When it comes to collegiate Jew hatred, University of Michigan’s antisemites rival the prowess of the Big Ten school’s famed football team. UM protesters were marching through the school’s campus chanting “From the River” nine months before Hamas terrorists massacred 1,200 people in Israel, including 40 Americans, on October 7. Hatred against Jews has been ramping up on UM’s campus and the surrounding Ann Arbor community, and on Sunday night, it crossed a threshold.
A 19-year-old student, who has requested in his identity not be disclosed, was walking near campus and in proximity to the Jewish Resource Center on Hill Street, at approximately 12:45 a.m. when a group of unknown males approached from behind and asked if he was Jewish, according to a police report. When the victim confirmed that he was, the unknown males assaulted him and then fled on foot. The victim suffered minor injuries and didn’t require hospitalization.
The Ann Arbor police has classified the attack as “a bias-motivated assault” but didn’t disclose the number of attackers involved in the assault nor provide any descriptions that might assist in their apprehensions. The Anti-Defamation League announced it would offer a $5,000 reward for information leading to the arrest and conviction of the muggers. The Michigan chapter of Council on American-Islamic Relations, which bills itself as America’s largest Muslim civil rights and advocacy group, is offering a $1,000 reward.
No word yet from the Michigan chapter of the ACLU, which last week protested Michigan attorney general’s misdemeanor arrests of two anti-Israel activists for trespassing on UM’s campus, as did Michigan Rep. Rashida Tlaib. Not surprisingly, Tlaib also has been silent on the attack of the UM Jewish student, perhaps hoping to garner the “Antisemite of the Year” for the second consecutive year. Tlaib was reportedly a member of a hidden Facebook group that that has praised the jihadists who kidnapped and killed hundreds of civilians — including at least 33 Americans.
It’s admirable that the ADL and CAIR have offered rewards to help police apprehend the attackers of the UM student, but if it was indeed a hate crime the money likely could be better spent elsewhere. Hate crime punishments in Michigan are akin to so-called smash and grabs in California, where shoplifting goods valued at $750 or less warrant nary a wrist slap. No one knows this better than Michigan AG Dana Nessel, whose bio previously boasted she was the first Jew and lesbian to be elected to oversee the state’s law enforcement apparatus.
In August 2022, Brandon Roy, a 39-year-old Michigan resident, left Nessel a voicemail on her personal cell phone, suggesting, among other things, to “go back to f—— Israel so you can get nuclear blasted out of the f—— sky.”
The penalty for harassing the AG of one of America’s most influential states? Roy was sentenced to two days in jail, eight days of community service and a year of probation for the threats, according to The Ann Arbor News. He violated terms of his probation late last year for having guns in his home, but he has since been released from jail and back on probation.
Allegations have surfaced that Jews aren’t the only victims of hatred on UM’s campus, although understandably the legacy media prefers to ignore this story. As reported by The Algemeiner, a publication with stellar coverage of antisemitism and anti-Israel media bias, UM’s Black Student Union (BSU) recently resigned from the anti-Zionist student group Tahrir Coalition, citing “pervasive” anti-Black discrimination fostered by its mostly Arab and Middle Eastern leadership.
“Black identities, voices, and bodies are not valued in this coalition, and thus we must remove ourselves,” BSU said in a statement posted on Instagram. “The anti-Blackness within the coalition has been too pervasive to overcome, and we refuse to endure it.”
BSU vowed its support of the anti-Zionist movement is “unwavering” but said the “integrity” of the Tahrir Coalition is “deeply questionable.”
“We refuse to subject ourselves and our community to the rampant anti-Blackness that festers within the (Tahrir Coalition),” the BSU statement said.
According to the Algemeiner, BSU did not cite specific examples of the racism to which Black students were allegedly subjected, but its public denouncement of a group that has become the face of the pro-Hamas movement at the University of Michigan is significant given the history of cooperation between BSU and anti-Zionist groups on college campuses across the US.
BSU’s Black members are not, however, the first to openly clash with anti-Zionist Arabs, the Algemeiner reported. The publication said Arab and Palestinian anti-Zionist activists launched a barrage of racist attacks against African Americans on social media in August, prompting legions of Black TikTok influencers to denounce the comments, with several announcing that they intended not only to remove Gaza-related content from their profiles but also to cease engaging in anti-Zionist activity entirely. The conversation escalated in subsequent posts, touching on Black slavery in the Arab world and what a young woman called “voracious racism” against African Americans.
“Why don’t we talk about the Arab slave trade? And keep in mind that the Arabs have enslaved more Black people than the Europeans combined,” said one poster.
The Arab Muslim slave trade, also known as the trans-Saharan trade or Eastern slave trade, is noted as the longest slave trade, having occurred for more than 1,300 years while taking millions of Africans away from their continent to work in foreign lands in the most inhumane conditions, according to an essay by award-winning Kenyan journalist Bob Koigi. He said scholars have christened it “a veiled genocide” because of the “most humiliating and near-death experience slaves were subjected to, from capture in slave markets to labor fields abroad and the harrowing journey in between.”
From the Algemeiner:
The history of anti-Black racism in the Arab world runs deep, experts have argued. In 2021, writer Cirien Saadeh said that Arabs living in the city of Detroit, Michigan often call Black men in their communities “abeed,” which means “slave,” and she alleged that Arab business owners “drain financial resources and don’t work to build relationships” with their African American neighbors and customers.
The following year, Jenin Al Shababi wrote in Diverse Educators that “racism is a virus that has embedded itself into the heart and soul of Arab communities,” explaining that it was a Palestinian store owner who prompted the killing of George Floyd in police custody in the spring of 2020. A decade earlier, Palestinian writer Susan Abulhawa, who has herself spread antisemitic conspiracies and tropes, noted that a Black Ethiopian domestic worker, Alem Dechesa, committed suicide after being abused, physically and emotionally, by her Arab employer. Thousands of Black domestic workers in the Middle East, she added, suffer similar violations of their human rights.
Sayyid Qutb, one of the most acclaimed Muslim intellectuals of the 20th century, once described jazz music, widely regarded as one of Black America’s greatest contributions to American music and culture, as “artistic primitiveness.” Writing in his 1951 essay “The America I Have Seen: In the Scale of Human Values,” he said, “[Jazz] is this music that the savage bushmen created to satisfy their primitive desires, and their desire for noise on the one hand, and the abundance of animal noises on the other.”
UM has among the biggest, if not the biggest, college DEI expenditures. It continues to aggressively grow the number of staffers dedicated to advancing diversity, equity, and inclusion, with at least 241 paid employees now focused on DEI and annual payroll costs of $38.68 million — an amount that would cover in-state tuition and fees for 1,781 undergraduate students.
Despite the expenditures, UM appears to be among the most polarized campuses in America.