UCLA: Worse than Oklahoma
By Alexander Grass
Let’s compare two recent incidents on campus in two very different parts of America. At the University of Oklahoma, a busload
of Sigma Alpha Epsilon fraternity members were caught on camera bellowing a racist chant, the more ignominious verses of which included “you can hang them from a tree, but they’ll never sign with me,” as well as “there will never be a nigger in SAE.”
In the days immediately following the controversy, two students from the fraternity were immediately expelled, the fraternity’s chapter was permanently closed by its parent organization, and the dean of the university issued a statement. Dean David L. Boren spoke plainly: “I have emphasized that there is zero tolerance for this kind of threatening racist behavior at the University of Oklahoma.”
Even now the university is promising further investigations. The parents of one of the offending students, Levi Pettit, even threw their own son under the bus, offering pleas for forgiveness and condemnation of their boy: “Of course, we are sad for our son, but more importantly, we apologize to the community he has hurt.” The high priests of white guilt demanded that the Pettits offer a sacrifice.
Across the country, another incident of hatred was taking place. Undergraduate student Rachel Beyda, the then-nominee for a student council judicial board slot at UCLA, was being screened for the position because of the highly problematic issue of her being Jewish. Fabienne Roth, without hesitation, asked Beyda the following. “Given that you are a Jewish student and very active in the Jewish community... how do you see yourself being able to maintain an unbiased view?” Even after Beyda’s questioning, Beyda was asked to leave the room so that the council could debate on whether or not Jews can control themselves once within an arm’s length of the mechanisms of power. If only Julius Streicher had been there to inform them that debate wasn’t even necessary. Roth and her co-councilmen should know that Jews are a pathological infection to government.
Confidently, the student council voted to deny Beyda a spot on the judicial board. Only after being prodded by an advisor – who probably realized the implications of a “no” vote based purely on religious affiliation – did the council reverse course and re-vote to approve the nomination.
UCLA’s student government passed an anti-Semitic vote, and it did it publicly. It’s a solid step off the station platform of veiled biases onto the locomotive train of undisguised hatred. Progressives love progress, and the turn from hushed whispers of loathing for Israel to vocal denunciations of Jews is anything if not a serious progression.
Undoubtedly, Roth fudged the regular script, accidentally forgetting that she is supposed to swap out the word “Jew” with “Zionist.” She also neglected to qualify her shameful remarks with the usual “but I have so many Jewish friends” or “I went to synagogue with my friend Becky on Yom Kippur.” But hey, she’s a kid, it’s a steep learning curve, and we all make mistakes. Oh well.
Maybe it’s the case that Roth wants to apply the same logic to all the university’s groups of ethnic, religious, or sexual association? Well, it would be one hell of a house-cleaning. If Roth’s exclusion principle is applied universally, the UCLA student government can no longer have blacks vote on resolutions related to urban communities, can no longer have gays vote on gender issues, and can no longer have Hispanics vote on anything related to immigration.
Professor Barry Kosmin of Trinity College pointed out perfectly the folly of the student council in an article for CNN. “Apparently it's necessary for the university to teach its student leadership that the U.S. Constitution bans religious tests for public office. While they are at it, they also can inform them that the Bill of Rights assures freedom of religion, speech and assembly to all citizens.”
By Alexander Grass
Let’s compare two recent incidents on campus in two very different parts of America. At the University of Oklahoma, a busload
of Sigma Alpha Epsilon fraternity members were caught on camera bellowing a racist chant, the more ignominious verses of which included “you can hang them from a tree, but they’ll never sign with me,” as well as “there will never be a nigger in SAE.”
In the days immediately following the controversy, two students from the fraternity were immediately expelled, the fraternity’s chapter was permanently closed by its parent organization, and the dean of the university issued a statement. Dean David L. Boren spoke plainly: “I have emphasized that there is zero tolerance for this kind of threatening racist behavior at the University of Oklahoma.”
Even now the university is promising further investigations. The parents of one of the offending students, Levi Pettit, even threw their own son under the bus, offering pleas for forgiveness and condemnation of their boy: “Of course, we are sad for our son, but more importantly, we apologize to the community he has hurt.” The high priests of white guilt demanded that the Pettits offer a sacrifice.
Across the country, another incident of hatred was taking place. Undergraduate student Rachel Beyda, the then-nominee for a student council judicial board slot at UCLA, was being screened for the position because of the highly problematic issue of her being Jewish. Fabienne Roth, without hesitation, asked Beyda the following. “Given that you are a Jewish student and very active in the Jewish community... how do you see yourself being able to maintain an unbiased view?” Even after Beyda’s questioning, Beyda was asked to leave the room so that the council could debate on whether or not Jews can control themselves once within an arm’s length of the mechanisms of power. If only Julius Streicher had been there to inform them that debate wasn’t even necessary. Roth and her co-councilmen should know that Jews are a pathological infection to government.
Confidently, the student council voted to deny Beyda a spot on the judicial board. Only after being prodded by an advisor – who probably realized the implications of a “no” vote based purely on religious affiliation – did the council reverse course and re-vote to approve the nomination.
UCLA’s student government passed an anti-Semitic vote, and it did it publicly. It’s a solid step off the station platform of veiled biases onto the locomotive train of undisguised hatred. Progressives love progress, and the turn from hushed whispers of loathing for Israel to vocal denunciations of Jews is anything if not a serious progression.
Undoubtedly, Roth fudged the regular script, accidentally forgetting that she is supposed to swap out the word “Jew” with “Zionist.” She also neglected to qualify her shameful remarks with the usual “but I have so many Jewish friends” or “I went to synagogue with my friend Becky on Yom Kippur.” But hey, she’s a kid, it’s a steep learning curve, and we all make mistakes. Oh well.
Maybe it’s the case that Roth wants to apply the same logic to all the university’s groups of ethnic, religious, or sexual association? Well, it would be one hell of a house-cleaning. If Roth’s exclusion principle is applied universally, the UCLA student government can no longer have blacks vote on resolutions related to urban communities, can no longer have gays vote on gender issues, and can no longer have Hispanics vote on anything related to immigration.
Professor Barry Kosmin of Trinity College pointed out perfectly the folly of the student council in an article for CNN. “Apparently it's necessary for the university to teach its student leadership that the U.S. Constitution bans religious tests for public office. While they are at it, they also can inform them that the Bill of Rights assures freedom of religion, speech and assembly to all citizens.”
So what was the response? It wasn’t as harsh as the punishment meted out to the Oklahomans, that much you can be sure of.
The student council members submitted a lukewarm, meaningless apology to the student newspaper, and Chancellor Gene Block
excreted some limp blog post about how UCLA “will not be defined by intolerance.” The problem is that as of this moment,
UCLA is most definitely defined by intolerance. Has Chancellor Block taken any action otherwise? No.
The University of Oklahoma thought nothing of expelling the fraternity brothers who moronically belched anti-black songs and racial epithets. Arguably, those kids deserved suspension instead of expulsion. On the other hand, UCLA demanded nothing of a much darker, much more exclusionary, and much more damaging action on the part of its student council.
The racial slur that the Oklahoma students used evokes images of segregation, lynching, and the contemptible legacy of Jim Crow laws. But there was nobody who was actually hurt. In the case of the proposed exclusion of Jewish candidates from student government, what we witnessed was not some immature misstep into the realm of bigotry, but the beginnings of the academic left’s venture to validate the exclusion of Jews from the political realm. How exactly is barring Jewish students from serving in student government different from barring Jewish academics from teaching to students at all? It’s not. Roth’s singling out of Beyda for her Jewishness is fully consistent with anti-Semitism, fully consistent with the Boycott, Divestment and Sanction movement, and fully consistent with a flourishing leftist Jew-hatred on campus.
The singling out of Jews also comports with the view in academia that Jews are contaminated by their neo-colonialist (read: Zionist-Jew) mindset, a mindset that must be eradicated. Does anyone really think that Roth’s interrogatives weren’t inspired by some anti-Israel raving heard in a Middle Eastern studies class? The university is rife with this stuff.
Why? Why are the racists at Oklahoma punished so completely, so quickly, while the systematic show of anti-Semitism at UCLA merits not even a slap on the wrist?
One part of this is the multiculturalist tendency. It weakens institutions, universities, and politicians so that they are unwilling to call the darkness by its name. Academia’s fetish for continental European political fashions, amongst those fashions both intellectualized anti-Semitism and rabid anti-American thinking, has brought to American universities the obsession over the Jewish question.
Gosh, how do we deal with these poisonous yids?
There is something else, though, more difficult to grasp, and something that liberal Jewry is eager to deny. American Jews represent everything that the left hates. They are a bourgeois class of white European descent, capitalists whose economic status is – to the left – inherently exploitative of people of color, and a group that has a community-wide connection to the bête noire of the left, Israel. Simply put, Jews do not merit the protection of the academic community in the way that blacks do.
Joe Scarborough from MSNBC pointed out the disparity between punishment for anti-black behavior and punishment for anti- Semitic behavior: “What if these students did this to a black student ... and if they said, ‘Because you’re black, do you think you can handle your position fairly?’ Every student that asked that question would be suspended immediately and kicked off campus.”
The comparison between these two universities is quite instructive. In Oklahoma, an imprudent single instance of prejudice was punished swiftly, severely, without indecision or hollow words. In UCLA, anti-Semites are directing student government. Which phenomenon will prove more destructive?
The University of Oklahoma thought nothing of expelling the fraternity brothers who moronically belched anti-black songs and racial epithets. Arguably, those kids deserved suspension instead of expulsion. On the other hand, UCLA demanded nothing of a much darker, much more exclusionary, and much more damaging action on the part of its student council.
The racial slur that the Oklahoma students used evokes images of segregation, lynching, and the contemptible legacy of Jim Crow laws. But there was nobody who was actually hurt. In the case of the proposed exclusion of Jewish candidates from student government, what we witnessed was not some immature misstep into the realm of bigotry, but the beginnings of the academic left’s venture to validate the exclusion of Jews from the political realm. How exactly is barring Jewish students from serving in student government different from barring Jewish academics from teaching to students at all? It’s not. Roth’s singling out of Beyda for her Jewishness is fully consistent with anti-Semitism, fully consistent with the Boycott, Divestment and Sanction movement, and fully consistent with a flourishing leftist Jew-hatred on campus.
The singling out of Jews also comports with the view in academia that Jews are contaminated by their neo-colonialist (read: Zionist-Jew) mindset, a mindset that must be eradicated. Does anyone really think that Roth’s interrogatives weren’t inspired by some anti-Israel raving heard in a Middle Eastern studies class? The university is rife with this stuff.
Why? Why are the racists at Oklahoma punished so completely, so quickly, while the systematic show of anti-Semitism at UCLA merits not even a slap on the wrist?
One part of this is the multiculturalist tendency. It weakens institutions, universities, and politicians so that they are unwilling to call the darkness by its name. Academia’s fetish for continental European political fashions, amongst those fashions both intellectualized anti-Semitism and rabid anti-American thinking, has brought to American universities the obsession over the Jewish question.
Gosh, how do we deal with these poisonous yids?
There is something else, though, more difficult to grasp, and something that liberal Jewry is eager to deny. American Jews represent everything that the left hates. They are a bourgeois class of white European descent, capitalists whose economic status is – to the left – inherently exploitative of people of color, and a group that has a community-wide connection to the bête noire of the left, Israel. Simply put, Jews do not merit the protection of the academic community in the way that blacks do.
Joe Scarborough from MSNBC pointed out the disparity between punishment for anti-black behavior and punishment for anti- Semitic behavior: “What if these students did this to a black student ... and if they said, ‘Because you’re black, do you think you can handle your position fairly?’ Every student that asked that question would be suspended immediately and kicked off campus.”
The comparison between these two universities is quite instructive. In Oklahoma, an imprudent single instance of prejudice was punished swiftly, severely, without indecision or hollow words. In UCLA, anti-Semites are directing student government. Which phenomenon will prove more destructive?
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