OPINION
Conventional wisdom holds that the current outpouring of anti-Semitism on college campuses is just the latest outburst of an ancient hatred.
There’s no doubt that hatred of Jews has a long history.
What’s happening today also bears the hallmark of a newer evil: Critical Race Theory (CRT). The language that students are using when violently protesting or tearing down posters of Hamas’s victims is the language of racial division and woke ideology, applied to the Jews.
Critical Race Theory sees the world in terms of oppressors and oppressed.
It’s a simple template in which you can simply drop the names of different groups into either category. In 2021, whites were the oppressors and blacks the oppressed. In 2023, Jews are the oppressors, and they’re apparently oppressing Palestinians.
The countless students criticizing Israel and apologizing — if not outright supporting —Hamas use this exact language.
It makes them feel virtuous and justifies essentially anything, even the kidnapping of grandmothers and murder of babies.
Of course, there’s no truth to the oppressor/oppressed template, no matter who you slot in.
Critical Race Theory ignores anything that contradicts or disproves its global view.
Abraham Lincoln is evil, even though he abolished slavery.
Medicine is racist because there are health disparities, even though such disparities are driven by cultural and behavioral factors, not racist doctors.
And now Jews are oppressors and colonial occupiers. Never mind their long history in the land of Israel. Never mind that mass murder and torture that Hamas perpetrated on Oct. 7.
The lack of human concern or historical accuracy is astounding, but then Critical Race Theory is always about throwing around accusations instead of acknowledging the facts.
If you say you’re anti-colonialist, anti-fascist, and anti-capitalist, you don’t need to know anything else.
You needn’t know that Israel pulled out of Gaza in 2005.
You needn’t know that 17,000 Gazans worked in Israel every day, before Hamas’s atrocities.
You needn’t know that Hamas uses women and children as human shields – that it wants them to die, so people turn on Israel.
And of course, you needn't know that the terrorists who murdered Jews simply wanted to murder Jews, not merely express a political opinion or seek a political goal. Instead, you can say that Israel is the one perpetrating a "genocide."
Don’t worry about knowing what that word actually means. And don’t worry about remembering the Holocaust, which Hamas wants to recreate in the 21st century.
What is the lesson of all this? Just like Madame Defarge in Charles Dickens' "A Tale of Two Cities," knitting and contemplating revenge, the current crop of hateful woke students will seek their pound of flesh from the Jews.
And they won’t stop there. Critical race theory, with its endless attack on enlightenment and true liberal thought, will always have new targets in the future.
What starts with being "canceled" will inevitably morph into violence and hatred, targeting heterodox thinkers and unpopular people in industry, science, and the arts.
When you see the world in terms of oppressed victims and evil oppressors, you’re always on the lookout for new targets. The fear and isolation that Jews are experiencing right now will ultimately be felt by millions more.
This isn’t to say that plain old-fashioned hatred of Jews isn’t real.
Of course it is.
In every era, including ours, there are people who just hate the Jews. (Look no further than the Hamas terrorists who butchered 1,400 people on October 7.)
But in America and so much of the West, anti-Semitism is now the symptom of a much larger disease.
That disease is a global view that can't conceive of human beings loving their neighbor, and only conceive of hatred toward others.
Critical Race Theory (CRT) has to be driven from the college campus immediately, before it leads to the death of more Jews, the destruction of Israel, and ultimately, the eradication of America itself.
Stanley Goldfarb, MD, a former associate dean at the University of Pennsylvania’s Perelman School of Medicine, is chairman of Do No Harm.
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