It was billed as a rally for students to demand free tuition from public institutions of higher education and lodge a cornucopia of grievances.
Instead, some giddy demonstrators devolved into a pack of rabid haters.
“Death to Jews! Death to Jews!” members of the crowd shrieked.
This didn’t happen in Germany in the 1930s, nor was it a modern-day ISIS extravaganza. The hatefest occurred last year at the Million Student March at Manhattan’s Hunter College, part of the City University of New York.
It was supposed to be an exercise in economic rage against the machine, taking place on campuses throughout the United States. But the Hunter event resembled a pogrom, with scared Jews slandered, scapegoated and made to fear for their physical safety.
Welcome to today’s colleges and universities, many of them venues in which Jew-bashing is not just tolerated, it’s tacitly encouraged by the frequent inaction and support of woefully politically correct administrators and radical leftist professors.
“This has metastasized into a cancer,” Charles Jacobs, special consultant on the fascinating new documentary film “Hate Spaces: The Politics of Intolerance,” tells me. The title evokes the “safe spaces” — rooms stocked with such stuff as crayons and videos of frolicking puppies — set up on campuses to shield students from “microaggressions,” or ideas considering too “triggering” for delicate flowers to contemplate.
But with all the nonsensical coddling of infantilized kiddies, few places of learning are free from threats, harassment and verbal and sometimes physical attacks on Jews. As my own Jewish daughter prepares to go to college next year, this frightens me to the core.
Fighting the power is proving elusive.
Hunter’s president and student leaders released a statement a day after the rally declaring they “strongly condemn anti-Semitic comments.” Oh, that’ll stop them.
But in a CUNY-commissioned report released in September, lawyers Barbara Jones and Paul Shechtman of Bracewell LLP essentially concluded that they were shocked — shocked! — to find that anti-Semitic words and deeds have befouled four of the system’s campuses. Then the kicker: “Much of what we have reported is protected speech.”
Imagine the public outcry if a report about attacks waged against Muslims, blacks, Latinos, women, gays, lesbians, transgenders or members of any other protected group were deemed “protected speech.”
The concerted assault on Jews and the American value of inclusion masquerades as anti-Israel activity. But the two faces of hate are one and the same.
According to the documentary, put out by the Americans for Peace and Tolerance organization, of which Jacobs is president, anti-Jewish unrest at Hunter and elsewhere is ginned up by well-funded organizations with missions to destroy Israel, particularly Students for Justice in Palestine.
The groups promote the sickening international Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement — BDS. The aim is to stamp out trade with, and investments in, Israeli companies and to end cultural and academic exchanges with the Jewish state, the only country in the Middle East in which women enjoy equal rights and homosexuals don’t fear being thrown off tall buildings.
Two more examples:
A screening of a pro-Israel documentary this year at the University of California, Irvine, drew protesters who blocked the exit paths, chanted, “Long live the intifada,” and prompted attendees to fear for their safety and call campus police.
Mock “eviction notices” were slipped under dormitory room doors of more than 2,000 students believed to be Jewish at New York University in 2014 by members of a pro-Palestinian group, ordering them to leave.
The cruel prank has spread to at least a dozen other campuses.
“Hate Spaces” is executive-produced, directed and written by Ralph Avi Goldwasser, who 12 years ago helped create the doc “Columbia Unbecoming,” in which 14 students and graduates of Columbia University describe being intimidated by professors for expressing pro-Israel views.
“Since then, it’s only gotten worse,” Goldwasser tells me.
A 2013 workshop held at Yale University promoted “sensitivity,” even toward participants who’d indulged in or fantasized about such fetishes as bestiality. Yet what protections are afforded to those of the Jewish faith?
None.
Near the doc’s end, Alan Dershowitz, a Harvard Law School professor emeritus, says, “We have to do more, we have to fight harder . . . because the facts are on our side, morality is on our side, history is on our side.”
I can only hope truth prevails.
Court puts children in thief’s ‘care’
A New York City mom put her 5-year-old son in “imminent danger,” a judge ruled, by stuffing two stolen coats under his clothes and making him wear a pair of boots for which she hadn’t paid in a $2,700 shoplifting spree at a Bloomingdale’s in 2012.
Now the momster has been granted permission to possibly endanger a new set of kids.
Members of a New York state appellate court voted last week to reverse the ruling. So Natasha Welsh’s name won’t appear on a child-abuse registry, which should help her find work — in child care!
She should be banned from having access to children.
Politician-made traffic jams are deadly
New York City’s maddening gridlock is not caused entirely by lane closures around Trump Tower or the Rockefeller Plaza Christmas tree. It was engineered intentionally by those in the administrations of former Mayor Mike Bloomberg and current Mayor Bill de Blasio, sources told The Post. The proliferation of bike lanes, pedestrian plazas and avenues from which turns are prohibited were created to make motorists so miserable, they’d use mass transit or bicycles, or walk.
But pedestrian deaths have ticked up recently, and there have been frightening incidents of people being shoved or falling onto tracks at jammed subway stations, sometimes fatally. Watch yourselves, people.
Most of us not in office don’t have access to helicopters.
‘This Is’ a great show
The best new show on television features no doctors, lawyers, cops, firefighters, politicians and not a single zombie. NBC’s surprise hit dramedy, “This Is Us,’’ is a family show — don’t scoff! — featuring a sterling, multiracial cast, writing that does not insult one’s intelligence and enough plot twists for a pretzel factory.
It’s heading for a break after Tuesday night’s episode. I can’t wait for it to return to the airwaves. It’s that good.