Here’s the problem with the “victim mentality”: Those who have it generally ignore genuine victims.
“Since the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation began publishing its annual audit of hate crimes in 1997, crimes targeting Jews have constituted the majority of all religiously motivated crimes every single year,” according to the AMCHA Initiative, a human rights group in Santa Cruz, California dedicated to protecting Jewish Students. Arguably, college campuses are at the epicenter, as AMCHA puts it in their annual report on anti-Semitism on campus, of this trend.
AMCHA looked at incidents at the 113 U.S. schools Jews were most likely to go to. “Anti-Semitic activity on campuses most popular with Jewish students continued to rise, increasing by 40% from 2015 to 2016,” AMCHA reported. Among these schools were: Vassar, the University of Chicago, Northwestern, Ohio State and Berkeley.
At these institutions:
- “During a student government meeting deliberating over an anti-Israel divestment resolution at Vassar College, one Jewish student was jeered at by divestment proponents when she stated, in tears, how she had been emotionally traumatized by the BDS campaign. Another Jewish student who talked about Israel’s founding in the wake of the Holocaust was accused of using the Holocaust as a political tool to justify ‘the “genocide” of another people.’”
- “At the University of Chicago, a Hillel-sponsored event featuring an Arab Israeli speaker was disrupted by protesters, who shouted down the speaker to the point that the event had to be prematurely terminated. Protesters were reported to have threatened to kill Eid if he did not stop speaking, and in a video of the event a young man can be heard yelling in Arabic, ‘I’m going to destroy this place!’”
- “A Jewish student at Northwestern University was prevented from participating in an anti-racism march on campus by the march’s organizers, who said to her: ‘You support Israel, so you cannot also support us.’”
- “An Ohio State University student threatened to murder students on his campus if the student government did not approve an anti-Israel divestment resolution, tweeting: ‘Yo if USG messes this up tomorrow I’m coming for everyone’s life tomorrow. Every one. Every single, blessed life. Every one.’”
- “After several Jewish groups, including Hillel, protested the fact that an antiZionist course was being taught at University of California Berkeley, a number of posters appeared on campus that maligned the groups with classic anti-Semitic tropes, claiming: ‘Jewish bullies smash free speech at Cal and are pledged $38 billion. Attention Non-Jews: PAY UP AND SHUT UP!’”