Antisemitism is Not an Academic Exercise

The attempted hijacking of a passenger jet carrying Israelis to Tel Aviv should disturb us for reasons that extend well beyond aviation security. A FlyDubai co-pilot allegedly stabbed the captain and attempted to crash the aircraft before passengers and crew intervened and other pilots aboard the flight took control, managing a landing in Saudi Arabia. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu later said the attacker had undergone “radical Islamist indoctrination.” 

The courage of the captain, passengers and crew prevented catastrophe. But the episode should also cause us to think seriously about something that happens long before anyone reaches for a weapon or tries to take control of an airplane: radicalization.

Hatred is not born fully formed. It is cultivated. It grows when people are taught that another group is uniquely evil, collectively guilty or undeserving of the same dignity extended to everyone else. It grows when extremism is excused because the target is unpopular. And it grows fastest when institutions that should know better begin treating dehumanizing rhetoric as intellectually respectable and threats on one’s life as the price of one’s national origin or religion.

This is one reason the escalating antisemitism on American college campuses cannot simply be dismissed as youthful political activism or heated disagreement over the Israeli government. Universities should absolutely be places where students challenge government action, debate foreign policy, and protest war. Criticism of Israel, like criticism of any nation, is protected expression. But there is a profound difference between criticizing a government and creating a culture in which Jewish or Israeli students are treated as legitimate targets for exclusion, harassment, or intimidation.

That distinction is at the heart of Soffer v. The George Washington University, the federal case Advocates for Faith & Freedom is pursuing on behalf of Jewish students, including Sabrina Soffer and the members of CAPE-Ed, an organization that promotes ethical policies and practices in education. The lawsuit alleges that GWU failed to adequately address a years-long pattern of antisemitism directed at Jewish students, a problem the plaintiffs say became substantially worse following Hamas’ October 7, 2023, terrorist attack on Israel.

The allegations deserve attention not simply because of what happened to particular students, but because of what they reveal about the culture developing in far too many of our educational institutions. When real hostility toward Jews or Israelis is repeatedly excused as mere political expression, students absorb a lesson that reaches far beyond any particular protest. They learn that prejudice is acceptable.

That should concern all of us.

Radicalization does not usually begin with someone announcing that he has embraced extremism. It often begins with moral divisiveness. The world is divided into oppressors and oppressed, villains and victims, the guilty and the innocent. Once people are placed into those categories, empathy becomes disturbingly selective or nonexistent. 

We saw examples of this brand of cruelty almost immediately after October 7. Israelis were still identifying their dead and searching for hostages when demonstrations erupted on American campuses that shifted attention away from the victims and toward rationalizations for the massacre. On some campuses, Jewish students discovered that even mourning murdered Israelis could place them on the “wrong side” of an ideological divide.

When terrorism can be rationalized faster than its victims can be mourned, something has gone terribly wrong.

None of this means that a particular American university produced the man accused of trying to bring down FlyDubai Flight 1073. There is no evidence of such a connection, and pretending otherwise would weaken the very argument that must be made. The point is more fundamental. Ideas matter, and institutions that shape young minds have a responsibility to recognize when political advocacy has morphed into the dehumanization of an entire people.

Education does far more than transmit information. It forms habits of thought. Universities teach students what deserves scrutiny, what deserves sympathy and, sometimes, what society permits them to despise. Those students eventually become journalists, attorneys, teachers, doctors, government officials, and business leaders. The moral assumptions they acquire on campus do not remain on campus.

This is also why fighting antisemitism cannot become an excuse for hostility toward other people groups either. Collective blame is precisely the poison that must be rejected. The principle worth defending is a universal axiom: every person is worthy of dignity and respect without regard to the person’s religion, ethnicity, or nationality. 

Universities have enormous influence at a stage of life when young adults are developing convictions they will carry for decades. With that influence comes responsibility. Academic freedom does not require moral blindness.  Free speech does not require administrators to tolerate unlawful discrimination, death threats, and racism.

The recent hijacking reminds us where radical hatred can ultimately lead. Every act of ideological violence begins somewhere, long before it breaches the doors of the cockpit. The question for our universities is whether they are willing to confront that reality or whether they are more willing to debase themselves by tolerating and fostering the dehumanization of their Jewish students. The future depends on universities being brave enough to choose the former.