AIM Antisemitism Accountability Project billboards even more campuses across the country
January 30, 2024
Accuracy in Media is working against antisemitism on American college campuses again. We’re taking the show on the road.
Our infamous mobile billboards will appear again at Harvard and Columbia, and several other campuses across the country: University of California at Berkeley, University of Colorado at Boulder, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and the University of Southern California. These have all had recent outbreaks of antisemitism, and it’s time to aim our shame at the people responsible.
This all will take place today and tomorrow when AIM hosts national days of activism to fight antisemitism.
This work is essential because these campuses are infested with antisemitism. We have proven time and again how holding students and faculty accountable is effective – and if the university won’t hold them accountable, we will.
We’ll be sending the billboard trucks to these places, naming and shaming those who spout these vile views.
At Harvard, for example, they appointed a professor who has signed on to Israel being an apartheid state to head the antisemitism committee. Even a past Harvard president thought that wasn’t good enough. At Columbia, the most outspoken antisemitic groups (Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voice for Peace) were ordered off campus. But no enforcement is being done, and little to nothing seems to have changed, leaving Jewish students in despair.
Berkeley has long had problems with antisemitism, but is now being sued by Jewish student groups for “unchecked” antisemitism. That is, the college authorities are not protecting Jewish students.
There’s at least one claim that the CU Boulder ethnic studies department has gone “full Goebbels”. Yes, even as horrifying as that is to consider.
At UNC Chapel Hill, things are so bad that even the Department of Education is investigating illegal discrimination against Jewish students. That is, not just a bit of shouting on campus, but full-on civil rights violations potentially. Matters are no better at USC.
We’ll be running the billboard trucks in all these locations. Not just because it’s fun, but because it works. The fun is in being able to hire a U-Haul to help Claudine Gay move out of Harvard’s presidential mansion. But our earlier work was instrumental in raising the issue into the public eye and making that resignation necessary. Exposing antisemitism works in being able to control it. Clearly, we need to up our work at Columbia even though we were instrumental in getting the law school dean to quit. We also aided in the process that made UPenn’s president stand down.
Naming and shaming is important on two different levels. First, there’s that personal sting when the antisemites see themselves being shamed in front of their own community. This will make at least some of them think about what they’re supporting – as has happened at Harvard and other places where students have rejected their former views and asked us to delete their names from the roll of shame. At a higher level, it gains media coverage, which shows the country as a whole the problem that exists in colleges. A problem that we’ve all got to do something about – even if it is simply to shame those who hold such views out of having them.
There is that old saying sunlight is the great disinfectant. We can go further, evil is able to thrive in the darkness, it’s only when the rock is picked up that we can see what is scurrying around underneath it. We need to – and we are, because it needs to be done – shining that light at the evils thriving in the darkness of college campuses.