Teen Vogue calls resistance to campus antisemitism racist, violent
April 30, 2024
In a recent article, Teen Vogue grossly misrepresents pushback to antisemitism on college campuses nationwide as racist, “brutal[ly]” violent attacks on students’ innocent exercise of free speech rights. The article continues to give its trusting readers the moral high ground on Israel, emboldening them to double down on their antisemitism.
Students at some of the United States’ most prestigious colleges are under attack. As they openly spout antisemitism, Teen Vogue’s news and politics editor, Lex McMenamin, tells readers not to believe their lying eyes. The antisemitic students are the true victims, not the countless Jews who have endured their bigotry.
That’s because the bigots in this case are largely students of color, making those opposed to their bigotry racists, naturally.
“This spring at Northwestern, two students, both of whom are Black, faced criminal misdemeanor charges after they made a parody version of the campus newspaper focused on Gaza; those charges were dropped after public outcry,” McMenamin explains. The public cried racism, calling the charges an “example of over-policing of Black students,” according to the Chicago Tribune.
Teen Vogue quotes a University of Michigan professor who asks, “Who’s doing most of the protesting? Overwhelmingly, it’s students of color — Black students, in particular — and at this moment we see a lot of Arab and Palestinian students. You can’t have an institution that espouses a commitment to democratic representation and political engagement that doesn’t provide and hold space for political dissent.”
America’s most powerful institutional thought leaders should mainstream antisemitism because their antisemites are students of color, particularly Black students. The stain of antisemitism is merely harmless “political dissent,” far less harmful than the mainstream conservatism that these same institutions have long abhorred, much to the dismay of this free-speech champion of a professor.
Teen Vogue’s claims that resistance to antisemitism is racist deliberately come after it already portrayed such resistance as violent. Earlier in her article, McMenamin writes that 20 “pro-Palestine” students were arrested by “riot police” at Pomona College in what one arrestee describes as a “brutal show of force.”
Pomona “chose to militarize campus in this way,” the student says.
Readers are thus misled to believe that opposition to antisemitism is violently racist.
Before October 7 of last year, antisemitism was generally seen for what it is: bigotry. Quite literally by the night of October 7, antisemitism had become more acceptable among those who had co-opted it as the new voice of the unheard. Antisemitism is now A-OK. If you disagree, antisemites will bully you into submission by defaming you as a violent racist and if that doesn’t work, they’ll try to kill you.