Antisemitism at Stanford Is Out of Control

What would you do if your computer science teaching assistant lectured the class about why the President of the United States should be killed? 

What if he applauded Hamas’ 10/7 attacks as legitimate and opined, in class, that Hamas would be a better government for the United States than our current regime?

Transfer out, I assume. But you might also wonder about whether that $60,000/yr tuition was a good investment, especially if you are a Jewish student. 

Parties that require you to denounce Israel to get in? Swastikas in dorms? Activists protesting an anti-antisemitism event by shouting that Jews are “child traffickers” who “will all be replaced”? Welcome to @Stanford since 10/7.https://t.co/pluCRtFMRC

— Theo Baker (@tab_delete) March 26, 2024

Now, before I get into a rant about how awful Stanford is, let me also remind you that it is an outstanding educational institution that connects its students to a vibrant technology ecosystem with some of the smartest and most creative people in the world. 

There, the commercial for Stanford is done. Now let me eviscerate it. 

Theo Baker, a student journalist at Stanford has a blistering piece in The Atlantic covering the degeneration of Stanford into an antisemitic hellhole. 

Had it been written before 10/7 I would have doubted every word, if for no other reason that academic institutions are wary of embarrassment, legal challenges, any accusation of an “ism.” It’s not that they are nearly as concerned about creating a “safe space” for students as they need everybody to think that they do. It’s part of the brand. 

But since the Hamas attacks on October 7th last year, colleges and universities have been competing with each other to be crowned the most comfortable home for hatred of Jews in the United States. Harvard, MIT, and Penn were vying for the title, but apparently Stanford has cornered the market. 

Baker gives us one of the best ledes I have read in a long time:

One of the section leaders for my computer-science class, Hamza El Boudali, believes that President Joe Biden should be killed. “I’m not calling for a civilian to do it, but I think a military should,” the 23-year-old Stanford University student told a small group of protesters last month. “I’d be happy if Biden was dead.” He thinks that Stanford is complicit in what he calls the genocide of Palestinians, and that Biden is not only complicit but responsible for it. “I’m not calling for a vigilante to do it,” he later clarified, “but I’m saying he is guilty of mass murder and should be treated in the same way that a terrorist with darker skin would be (and we all know terrorists with dark skin are typically bombed and drone striked by American planes).” El Boudali has also said that he believes that Hamas’s October 7 attack was a justifiable act of resistance, and that he would actually prefer Hamas rule America in place of its current government (though he clarified later that he “doesn’t mean Hamas is perfect”). When you ask him what his cause is, he answers: “Peace.” 

I switched to a different computer-science section.

Honestly, that is punchy. Bravo! If you stopped reading there (you shouldn’t), you would have gotten your money’s worth for an issue of the magazine. 

If El Boudali were an outlier at the Stanford campus, that would be one thing, but it turns out that the campus has been a hotbed of antisemitic hate and activism for months. It is as if the genie was let out of the bottle on October 7th–and remember, all the protests against Israel began well before it moved into Gaza to clean out Hamas–and nobody has yet to find a way to get that genie to go back home. 

Israel has become a country that takes the place of Emmanuel Goldstein in 1984. Only this time has the Two-Minutes Hate been replaced with months of preparation for a pogrom. On the campus of one of the most elite (and superb) schools in America, situated in the most Left-leaning region in the country, madness has broken out. 

Few students would call for Biden’s head—I think—but many of the same young people who say they want peace in Gaza don’t seem to realize that they are in fact advocating for violence. Extremism has swept through classrooms and dorms, and it is becoming normal for students to be harassed and intimidated for their faith, heritage, or appearance—they have been called perpetrators of genocide for wearing kippahs, and accused of supporting terrorism for wearing keffiyehs. The extremism and anti-Semitism at Ivy League universities on the East Coast have attracted so much media and congressional attention that two Ivy presidents have lost their jobs. But few people seem to have noticed the culture war that has taken over our California campus.

Stanford isn’t even run by a particularly woke president. Richard Saller, the interim president who landed in the middle of this mess, tries to keep the school out of politics. 

Fat chance. Academia is, first and foremost about politics these days, and since the Stanford administration wasn’t going to get into the business of attacking Israel wholeheartedly, others would. 

During a mandatory freshman seminar on October 10, a lecturer named Ameer Loggins tossed out his lesson plan to tell students that the actions of the Palestinian “military force” had been justified, that Israelis were colonizers, and that the Holocaust had been overemphasized, according to interviews I conducted with students in the class. Loggins then asked the Jewish students to identify themselves. He instructed one of them to “stand up, face the window, and he kind of kicked away his chair,” a witness told me. Loggins described this as an effort to demonstrate Israel’s treatment of Palestinians. (Loggins did not reply to a request for comment; a spokesperson for Stanford said that there were “different recollections of the details regarding what happened” in the class.)

“We’re only in our third week of college, and we’re afraid to be here,” three students in the class wrote in an email that night to administrators. “This isn’t what Stanford was supposed to be.” The class Loggins taught is called COLLEGE, short for “Civic, Liberal, and Global Education,” and it is billed as an effort to develop “the skills that empower and enable us to live together.”

Academics these days claim to be obsessed with creating “safe spaces” for students, and we often make fun of the Gen Z “snowflakes” who seem to be everywhere. 

But make no mistakes: these are not “snowflakes,” and all that talk about ‘trauma” and “safe spaces” is simply a smokescreen for a vicious campaign to attack today’s Emmanuel Goldsteins. When any of these students feel “unsafe,” their response is to attack viciously and take no prisoners. They aren’t snowflakes; they are wolves in sheep’s clothing. Wolves who admire Hamas. 

In a remarkably short period of time, aggression and abuse have become commonplace, an accepted part of campus activism. In January, Jewish students organized an event dedicated to ameliorating anti-Semitism. It marked one of Saller’s first public appearances in the new year. Its topic seemed uncontroversial, and I thought it would generate little backlash.

Protests began before the panel discussion even started, with activists lining the stairs leading to the auditorium. During the event they drowned out the panelists, one of whom was Israel’s special envoy for combating anti-Semitism, by demanding a cease-fire. After participants began cycling out into the dark, things got ugly.

Activists, their faces covered by keffiyehs or medical masks, confronted attendees. “Go back to Brooklyn!” a young woman shouted at Jewish students. One protester, who emerged as the leader of the group, said that she and her compatriots would “take all of your places and ensure Israel falls.” She told attendees to get “off our fucking campus” and launched into conspiracy theories about Jews being involved in “child trafficking.” As a rabbi tried to leave the event, protesters pursued him, chanting, “There is only one solution! Intifada revolution!”

At one point, some members of the group turned on a few Stanford employees, including another rabbi, an imam, and a chaplain, telling them, “We know your names and we know where you work.” The ringleader added: “And we’ll soon find out where you live.” The religious leaders formed a protective barrier in front of the Jewish students. The rabbi and the imam appeared to be crying.

Even the most well-intentioned administrators–and God knows there are few enough of them–are helpless because they don’t yet understand the gravity of the situation and are paralyzed with fear of their own students and employees. 

Or, should I say, of their left-wing students and employees, who are leading the takeover of our academic institutions. 

There really is only one way to deal with any of this insanity, and that is to fire and expel people when they cross the line. But, as we saw at MIT, when the administration considered suspending students for breaking the rules they pulled back from the brink because it might actually hurt the prospects of students, especially the cash-cow foreign students who might lose their visas. 

Of course, hurting the prospects of students is precisely what would stop this insanity. Every student should have the right to express an opinion–even unpleasant ones–but we are far past that point. Calling for the death of the president as part of computer science isn’t academic free speech. Students shouldn’t have to pay tuition to be subjected to that. 

Unfortunately, at Stanford, students do.