‘Scholasticide’ Slur : Why Trump Should Defund Antisemitic Institutions

Photo Credit: Abed Rahim Khatib/Flash90.

Palestinians at an UNRWA school in the Nuseirat camp in the central Gaza Strip after an Israeli airstrike targeted terrorists, on June 6, 2024.

The vocabulary of contemporary antisemitism is somewhat limited. It lacks not only the facts that might justify their steady stream of invective and false accusations against the State of Israel and the Jewish people. Its supporters have also been forced to invent new meanings for old words like genocide to distract the world from the murderous intentions and actions of Palestinian groups like Hamas and to falsely label Israel’s defensive war against the terrorists as both criminal and intended to wipe out all Palestinian Arabs.

Yet as bad as that might be, those who are determined to justify the war against the Jewish state as a righteous rather than a genocidal cause must also come up with new language. That’s necessary if they are going to mobilize every possible constituency to join their perverted campaign to erase the Jewish state and wipe out the Jews.

One such word is “SCHOLASTICIDE.”

The term entered public discourse this week because members of the American Historical Association voted at its annual meeting in New York in favor of a resolution accusing Israel of “scholasticide” in the Gaza Strip. It also condemned U.S. support for the war on Hamas and demanded an “immediate ceasefire” in Gaza without so much as a single mention of terrorism or even lip service to the question of releasing the nearly 100 hostages still being held by the Islamist group.

The norm in academia

That such an organization is dominated by left-wingers and has swallowed the big lie that Israel and the Jews are “white” oppressors and supporters of “apartheid” is not newsworthy. Such resolutions at otherwise insignificant gatherings that exist more to help desperate unemployed persons with worthless degrees get jobs than any scholarly purpose are a dime a dozen these days. Indeed, it is news when some academic group doesn’t condemn Israel and lend its support to the war against its existence.

However, the timing of this particular vote is significant.

Coming as it does only two weeks before President-elect Donald Trump takes office, it is an important reminder of the debate about what the federal government—a vital source of funding for almost all universities—can do about the surge of antisemitism that has swept across the country, particularly on college campuses since the Hamas-led terrorist attacks in Israel on Oct. 7, 2023. The vote of association members has given the country a well-timed wake-up call. While the writing has been on the wall for years, with Trump back in office, something can finally be done about the way the mandarins of American higher education have effectively joined the ranks of the Jew-haters.

Their debate—during which these would-be scholars booed and tried to shout down those who spoke against the anti-Israel resolution before it was approved by a vote of 428-88—opens a window into the bizarre world of self-satisfied and arrogant leftist ideologues most Americans are unaware of.

Justifying Trump’s plans

As Pamela Paul, a liberal opinion columnist at The New York Times noted with some concern, the problem with the resolution isn’t just that it is untethered to the facts about the conflict. Nor is it only a mistake because it can only serve to encourage more campus unrest where pro-Hamas mobs of students, faculty and staff have intimidated Jews and expressed support for Jewish genocide (“from the river to the sea”) as well as anti-Jewish terrorism (“globalize the intifada”).

As Paul wrote, the thing that ought to worry these academics the most is the fact that it will provide more motivation for Trump to “crack down” on left-wing activists at the many schools where antisemitism is not just normative, but enabled by the indifference and tacit support of faculty and administrators.

She’s right about that but wrong in asserting that this would be a bad thing that the supposedly smart people who attend such meetings ought not to encourage.

To the contrary, the historians have provided Trump with yet another example of more than just their lack of rigorous scholarship. They have also given him, as well as those who will soon run the U.S. Department of Education and the Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division, proof that schools that incite hatred against Israel and the Jews under the cover of academic instruction are violating Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which forbids such discriminatory conduct. Up until now, when complaints have been registered, these institutions have been given slaps on the wrist or induced to make empty promises of better behavior in the future. Instead, Trump should ensure that those schools that have incorporated falsehoods and misinformation about Israeli “genocide” and “scholasticide” as a part of everyday teaching are stripped of federal funding.

What passes for education in the Gaza Strip …

According to those who advocate for the use of “scholasticide” to describe events in Gaza, the term was coined specifically to smear Israel during the first of the wars Hamas initiated against the Jewish state in 2008. As with other anti-Israel tactics, it is an argument that is fundamentally rooted in deception and lies that count on the ignorance of those that it seeks to influence.

The schools that have been destroyed in Gaza are routinely used by Hamas to store weapons, shelter terrorists and launch rockets against Israeli civilians. The historians ignored the fact that this makes them legal targets. More than that, education in Gaza—whether operated directly by Hamas or by the U.N. Relief Works Agency (UNRWA)—is an essential element in the Islamist war to eradicate Israel.

Hamas and UNRWA (whose purpose is to perpetuate the conflict, employing Hamas members and some active terrorists) schools help indoctrinate Palestinian Arab children to hate Israel and the Jews, and to believe the continuation of the futile century-old war against Zionism is an essential element of their identity.

Contrary to the historian’s resolutions, the Israel Defense Forces do not deliberately seek to destroy schools. However, when Hamas uses such buildings as launchpads to fire on Israeli citizens, the IDF cannot and should not let them be safe spaces for carrying out the murder of Jews.

The claim is also ironic because it has only been since June 1967, when Israel came into possession of Judea and Samaria, that educational institutions run by the Palestinian Arabs were given the funding and opportunity to serve that population. It’s also absurd since the whole point of anti-Zionist invective—whether from Palestinians or their foreign supporters—against Israel is to essentially erase Jewish history. It is only by denying the fact that Jews are the indigenous people of the country whose roots, amply documented by the Bible in addition to archeological evidence, date back thousands of years and long before the arrival of any Muslims.

But there’s more to this controversy than the absurd and ahistorical allegation of Israeli “scholasticide” against Palestinian Arabs.

Twisting language

The twisting of language to justify the antisemitic campaign against Zionism, Israel and the Jews is just as important to the “pro-Palestine” cause as their rationalizations of terrorism and the barbaric atrocities of Oct. 7 as legitimate “resistance.” That’s especially true about their now routine misuse of the term genocide to describe Israeli actions rather than those of Hamas.

Genocide refers to a deliberate campaign to wipe out an entire people. It was coined in the aftermath of the Holocaust because there was no existing term to describe a national policy, such as that of the Nazi regime in Germany, which aimed at the complete extermination of a people. It was created by Rafael Lemkin, a Polish Jewish lawyer and lifelong Zionist who survived the Holocaust and devoted his life to the study of mass atrocities. As zealous as he was about documenting war crimes of all sorts, he was careful in defining his terms, including the distinction between the inevitable casualties that are part of any war and crimes against humanity.

Examples of actual genocides are what the Nazis did to the Jews during the Holocaust; the terror famine perpetrated by the Soviet Communists in Ukraine during the Holodomor from 1932 to 1933; or the slaughter of members of the Tutsi tribe in Rwanda by the Hutus in 1994.

And far from Israel committing genocide in Gaza, as military experts who understand the laws of war have pointed out, their efforts to avoid civilian casualties are unmatched by any modern army in history. The ratio of casualties between combatants and civilians in Gaza—Hamas operatives make up nearly half of all those who have been killed in the past 15 months—is lower than any other example of urban warfare. That’s especially true when you consider that Hamas deliberately seeks to create Palestinian casualties by hiding among civilians and using tunnels underneath homes to store terrorists and weapons, even firing rockets at Israel from areas designated as humanitarian safe zones. And while tragically, many Palestinians have died in the war that those who claim to lead them started (though almost certainly not nearly as many as the false statistics put forward by Hamas claim), the total is a small fraction of the population and not anything like an actual genocide.

The false use of a term that came into existence to describe the mass slaughter of Jews to delegitimize the efforts of the Jewish state to prevent another Holocaust for which Oct. 7 was just a trailer is more than ironic. It’s a standard tactic of antisemites throughout history to falsely accuse Jews of committing crimes that their haters seek to do.

The treason of the intellectuals

That the virus of antisemitism has continued to spread in the 21st century only 80 years after the Holocaust is a catastrophe for humanity. What is particularly upsetting about the latest iteration of the plague of Jew-hatred is that the stormtroopers of contemporary antisemitism are largely to be found among those who purport to be the educated elites of society.

Yet as Niall Ferguson, one of the most distinguished and best-read contemporary historians, wrote in The Free Press, as American universities became hotbeds of antisemitism, this isn’t new. The Nazi movement that took root in Europe in the 1920s and ’30s was not the product of working-class or uneducated people. Rather, its advocates were largely to be found among those with college degrees and who trafficked in ideas rather than only street violence. As his essay titled “The Treason of the Intellectuals” (an illusion to the seminal 1927 study of the topic by French scholar Julian Benda) pointed out: “Anyone who has a naive belief in the power of higher education to instill morality has not studied the history of German universities in the Third Reich.”

While the intellectuals of the 1920s elevated race as the most important factor in society in order to stigmatize Jews and elevate non-Jewish Aryans, today’s elites have similarly embraced the same concept to harm those designated as “white oppressors” and to raise up “people of color.” But while those who support the latter cause may think they are “progressives” trying to better the world, by designating Jews and Israel as evil oppressors, they have unleashed a new wave of antisemitism that Hamas and its sympathizers hope will lead to another Holocaust.

Ferguson is among those who have recognized the rot at the core of American academia stems from the dominance of the toxic myths of critical race theory and intersectionality that have enabled this fashionable belief that has legitimized antisemitism. He thinks that the only answer is not to try to reform elite schools where these ideas are the new orthodoxy but to build new ones, like the University of Austin he has helped found.

He’s right; still, that leaves us with the question of what to do about a university system that has been hijacked by hate-mongers who pose as humanitarians.

The answer is to defund every school where antisemitism and anti-Americanism are not merely tolerated but have become built into its teaching. There already was a powerful case to be made in favor of defunding institutions where the new treason of the intellectuals is normative. The American Historical Association has reminded us why this should be a priority for the new administration.

{Reposted from JNS}