety-four-year-old prime minister, Mahathir Mohamad—a candid and committed anti-Semite—spoke at Columbia University’s “Global Leaders Forum,” where he drew a large crowd. Clifford May comments:

No one challenged Mr. Mohamad’s right to voice his hatred of Jews. Nevertheless, he felt compelled to defend that right. “When you say ‘you cannot be anti-Semitic,’ there is no free speech,” he instructed his audience. . . . “Why can’t I say something about the Jews, when people say nasty things about me and about Malaysia?” . . . Among Mohamad’s oft-stated beliefs: “Jews rule the world by proxy.”

[T]he moderator, Professor Lien-Hang T. Nguyen, never asked a tough question or challenged the speaker’s assertions and expressions of prejudice and animus. I’m sure Columbia faculty and students extend similar courtesy to speakers who [are] Republicans, conservatives, and especially officials of the Trump administration. . . . “We have a lot of wisdom that we can draw on from you,” Nguyen [told] the senescent politician. At the conclusion of the program, he exclaimed: “That was amazing.”

I want to give Mr. Mohamad credit on one score: he’s honest about his hatred of Jews. He doesn’t pretend he’s only attempting to champion Palestinian rights. He doesn’t pretend to be supporting boycotts just to encourage Israelis to withdraw from “occupied territories.” He doesn’t claim that he’s not anti-Semitic but merely anti-Zionist.

Read more at Washington Times

More about: Anti-Semitism, Malaysia, University

It’s Time for Haredi Jews to Become Part of Israel’s Story

Unless the Supreme Court grants an extension from a recent ruling, on Monday the Israeli government will be required to withhold state funds from all yeshivas whose students don’t enlist in the IDF. The issue of draft exemptions for Haredim was already becoming more contentious than ever last year; it grew even more urgent after the beginning of the war, as the army for the first time in decades found itself suffering from a manpower crunch. Yehoshua Pfeffer, a haredi rabbi and writer, argues that haredi opposition to army service has become entirely disconnected from its original rationale:

The old imperative of “those outside of full-time Torah study must go to the army” was all but forgotten. . . . The fact that we do not enlist, all of us, regardless of how deeply we might be immersed in the sea of Torah, brings the wrath of Israeli society upon us, gives a bad name to all of haredi society, and desecrates the Name of Heaven. It might still bring harsh decrees upon the yeshiva world. It is time for us to engage in damage limitation.

In Pfeffer’s analysis, today’s haredi leaders, by declaring that they will fight the draft tooth and nail, are violating the explicit teachings of the very rabbis who created and supported the exemptions. He finds the current attempts by haredi publications to justify the status quo not only unconvincing but insincere. At the heart of the matter, according to Pfeffer, is a lack of haredi identification with Israel as a whole, a lack of feeling that the Israeli story is also the haredi story:

Today, it is high time we changed our tune. The new response to the demand for enlistment needs to state, first and foremost to ourselves, that this is our story. On the one hand, it is crucial to maintain and even strengthen our isolation from secular values and culture. . . . On the other hand, this cultural isolationism must not create alienation from our shared story with our fellow brethren living in the Holy Land. Participation in the army is one crucial element of this belonging.

Read more at Tzarich Iyun

More about: Haredim, IDF, Israeli society