The DEI Complex Will Never Protect Jews

In a good example of Leftist deception, DEI in reality promotes uniformity. inequality and exclusion. And guess who is excluded

The vast diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) complex has sucked away incalculable sums of money and institutional energy and now all but defines the purpose of American higher education. For this industry to overlook the needs and anxieties of Jewish students during the toughest times they’ve ever faced would invite hard questions about what campus DEI is even for. Surely, there’s no way the DEI establishment, a former oddity of higher education that rose to shape the morals, sentiments, and business models of the mainstream corporate, entertainment, and cultural world—would botch something so simple as providing basic moral or rhetorical support to a besieged minority group when the stakes are this high. If the DEI offices’ hearts aren’t in it—Jews being rich white people whose near ancestors just happened to have been the Nazis’ chief targets—they could at least feign a strategic interest in Jews, thus protecting themselves from future accusations of willful neglect.

Young Jews have never felt more alone on American campuses as they have during these past two weeks. Classmates and soon-to-be-former friends have rallied in large numbers to celebrate the burning and torture of 1,400 Israelis. Professors have announced their glee at the redemptive spilling of settler blood. University administrators who treat every scratch of racist graffiti as a kind of communitywide soul-murder have discovered a newfound sense of nuance when faced with the 21st century’s worst butchery of Jews.

The nation’s army of campus DEI staff presumably exists for moments like this one, where an already unpopular minority group confronts an unanticipated surge of stress and potential danger. Yet DEI offices haven’t even bothered with pro forma expressions of fake concern. This week, I called or emailed over a dozen equity divisions at prominent colleges and universities to ask whether they had released any statements, held any events, or created any new programming for Jewish students since the Hamas rampage of October 7 and the wave of campus unrest that followed. The answer is no—of course not.

The fact Jews put their names on buildings and otherwise lavishly support many of these institutions apparently makes no difference to DEI bureaucrats. For example, I received no response from any of the diversity czars at the University of Pennsylvania, where internal dissension over the administration’s refusal to condemn the Hamas attack has already cost the most Jewish of Ivies hundreds of millions in pledged funding.

One of the few responses I did receive came from the University of Michigan—which makes sense, since according to a 2021 Heritage Foundation report, the school had 163 DEI employees, the most in the nation. A representative of the university directed me to two statements from Santa J. Ono, the school’s president. Neither announcement made any specific mention of Jews, while the list of “support resources” appended to each press release did not include any service that the university Office of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion was itself offering. Which is as clear an answer as one might ask for, I guess.

The City University of New York might have just purged the final Jews from the institution’s 80-member senior leadership team, but a staffer still helpfully pointed me toward two post-attack statements from Chancellor Felix Matos Rodriguez. His short concern-blurbs from October 7 and 9 deserve credit for naming Hamas as the perpetrator of the violence that set off this latest round of war. Still, the latter statement contains a startling admission that CUNY campuses have become an incubator of sympathy and justification for some of the darkest acts imaginable. “We want to be clear that we don’t condone the activities of any internal organizations that are sponsoring rallies to celebrate or support Hamas’ cowardly actions,” Rodriguez wrote in anticipation of these exact events. “Such efforts do not in any way represent the University and its campuses” he continued—a suggestion that according to his own statement is clearly false.

George Washington University, the site of an act of vandalism against a Torah in 2021, is so serious about social justice on campus that the website of its Office for Diversity, Equity, and Community Engagement puts a self-flagellating land acknowledgement at the very top of the page: “We acknowledge the truth that is often buried: We here in the D.C. area are on the ancestral homelands of the Piscataway, Anacostan, and Nacotchtank Peoples, who were among the first in the Western Hemisphere. We are on Indigenous land that was stolen from the Piscataway, Anacostan, and Nacotchtank. We pay respects to the Piscataway, Anacostan, and Nacotchtank elders and ancestors. Please take a moment to consider the many legacies of violence, displacement, migration, and settlement that inform and impact us all.”

Impressive, no doubt. Yet the university’s equity bureaucrats apparently did not take a moment to consider the plight of Jewish students horrified at the butchery in Israel and the celebration it provoked among their peers. When asked what that office itself did the week of October 7, I was directed toward two statements from university President Ellen M. Granberg—who, I should add, deserves credit for being one of the very few in higher education to describe the Hamas attack in appropriate moral terms. “We know there is a long and complex history associated with this conflict,” she wrote. “Still, this does not justify the evil we have collectively witnessed.”

If the DEI offices’ hearts aren’t in it—Jews being rich white people whose near ancestors just happened to have been subjected to the Holocaust—they could at least feign a strategic interest in Jews, thus protecting themselves from future accusations of willful neglect.

Given the dearth of replies by either phone or email, it became necessary to look through Twitter feeds, event schedules, and recent announcements on the universities’ DEI pages in order to ascertain their level of activity in response to the worst crisis Jewish college students have faced lately. On Oct. 18, the Twitter feed of the Rutgers University Office of Diversity, Inclusion, and Community posted a pair of graphics about “meeting the moment with humanity.” In one of them, the #RUWorkforinclusion hashtag appeared below a quote from Archbishop Desmond Tutu, who was once one of the world’s leading opponents of the existence of the State of Israel. The office did not put out any statement in the immediate wake of the October 7 assault, although it did host a webinar on “micro-inequities” on Oct. 17. Presumably, even according to Archbishop Desmond Tutu, the mass slaughter of Israelis might qualify at least as a “micro-inequity.” However there was no sign Jewish students were particularly encouraged to attend that or any other Rutgers DEI event.

Not to be outdone by its less rarefied rival to the north, the University of Virginia’s Division for Diversity, Equity and Inclusion held events on microaggressions on both Oct. 17 and Oct. 18. Those who missed “I Felt That: Intro Microaggressions” must have been a little lost at “I Felt That: Microaggressions—The Remix (Intermediate)” the following night. The idea that the survivors of the Hamas massacre and their fellow Jews on campus might have also felt something worth recognizing was nowhere in evidence.

The University of North Carolina saw a faceoff between mourners and celebrants of the Hamas attack that nearly turned violent. Jewish students and their campus allies—assuming they have any—might have looked at the resistance enthusiasts in their midst and wondered in horror at exactly who they’d been going to school with. If they’d looked at the University Office for Diversity and Inclusion’s web page, they’d have found an infographic about “inclusive excellence.”

Nobody picked up the phone when I called Michigan State University’s Office of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, whose website includes handy and potentially disgrace-preventing instructions on how not to botch a land acknowledgement ritual. “Although land acknowledgements are powerful statements,” the guide reads in boldface type, “they are only meaningful when they are coupled with authentic and sustained relationships with Indigenous communities and community-informed actions.” Those of a Talmudic cast will be intrigued to learn that there is both an official land acknowledgement for Michigan State University and a shortened land acknowledgement for Michigan State University that satisfies the rigors of equity Halacha. No one at the school’s DEI office seems to be acknowledging the turmoil of the university’s Jewish students, though.

For the past two weeks, DEI offices have had a chance to show they can be responsive to the real-life needs of young people facing a scary and unfamiliar crisis. But these offices clearly do not exist to serve Jews, or wish to recognize Jews might be capable of feeling pain, even when their friends and co-religionists have been slaughtered en masse. That’s because DEI bureaucracies don’t exist to serve actually existing people of any background. The purpose they serve is a theological one, and dogma enforcement is a big part of what universities do these days. The aforementioned Heritage study found that in the aggregate, there were 1.4 times as many DEI staff as history professors across the 65 institutions surveyed. “Promoting DEI has become a primary function of higher education,” the report observed.

An equity office’s job is to engineer the values of the rising elite so that DEI and the wider ideological edifice it serves will remain powerful, protected, and even feared. These bureaucracies are not burning through institutional capital in order to salve the anxieties of Jewish students, because helping students was never the point. Their ambitions are of a different order: DEI embodies the moral authority of a larger system for distributing status and power. It doesn’t care about actual human beings—and as we’ve learned since the massacre of October 7, it especially doesn’t care about Jews.

https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/the-dei-complex-will-never-protect-jews

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Why they rip down the 'Kidnapped from Israel' fliers

by Jeff Jacoby

A CAT from my neighborhood has gone missing. Her owner has distributed fliers around the area, asking residents to keep an eye out for her. "LOST CAT," it says in big letters beneath a photo of Coco, a beautiful animal with fluffy white fur and blue eyes.
Whether the fliers will lead to Coco's recovery I don't know. But of one thing I am certain: No one walking through the neighborhood will be grabbing all the posters and stuffing them in the trash. Even people who dislike cats wouldn't be that callous and mean.

But ever since fliers calling attention to something far more terrible than a missing cat — the plight of the more than 200 hostages abducted from Israel by Hamas on Oct. 7 — began going up on telephone poles, subway walls, utility boxes, and worksite fences in cities around the world, a startling number of people have been eager to tear them down. Individuals have been filmed destroying or defacing the posters in Boston, London, Miami, New York, Melbourne, Philadelphia, Richmond, Ann Arbor, and Los Angeles.

There is no possible justification for such heartlessness. The whole purpose of the fliers is to heighten awareness of the Israeli (and other) civilians kidnapped by the Hamas terror squads — to put names and faces to the hostages, all with one goal: to bring them back home. How can a project so heartfelt and humane trigger such a poisonous response?

The posters were the brainchild of two Israeli artists, Nitzan Mintz and Dede Bandaid, who were visiting New York when Hamas carried out its bloodbath. Aching to help in some way, they drew on their art backgrounds to design the eye-catching fliers. Each is topped with the word "KIDNAPPED" in large white letters on an orange background; below that heading is the name, age, nationality, and photo of one of the hostages, who range in age from 3 months to 85 years.

The posters went viral overnight. Within days they were appearing everywhere, a powerful symbol of Israel's anguish and of the desperate yearning for the captives' safe return. Then came the backlash. "Within minutes or hours of going up," reported the New York Jewish Week, "many of them had been partially ripped off the subway station's walls, tears obscuring the victims' faces or details about their lives, while others were defaced with marker or surrounded by messages such as "Free Palestine." On a poster of two of the youngest hostages, 3-year-old twins Emma and Yuli Cunio, Hitler mustaches were drawn on the girls' faces. On other posters, the words "Lies" or "Actors" were scrawled.

Those ripping down or damaging the signs are by no means abashed about doing so. Some have filmed themselves attacking the fliers and posted the video online. Others, when asked why they were trashing the pictures of civilian hostages, have yelled about "genocide," declared their support for "Palestinian civilians," claimed the fliers contained "inaccurate information," or simply cursed out the person filming them.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is intensely controversial and generates great emotion on both sides. But these assaults on the "Kidnapped" posters have nothing to do with the merits of the dispute. The sole purpose of the fliers is to emphasize the humanity of the innocent hostages seized by Hamas (many of whom, as it happens, were peace activists deeply committed to Arab-Israeli coexistence). What drives the people ripping down the posters or adding Hitler mustaches to the pictures is a pathological need to deny the humanity of those kidnapped Jews.

A core principle of antisemites in all times and places is that Jews are not fully human and are never innocent. A thousand years ago, Jews were slaughtered by Crusaders for being satanic Christ-killers who consumed the blood of children; a century ago Hitler preached that they were subhumans who polluted the racial purity of Aryan Europe. Today the Jewish state is accused of committing the demonic crimes of genocide and apartheid. The poison never changes, only the vial it comes in.

The "Kidnapped" fliers are intolerable to the haters because they so urgently challenge the antisemitic paradigm. They make it vividly clear that in the war between barbarism and civilization, between oppressor and oppressed, it is Jews who are under attack. That infuriates those whose worldview revolves around the certainty that Israel and its supporters are the victimizers. The outpouring of sympathy for Jews kidnapped by Palestinian terrorists — and the moral force of that sympathy — is anathema to them.

That explains as well why the atrocities committed on Oct. 7 immediately triggered so many vehement public demonstrations in support of the Palestinians. Precisely because the massacre and abductions had been so unspeakably horrific, it was necessary to reinforce the narrative of Jewish villainy. At times, denunciations of Israel gave way to naked antisemitsm. At a pro-Palestinian rally in Sydney, a chorus of voices chanted "Gas the Jews! F*** the Jews!" Others expressed their hatred by rejoicing in the slaughter of Israelis. A professor at Cornell, for example, told a crowd he was "exhilarated" by what Hamas had done.

In the wake of terrible mass shootings like the one that took at least 18 lives and convulsed Lewiston, Maine, on Wednesday, grieving family and friends often display pictures of their loved ones. It is a way of reinforcing the humanity of the victims and of evoking compassion from passersby. Who, seeing such a display, would destroy or vandalize it? Some norms are so ingrained as to be all but inviolable. When someone puts up an image of a missing or murdered child, no decent person rips it down.

But antisemitism has the power to override every norm and decent impulse.

On Reddit last week, a commenter explained that coming across a "Kidnapped" flier made him feel not empathy with the hostage, but "the exact opposite." It filled him with "white hot rage," he wrote, and he decided that "ripping it down and tearing it to shreds is the only thing I can do."

The ripped-up fliers are one more indication of the rising tide of antisemitism in America and the West. A "white hot rage" is building. I, for one, cannot shake the conviction that Jews are at graver risk than they have been in decades, and not only in southern Israel.

https://jeffjacoby.com/27308/why-they-rip-down-the-kidnapped-from-israel-fliers

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Premodern Diversity vs. Civilizational Unity

Victor Davis Hanson

Few Romans in the late decades of their 5th-century A.D. empire celebrated their newfound "diversity" of marauding Goths, Ostrogoths, Visigoths, Huns, and Vandals.

These tribes en masse had crossed the unsecured Rhine and Danube borders to harvest Roman bounty without a care about what had created it.

Their agendas were focused on destroying the civilization they overran rather than peacefully integrating into and perpetuating the Empire.

Ironically, Rome's prior greatness had been due to the extension of citizenship to diverse people throughout Europe, North Africa, and Asia.

Millions had been assimilated, integrated, and intermarried and often superseded the original Italians of the early Roman Republic. Such fractious diversity had led to unity around the idea of Rome.

New citizens learned to enjoy the advantages of habeas corpus, sophisticated roads, aqueducts, and public architecture, and the security offered by the legions.

The unity of these diverse peoples fused into a single culture that empowered Rome. In contrast, the later disunity of hundreds of thousands of tribal people flooding into and dividing Rome doomed it.

To meet the challenge of a multiracial society, the only viable pathway to a stable civilization of racially and ethnically different people is a single, shared culture.

Some nations can find collective success as a single homogenous people like Japan or Switzerland.

Or equally, but with more difficulty, nations can prosper with heterodox peoples -- but only if united by a single, inclusive culture as the American melting-pot once attested.

But a baleful third option -- a multicultural society of diverse, unassimilated, and often rival tribes -- historically is a prescription for collective suicide.

We are beginning to see just that in America, as it sheds the melting pot, and adopts the salad bowl of unassimilated and warring tribes.

The U.S. is now seeing a rise in violent racially and religiously motivated hate crimes.

The border is nonexistent.

Millions of unlawful immigrants mock their hosts by their brazen illegal entrance.

They will receive little civic education to become Americans. But they will learn that unassimilated tribalism wins them influence and advantages.

In contrast, America was once a rare historical example of a multiracial, but single-culture democracy that actually worked.

Multigenerational Americans were often energized by keeping up with new hard-working immigrants determined to have a shot at success in a free society long denied them at home.

Other large nations have tried such a democratic multiracial experiment -- most notably Brazil and India. But both are still plagued by tribal feuding and serial violence.

What once worked for America, but now is forgotten were a few precepts essential for a multiracial constitutional state wedded to generous immigration.

One, America is enriched at its cultural periphery by the food, fashion, art, music, and literature of immigrants.

But it would be destroyed if such diversity extended to its core. No one wants Middle-East norms regarding gays or emancipated women.

No one prefers Mexican jurisprudence to our courts.

No one here wants the dictatorship of Venezuela or the totalitarianism of communist China.

Two, people vote with their feet to emigrate to America. They flee their native culture and government to enjoy their antitheses in America.

But remember -- no sane immigrant would flee Mexico, Gaza, or Zimbabwe only to wish to implant in their new homes the very culture and norms that drove them out from their old.

If they did that to their new home, it would then become as unattractive to them as what they fled.

Three, tribalism wrecks nations.

Just compare what happened in Rwanda, the former Yugoslavia, or Iraq.

Anytime one ethnic, racial, or religious group refuses to surrender its prime identity in exchange for a shared sense of self, other tribes for their own survival will do the same.

All then rebrand their superficial appearance as essential not incidental to whom they are.

And like nuclear proliferation that sees other nations go nuclear once a neighboring power gains the bomb, so too the tribalism of one group inevitably leads only to more tribalism of others. The result is endless Hobbesian strife.

Four, immigration must be measured, so that newcomers can be manageably assimilated and integrated rather than left to form rival tribal cliques.

Five, it must be legal. Otherwise, the idea of citizenship is reduced to mere residency, while the legal applicant is rendered a fool for his adherence to the law.

Six, it must be meritocratic, so immigrants come with English and skills and do not burden their hosts.

And last, it must be diverse. Only that way, can all groups abroad have equal access to the American dream.

A diversity of immigrants also ensures that no one particular ethnic or political tribe seeks to use immigration to divide the nation further.

The old immigration once enriched America, but our new version is destroying it.

https://townhall.com/columnists/victordavishanson/2023/10/27/premodern-diversity-vs-civilizational-unity-n2630454

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Is Australian multiculturalism failing?

The events described below are real but isolated. They do not well reflect everyday life in Australia. Let me tell another story: Most days I have my breakfast in a local suburban cafe that has a very good menu. And it is very popular and busy.

But as I sit there day after day I observe a minor miracle. There are usually only one or two other people with my Celtic coloring (freckles!) but everybody behaves in a manner that I see as proper. There are always some Chinese, some Indians and probably some people from Europe. The cafe was formerly run by an Italian and is now run by a Vietnaese. Both were superb managers

And there are no raised voices and no aggression of any sort. Everybody there remains polite at all times. I have not once seen an exception to that. There are even some apparent Middle-Easterners of probably Muslim persuasion who make no waves at all. They usually keep in their own groups but no harm comes of that.

So every day I sit in the middle of a very multicultural population and experience nothing that disturbs my Old Australian soul. I have no doubt that in Australia I live in a brilliantly successful multicultural society


In March 2022, Declan Cutler, a working-class 16-year-old, died after being stabbed over 50 times by a ‘gang of teenagers’ in a random attack in North Melbourne.

Hours after the incident, one of the attackers allegedly went home and searched the question, ‘Is hell guaranteed for a Muslim who commits murder?’

Earlier this year, Jason Langhans, 17, was killed when he tried to stop a fight between gatecrashers and partygoers at a get-together in the small coastal town of Tooradin.

The attacker, a 17-year-old Afghan who has not been named, moved to Australia as a refugee, drove a screwdriver 8cm into Jason’s brain. The judge noted that he had a ‘traumatic upbringing’, leaving Afghanistan for Pakistan, Indonesia, and then Australia by boat.

Earlier this month, hundreds of protesters gathered at the Sydney Opera House and called for the death of an entire race of people … the Jewish people.

Minister for Immigration Andrew Giles says that Australia’s multicultural diversity is ‘a source of national strength’.

But these increasingly common events, along with a changing conversation abroad, might give us pause to reflect.

Suella Braverman, Home Secretary for the United Kingdom, recently stood in front of a crowd last month and announced that ‘multiculturalism in Great Britain had failed’.

Her analysis of Britain’s handling of immigration and diversity was scathing, and perfectly reflected the way the debate around multiculturalism is changing.

‘Uncontrolled immigration, inadequate integration, and a misguided dogma of multiculturalism have proven a toxic combination for Europe over the last few decades.

‘We are living with the consequence of that failure today. You can see it play out on the streets of cities all over Europe. From Malmo, to Paris, Brussels, to Leicester. It is 13 years since Merkel gave her speech, and I’m not sure that very much has changed since.’

Australia’s official policy of ‘Multiculturalism’ is celebrated in ministerial white papers and corporate boardrooms but its real-life consequences are starkly different.

In the streets of Melbourne’s CBD earlier this year, Sikh separatists attacked Hindu protesters with sticks while chanting ‘death to India’.

In Sydney, Hindu protesters were filmed allegedly menacing Muslim-run businesses in Harris Park, an area with a long history of ethnic-religious violence.

In Brisbane, during the Hong Kong independence protests at the University of Queensland, students were physically assaulted by a number of pro-Chinese students.

Fireworks and celebrations erupted in the Sydney suburb of Lakemba following the attack of Israel by Hamas.

The question has to be asked: How is the average Australian benefiting from this? And if we’re not benefiting, what are we doing to stop it?

Because as one British writer put it, the eruption of ethnic tensions in our cities doesn’t just reflect the complete failure of integration, it also reflects a complete repudiation of our systems, laws and way of life.

‘When you watch people have so little respect for British values and British laws they gleefully saunter around Britain’s streets saluting atrocities committed by ISIS-style terrorists then you know multiculturalism is failing.’

This has happened, he says, ‘Because of mass immigration into Britain, because of the total failure of our politicians to integrate old and new immigrants into British society, and because of their determination to continue to import more culturally and religiously distinctive migrants and tribal grievances from abroad.’

It isn’t just Britain changing their tune on multiculturalism.

Last year, the Sweden Prime Minister announced: ‘Integration has been too poor at the same time as we have had a large immigration. Society has been too weak, resources for the police and social services have been too weak.’

More than Sweden, the other paragon of Scandinavian progressive pragmatism, Denmark, instituted an abrupt turnaround on its previously generous immigration program, with Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen citing a multi-decade failure of its newcomers to integrate.

And just weeks ago, former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger said in a television interview that ‘it was a grave mistake to let in so many people of totally different cultures, religions, and concepts’.

‘It creates a pressure group inside each country.’

Is it now time to admit that Australia also made a ‘grave mistake’? Do we have pressure groups inside our country, and if so, what are we going to do about it?

‘I think we are starting to realise there’s a difference between being an Australian and living in Australia,’ wrote one person in a viral tweet, following the Opera House incident.

Australian politicians like to claim we’re the ‘most successful multicultural nation on Earth’, but how much longer can they ignore the fraying edges that has become increasingly evident this month?

Opposition leader Peter Dutton is talking tough on the issue, saying that anyone on a visa at the protests who was breaking the law ‘should be deported’. But what of the hundreds of thousands of new arrivals coming in next year? What of the gangs roaming our streets, killing unsuspecting teenagers? There is simply no plan to deal with these multicultural clashes – governments are just throwing a Hail Mary and hoping it doesn’t explode on their watch.

With a record 450,000 migrants arriving in Australia this year alone – many of which not only from nations with which we share little culturally, but who are also adversaries to our allies – it can be assumed Labor isn’t heeding Braverman’s warning about ‘uncontrolled immigration, inadequate integration, and a misguided dogma of multiculturalism’.

Moreover, with Australia’s legitimacy increasingly attacked by the political left, and with the country referred to as a ‘coloniser state’ that disenfranchised indigenous people, it’s hard to see what the large numbers of people coming here will integrate into.

Our country is heading down a strange path. The roots that once held us together are increasingly weakened, while the rapidly rising number of people coming from other countries have no dominant culture or way of life to integrate into.

Until a stronger discussion is had around multiculturalism and immigration, these cultures will inevitably clash again, with increasingly tragic circumstances.

https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/10/is-multiculturalism-failing/

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My other blogs. Main ones below:

http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)

http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)

http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)

http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)

http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)

http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs

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