Nihilistic “Multiculturalism” On Campus Fosters Anti-Semitism
“Why [do] Americans keep handing their sons and daughters over to this nihilistic form of cultural suicide?”
Mike Gonzalez, senior fellow at The Heritage Foundation and former staffer during the George W. Bush administration, describes how multiculturalism on college campuses across America is fostering anti-Semitism, in his latest column for The Daily Signal.
For decades, Gonzalez writes, multiculturalism “has been burning up campuses.” However, instead of its proper meaning, multiculturalism has been turned into a combination of anti-Semitism, anti-Western, and anti-American sentiments. This opinion is shared by Walter E. Williams, who recently wrote that “college campus idiots” are spreading the “cancer” of multiculturalism.
One of the more recent examples that received a lot of attention happened in February at the University of California, Los Angeles when Jewish student Rachel Beyda was grilled in front of a student council board reviewing her candidacy in what Gonzalez dubbed “an anti-Semitic inquisition.”
One of those questions was, “Given that you are a Jewish student and very active in the Jewish community, how do you see yourself being able to maintain an unbiased view?”
Though there were present some council members who denounced this type of questioning, Beyda was initially passed over for the position. She was later voted to the student council.
Gonzalez chides UCLA’s chancellor Gene D. Block for offering the “trite cliché” that what transpired in the student council meeting should be considered a “teaching moment” for all involved.
“Until not too long ago, universities used to teach that we’re all equal and have equal rights and that universal values transcend our membership in ethnolinguistic groups,” Gonzalez writes.
But now this focus on the newly-defined multiculturalism has Gonzalez asking why American parents “keep handing their sons and daughters over to this nihilistic form of cultural suicide.”
Gonzalez blames radicals from the 1960s who have hijacked the term and turned it into something all together different:
Multiculturalism teaches that members of different ethnic or gender groups (for there are now more than two) have a gnosis, a special insight that others don’t have, which is why they must have proportional representation throughout the different levels of society. But when you scratch the surface you quickly realize that, to paraphrase George Orwell, some groups are more equal than others.
Inevitably, this means that “environmental extremist groups will always trump those of football fans or Greek fraternities.” Because as Gonzalez writes, “The value system of the left is what will determine who wins and who loses.”
And according to Gonzalez, it is Jews who are losing on campus:
Jews have been on the losing side for some time, both because they are now considered to have ‘privilege’ and because it is de rigueur to see Israel as the oppressor of Palestinians. Israeli divestment movements are a rage on campuses.
In fact, Gonzalez points to a 2014 investigation by the AMCHA Initiative into UCLA’s Gustav E. von Grunebaum Center for Near East Studies that found “'[s]ignificant anti-Semitic activity and anti-Israel bias’ at its public events” with many invited speakers promoting boycott and divestment against Israel, as well as comparisons between Jews and Nazis.
Though no official statement was given by authorities from UCLA condemning the findings, Gonzalez points out that the von Grunebaum Center did lose its Department of Education Title VI funding.
And even if a satisfactory answer to Gonzalez’s question as to why American parents continue handing their children over to this “cultural suicide” may be elusive, perhaps this could be a “teaching moment” for parents as well as university faculty members. But as Gonzalez advises, “don’t bet the farm.”
