To the surprise of precisely no-one, least of all those of us who had studied or taught there, New York University kicked off the new academic year this week with a student-produced guide focusing on Israel as more or less the source of all existing evil.
You can read the guide here, if you’re in to that sort of thing. If you’re not, the indispensable Washington Free Beacon crunched the numbers for you: “Israel is mentioned 55 times” in the report, the Beacon found. “That’s more than the number of references to ‘Trump,’ ‘alt-right,’ ‘racism,’ ‘fascism,’ ‘white supremacy,’ and ‘socialism’ combined.”
Not that socialism isn’t mentioned:
If you make it all the way to page 38, you’ll enjoy the heartfelt plea to dismantle capitalism. But this is just a fleeting distraction, and on page 41 the guide gets back to what really matters, which is the dismantling of the Jewish state.
Two organizations that support the annihilation of Israel in its current form:
—Jewish Voices for Peace
and
Students for Justice in Palestine—
are recommended as “radical” groups students might enjoy joining, and NYU’s Tel Aviv campus is decried as one of the university’s “imperial projects.”
Toss in a series of wildly inaccurate historical maps, and a call to boycott Birthright—the free trip, thunders the guide, is “pure propaganda designed to obscure the destruction of Palestinian homes, lives, history, and culture”—and you know exactly who your son’s or daughter’s new classmates are going to be if he or she were fortunate enough to make it into the Greenwich Village campus.
