Mainstream journalists and politicians have engaged in a campaign of mass slander against U.S. college students protesting the Gaza genocide. Their “antisemitism” Big Lie echoes the racist hate campaigns of the past, inciting hostility toward young people whose only crime is their dedication to justice.

A newly published survey provides some important context for these protests and undermines the smear campaign against the protesters.

Students Are Not Antisemitic

The Chicago Project on Security and Threats (CPOST), a project of the University of Chicago, recently published “Understanding Campus Fears After October 7 and How to Reduce Them,” subtitled “a non-partisan analysis of Antisemitism and Islamophobia among College Students and American Adults.” Robert A. Pape, political scientist and CPOST’s director, writes that its findings “are an opportunity to re-center the national discussion around students and away from politics.” Let’s hope so.

Understandably, Pape and his colleagues focus on the steps that should be taken to make all students feel safe on campus, regardless of religion, ethnicity, or politics. In doing so, their report includes important findings that deserve wider attention.

Their “antisemitism’ Big Lie echoes the racist hate campaigns of the past, inciting hostility toward young people whose only crime is their dedication to justice.

Is there a “climate of antisemitism” on campus? CPOST’s study found that college students are less Islamophobic than the general population, but they are not more antisemitic. The level of student bias against Jews is the same as their bias against Muslims, but no greater.

Why, then, is there a national debate about campus antisemitism and none about the comparable scourge of Islamophobia? What message does that send to the Muslim students whose fears are being ignored?

The Protests Aren’t Antisemitic, Either

House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries wants a vote on the “Countering Antisemitism Act,” but neither he nor the president have proposed similar safeguards against Islamophobia. House Speaker Mike Johnson, who said that Columbia protesters have begun “to threaten lives and intimidate and harass people,” has an even more draconian antisemitism bill—also without plans to address Islamophobia.

President Biden, like the others, has condemned what he calls “antisemitic protests.” That slur is challenged by the Chicago study. The authors found that “while college students are not more antisemitic than the general population,” they are “more anti-zionist.” They also found that “prejudicial antisemitism and anti-zionism are largely separate phenomena,” with an “overwhelming” absence of any overlap between antisemitism and a negative view of Israel.

We’ve know for decades that the lie which equates anti-zionism with antisemitism serves a political goal by suppressing speech. We now have evidence to back it up.

“From the River to the Sea”

One protest slogan has been cited over and over as “antisemitic,” with accusers claiming it calls for genocide against Jews: “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.”

Most students do not use it in anything approaching a genocidal way. The CPOST study found that only 14 percent of Muslim students, or roughly one in seven, interpret that slogan “to mean the expulsion or genocide of Israeli Jews.” That figure is too high, as is the 13 percent of students who believe that violence against Muslims is sometimes justified. But it also tells us that most people who use the slogan are not calling for harm against anyone.

Does antisemitism exist among [protesters]? Since it is pervasive in this society, the answer is yes. But amplifying a comment or two from a couple of isolated individuals is a totalitarian smear tactic.

That makes sense, since the phrase can be interpreted nonviolently in at least two ways. One is that a two-state solution should include the territory ceded to Palestine in 1948, which touched both the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. Another is that Israel and Palestine should become a single, democratic, non-racial and non-theocratic state, with rights and safety for all. Under that interpretation, “Palestine will be free” is no more a call to genocide than “South Africa will be free” was a call to kill whites during the anti-apartheid struggle.

The study does note that the slogan makes two-thirds of Jewish students feel unsafe. For that reason, Pape recommends avoiding it.

But we now have confirmation that campus officials, politicians, and the media are misleading the public about that phrase. They’re endangering the protesting students and worsening the fears of pro-Israeli students. They should stop.

Conclusion

The political scientist Bernard Cohen once wrote that, while the press isn’t always successful and telling people what to think, “it is stunningly successful in telling people what to think about.” The student protests are a textbook example. The debate around these protests is focused on the false charge of antisemitism, not on the moral challenge raised by the protesters.

Does antisemitism exist among them? Since it is pervasive in this society, the answer is yes. But amplifying a comment or two from a couple of isolated individuals is a totalitarian smear tactic. Republicans did it with the racist Willie Horton ads in 1988. Trump does it when he highlights crimes allegedly committed by immigrants. And politicians, journalists, and college administrators are doing it today with their charges of protester antisemitism.

CPOST’s moderate recommendations for easing campus fears include, “Clear and immediate communication by college leaders condemning violence and intimidation by students and against students on their campuses.” Instead, those leaders are ordering police violence against protesting students, as they and the political/media elite stoke more fear and hatred against them—even in the wake of the anti-protestor mob violence at UCLA. That isn’t just wrong; it’s a dereliction of duty.

As leaders, these prominent individuals have been entrusted with the care and protection of the nation’s young people. Instead, they’re slandering them and putting them at risk. Why? To distract us from a genocide.

The people who make, report, and teach history should take note: it has never been kind to those who spread Big Lies. It won’t be this time, either.

Wall Street donors, corporate CEOs, "Never Trump" Republicans, "Lincoln Project" consultants, "National Security Professionals for Biden": many have expressed revulsion for Donald Trump, the man and the president. It's certainly understandable. Just this week, Trump minimized his own illness, an act of self-aggrandizement will almost certainly result in more deaths.

But how many elites are repelled, at least in part, because Trump is publicly acting out impulses they hide in themselves?

"We don't need a 'moonshot' for what ails us. We need an earth shot—a range of investments grounded in science, environmental health, and social justice."

They Did It Their Way

America's oligarchs usually see themselves as victors in the game of life, a game played on a level playing field. They don't see the advantages—of race, of birth, of inheritance, or neurotic acquisitiveness—that led to their success. They hide their own misdeeds behind closed doors, while using the media as a canvas for flattering public self-portraits.

Donald Trump is their picture of Dorian Gray.

Sure, some of them express horror at his behavior. They may even feel that horror on a visceral level. But the things Trump expresses—the vanity, the competitiveness, the sense that his success (such as it is) is his accomplishment alone—are core beliefs for most of the people who run this country. Most politicians succeed through competition and self-promotion, and the business world's biggest successes are self-selected for sociopathy.

The greed, the bullying, the sexual predation: they hush theirs up, while Trump parades his in public. He is the Id of the American ruling class, the uninhibited creature summoned up from the darkest recesses – of their psyches, their campaign contributions, and their SEC filings.

Wrestling the Monster

When it comes to Covid-19, Trump acted with reckless disregard for his own well-being. Worse, he endangered others. When he became ill, he used the people's resources extravagantly, from helicopter rides to experimental drugs of limited availability that are typically reserved for more severe cases. Then, after having imbibed all the resources one body can absorb, he said the disease was "nothing to be afraid of."

As Washington Post columnist Monica Hesse observed, "President Trump's Monday message to his citizens in conjunction with his own diagnosis, which was, essentially: Avoiding the virus is for suckers."

It's easy to respond to Trump with equivalent snark—to say, for example, "I like presidents who don't get Covid." But to do that is to downplay the deeply corrosive nature of the president's behavior.

Predictably, Trump's acolytes echoed their idol. They attributed his return to the White House to some personal strengths or virtues, and not to the lavish public resources expended on his behalf. Hesse lists several of them, from Sen. Kelly Loeffler's "COVID stood NO chance against @realDonaldTrump!" to Rep. Matt Gaetz' "President Trump won't have to recover from COVID. COVID will have to recover from President Trump."

They talk as if Covid-19 were a movie monster that can be defeated through hand-to-hand combat and sheer force of will. But the coronavirus is an organism whose spread and lethality occurs within a matrix of forces, from collective behavior (wear your damn mask!) to individual health and socio-economic status. It's the product of communal failures that range from economic inequality and racism to the absence of public health insurance.

Trump's comments are an insult to the memory of 210,000 dead, none of whom bear the culpability for their own deaths that Trump does. His words, and those of his minions, hide the fact that this pandemic is a communal failure. It will take a community effort—local, national, and global—to fully cure it.

The Other Disease

Trump still has Covid-19, as of this writing. But he has another disease, too, one that's even more corrosive to the public health: the disease of toxic individualism. Most of his party has it, as do many Democrats. The business class is a hot zone for it. It's hard to name a corporation, bank, or CEO that hasn't acted selfishly in this crisis.

Predictably, billionaires got much richer. How did they do it? Some snapshots:

Big Tech reportedly used the pandemic to double down on monopolization.

Nursing homes backed by private equity had higher rates of Covid-19 infections and deaths.

Vulture capitalists made a fortune off the pandemic by short-selling commercial real estate.

Wells Fargo reportedly gamed PPP loans.

Jeff Bezos, who scored especially big on the pandemic, exploited his workers and (through his corporation) targeted union organizers.

So did Boeing, which was saved from its own mismanagement—and from the deaths of over 600 passengers from a botched tech rollout—by the government. Uber, Lyft, AirBnB—they cut every corner they could.

Vectors

But our culture continues to uplift corporate CEOs, without acknowledging the true formula behind their successes. And by formula, I mean something that looks like this:

(public resources + employee labor + own sociopathic drives/their greed + investor shares)

They use the wealth thus accumulated to corrupt our political process. The Republicans of today are largely inseparable from big-corporate culture. And when the Democratic Party tells members of Congress to spend four hours a day raising money, it's telling them to spend 28 hours a week steeped in this worldview—a soul-killing task if ever there was one.

And with every hour spent on a donor call, the disease of toxic individualism spreads.

Houston, We Have a Problem

Would the genial Joe Biden be a better steward of this system than Donald Trump? I believe so. But he and the Democrats are still constrained in their thinking by corporatized individualism. Take the "cancer moonshot," headed by Vice President Biden at the close of the Obama era. It was a touching effort, when seen in the context of Beau Biden's tragic death. But the name and framing evokes the Apollo missions of an earlier era—missions that were presented as the stories of individual heroes, most with military backgrounds, who conquered the skies (with the help of massive public spending on new technologies from defense contractors).

We'll need to spend more on cancer drugs, of course, and they should belong to the public that funded their development. But we already know how to cure many cancers. We can cure some with better nutrition. We can cure others by cleaning up the air and water, especially in our poorer communities. We know how to cure them – but our elites don't want to do what must be done.

We don't need a "moonshot" for what ails us. We need an earth shot—a range of investments grounded in science, environmental health, and social justice.

The Cure

The same is true of Covid-19. Yes, we need a vaccine, and better drug treatments. But we also need to make medical care—the same care Trump received, or close to it—available to everyone, as Sen. Bernie Sanders and Rep. Pramila Jayapal have proposed. We need to eliminate racism and ageism in the delivery of care. We need to distance, and to wear masks. If we did those things, we would save more lives today.

It will take longer—a lot longer—to cure our toxic individualism. We can start by naming it and diagnosing it: in Trump, in our culture, in our politics, in ourselves. This national soul-sickness may have begun with our elites, but it's up to us to cure it—in ourselves, and in each other. The mechanics of that cure will take many forms, but it begins with words almost too trite to mention, words like—dare I say it?—"love."

That may have sounded like fuzzy-headed hippie sentiment last year. Who knows? Maybe it was, then. Now, our lives depend on it.

Richard (RJ) Eskow is Senior Advisor for Health and Economic Justice at Social Security Works and the host of The Zero Hour with RJ Eskow on Free Speech TV. Follow him on Twitter: @rjeskow