Southern Poverty Law Center says it cares about hate -- just not the kind directed at Jews. That's the only logical conclusion FRC can draw from the lack of attention SPLC is drawing to the incredible spike in anti-Semitic incidents on U.S. campuses.
The Anti-Defamation League was just as surprised as we were to see the spike of hostility toward Jewish students -- "from swastikas on school walls to bullying, harassment, assaults, and bomb threats." ADL President Jonathan Greenblatt, who said the group had been tracking these patterns since the 1970s, told reporters, "We've simply never seen anything like this." According to his numbers, there's been a 90 percent increase in these acts on university or college campuses.
Those numbers certainly jive with what FRC has been tracking in its new report, "Left-Wing Anti-Semitism: The Greatest Campus Threat Is Ignored by the SPLC." Most Americans, we point out, would be mortified to learn that the "colleges and universities to which they pay a king's ransom have become safe havens for an increasingly noticeable anti-Semitism that has produced an environment of bullying, intimidation, and fear for Jewish students and academics. This newly minted anti-Semitism has entwined itself into the fabric of many educational institutions via a predominant multicultural ideology that pronounces Israel to be its enemy." To add insult to injury for American liberals, many watchdog groups of the Civil Rights era -- most noticeably SPLC -- have turned a blind eye to this emerging Jew-hatred.
As I told Fox News, this shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone familiar with SPLC. But its deafening silence on incidents outside its preferred targets on the religious right cannot be ignored. While the SPLC wants to be viewed as a referee on the field of political debate, their demonization of mainstream conservatives and predictable silence on anti-Semitic incidents can only lead to one conclusion: the SPLC wants to be both referee and player.
College campuses are so hostile that in the fall of 2016, the Algemeiner, America's largest online Jewish news outlet, created a campus guide for prospective Jewish students entitled the "Annual List of the U.S. and Canada's Worst Campuses for Jewish Students." FRC surveyed the SPLC website to see what they had to say about anti-Semitism on the Algemeiner's U.S. campuses (not Canadian campuses). The answer? Nothing. There are no SPLC references to instances of left-wing or pro-Palestinian anti-Semitism on any campus in that context.
Of course, as Fox News's Caleb Parke points out, "this comes as SPLC recently announced student chapters on more than 100 colleges and universities nationwide." But if Richard Cohen's group isn't willing to confront the real intolerance at U.S. campuses, no one is quite sure why.
