Andrew Stiles writes for the Washington Free Beacon about the latest disturbing campus controversy involving antisemitism.
Ezra Klein. Bless his heart, the poor guy.
Earlier this week, the New York Times columnist and Democratic Party thought leader tried to express solidarity with pro-Hamas activists who disrupted his event at Sarah Lawrence—a mid-to-bottom-tier liberal arts college in New York. He was not successful.
In a video taken at the event—a conversation between Klein and Sarah Lawrence president Cristle [sic] Collins Judd—a keffiyeh-clad agitator berated Klein while a group of masked students held a banner denouncing the Jewish journalist as a “Nazi normalizer.” Judd sat silently throughout.
The disruption did not come as a surprise. The day before Klein arrived on campus, which happened to be Holocaust Remembrance Day, pro-Hamas activists decorated the campus with graffiti blasting Klein as a “Zionist pig” and “genocide denier.” They had even organized a faculty-sponsored counter-event to protest the platforming of a “liberal Zionist mouthpiece.” …
… Klein appeared somewhat surprised when the activists refused to engage with him. “Why do you think I deny what’s going on in Gaza?” he asked the terrorist sympathizer. “I don’t think you know what I think.”
It’s safe to assume the student activists didn’t know much about anything. Klein has not shied away from criticizing Israel, which he has argued is on the verge of becoming a “pariah state.” He voted for New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani (D.) and said he didn’t think there was “anything anti-Semitic about him at all.” He has described “anti-Zionists” of the left as promoting universal human rights, even if they occasionally hold “dumb signs at protest rallies.” In Klein’s view, it’s the right-wing anti-Semites who are motivated by racial animus.
At the Times, Klein has interviewed “genocide scholars.” He has platformed Hamas apologists such as Ta-Nehisi Coates and Mahmoud Khalil, the Columbia University protest organizer who has repeatedly refused to condemn the terrorist group.
