Israeli Official Calls on World Leaders to ‘Shift Gear’ in War on Anti-Semitism

By: TPS

A senior Israeli official has called on governments to step up their actions against anti-Semitism following three anti-Semitic events that occurred around the world on Saturday.

A Holocaust memorial was desecrated in the old cemetery in Rivne, Ukraine, swastikas were discovered at the entrance to a Winnipeg Synagogue in Canada, and graffiti stating “the Jews killed Christ. They are the enemies of the whole human race” was scrawled on a Cincinnati bridge.

The Mayor of Cincinnati John Cranley stated that “there is no place for hate in our city. We stand with our Jewish neighbors in the fight against anti-Semitism.”

Vice-Chairman of the World Zionist Organization Yaakov Haguel stated Sunday that the three incidents were “each shocking in their own right.”

“Sadly, incitement follows incitement against Jews in Europe, North America and around the world,” he stated, demanding that the world’s governments “shift gear” in the fight against anti-Semitism.

“Jews live in fear and hide their identities. The responsibility for protecting Jews lies with the heads of state,” he underscored.

“We at the World Zionist Organization will lend a hand to all the leaders of the Jewish communities in the world to fight these phenomena so that Jews can be proud everywhere in the world,” he declared.

Back in January of this year, TPS reported that a new and shocking study has found that faculty on US campuses who support the academic the anti-Israel Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement are actively promoting their political agenda directly to students by utilizing their time in the classrooms.

The study by the AMCHA Initiative, which provides the first empirical evidence on the subject, examined 50 syllabi at 40 public and private colleges and universities over an 11-year period and found that BDS-supporting instructors had an average of 78% of their course readings authored by BDS supporters, whereas non-BDS-supporting instructors had an average of 17% of their course readings authored by BDS supporters.

“These data demonstrate that the large quantitative difference between the groups is not just the result of a few outliers, but represents a qualitative difference between these two groups of instructors in terms of how they select course readings,” AMCHA, an anti-Semitism watchdog, stated.

The researchers further charged that these results imply that not only are academic boycotting instructors actively including pro-BDS readings, they are also “severely limiting or completely excluding readings that would provide a more balanced picture of Israel.”

In their report, “Bringing BDS into the Classroom,” the authors fully acknowledged that “freedom of speech protects faculty’s right to sign petitions and make extramural statements in support of academic BDS and academic freedom generally protects their right to develop and teach courses as they see fit.” However, the also raised concerns about the “serious and undeniably harmful consequences of politically-motivated faculty weaponizing their course curricula.”

They noted that “distorting and blocking the flow of knowledge” is a violation of “the norms and standards of scholarly inquiry” and undermines “the university’s academic mission.”

(TPS)