09-05-2025
Avi Benlolo: Universities are a wrecking ball against civilization
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Harvard's Presidential Task Force on Combating Antisemitism released a sprawling 300-page report last week that attempts to confront the antisemitism festering on its campus. But beneath its ambition lies a troubling truth: antisemitism has become embedded in the ideological core of many universities. And the real question is no longer just how to address it — but whether universities can even be rehabilitated at all.
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This crisis didn't begin on October 7, 2023. That day, when Hamas terrorists murdered and raped innocent civilians, merely revealed the moral decay that had taken root over decades. Since the early 2000s, university campuses have been infected by movements like 'Israeli Apartheid Week' and BDS — activist campaigns masquerading as academic inquiry, laying the groundwork for today's open hostility toward Jews and Israel.
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Back at Harvard, Rabbi David Wolpe, who served as a visiting scholar, shared his chilling experience in the Free Press. At a Sukkot celebration at the Divinity School, a speaker began by assuring the crowd that it was 'a safe space for anti-Zionists, non-Zionists, and those struggling with their Zionism.' In other words: not safe for Jewish students proud of their identity.
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Wolpe described Israeli students being mobbed and assaulted; Jewish students ghosted by friends; professors eliminating Israeli sources from their syllabi; and required readings teaching that Zionism is a manipulative colonial ideology. Incredibly, 'privilege training' was offered to Jewish students — not to support them, but to reframe them as oppressors.
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It's hard to imagine that after the horrors of October 7 — murders, rapes, mutilations committed by terrorists wearing the keffiyeh — students today are proudly wearing that same garment as a symbol of solidarity. The keffiyeh, co-opted by Yasser Arafat — the lead terrorist of his time — has become a symbol not of heritage but of terror. Its normalization on Western campuses is no different than wearing swastikas in the 1930s. And yet, here we are again.
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But this isn't only about Jews. The warning that 'what starts with the Jews doesn't end with the Jews' is more relevant than ever. The antisemitism on campuses today is the tip of an anti-Western, anti-democratic movement masked as social justice. It seeks to dismantle Judeo-Christian values, freedom of thought, and liberal democracy. Some call it wokeism. Whatever the name, its goal is clear: to destroy Western civilization from within.
