Good news on the BDS front

I have made the comment a number of times that our communication flow is often easily hijacked by small groups of motivated advocates, generating headlines and controversies unrelated to real concerns and interests of Americans. This is especially true of some of our more prestigious universities where BLM, safe spaces, micro-aggressions, boycotting of western civilization, cultural appropriation, etc. are insistently pushed agendas having nothing to do with the student body at large. They are issues for tiny minorities of students who are simply shouting louder than everyone else.

One of the more organized efforts to sponsor bigotry, hatred, and anti-semitism on campuses in the past ten years, has been the BDS movement. BDS stands for Boycott, Divest, and Sanction and is an effort to subvert Israel and foster anti-semitism masquerading as anti-zionism.

As is not uncommon at the fringes, it is a hate group which tries to cloak itself in moral righteousness.

They recently scored a victory at University of Michigan, getting the student council to pass a BDS resolution, 23-17. This is shockingly unremarked. It is as if the KKK were organized on campus and getting the student government to pass a resolution condemning the NAACP. Especially as anti-semitism is the second most common form of hate crime after race hate crimes.

Bad as it seems, though, there is reason to be less concerned. All of the above is true but a recent report, The Limits of Hostility: Students Report on Antisemitism and Anti-Israel Sentiment at Four US Universities by Graham Wright, Michelle Shain, Shahar Hecht, and Leonard Saxe reveals that:

Support for BDS is rare. At each of these schools support for an academic boycott of Israel was virtually nonexistent among Jewish students and was rare among non-Jewish students.

Small, vocal, well organized groups are driving these outcomes, not the student body itself. At University of Michigan, while nearly 60% of the student government representatives voted for BDS, only 7% of the non-Jewish student body endorsed or strongly endorsed the BDS decision. 7% at Harvard, 8% at Penn, 12% at Brandeis.

The anti-semitism on campus is not all that it seems. It is the product of a tiny fevered minority of students punching way above their weight and driving an agenda few others support. Consistent with the findings from The vox populi of Google Trends.