How Brown University spreads antisemitism even to high schoolers

 A monthly series of Harvard CAPS / Harris polls reveals disturbing, antisemitic attitudes held by many young Americans, including on Hamas’ massacre of Israelis (51% found it justified) and Jews as a class (67% considered them oppressors).  

That so many youth admit to holding views that would have placed them on the racist fringes of society in their parents’ generation points to the moral confusion fostered in many American classrooms.

Brown University’s contribution to this trend is notable, not only for the extremist ideology promoted on campus by its Center for Middle East Studies but also because it aims to shape even younger minds through its Choices Program, a social-studies curriculum for high schoolers that includes units informed by the same radical ideology.

According to the program’s website, its resources are used by 1 million students across the United States and in 200 international schools.   

Brown has one of the highest proportions of faculty who publicly support anti-Israel boycotts. 

(A study by the Amcha Initiative reports a positive correlation between faculty support for an academic boycott of Israeli institutions and antisemitic activity on campus.)

As the CMES’s founding director in 2012, Professor Beshara Doumani lost no time in establishing a “New Directions in Palestine Studies” initiative to “shape the agenda of knowledge production on Palestine and Palestinians” and build “an international community of scholars dedicated to decolonizing and globalizing” the field of study.

Jews are portrayed as settler-colonialists who took over native Palestinian land.

The concept of a Jewish homeland, Jewish history and a Jewish people is relegated to “myth” and “legend.”

Efforts to combat antisemitism are confronted as part of a Jewish colonial conspiracy to “delegitimize” Palestinian “resistance” — the preferred term for terrorism.

In 2021-2023, Doumani served as president of Birzeit University, where Hamas’ student faction won landslide victories in student elections, murders of Israeli civilians were celebrated and the radicalism that permeated the university increased.

Back at the program Doumani started at Brown University, a visiting fellow taught that “antisemitism, Zionism and Nazism were varying forms of racism and nationalism.”

A visiting professor declared that Zionism adopted “the logic of Europe, the logic of an ethnic, racial, pure state.”

And another referred to Jewish “Kristallnacht mobs” who are “thirsty for Palestinian blood.”

Such extremist rhetoric reeks of Holocaust inversion and evokes ancient, antisemitic blood libels.

When dozens of student organizations at Brown responded to Hamas’ savagery on Oct. 7 by calling the terrorist group’s actions “just,” their legitimization of the atrocities reflected the lessons they were being taught by their school’s educators.

Brown’s Choices Program delivers similar ideology with some of the same activist-scholars serving as contributors.

The professor who spoke of Jewish “Kristallnacht mobs” appears in the curriculum’s videos to teach that Israel is an apartheid state, guilty of racism.

Other videos feature “scholars” with histories of anti-Zionist activism to misinform students that Israel was established as a settler-colonialist state on the indigenous land of current-day Palestinians.

It was meant only for Jews, who deprive indigenous Palestinians of their homes, civil rights and liberties.  

Arab aggression against Jews before and after the 1948 creation of Israel is downplayed and legitimized, while Palestinian terrorism is entirely ignored.

The Jewish people’s claim of indigeneity, evidenced by massive archaeological and historical documentation of a continuous Jewish presence in the land, is disregarded or dismissed.

In the student readings, terror organizations are called “resistance groups,” and their deadly attacks justified as “armed struggle against Israeli occupation.”

The Western world’s terrorist designation of Hamas is minimized by suggesting that only the United States and Israel consider it a terrorist group, but “the U.N. does not”; Hamas “calls itself an Islamic national liberation and resistance movement.”  

Jews are depicted as European colonial interlopers with no significant connection to Israel, the overall message being that an independent Jewish state is unjust.    

Notably, per a review of federal data by GoLocal, Brown University received over $11 million in funding from the “Palestinian territories,” which includes money for an endowment of the professorship Doumani holds.  

The Choices curriculum’s Middle East unit was promoted with funding by the Qatar Fund International for teacher-training workshops and scholarships to enable teachers to purchase the curriculum.

Such foreign funding helps promote sectarian activism over objective scholarship and partisan politics over scholastic rigor in US schools and universities. 

Is it any wonder we’re witnessing a new generation whose prevailing set of values includes history’s oldest hatred?  

Ricki Hollander is a senior researcher at the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting & Analysis.

https://nypost.com/2024/03/29/opinion/how-brown-university-spreads-antisemitism-even-to-high-schoolers/