Anti-Semitism on campus

If someone were to tell me that they were shocked about the anti-Semitic annotations found in that history book, my automatic response would be “but why?”. Contrary to what some people might believe, ‘the Jewish question’ is not a bygone of World War II. It’s always been present and it’s never been alone – for example Islamophobia.

While recently there appears to be a spike in the amount of anti-Semitic people and groups coming to the fore (i.e. Ken Livingstone), anti-Semitism will always be sustained behind doors, behind pages, behind our mobile screens with those who continue to share its views or remain silent about it.

As long as these anti-Semitic comments are made with a barrier to protect those who wrote them, they will perpetuate a society in which it is OK to make hurtful, dumb and highly insensitive comments such as “Surprise, surprise, yet another Jew!”
This is the common keyboard-warrior/troll mentality and we’ve already seen it in play over the past few months.

Contrary to what some people might believe, ‘the Jewish question’ is not a bygone of World War II.

The racist comment on a Warwick student’s bananas written in, no-doubt, a fit of giggles and euphoria as the guilty party believed themselves to be immune from accusation and punishment; and the anti-Semitic tweets found on yet another Warwick student’s profile. These were also written with a certain sense of stupid joviality and an ignorant sense of protection and finally, the senseless student who, not only wrote in a library book in pen by the way, but also knew that tracking back the comments would be practically impossible and therefore, totally worth it.

There doesn’t seem to be an easy solution and the pessimist in me can’t see any of this – this incessant bullying of those who are different in some way – stopping at all, or at least, not any time soon. It makes my heart drop when I think about it – the injustice of it all. When you look at the stories of the ‘Other’, those who aren’t of a Western religion or a Western country, you cannot begin to fathom what it must be like to live like some of them.

When you look at the stories of the ‘Other’, those who aren’t of a Western religion or a Western country, you cannot begin to fathom what it must be like to live like some of them.

Holocaust survivor Henry Flescher describes his experiences on a Reddit forum called “Ask Me Anything”. He speaks of witnessing a friend “hanged because he was using a telephone wire as a belt to hold up his pants. They hung him and he fell back down. They put him back up and hung him again”. That amount of pain and suffering is incomprehensible to those who live privileged and generally comfortable lives, including the coward who so insensitively wrote, “Belsen was a gas, right?”