David Brog, head of the Maccabee Task Force, says a savvy action plan, lots of money and a focus on empowering (almost) all pro-Israel students are gradually 'taking back the quad'
The first is that for all the hue and cry about anti-Israel activism on campus, the most potent Israel-demonizing efforts are centered on just some 40-60 of the thousands of campuses in the United States and Canada.
And the second is that, when it comes to demonizing Israel on campus, there is no comparable effort focused on any other country. No remotely comparable effort. There’s intensive, relentless bashing of Israel… and of no other nation on earth. Not Syria, where President Bashar Assad has massacred hundreds of thousands of his own people. Not North Korea, which runs re-education and concentration camps. Not Venezuela, Cambodia or Afghanistan, which head the World Justice Project’s Rule of Law Index. Not China or Russia, singled out in the latest US State Department report on human rights practices. Not Yemen, Turkey or Saudi Arabia, prominently criticized in Amnesty International’s latest human rights audit. Just Israel. Israel. And Israel.
A South Korean protester walks by a portrait of the North Korean leader Kim Jong Il, demanding the liberation of North Korean concentration camps and the indictment of Kim in the International Criminal Court, in Seoul, South Korea, Wednesday, Nov. 25, 2009. A key U.N. committee had expressed “very serious concern” that month at widespread reports of torture and other grave human rights violations in North Korea. The letters read ” Guiltiness!”. (AP Photo/Ahn Young-joon)
Says Brog: “I bet you could find maybe that a campus somewhere held a demonstration for Tibet… And maybe, God willing, there was somebody doing something against the genocide in Darfur. That might exist. What I am not aware of is any systematic effort to do it nationally. I am also not aware of any effort to take it one step further and say, ‘Because of this we should be boycotting and divesting from the government that enabled it.’ It might happen in one-offs. I don’t know… And that points to the hypocrisy at the heart of the (anti-Israel) effort.”
The Times of Israel: What’s the thinking behind the Maccebee Task Force? Give me the big picture.
David Brog: Basically the Adelsons recognized this challenge we’re facing on college campuses and they wanted to devote resources to helping students fight back. They chose the name Maccabee Task Force with that image in mind.
Sheldon Adelson listens as New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie speaks during a Republican Jewish Coalition event, March 29, 2014, in Las Vegas. (AP Photo/Julie Jacobson)
Mr. Adelson, growing up, experienced anti-Semitism. He and other Jews were physically attacked on the streets where he grew up in Boston because they were Jewish. Something upset him in a deep way: the idea that Jews are still being bullied in America. So he wanted to enable Jewish students to better fight back.
That was our mission, but it wasn’t easy to figure out how we do that.
So how are you doing that?
