DEI Is Antisemitic

Editor’s Note: This article was originally published by PJ Media on December 29, 2024. With edits to match Minding the Campus’s style guidelines, it is crossposted here with permission.

The foundational idea of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) is the Marxist theory that all humanity is divided between oppressors and victims. This class conflict can be seen in its economic dimension—bourgeois vs. proletarians—its political dimension—oligarchy vs. democracy or fascist vs. woke—its sexual dimension—men vs. women—its racial dimension—whites vs. blacks, Indigenous, people of color (BIPOC)—its health dimension—the fully abled vs. the disabled or “otherwise abled”—its sexuality dimension—heterosexuals vs. lesbians, gay, bisexual, trans, queer, two-spirit, plus many other varieties (LGBTQ2S++)—or its ethnic and religious dimension—Christians and Jews vs. seculars and Muslims.

The DEI understanding of the Marxist class conflict is bolstered by intersectionality, under which multiple victim statuses can be observed. The result is a hierarchy of victimhood, with people classed according to how many victim statuses they occupy. The greatest prestige, in the eyes of DEI advocates, is accorded to the multiply victimized, e.g. disabled black lesbians, Muslim working-class females, et al.

Accorded least prestige, and maximum scorn, are the designated oppressors: whites, men, Christians, Jews, the wealthy, the able, and straights/heterosexuals. The last decade in North America has seen the culmination of decades-long campaigns to vilify these “oppressors.” At long last, the vilification of members of these categories has resulted in their marginalization in the major institutions in Canada and the United States—and also in Europe and Australasia.

But whites are the majority in the U.S.—about 60 percent—and Canada—about 70 percent. So they are, collectively, too large and too strong to attack frontally and violently. Men, too, are too many and too able to protect themselves to attack frontally and violently. Whites and men are undermined in more subtle, if explicit, ways, such as in discrimination in admission, hiring, promotion, funding, and awards in universities. In contrast, Jews are a small and relatively weak population, outstripped in North America and Europe, for example, by the voting power of larger Muslim populations.

[RELATED: DEI Statements Erode the Diversity That Matters. Qualified Candidates Can’t Get Jobs.]

An illustration of the relative frequency of attacks on Jews is hate crimes. Everywhere Jews are the overwhelming recipient of hate crimes directed at religious targets. An example of this is the University of Virginia, where in 2023-24 there were 33 hate crimes against Judaism, nine against Islam, one against Hinduism, and two against Christianity. Even before the hate Jews year of 2023-24, hate crimes against Jews were far and away the predominant hate crime at the University of Virginia—and pretty much everywhere else.

Joel Gardner—President of the UVa alumni group Jefferson Council—pointed out that “[d]espite the fact that the Jewish people have been the most oppressed group in history, about 40 percent of whom were slaughtered worldwide less than 80 years ago, Jews are seen by DEI programs as being oppressors.”

“There is no doubt as demonstrated by specific examples in my article, that antisemitic acts are treated much differently than acts against perceived oppressed groups. The current administration has been defined by its double standards in numerous instances and antisemitism is the natural fruit of the DEI narrative,” Gardner said.

Gardner’s observations of DEI at UVa are more or less applicable to every institution that espouses DEI, which means almost all universities, academic professional organizations, funding agencies, and academic awards organizations.

The Marxist DEI Manichean opposition between oppressors and victims has been used as a mandate for the exclusion of whites, males, Christians, and Jews, and occasionally Asians, as dis-honorary whites. What did Asians do wrong? Why are they, in the DEI jargon, “white adjacent”? The answer is that they are a successful minority. This is offensive because the “social justice DEI” explanation for success in academia, economics, and politics is that success was stolen from “marginalized, underserved” victim populations by means of prejudice and discrimination.

Jews too are a successful minority. So, the DEI view is that they too are guilty of stealing from marginalized minority victims. Of course, no attempt has ever been made to empirically document this explanation for success and failure. It is asserted as a known truth, not to be questioned, a dogma. Alternative explanations for differences in results between categories are not, in the “social justice” view, allowed. This is an ideological approach based on faith in “moral virtue,” not a reality-based or scientific-minded approach.

But there are credible alternative explanations for differential results. One is the impact of family structure. The census categories that DEI reifies differ markedly in the extent to which children are raised in two-parent families and in one-parent families. According to the Institute for Family Studies, those raised in married birth-parent families were 81 percent of Asian children, 70 percent of white children, 55 percent of Hispanic children, 51 percent of multiracial children, and 33 percent of black children. Statistical evidence indicates that being raised in married two-parent families results in greater academic and economic success, while single-parent upbringing, notwithstanding the Sisyphean efforts of the single-handed parent, more often results in academic failure and, too often, incarceration.

A second explanatory factor is family and local community culture. When the family and local community stress discipline and education, children are more likely to be oriented to educational achievement, which is the standard path for economic and status success in North America. DEI “social justice” ignores these influences in comparing relative success among different census category populations and insists that low standing is the result of oppression. Don’t offer contradictory evidence; they don’t want to know.

As discussed, one side of DEI is the designation of Jews as oppressors. But we also have to consider the DEI classification of Muslims as victims, and the consequences of making Muslims a protected class. Jews in North America, and in particular in North American universities, have no aggressive intentions or politics directed at Muslims or at their original homelands. There are no campaigns run by Jewish students to destroy Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Pakistan, Indonesia, or the “Palestinian” people. Jews would like to live in peace with Arabs, Persians, Pakistanis, and other Muslims. Muslim students have no need to be “protected” from Jews.

Conversely, many Muslims in North America, whether as citizens, illegal aliens, or visiting students, believe it is their duty to attack Jews and the Jewish homeland of Israel. For decades there has been a “boycott, divest, and sanction” movement on not a few North American campuses, interspersed with “Israel apartheid weeks,” intended to undermine international support for Israel. This includes demonization of “Zionists” and a campaign to ban all Zionist and all things Zionist from campuses. Since most North American Jews support Israel—as do most American citizens—Jews are targeted and attacked. American public opinion also favors Israel. Recently, we have seen pro-jihadi terrorist and pro-genocide tent encampments, demonstrations, and occupations on campuses aimed at the elimination of Israel, with Jewish students and professors banned from certain campuses by Muslim vigilantes.

I have had my own run-ins with Muslim students. Four Muslim student groups, joined by four other student groups, wrote a public letter to my university administration vilifying me as a racist and Islamophobe, claiming that I, through my publications, brought disrepute to the university, and demanding that the emeritus status that I had earned during my fifty years of service be revoked. Unusually among universities that commonly capitulate to minority student complaints, my university said that differences of opinion are not grounds for disciplinary actions.

[RELATED: DEI’s Silence on Religious Diversity]

What particularly offended the students, as they indicated in their letter, was an article in which I said that Middle Eastern politics at the tribal and pre-modern level was violent and ruthless. I needn’t have qualified it, given the recent demonstration of enslavement and beheading by the Islamic State and the gassing and bombing of citizens by the Assad regime. To the students, it was never a matter of what the truth was. What mattered was that I was throwing shade on the region with which the students identified, rather than painting it as the home of beauty and virtue.

How can we explain the fanaticism of activist Muslim students? It is in no way a matter of human rights, civil liberties, democracy, and indigenous rights, as they claim for Western audiences. In Arabic and Persian, Urdu, and Javanese, Muslim authorities demand that Islam be supreme, and those of other religions be subservient, dhimma, or else enslaved or killed. The independent and self-governing Israelis are immorally disobedient to Islamic supremacism.

As well, the land of the Ancient Hebrews, which was conquered by Muslim Bedouin armies in the seventh century, must, like all land once controlled by Muslims—think also of Spain and Sicily—remain under the control of Muslims. The Israelis disobey Islam on this ground as well. This too is why Muslims are angry at Israel. And to make matters worse, the Jews, the most despised of all when under Muslim control, have had the audacity to beat Arab Muslim warriors in a series of wars, the embarrassment and shame of which must be canceled by conquest of Israel.

In sum, thanks to woke DEI policymakers, enforcers, activists, supremacists, and pro-terrorist Muslims, Jews in North America are being crushed.

Image by andybirkey — Adobe Stock — Asset ID#: 568115709