CNN anchor Dana Bash said Monday on “News Central” that the rhetoric used at anti-Israel-Hamas war protests at Columbia University was dangerous “anti-Semitism.”
The Atlantic writer Franklin Foer said, “Protesters say that they’re just criticizing Israel. And I believe that in a lot of their minds, that’s their intent.But there’s a whole vocabulary that they have for talking about what’s happening on campus that veers almost directly into anti-Semitism, where they accuse Jewish donors, they accuse a Jewish, Jewish forces in the world for ordering the crackdown. It’s not the university president acting on her own. There’s a cabal.”
Co-host Kasie Hunt said, “Those are straight up anti-Semitic tropes right there that you outline.”
Bash said, “Yeah. And and it’s, and I’ll even go further, it’s not almost anti-Semitism. It is anti-Semitism. And this is something that is on display right now. But the, sort of roots of this kind of devolving, from A to B go back millennia. And this is something, the roots of anti-Semitism, that pop up in societies that frankly, tend to be, a canary in the coal mine for a society and democracy in this case, that is in a lot of trouble.”
She continued, “It is. I like to look at this and replace Jews with any other minority group here. And what would the entire country be doing? They would be outraged. Rightly so.It is not just Palestinian rights. I, got the, the the letter that we reported on that the rabbi at Columbia sent saying that Jewish students, you’re not safe here. From a parent of a Columbia University student. I got it yesterday morning. And this person’s daughter has heard things like, you’re a Nazi. Things like, you know, go, go kill yourself and other and even worse things.”
Bash added, “That’s not protest, that’s harassment. And it is on the brink of violence. And the fact that these Jewish students feel so unsafe and it is, so systemic when it comes from, ultimately going back from classes that don’t necessarily get policed, that is dangerous.”
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