The anti-American activists are the anti-Capitalist activists are the anti-Israel activists

Excerpts from interview with Cornell Law prof William A. Jacobson.

"I was there when what we now call critical race theory and critical theories and intersectionality and all those racialized ideologies were in their formative stages at Harvard Law School in the early 1980s. And nobody really paid attention to them then. But what they were doing is they were beginning, even back then, to cast the Israeli Arab dispute in very racial terms, that they would build coalitions of non-white student groups against Israel. Now, it wasn’t as strong, it wasn’t as big as it is on campuses now, but you can see how over 30, 40 years that became institutionalized in colleges.

And now everything in colleges is about race. I know, because I teach on a college campus, at Cornell. So every dispute is now in terms of white oppressor versus non-white oppressed. And that is how the Israeli Arab dispute or Israeli-Palestinian dispute is portrayed relentlessly on campuses.

And what happens is that Jews end up becoming a proxy for everything that these groups hate about our own society. So if you did one of Kamala Harris’s Venn diagrams and you had things that were over overlapping, you know, anti-American, anti-Capitalist, anti-Israel, there is a huge overlap. It’s not one circle, it’s still three. So Kamala can restat her mind on that, but it’s a huge overlap. The anti-American activists are the anti-capitalist activists are the anti-Israel activists on campuses.

Israel becomes a very useful target because they tap into very deep strains of antisemitism in the Black Lives Matter movement and in the Black Panther movement, Louis Farrakhan movement. And so that’s what happens. They use Israel as a punching bag.

And what do you know, most Jewish students, although you may not know it from looking at the media, the overwhelming majority of Jewish students support Israel. So what you have on campuses is Jewish students being demonized as white oppressors, and now it’s playing itself out."

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I think people are living in an unreality. Anybody who knows what happens when communism takes over could not be in favor of it. And so they have no historical perspective, they have no historical perspective on our own country. The United States on campuses is portrayed as uniquely evil. Like we were the only country in the entire globe who ever had slavery. They’re not told that at the time we had slavery, and I’m certainly not excusing it, it was a worldwide phenomenon. We were the ones who ended it. We one of the first, if not the first to end it.

So they’re not taught that everything, that the United States is uniquely evil, and they’re taught the same things about Israel, that Israel is uniquely evil, because they have a religion that dominates the country. Well, there are 50 plus Muslim majority countries who incorporate Islam into their laws and their privileges, that’s never called aparteid. So you have this demonization of the United States. You have the demonization of Israel as the useful tool, and you have essentially the paradigm that you have from the Iranian mullahs, which is the US is the Great Satan, and Israel is the Little Satan,"

"the faculty is a huge problem. It is a one-sided portrayal of the conflict. It is something that does not reflect American general opinion on things. And Israel is demonized relentlessly.

A lot of people are aware that conservatives are not hired at universities or if they are hired, they’re eventually driven out. Same is true for pro-Israel professors. It’s very hard to find, even on a campus like Cornell, which is not bad compared to some of the others, it’s got its problems. But you’d find very few pro-Israel professors. Talk to any professor who’s, or any PhD student who’s looking to go into academia. They hide any pro-Israel activity they’ve ever had because they know they won’t get hired.

And so you have, just like you have a disproportionate, unnatural imbalance between far left and left, professors versus professors who are moderate or conservative. You have the same imbalance. I would say it’s probably even worse, between anti-Israel professors and professors who are at least neutral or pro-Israel. There are several thousand professors around the country who have signed onto the boycott of Israel. There are multiple faculty, large faculty professional organizations like American Studies Association, who have signed onto the boycott of Israel.

The professors are an enormous part of the problem on the campuses, and it’s one that no administration is willing to address."

"a lot of the people who were raised in this culture on campuses have now moved on to big tech and high tech and positions of power. And that’s a problem. And I think it’s only going get worse.

I’ve said for many years that what’s happening on campuses is a threat to our country’s survival because they’re balkanizing the country. They’re setting groups against each other based on race and ethnicity and religion. And if you wanted to destroy our country, what would you do any differently than what is happening now on campuses?"