“If you’re Jewish and have any self-respect...there’s only one thing you should be doing: leave"
The Harvard Crimson proclaimed last week, “We are proud to lend our support to both Palestinian liberation and BDS — and we call on everyone else to do the same.” The editorialists congratulated themselves on their bravery, citing the “fact” that anyone who dares “to question Israel’s policies or endorse Palestinian freedom… will be shunned from the newsroom.” (That, incidentally, is a repeat of the familiar anti-Semitic trope that Jews control the media.)
Liel Leibovitz in Tablet ripped off that cloak of bravery. Far from dooming their future as journalists, the editorial writers were advancing them, he charged. They “were putting up a piece of performance theater that is crucial to finding later employment in the Borg that now runs this country… slimy twerps… advertising to their older and more moneyed kinfolk that they are ready for hiring.”
The Jerusalem Post tried to put a brave face on the endorsement of BDS by the student paper at America’s most selective school, suggesting that perhaps the authors don’t know that BDS stands for the destruction of Israel and that “free Palestine” means a Judenrein expanse “from the River [Jordan] to the [Mediterranean] Sea.”
It strains credulity, however, to think that a group of Harvard students never bothered to Google Omar Barghouti, leader of the international BDS movement, who has repeatedly stated that he totally rejects a Jewish state in any part of Palestine. Or failed to realize that “from the River to the Sea” leaves no room for a Jewish state. And indeed nowhere did the Crimson acknowledge Israel’s right to exist.
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