Antisemitism, Islamophobia and ‘feeling unsafe’

Feeling unsafe on your campus or house of worship is not a good thing. But actually being physically unsafe is a threat of another magnitude.

As protests against Israel’s war in Gaza and debates about antisemitism continue, a question arises: What is the difference between “feeling unsafe” and “being unsafe”?

Conflating the two, as is often happening, creates a dramatically false equivalence that has infected the discourse about Israel and Palestine.

A look at the actual casualty toll in America resulting in bloodshed since Oct. 7 is instructive: one six-year-old Muslim boy stabbed to death in Detroit; three Palestinian American college students shot in Vermont; one Palestinian American protestor stabbed in Austin; scores of pro-Palestinian demonstrators beaten at UCLA by a mob; dozens of pro-Palestinian protesters at the University of Mississippi pelted with food and water bottles; and, on May 8, a 55-year-old pro-Palestinian demonstrator in New York City was struck by a car driven an Israel supporter, who was charged by police with second-degree assault.

On the other side, beyond some pushing and shoving around demonstrations, a Jewish protester at a pro-Israel rally died in Southern California after being hit by a megaphone in a scuffle. There may be more, but without fatal or bloody result.

Muslim Americans and Arab Americans have many other complaints short of violence making them feel unsafe, with at least as much legitimacy as Jewish college students, given these attacks. However, they are not as widely publicized, much less have White House press conference statements and presidential addresses focusing on their plight.

After President Joe Biden’s speech Tuesday at the Holocaust memorial in Washington, D.C., Arab America Foundation co-founder Warren David told the New York Times that he wished the president had addressed the issue of racism against Arab Americans, as well as those Palestinian civilians who have been killed in Gaza.

Yet groups like the Anti-Defamation League seem to chronicle and calculate every Jewish and/or Israeli student who says they “feel unsafe” because of someone’s disparaging comment; a sense of being ostracized; by some hurtful social media comment; or some stupid antisemitic, or anti-Zionist — or, yes, threatening — comment made by an outlier demonstrator. (In my experience as a reporter and researcher, people who actually commit acts of terrorism generally do not send threats or warnings.)

For some broad-brushing campus Israel partisans, this means that an antisemite is anyone who charges Israel with civilian genocide in Gaza; or who questions the right of Israel to exist as a Jewish State; who wants to “globalize the Intifada”; who demands an Arab state “from the river to the sea”; or who even denies the Holocaust. Thus, any of this can make Jewish students feel “unsafe,” the Constitution’s First Amendment notwithstanding.

But these are relative trivialities compared to those dying on both sides in Gaza, as well as the innocent Muslims and Palestine supporters violently attacked in the U.S.

As Dilshad Ali asked in a recent column, are these Israel supporters feeling unsafe, or just being made uncomfortable by criticisms and attacks on Israel? The practical effect of students making the issue antisemitism is to divert the larger debate about Israel and Palestine.

Feeling unsafe on your campus or house of worship is not a good thing. But actually being physically unsafe is a threat of another magnitude. To be clear, protester/counter-protester scuffling and brawling does not always constitute either antisemitism or Islamophobia — although sometimes it does. In a superheated environment, people seeking confrontation or a fight generally find it.

The trend of equating feeling unsafe and being unsafe is tempting, because it is almost entirely subjective. Yet anecdotes are not evidence. In fairness, earlier cohorts of campus activists are partly responsible here, climbing this slippery slope with restrictive speech codes and “trigger warnings” for words they considered “microaggressions.” Likewise, tactics like banning or disrupting speakers they disagree with — think USC valedictorian Asna Tabassum — or promotion of the legal doctrine of a “toxic environment.”

Carried to an extreme, as the political right lately has, this means Florida public schools cannot teach about slavery, segregation and racism for fear it might make students feel uncomfortable. But Gov. Ron DeSantis also recently signed a bill requiring public schools to teach about the evils of communism as early as kindergarten, without apparent concern for the feelings of any little Marxists in class.

Still, the creative bookkeeping that conflates feeling unsafe and being unsafe has cynically fueled and weaponized the hysteria about the “wave” of antisemitism sweeping North America. As someone who has chronicled the rise of antisemitism and anti-Zionism for years before Oct. 7, I question the scope of such a wave.

One solution, although not currently in prospect for either side, would be a commitment to both civility and nonviolence.

“Put differently, the question is what comes after campus protests and the end of this battle between supporters of Israel and Palestine,” Harry Boyte, a scholar of civic organizing and a leader in the national depolarization group Braver Angels, said in an interview. “The rich tradition of nonviolence offers important resources.”

Martin Luther King Jr. wrote, in his 1967 book “Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community?”: “I must oppose any attempt to gain our freedom by the methods of malice, hate, and violence that have characterized our oppressors. Hate is just as injurious to the hater as it is to the hated.”

Elsewhere, King wrote, “The nonviolent approach does something to the hearts and souls of those committed to it. It gives them new self-respect; it calls up resources of strength and courage that they did not know they had.”

Adopting that attitude would make everyone feel safer — and be safer.

Mark I. Pinsky is a journalist and the author of seven nonfiction books, including “A Jew Among the Evangelicals: A Guide for the Perplexed.”