Khymani James is a student at Columbia University. Defining itself as queer and black but apparently little aware of Hamas’s doctrine on sexual mores, he compared in an interview broadcast on social networks “the extermination of the Zionists” to the massacre of whites during the Haitian revolution. If the video in questionwhich you have to watch to understand the extent of the disaster, was a hoax, you wouldn’t believe it.
That James partly disavowed his words changes nothing in the matter. For months, the Ivy League has amazed the world. It is no longer that we want to liberate Palestine “from the river to the sea” – as if it was not always clear that this slogan was genocidal – we are telling American Jews to return to Poland and we threatens them with a rain of rockets. We even prevented them from accessing libraries, and that’s the word “yahoud” (“Jew”, in Arabic) which resounded with ferocity on the Columbia campus.
In this context, the treatment reserved by the New York university for Shai Davidai, assistant professor at the Columbia Business School – and born in Israel – contrasts strikingly with that of his colleague Joseph Massad, pro-Palestinian political theorist. The first had his card deactivated – supposedly to protect him – after students denounced his “threatening” attitude: videos which have circulated show rather a young man tested, damaged in everything in which he believed until then. Shai Davidai, a proud progressive, tries to make the protesters see reason, or to warn parents that their children are not safe at a university where cruelty towards civilians, if they are Israeli – or Jews – is approved by student organizations. Joseph Massad, for his part, hailed the butchery of October 7 as something of“awesome”, wonderful. He still teaches. Universities which have made it a real “violence” not to designate plural pronouns “they” a person who, born a man, would today consider herself a woman, tolerated such calls for carnage for months.
The recent police raid on the Columbia campus seems to resonate with that of April 20, 1968, when more than 700 students protesting, in particular, against the construction of a segregated gymnasium, were arrested and beaten. The comparison is, however, misleading: the Jews, many of those who demonstrated at that time, were not asked to return to Europe or at the very least to show an anti-Zionist credentials. Above all, the peak of brutality experienced by American universities is part of what could be described as “neo-segregationism”, unconditional support for Hamas being only one of its forms. For example, Columbia students recently received their diplomas in separate ceremonies for Asians, blacks, Hispanics, Native Americans, and the poor. (“first-generation and/or low-income community”), and for homosexuals, transsexuals… The battle for civil rights and mixed race has given way to a balkanization of campuses, while the demand for fluidity has transformed into a perhaps unprecedented rigidification of identity.
It should be noted that the only community whose singular character is not recognized is precisely the Jewish: not white enough at the time when the numerus clausus prohibited them from academic success, they are now too white. Ivy League universities have an unofficial “negative” discrimination policy which is merely a corollary of their official “positive” discrimination policy towards other groups.
We compare these facts with those of the 1930s. This analogy is also misleading, if only because Israel is a state capable of defending itself. Furthermore, this time, Jews agree with the anti-Semites, to the point of having organized an Easter evening, an “anti-Zionist seder” [NDLR : le séder est le repas rituel au cœur des célébrations de la Pâque juive], April 22, in Columbia. This kind of alliance and this certainty of being on the side of the good ones is more reminiscent of Bolshevik totalitarianism, when Jews did not hesitate to deny their traditions and their most “backward” co-religionists, even if it meant sending them to the gulag in the name progress and justice.
But another religious ceremony made more noise: the Islamic call to prayer resonated in front of the large Butler library, a stone’s throw from the Pulitzer journalism school. The video that has been circulating shows us a group of students miming strong spiritual attention, wearing keffiyehs and, for many of them, this surgical mask that has become the symbol of American progressivism. We must also stop for a moment on this sign that we also saw flourishing during the pro-Palestinian demonstrations at Sciences Po Paris, proof that France now follows fashions rather than launching them. In reaction to Trump, it has become a political marker – even, in some cases, “LGBTQ”: is progressivism nothing more than hygienicism? Moreover, at Columbia as elsewhere, there is a confluence between the “progressive” mask and the Islamic veil, both being perhaps understood as a way of escaping the “gaze” – to the “look”, especially male. It is also against the background of this social and even aesthetic denial that we must understand the latest events. They are all the more worrying: the Ivy League protesters are not the new hippies, they are soldier-monks.
The shift of an elite towards murderous populism
What are the causes of all this vehemence? In addition to ignorance, it must be emphasized that American universities have seen a neo-scholastic culture unfold within them, particularly under the bastardized influence of French Theory. After all, Houria Bouteldja’s racist book White people, Jews and us was published by MIT Press and prefaced by Cornel West, who teaches at Union Theological Seminary, a liberal Protestant seminary linked to Columbia. However, some distinctions should be made: if it was at Columbia that the Palestinian-American critic Edward Saïd taught and developed his critique of “orientalism”, we must not forget that this “Renaissance man”, friend of the Israeli Daniel Barenboim, was also, at a time when the teaching staff still included many Jews from old Europe, a safeguard against the kind of fanaticism that we witness today. Unlike Massad, he never dehumanized the “Zionists”, to whose demands he could even recognize a vague legitimacy. In truth, neither Said nor Jacques Derrida – who was Jewish and was not anti-Zionist – had foreseen these excesses, but a sectarian and dogmatic reading of their work partly explains them.
As at the end of the Middle Ages, this scholasticism gave rise to a witch hunt. We no longer debate the sex of angels, but, with Judith Butler, whether a 3-year-old girl who wants to urinate standing up is good “female” ; or if today’s Palestinians are not, ultimately, the “real Jews”. This is in any case the opinion of Massad, who, like a good scholastic, sells his students a new theology of substitution [NDLR : doctrine chrétienne selon laquelle le christianisme se serait substitué au judaïsme dans le dessein de Dieu], while claiming that homosexuality is an imperialist and Western invention, which does not seem to bother them. We see that the “disorder in gender” especially justifies, as Butler did, when women of flesh and blood – Jews – are raped and tortured, to turn a blind eye, even to justify their torture. “Me too… unless you’re a Jew.”
It would be wrong to believe that these caricatured theories only concern a small circle of enthusiasts: the universities of the Ivy League are not our literature or philosophy departments and, tomorrow, these enthusiasts will be lawyers, journalists, directors, or even bankers and senators.
But it would also be wrong to reduce these facts to their ideological dimension. Aloneness through the systematic destruction of traditional places of sociability and exchange explains a good part of contemporary radicalism: the same line runs from Khymani James to the killers “incel” [contraction d'”involuntary celibate“, célibataires involontaires, communauté d’hommes connue pour sa haine des femmes et sa violence à leur encontre] campuses. The reign of screens, which reinforces this loneliness, is a fact that should not be underestimated, and it intensified during the pandemic, when schools were replaced by TikTok at least as much as Zoom. It is also remarkable that, if President Biden seems to want to ban the Chinese social network, Trump has indicated that he would do nothing if he is re-elected. We remember that a few months ago, following October 7, a vast campaign to rehabilitate Bin Laden had emerged on the Chinese social network, with young people simpering that in view of his anti-imperialist teachings he could not to be the villain they had been described as.
Another connection must be made. On January 6, 2021, Trump challenged his rival’s election, encouraging a coup horde to invade the Capitol. The Americans are a people only through their Constitution, and they saw it trampled. Doesn’t the call to prayer that rang out at Columbia echo this other episode of fanaticism? If this were the case, we would have witnessed, in two years, the collapse of the country’s most venerable institutions: on the one hand, the symbol of its political representation, due to a populist president but supported by so-called “conservatives”; on the other hand, the sustainability of its knowledge, this time due to its intellectual elite, which has moved from progressivism to another form of murderous populism.
* David Haziza is a normalien and a doctor in French and comparative literature (Columbia). A researcher and essayist, he works at the crossroads of religious studies and literature. This year he is teaching European history at Yeshiva University in New York.
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