A former college administrator wrote that campus antisemitism, on display over the past weeks in reaction to the Hamas attack on Israel, is deeply embedded in bad DEI thinking and policy.
“Toxic DEI ideology deliberately stokes hatred toward Israel and the Jewish people,” former DEI director Tabia Lee wrote in a New York Post op-ed last week.
Lee was fired from her administrator job at De Anza College in California earlier this year after objecting to some “antiracist” and gender ideologies, The College Fix reported. She filed a lawsuit against her former employer in July,
In the Post article, Lee wrote that she “made the mistake” at De Anza of trying to foster an “inclusive” environment for all, including Jewish students.
Jewish students told her that the campus had long been antisemitic.
In response, Lee hosted Jewish speakers, for which her colleagues called her a “dirty Zionist” and neglected to promote the events, she wrote.
She went on to detail the roots of antisemitism in “diversity, equity and inclusion”:
At its worst, DEI is built on the unshakable belief that the world is divided into two groups of people: the oppressors and the oppressed.
Jews are categorically placed in the oppressor category, while Israel is branded a “genocidal, settler, colonialist state.”
In this worldview, criticizing Israel and the Jewish people is not only acceptable but praiseworthy.
(Just as it’s OK to attack America and white people.)
If you don’t go after them — or worse, if you defend them — you’re actively abetting racist oppression.
I have never encountered a more hostile environment toward the members of any racial, ethnic or religious group.
I was ultimately fired by De Anza College, and I suspect my defense of Jewish students played a part.
This all took place before Hamas launched its attack.
Now, DEI-focused colleges are “hurting Jewish students with their silence, their moral equivocation about terrorism against Israel or their outright praise of the terrorists,” she wrote.
MORE: Stanford prof segregates Jewish students
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