Glenn comments on the Canadian Elections, the Dems' latest meaningless resistance stunt, and the increasingly desperate talking-points from pro-Israel pundits. PLUS: Jewish Academics Debunk “Campus Anti-Semitism” Narrative. ------ Watch full episodes on Rumble, streamed LIVE 7pm ET. Become part of our Locals community Follow System Update: Twitter Instagram TikTok Facebook LinkedIn
Welcome to a new episode of System Update, our live nightly show that airs every Monday through Friday at 7 p.m. Eastern exclusively here on Rumble, the free speech alternative to YouTube.
Tonight, Canada last night held a nationwide election where they elected their members of parliament, which in turn selects their prime minister.
And for a long time now, it seemed basically inevitable.
That the Conservatives under the leadership of Pierre Polyev would finally oust the Liberals from power.
They've been in power for many years under the Prime Ministership of Justin Trudeau.
He became extremely unpopular and polls showed massive leads for the Conservatives over the last year or so.
Even when Justin Trudeau announced he was leaving the leadership of the Liberal Party, would not seek re-election as Prime Minister, it really didn't change much.
And yet, last night, not only did the Conservatives lose and the Liberal Party win, and it's possible the Liberal Party may even have a majority of seats in the Parliament without relying on even smaller parties for a coalition.
And it wasn't a blowout.
It was a fairly close election from the perspective of total votes, but that's not how Canada decides elections.
Instead, it decides it by Parliament, how many people of each party are in Parliament.
What's amazing is that Polyev not only lost the election for the Conservatives and won't become, obviously, the Prime Minister, as he expected to, as everyone expected to for at least the last year, Polyev actually lost his seat in Congress.
He lost his seat that he's held since 2004, for the last 20 years, to the Liberal candidate, and he is now not just out of the leadership of...
Being Prime Minister, but also not even a member of Parliament anymore.
We'll talk about what the factors were that led to this, to the extent that Canadian experts are talking about that and what we've been observing for a long time.
We'll also have some rapid-fire coverage of a couple of other topics that I wanted to cover.
And then, late last week, three professors, Eli Meiroff, Emily Schneider and Brooke Loeber wrote for a blog called "Academy Blog" that is a very prestigious blog that was used by a lot of scholars and professors and they published a rebuke against the narrative.
that the government is using, that media is using against the narrative that anti-Semitism is rampant on college campuses.
Two of them join us tonight to discuss their concerns with that narrative being espoused by Trump officials and campus officials across the United States to do things like justify special protections for Jewish students as well as imposing heightened speech codes on American campus based on a...epidemic of anti-Semitism that they claim is fabricated out of a whole cloth.
And we'll hear from them in just a little bit.
Before we get to that, we have a few quick program notes.
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For now, welcome to a new episode of System Update starting right now.
System Update.
In one sense, the results of last night's federal election in Canada were not really shocking because over the past six to eight weeks, polls showed that the Conservative Party had essentially lost the massive lead that it held for a year or so.
That has made everyone assume that their victory, their takeover of Parliament, and their installation of the leader of the Conservative Party, Pierre Polyab, was basically inevitable.
So the fact that liberals ended up winning the election and their current incumbent prime minister who became prime minister when Justin Trudeau resigned, Mark Carney, is not unexpected.
The betting market said it was something like 80%, 80%, 90% chance that the liberals would win.
But it is shocking when you compare it to the trajectory over the last year or even 18 months.
Where there has been a complete collapse in support for the Conservative Party and a shift in support to the Liberal Party.
Now, by votes, this was far from a landslide.
I think the vote was 43% of the electorate for the Liberal Party, 41% for the Conservatives, but that's not the real way that elections are determined.
The way elections are determined is by who wins how many seats in Parliament and becomes the majority party and then the leader of that party.
Ends up as Prime Minister and there the margin was, again, not a blowout but still more significant.
Here's from Canada's Globe and Mail reporting on the election this morning.
"Liberals returned to power with a fourth consecutive term.
Canadians gave the Liberal Party its fourth mandate since 2015, but the race with the Conservatives was much tighter than polls predicted."
At 4.15 a.m., the Liberals were leading or elected in 168 ridings, which is basically congressional districts, and the Conservatives in 144.
LeBloc with Bekois had 23 seats, the New Democrats 7, and the Greens 1. The Liberals held a slim lead in the popular vote, 43.2%, to the Conservatives 41.7%.
Carney said his government will build one economy for the country, not 13, referring to the provinces and territories.
The Liberal government is committed to free trade within the country by Canada Day, he said, quote, "This is Canada and we decide what happens here." He added that the country must take such steps as strengthening relationships with reliable partners in Europe, Asia and elsewhere.
So you see, even in that rhetoric there, that Donald Trump's talking about Canada as Becoming the 51st state, referring to Justin Trudeau as Governor Trudeau, imposing tariffs, repeatedly saying he's not kidding when he says Canada should integrate into the United States,
that had a big effect on the Canadian populace.
In fact, it manifested in many ways.
There are National Hockey League games where Canada and American teams play.
It's true in baseball as well.
And we saw Canadians booing the national anthem.
Many Canadians have refused to vacation in the United States or come to the United States as they did.
There's this nationalistic surge saying how dare you the United States for trying to control our politics and country, talk about us like we're not even a sovereign country.
And that created a lot of the backlash.
From the National Post, also this morning, it's another Canadian newspaper, Pierre Polyev loses his seat after indicating plans to remain party leader.
"Elections in Canada reported the Liberals' Bruce Famjoy captured Polyev's Ottawa area riding by about 3,800 votes."
Without a seat in Parliament, Paliyev will not be able to return to the House of Commons when it resumes.
That makes things more awkward for the conservative leader who must now find a way to regain a seat while also soothing party concerns about its loss.
Now, needless to say, if they want to, the conservative, find a way to get him back into the House of Commons and into Parliament, they'll be able to, probably.
As we've seen with Kamala Harris and in many other elections, when you lead a party in an election where they believe you have a chance to win and you end up losing, and then on top of that suffer the humiliation of losing your own district that you've held for 20 years,
it's very difficult to recover from that as a viable leader that people are willing to get behind and believe that one day you'll lead them to victory.
And it's such a remarkable turnaround because, as I said, the conservatives were way ahead of the Liberal Party for so long.
And it really only started to change when Donald Trump came in and started talking about Canada.
I mean, that's the reality.
You talk to any Canadian and they will tell you that by far the biggest factor in the Canadian election was Donald Trump.
Once Mark Carney assumed the prime ministership, it almost reversed.
The Liberals ended up with a huge advantage.
That's why the betting markets were saying 80 to 90 percent that they would win.
They've been shrinking over the last...
A couple of months or a couple of weeks tightening up because people in Canada are really dissatisfied with the liberal leadership, with the economy, with the cost of living.
So many of the grievances and resentments toward status quo parties that people all over the democratic world are expressing.
And it would have been easily sufficient to drive the Conservatives into power had it not been for the fact that they had this nationalistic backlash.
And for a long time, Polyev was very pro-Trump.
The MAGA movement loved him.
He was perceived as part of this right-wing populist movement, of which Trump was a member.
And the anti-Trump sentiment in Congress became so strong in Canada, that's so strong, that Polyev started vehemently denouncing Donald Trump, attacking Donald Trump.
Obviously, a lot of conservatives in Canada think that's why he lost, this attacking to the center, this separation from Trump.
But whatever it is, you can just trace the clear trajectory of the collapse of the Conservative Party's support, the loss of their lead with Donald Trump, and especially his repeated denunciations of and focus on Canada and its government.
So again, I'm not saying it's the only factor, but I've talked to a lot of Canadians over the past week and today, and I haven't found one who minimizes the impact that Trump had.
That's just the reality of what it is.
Not even a criticism of Trump.
It's just kind of a reality that you can see why this backlash against Trump would happen and how that could manifest as much greater negativity toward the candidate who had been posturing as and modeling himself after a MAGA but Canada first right-wing populist.
Very much in the style of Trump.
Demeaning the media, showing contempt for them, for institutions in general, that looked to be a path for victory until all of this stuff with Trump happened.
We'll have some Canadian analysts on over the next week or so to break that down more carefully.
But like I said, I've been talking to a lot of people following this election very closely and you won't find anybody who denies that's a major rule.
All right.
This week, the Democrats were constantly being told by their base that they're not doing enough to oppose Trump.
That led Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey to engage in this utterly vacant and pointless stunt where he gave a filibuster for 18 hours, broke the record, I think held by Strom Thurmond previously.
Congratulations to Senator Booker.
Twenty-five hours, actually.
Twenty-five.
Sorry, Senator Booker, for minimizing the greatness of your act.
But Democrats decided to follow up that inspiring and stirring protest with a different one where they decided all to sit together on the steps of Congress while Congress was in session in order to sing and speak.
Not really sure what the whole purpose was, but here's a clip from it.
If we build this world from love, then God will build this world from love.
So you see there was unbelievable music, entertainment, inspiring political songs there.
There you see Cory Booker.
To the left and Hakeem Jeffries to the right, the Senate Minority Leader, the House Minority Leader for the Democratic Party.
They sat there for hours.
And then Cory Booker went on to X to celebrate this remarkable act of resistance that was going to make all the difference.
And he said, "Thank you to everyone who shared their story today on the Capitol, Steps or online.
This is how we will stop cuts to Medicaid.
This is how we will stop Trump and Congressional Republicans' devastating agenda.
This is how we will rise."
Now, if you're somebody who does want to see Trump's agenda impeded and the Democrats emerge victorious in the next election, or even find a way to gain more political power before the next midterm, I would suggest this is not something you should be particularly excited by.
It's unbelievably performative and self-promoting, and who cares?
Who cares?
Chuck Schumer went on a show this week and was asked, like, what are you doing about Trump's doing this?
And he's like, look, we just sent a very strong letter, very strong, where we asked eight strong, tough questions.
And even Dana Bash, the CNN anchor, I understood how pathetic that was.
And she's like, all right, well, you'll let us know if you ever get an answer.
It's like a meme, a trope, that the way Democrats conduct themselves is they send very sternly worded letters.
And that's the extent of their ability to harness power.
All right, last issue before we get to our guests, who I'm very excited to talk to.
We showed you last night a couple of...
Truly remarkable speeches, one given by the former Minnesota Senator Norm Coleman at an event in Jerusalem for the Jewish Congress, Jewish Summit.
That was when he said, "We Jews are the masters of the universe.
All the masters of the universe are Jews, including the people who control social media, Sam Altman and Mark Zuckerberg and Sergey Brin, that's who he named, and he said, "It's time for us To use our positions as master of the universe to make sure to spread propaganda,
control the internet in a way that will make Americans love Israel again.
I broke that down last night.
I'm sure you can break that down for yourself why that's so remarkable.
We also showed you Ruth Wyss, the Harvard Yiddish professor who just published an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal claiming that Harvard of all places is an Islamist outpost.
An Islamist outpost.
And we showed you two clips of her, one of which she was saying that the duty of all American Jews is to enlist in the army of words to serve Israel, to glorify Israel.
Even though they're American citizens, their duty is to enlist in what she called the army of words and defend Israel to your last breath.
And she also said that if you're a Jew anywhere in the world, not just an Israeli citizen, but an American citizen, Canadian citizen, European citizen, and you're Jewish, that your duty when Benjamin Netanyahu walks into the room is you stand up and salute because that's your leader.
We talked about why that was not only incredible, but all of these things feed into the longest standing and most destructive anti-Semitic tropes.
Like, yeah, we rule the world.
We're going to use it to propagandize you.
Our leaders are not the people who lead the citizens of the country of which we're a citizen.
Our leader, the real leader, is the president of Israel who we stand, the prime minister of Israel, who we stand in salute when he enters the room.
One of the people who spoke at the same conference in Jerusalem where Norm Coleman appeared is Melanie Phillips.
She's a longtime right-wing columnist and pundit, but also a Jewish activist for Israel.
And I just want to show you a little bit of what she had to say.
The West is paralyzed before the Islamist death cult that threatens it because the West is itself gripped by a cultural death wish.
The Western culture that stands against the Jews is going down.
The West will survive only if it decides to love itself and if it decides to love us.
The Jewish people, instead of disdaining us and trying to erase what makes the Jewish people special and what's made the West special too.
So just to summarize that, if you are somebody who believes in Western civilization, who supports the preservation of Western civilization, the prosperity and thriving of Western civilization, there's something you have to do unless you want Western civilization to collapse.
And that is that you have to relearn to love Israel, support Israel, and specifically support Jews instead of Arabs, instead of other people.
Because supporting Israel and loving Jews is foundational, she said, to the preservation of Western civilization.
And if you believe that, then you would immediately say, wow.
Better support Israel.
Better pressure my government to send even more money in arms there.
But again, I really think this rhetoric is becoming increasingly unhinged.
And like I said, it doesn't surprise me at all that these people have these beliefs.
I've long known they do.
I've long heard them say it.
It just surprises me the eagerness, the willingness to say it all in public and to say it in such naked and unconstrained terms.
But I think they're seeing the same public opinion polls we've repeatedly covered about the collapse of support for Israel in the United States, the collapse of support for Israel throughout the West.
And it's an act of desperation to escalate the rhetoric, escalate the censorship, escalate the propaganda as some kind of last-ditch effort to try and salvage what Israel believes it needs to maintain superiority so they can attack their neighbors whenever they want,
they can start whatever wars they want.
And nobody can fight back against them.
They need the support of the population in the United States and in the West more broadly.
So people don't start asking and complaining, "Why do we finance Israel?
Why do we arm all their wars?
Why do we tie ourselves to this wars?
Why do we accept an erosion of civil liberties and quitting free speech in our own country in order to shield not our own government but the Israeli government from criticism?"
And they know people are asking that question.
They know that's leading to an erosion of support, including seeing every day, for 15, 16 months now, the IDF, blowing children in half, just indiscriminately bombing all of Gaza hospitals, mosques, shelters,
schools, UN facilities.
And at some point, people are going to say, "Wow, this is a really savage government.
They're barbaric.
They're war criminals."
And of course that's going to affect public opinion.
And their solution now is to say, you have no choice but to support Israel.
It's the only way to save Western civilization.
And if you don't, the masters of the universe, we control all the social media outlets.
That's what Norm Coleman said.
And we're going to have to start using those to ensure that you relearn to love Israel.
So I think it's really worth covering what these influential Israel supporters throughout the West are saying because it gives a real glimpse into that mindset of that particular faction.
Thank you.
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Late last week, three academics, three professors, Eli Meyerhoff, Emily Schneider, and Brooke Loeber, wrote for the Academy blog, which is a very prestigious site that a lot of scholars and academics use to communicate with one another,
and they published a pretty stinging rebuke of the now common narrative that anti-Semitism is rampant on college campuses.
It's actually become a crisis and an epidemic in the United States as never seen before.
And two of them joined us tonight to discuss their findings, their concerns with that narrative.
And that's the narrative being espoused by officials of the Trump administration, previously so the Obama administration, to justify a whole range of erosions and attacks on core liberties inside the United States, including academic freedom, free speech, the right to study on a visa or have a green card and express whatever visa you have.
Against whatever foreign country, all of which is being eroded and it depends upon this narrative that there's an anti-Semitism crisis consuming American Colleges.
Professor Meyerhoff is the program coordinator at Duke University's John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute.
In addition to serving as the lab manager of FHI's Amazon Lab and Manuscript Migration Lab, he has previously worked as an adjunct instructor at the University of Minnesota and in Duke's programs in international comparative studies, education, and literature.
Professor Schneider, Emily Schneider, is an assistant professor in the Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice at Northern Arizona University.
She received her PhD in Sociology from the University of California, Santa Barbara, where she completed her dissertation on Jewish tourism to Israel and Palestine in 2019.
She has published extensively about travel and criminality in Israel.
Both of them, all three of them actually, are Jewish and wrote from that perspective about anti-Semitism.
on campus and whether this narrative of an epidemic or an explosion of anti-Semitism has any basis in reality and neither of them do.
We are really excited to welcome each of two of them to our show.
Professor, good evening.
It's great to see you.
Good to see you.
Yeah.
All right.
So I really want to encourage as many people as possible to read what it is that the three of you published because it's so relevant.
To so many debates that are now dependent upon this narrative and I think very enlightening of a perspective that's very rarely heard.
So, by the way, the name of the article is It's Not Too Late to Tell the Truth About Anti-Semitism on Campus.
And we will include the link in the show notes.
But let me ask each of you, what is it that motivated you to decide that you needed to Explain this perspective and write this article.
You can start, Professor Schneider, and then Professor Merhoff, we'll go to you just to arbitrarily create a sequence.
Sure.
Yeah, I mean, the impetus for writing this article was essentially things that you've already laid out, watching kind of this explosion of You know, smears take place across our college campuses to basically conflate criticism of Israel with anti-Semitism.
And so we felt that it was important to be a specifically Jewish voice of academics that could come out and stop trying to provide this overly complicated response to these accusations and instead to basically say that these are a tool, right, of the current political administration, of earlier administrations as well,
and that we no longer need to give validity to them.
What was your impetus for wanting to talk about this?
I think my impetus personally came from attending a anti-Semitism workshop.
that the Hillel at Duke University put on.
I experienced this workshop as basically pro-Israel propaganda where they were equating critiques of Israel and support for Palestine solidarity movement with anti-Semitism and I saw that As their attempt to shut down a student-led movement against Israel's
genocidal assault on Gaza, it just felt disgusting to me to see and hear them wield Jewish identity as an excuse for crushing protest.
And, uh, distracting from, um, horrible genocide happening in Palestine.
I want to read, uh, just a short, uh, passage in your article, and then Professor Schneider want to ask you about it.
You wrote, uh, just one second.
He wrote, "We are Jewish academics who have devoted our lives to teaching and research on college campuses.
If there were a pervasive culture of anti-Semitism on campuses, we would know about it and we would fight it, but we have observed no such thing."
What do you mean by-- when you say if this epidemic of anti-Semitism or this massive explosion of anti-Semitism existed on campuses, we would know it, we would see it.
What is it that you think you would be seeing?
How would you detect that if it were happening?
Yeah, so the usual kind of charges are levied against pro-Palestinian students, you know, who are speaking out against Israel's genocide.
And what I think that would look like is them taking a blanket kind of approach to all Jewish students and one assuming all Jewish students, you know, believe, you know, in what Israel is doing and support it, and then extending that assumption to a prejudiced and discriminatory approach to how they interact with Jewish students.
I think to me that that is the...
The definition of antisemitism, that's what real antisemitism looks like.
It's taking that assumption in a stereotype and then policing Jewish students and treating Jewish students in a discriminatory way.
And I have not experienced that at all.
I've been deeply involved in various movements for justice in Palestine, and I'm deeply connected to many of the student activists on my campus and other places as well.
And not only has there not been a culture of antisemitism, I would say there has been actually a celebration of Jewish identity.
And support for Jewish involvement in these movements and a real desire to learn about Jewish history.
And so I've been incredibly proud and moved by the ways that pro-Palestinian activists have welcomed Jewish students and have wanted to work with us, you know, faculty as well.
And so to me, that is just the complete antithesis of a culture of antisemitism within these campus movements.
You know, I think one of the biggest The most deliberate deceit about these college protest movements is to pretend that there are no Jews inside these protest movements or participating in or helping organize them, and the victims or the people who are targeted or made uncomfortable are just Jews.
Not necessarily Israel supporters, but Jews.
The amazing thing is that it has long been an anti-Semitic trope to conflate Israel with Jews and to say, Oh, if you oppose Israel, it means you're anti-Semitic or all Jews have loyalty to Israel.
And now this is basically, this conflation has become the foundation for alleging this anti-Semitism.
Applying this anti-Semitism label to the protest movement, you know, we interviewed Columbia students who participated in and even led these movements.
Some of them are Jewish.
They had Shabbat dinner inside the encampments at Columbia every Friday night where everybody participated.
The case of Mahmoud Khalil, as I'm sure you know.
The allegation is he's an anti-Semite, yet you talk to everybody at Columbia who knew him, Jewish students as well, and they all say that he was always the first person, if there was anything that even bordered on anti-Semitism in terms of a sentiment or statement, who would step in and denounce it.
But this is the conflation that's happening exactly in order to say a criticism of Israel is, by definition, an anti-Semitic attack or a criticism of Jews themselves.
At your campus, Professor Meyerhofer, what has been the role of Jewish students and the nature of these protests?
Jewish students have played a big role in the Palestine Solidarity Movement here at my campus.
There's a group called the Jewish Solidarity Movement that has been organizing events in collaboration with The Students for Justice in Palestine group at Duke and at other local campuses like UNC.
And this Jewish group is open to anyone and has a non-Zionist and anti-Zionist understanding of Jewishness, which is a way of understanding what Jewish identity means in a way that doesn't tie it with Support of Israel instead of the kind of Zionist reduction of Jewishness to support
for Israel.
And they've held Jewish ritual events like a Passover Seder that was open to anyone and that gave Interpretations of the Seder ritual in a way that supported the idea of liberation for all,
including Palestinian people.
It's wild how in the way that pro-Israel organizations like the Anti-Defamation League or ADL have They tarred or smeared these anti-Zionist Jewish organizations by calling them anti-Semitic.
Like in the ADL's most recent audit of anti-Semitism, they included a ritual event by Jewish Voice for Peace, a Jewish ritual as an anti-Semitic incident.
I want to ask you about the same thing, but I just want to say, I think about two weeks ago, maybe three weeks ago now, I had a debate with Megyn Kelly on her program, where we very vociferously debated the Mahmoud Khalil case, but the notion of deporting people who have participated in protests,
or in many cases, not even participated in any protests, just like wrote op-eds, or have social media content critical of Israel.
And when I brought up...
And continued to bring up this fact that is almost never mentioned, that there are a ton of Jewish students inside these protests, that we've interviewed them at Columbia, they're all over the place.
She said, "Oh yeah, those are the Jewish voices for peace.
Those are the Jews who don't support Israel, so they don't really count."
Meaning, like, the only real Jews are ones who support Israel.
And there is, like, a latent anti-Semitism in that to me.
I'm not accusing her specifically of that.
But this conflation, like I said, used to be one of the most toxic anti-Semitic tropes.
And ironically, this expanded hate speech.
A definition of anti-Semitism that Trump is now demanding be adopted on college campuses.
This IHRA definition includes as one of its examples, holding Jewish people in general responsible for what Israel does.
That's considered formally to be anti-Semitism, even though in so many ways it's become the foundation of this narrative that you wrote this article to debunk.
What has been your experience with Jewish students on your campus?
I mean, I've had a similar experience to Ellie in terms of Jewish students being involved, and we've seen stories of this all over the country.
So I don't think it's at all exceptional for Jewish students to be involved in the encampments and the protest movement.
I think what's even more important, though, is to know that there's a long history of this.
And I'll give a shout out to Jeff Levin's book, Our Palestine Question, which is a book that chronicles the history of Jewish Americans' relationship to Israel.
And so the Jewish American relationship to Israel has changed drastically throughout the course of...
Israel's existence and what's so interesting and like you imply slightly anti-Semitic is to Act as if, you know, the Jewish connection, Jewish-American connection to Israel is non-negotiable and is ahistorical.
It's something that's changed over time.
And I mean, going back even further, like to the early years of Zionism, Jews have always opposed Zionism.
Zionism was relatively unpopular in its early years among Jews for this reason that they didn't want to be conflated, right, with a nation state.
And so there's nothing anti-Semitic.
Essentially being a normal Jewish person who might have political positions that differ from the state of Israel.
And it's that conflation itself that I find so dangerous and threatening to the Jewish people.
Let me ask you both, and you can consider this sort of devil's advocacy, but there's a part of me that also does actually believe it, which is there has been...
Similar narratives on college campuses that have largely come from the left about other groups.
There's a racism epidemic.
There's an epidemic against Latinos, against immigrants, against Muslims, against trans people.
And as a result of this epidemic of bigotry or the systemic bigotry on college campuses...
We need protections for those groups, including kind of curbing the outer limits of hate speech that might make those groups feel uncomfortable or unsafe.
And my concern with it had always been, and I think we're seeing it now, but that's what I want to ask you, is that this is now the framework that a lot of people who mock those narratives are now embracing.
In order to justify all the controls that they want and the powers they want to impose, including censorship on campuses, the elimination of academic freedom, the requirement that you cleanse or purge a lot of Israel critics from faculty, do you think there is any kind of unintended connection between what had been this left-wing narrative about various minority groups and the solutions required on college campuses and what we're seeing now?
Yeah, I mean, what I see happening is I feel like progressives made a mistake in many ways of relying on these institutions and relying on the law and censorship to promote their ideology.
And so I think that ultimately that didn't work.
We can see how quickly DEI has been rolled back and how all of these different kind of safeguards we had and mechanisms to promote racial equality on college campuses just got...
Wiped away as soon as it threatened the budget of these campuses.
And so I think that what we're seeing now is that You know, the left thought that they could maybe rely on these institutions to protect them, but that didn't actually work out.
And I think Jews are making the same mistake in many ways, thinking that these institutions that are really just beholden to power in many ways are going to provide safeguards against racial oppression and discrimination, and ultimately the only thing that can keep us safe is solidarity and is working together as people who are,
you know, equally implicated in these systems to fight back against various forms of oppressive power.
Yeah, I think that's very well said.
Professor Meyerhofer, what's your view on that question?
Yeah, I think you could see the kind of liberal incorporation of the radical leftist demands of social movements from the '60s as part of the source of where groups like the ADL are getting their language for Talking about anti-Semitism in the way that they do now is really an overlap.
I think, yeah, looking back at the history of those movements from the '60s and '70s, late '60s, when there's kind of transnational grassroots movement on U.S. college campuses that was making connections between kind of racism that they're experiencing in the U.S. with the racism and other forms of oppression that anti-colonial
movements were experiencing and fighting against around the world.
Those kinds of transnational social movement connections were seen as a real threat by the U.S. government and by the Israeli government and pro-Israel organizations.
Because these groups were drawing connections between the kind of structural, institutional forms of violence, structural racism, settler colonialism that oppressed peoples were experiencing in the U.S. and that oppressed peoples,
the Palestinian peoples, were experiencing in Israel by the Israeli government.
And so, yeah, it was really in response to...
The threat that those grassroots movements presented to the Zionist Israeli project that pro-Israel groups like the ADL created this narrative of the new anti-Semitism, which was this conflation of critique of Israel with anti-Semitism,
especially from the left.
They've basically used that new anti-Semitism narrative.
As a kind of shield and a sword against potential delegitimizing threats to Israel.
We see that new antisemitism narrative continuing to today with the IHRA working definition of antisemitism that universities and police and governments have been instituting.
It's a definition of antisemitism that really individualizes it to hate speech and Kind of obscures a more structural understanding of antisemitism,
which is interlinked with racism.
So like in the ADL's antisemitism audit counts, they include critiques of Israel by anti-Zionist Jewish groups, which allows them to inflate their account of antisemitism.
College campuses, but then they obscure and exclude white nationalist movements, events, and propaganda, even though those white nationalist groups are explicitly and fundamentally pushing a kind of white supremacist ideology that includes anti-Semitism at its core,
like what we see with the great replacement theory.
You know, I would add, too, that you can go—like, a lot of people have been convinced that the sort of focus on supposed anti-Semitism on college campuses began only after October 7th, similar to the way a lot of people have been falsely convinced that war between Gaza and Israel only happened after October 7th,
that everything was so peaceful there, so perfect and wonderful, everyone was just happy and minding their own business, and suddenly Hamas attacked out of nowhere.
And you can actually go back, you know, 10, 15 years where I think the Israeli government and the supporters in the U.S. begin to become very afraid specifically about the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement where the epicenter was on college campuses because there was a huge amount of American student activism in the 80s.
To divest and boycott South Africa that brought down that regime.
And I think they became very concerned that that would happen again here.
And they set out to start criminalizing BDS in Europe, but also focusing a lot of money, a lot of institutional power on essentially characterizing formally Israel criticism as anti-Semitism.
You see this going back many years.
And October 7th sort of became the galvanizing event of something that had been in motion for a long time.
This last question, which is about administrations at universities.
And part of me wants to be surprised by how many of them have capitulated so quickly.
And even, you know, with Harvard now standing up and saying, no, we're going to resist.
I mean, that only came after a year's worth of concessions and all sorts of attempts to prove they were cracking down on these protests, including adopting formally the IHRA definition at Harvard.
But you see Columbia capitulating so quickly and basically schools all around the country.
I mean, they got the president of Penn fired over this, you know, ousting Ivy League presidents, which used to be unheard of.
Part of me, especially for bigger universities that are less vulnerable, would want to believe that it's kind of embedded in University administrators that the one thing you don't allow to be eroded or attacked is academic freedom.
Like, that's the value.
You're really there to protect campus free speech, free discourse, and academic freedom, the right of faculty members to do the work they want, to express things that they want.
And yet, that's clearly not happening.
I mean, there are a couple here and there where you're seeing some resistance.
But by and large, you're seeing the kind of crackdown on these protests that the government demanded under Biden and now under Trump.
What do you make of that?
Does that surprise you in any way?
I'd like to hear from both of you on that.
Yeah, I can go ahead.
I mean, I think what it shows us is just how deeply invested our government is in its alliance with Israel.
Believe that university presidents wanted to crack down on student protesters in the way that they did.
I think that the pressure for this came from above.
And I think that that was, you know, whether it's boards of regents or, you know, donors or that kind of thing, I think that that pressure is more connected to kind of the governmental level rather than any sort of like individual whim of university presidents.
I think they found themselves in a very unfortunate situation.
And so I guess it doesn't surprise me.
Because I think, you know, pro-Israel ideology is so deeply ingrained in U.S. empire and U.S. militarism.
And it's not something that our universities are able to easily kind of create a sort of symbolic way of acknowledging it.
And I think that in many ways is the power of the pro-Palestinian movement, whereas other issues can kind of get folded into performative acts of solidarity and ways of kind of giving lip service to different issues of inequality.
The Palestinian issue really unravels a lot of the kind of foundational myths of U.S. empire, of global capitalism, of militarism.
And I think that's why it's so dangerous, not necessarily to university presidents per se, but to those who they are beholden to and who they must answer to.
Yeah, Professor Meyerhoff, what about you?
Are you surprised by the reaction of administrators?
And by administrators, I agree with what Professor Snyder said.
It's not necessarily coming from college presidents, but more this institutional pressure from above to force them to do it.
But either way, you still see these academic institutions, including the largest, most powerful ones, capitulating on what is supposed to be their core value.
Does this surprise you at all?
And what do you make of this dynamic?
It doesn't surprise me because I know that academic freedom has long been a contested terrain.
It's really about understanding who gets to decide what the academy is for, what its purpose is.
And so academics are...
The people who are supposed to enjoy that freedom, but their conditions for enjoying that freedom have long been limited by a kind of structure of the university that gives so much power to both administrations and the boards and trustees.
And I think since the creation of the AAUP, American Association of University Professors, which has been the main protagonist for academic freedom since this foundation in the 19-teens,
they've struggled.
As professors to gain more power, democratic control over the university against outside attempts to influence what they can do.
But only in the past few decades have professors really turned to try to create a more Democratic worker and student controlled academy where not administrators and boards and trustees but
instead faculty and students themselves could have more control over what they get to teach and learn and think and ask questions about I think there's long been this kind of backdoor loophole that has allowed outside organizations like these pro-AZRO organizations like ADL and
Hillel to influence what happens on college campuses.
But I think today we are seeing Movements of faculty and students led by student groups and faculty groups like the AUP pushing for more democratic control over their universities.
Seeing students and faculty as the people who should get to say what the limits of thinking of Well,
I want to congratulate both of you for publishing this article.
I know no matter who you are, it is not easy to debunk so explicitly a narrative that has become among the most sacrosanct and orthodox in our country, one that's being weaponized in a lot of different ways and therefore is very valuable to people.
But I think the way you did it was great.
The fact that you did it was very commendable as well.
Glad to see that coming from academia.
And I also really appreciate your taking the time to come on our show and talk about it as well.
Thanks very much.
Thank you for having us.
Thank you.
Okay, have a good evening.
Bye-bye.
All right, so that concludes our show for this evening.
Just as a programming note, tomorrow, because I'll be traveling, I'm actually testifying before a committee of the Brazilian Senate about some of the reporting we've done here in Brasilia, so I have to travel there.
Lee Fong will be hosting our show because I'm not able to and he has proven himself a great guest host.
Whenever he has to step in, people really seem to like it.
I'm sure he will do an excellent job tomorrow.
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