Acceptable antisemitism
A speaker at Duke University implies support for the mass murder of Jews, and nobody cares.
After the election of Donald Trump and rise of extremist politicians and commentators, people said genocidal antisemitism would become more prevalent and socially acceptable. And they were right.
Look at this shocking anti-Jewish hatred being promoted by a speaker at a university located in the cradle of the Confederacy:
When asked what would happen to Israelis if Palestinians took all the land “from the river to the sea” during Duke’s anti-Israel week, keynote speaker Mohammed El-Kurd replied “I don’t care. I truly, sincerely, don’t give a f…” The audience roared its approval. Clearly Duke University’s antisemitism problem is going from bad to worse.
Where was Antifa while this was going on? From the looks of things, they were in the audience, cheering, and preventing some (((people))) from filming the speech:
Who is Mohammed El-Kurd? Despite his name he claims to be “Palestinian.” He has an extensive Canary Mission rap sheet detailing his hatred of Israel, Jews, America, the police, his adoration for terrorism, spreading misinformation, denial of Jewish history, and more. He is notorious for quotes such as “Zionists have an unquenchable thirst for Palestinian blood”. In his book Rifqa he claims that Israelis “harvest organs of the martyred, feed their warriors our own.”
Who decided to pay El-Kurd and put him on the university’s stage, to speak before Duke students and faculty? Duke has a history of hosting “Israel Apartheid Week” (IAW) in which lies about Israel and Jews are promulgated in order to destroy the world’s only Jewish state. In February, despite student concerns about inviting such an antisemitic speaker, the Duke Student Government voted—without a quorum— to spend $16,000 on IAW, which included $5,000 designated for El-Kurd. Ironically the vote also came soon after the DSG voted for the IHRA (International Holocaust Remembrance Association) definition of antisemitism. Apparently the DSG doesn’t understand IHRA since they violated it so readily.
Supporting the Palestinian cause and opposing the Jewish state doesn’t automatically make one antisemitic. I actually agree that some supporters of Israel are too quick to make that accusation.
But the Venn Diagram for people who want Israel eradicated and people who want Israelis eradicated has a lot of overlap.
And this isn’t even the first time a rabid Jew-hater has been invited to speak on a university campus by the same people for whom, in nearly every other circumstance, clearing your throat is considered a racist microaggression:
Irwin Cotler speaking at U of T results in a faculty uproar, but a literal Holocaust denier?
You know I complain about “cancel culture” a lot (despite some people using that term in the most cynical manner possible), and yet here I am hypocritically demanding that speakers I don’t like be shut down, right?
Actually, no. I don’t want their speeches shut down.
Making people like this free-speech martyrs plays right into their hands. (David Irving’s constant legal battles - some of them, mind you, instigated by Irving himself - sold an awful lot of his faux-history books.) More importantly, I want people to see exactly who these people are, and who insists on giving them a public platform. If we’re going to fight antisemitism and hatred, it helps to know the enemy, and that includes self-professed “anti-racists” and “social justice” activists who are hiding a much more sinister agenda.
If you’re in an uproar about Marjorie Taylor Greene babbling about Jewish space lasers and silent about this - or vice versa - you’re only worried about this when it comes from the other team. We can argue all day and all night about which side is “worse,” but antisemitism is a virus that spreads easily between ideologies.
All of what you wrote about here is repugnant. But the stench of this disease always is, and it will only fester more in darkness than in broad daylight. An unseen enemy is always more dangerous than the one who's clearly visible.