Levin: Academia Embrace of Antisemitism the ‘Abandonment of the Jews’

During his Sunday show’s open, Fox News Channel’s “Life, Liberty & Levin” host Mark Levin hammered higher education and the media for its apparent support of antisemitic voices on its campuses.

Levin called it the “abandonment of the Jews.”

Partial transcript as follows:

LEVIN: I do a lot of research for this show as you well know. I don’t want you to waste your time. I don’t want you to waste your hour. There’s other things you can do. I’m well aware of that. And so when you come here, I want to make sure that I provide you with some information that you can take away.

I’ve read two books that I want to bring to your attention that hits this subject. Professor Stephen Norwood wrote a book, “The Third Reich in the Ivory Tower: Complicity and Conflict on American Campuses.” Bradley Hart wrote a book: “Hitler’s American Friends: The Third Reich Supporters in the United States.”

I want you to listen to some of this is very important. Obviously, I can’t read all the books and many of you are not going to get the books, but let me give you a taste of what’s in here in this chapter called “The Students” in “Hitler’s American Friends.”

It says in part: American universities did little to curtail the influence of pro-German speakers on campus. Throughout the decade, German exchange students, some of whom were Nazi Party members, and were likely operating as propaganda agents and other speakers were given mostly unchallenged platforms on university campuses.

American universities therefore offered the German government a remarkable level of establishment legitimacy in the United States. Even after the violently antisemitic nature of the regime had become clear, just as Hitler’s corporate friends had shown little reluctance doing business with the Reich, his friends in academia maintained their own relationships with the Reich.

Both the Nazis and U.S. government were aware of the propaganda potential provided by American universities. testifying before the Dies Committee, John C. Metcalf argued that the German government had a particular interest in American students. The purpose of the exchange students to universities has long been to foster goodwill and peace among the nations. The result is greater understanding, he testified.

But this worthwhile aim has been neglected in the exchange of German students for American. Now, American students are being indoctrinated with the aims of fascism in Germany, both abroad and at home to the detriment of democratic institutions in America.

This is the 1930s and 40s on American campuses, like Harvard, like the University of Virginia, like Columbia, like so many of them.

He goes on: Around the country, students and faculty alike increasingly became embroiled in unfolding international tensions as the 1930s progressed. Most often, it was the vocally anti-Nazi professors, some of whom were themselves Jewish refugees from Nazi oppression, who faced the brunt of administrative repression.

At one point, it was even rumored that the German Council general in New Orleans was offering cash to universities that dismiss anti-Nazi professors.

Look at all the foreign cash flowing into our universities from the Islamist organizations and front groups in this country? The Confucius Institute, just keep what’s going on in America today in mind when I tell you what was going on during the Third Reich.

The same was much less often the case for openly pro-Nazi professors unless student or public pressure demanded action. There were apparently no sanctions levelled. For instance, when University of Idaho Mechanical Engineering Department head, Henry Gauss traveled to a controversial Gottingen University celebration in 1937 declared himself to be the representative of American Universities west of the Mississippi despite having no official remit to do so and then gave “the Hitler salute” to the rector.

He remained department head until 1952. And a building on campus bears his name today.

Faculty members and administrators could have made a major impact by denouncing the open prejudice of Nazism and protecting dissenting voices. Too often, they let their students down by failing to do so.

It goes on in part: The campus conflicts were directly fed by the surprising degree to which American universities and faculty members remain willing to send their students to study in the Third Reich even after the antisemitic and violent nature of Nazism were clear.

Read all about it: “Hitler’s American Friends.” You’ve not heard about it anywhere else in this country, but history does repeat itself and it is repeating itself today in American universities and in the American media.

One more: “The Third Reich in the Ivory Tower” by Professor Steven Norwood: Complicity and conflict on the American Campus.

Here is the table of contents in part: Legitimizing Nazism Harvard University and the Hitler regime 1933 to 1937; Complicity and conflict: Columbia University’s response to fascism 1933 to 1937; the Seven Sisters Colleges and the Third Reich promoting fellowship through student exchange.

A respectful hearing for Nazi Germany’s apologist, the University of Virginia Institute of Public Affairs roundtables. 1933 to 1941.

Nazi Nests: German departments in American universities 1933 to 1941.

Let’s get into this a little bit more. It’s relevant, it’s crucially important, it provides context. He writes in part: The Harvard University administration during the 1930s, led by President James Brian Conant ignored numerous opportunities to take a principled stand against the Hitler regime and its antisemitic outrages and contributed to Nazi Germany’s efforts to improve its image in the West. Sound familiar?

It’s like a concern about Nazi antisemitism was shared by many influential Harvard alumni and student leaders. In warmly welcoming Nazi leaders to the Harvard campus, inviting them to prestigious, high-profile, social events, and striving to build friendly relations with thoroughly Nazified universities in Germany, while denouncing those who protested against these actions, Harvard’s administration and many of its student leaders offered important encouragement to the Hitler regime, as it intensified its persecution of Jews and expanded its military strength.

You can see why I dug into the research and pulled this out for you. It’s crucially important.

The few scholars who previously addressed this subject devoted insufficient attention to antisemitism in the Harvard administration and student body and underestimated the university’s complicity in the Nazi’s persecution of the Jews.

Listen to this stuff: From 1933, when Conant assumed the presidency of America’s oldest and most prestigious university, Harvard, through 1937, Conant failed to speak out against Nazism on many occasions, when it really mattered.

He was publicly silent during the visit of the Nazi warship Karlsruhe to Boston in May 1934, some of whose crew Harvard entertained. He welcomed the high Nazi official, Ernst (Putzi) Hanfstaengl go to the June 1934 Harvard commencement.

In March 1935, the Harvard administration permitted Nazi Germany’s counsel general in Boston to place a wreath bearing the swastika emblem in the University chapel.

Conant sent a delegate from Harvard to the University of Heidelberg’s 550th anniversary pageant in June 1936 and he extended warm greetings to Georg- Augusta University and in Goettingen on its 200th anniversary in June 1937.

In providing a friendly welcome to Nazi leader, Hanfstaengl, President Conant and others prominently affiliated with Harvard communicated to the Hitler government that boycotts intended to destroy Jewish businesses, the dismissal of Jews from the professions, and savage beating of Jews were not their concern.

And you know what, ladies and gentlemen, these administrators who testified before the Republican majority House Education Committee sound the same damn way. These universities are doing the same thing with the Islamisists, with the Hamas front groups, CAIR, and their network in the United States, through their faculty and tenure, through their admissions processes. Our country, through the student visa process, which is completely out of control and unmonitored, unvetted people coming into the country, coming into our classrooms, coming into our schools, coming into our society in the ivory towers of Harvard, University of Pennsylvania, MIT and elsewhere.

And of course, as I’ve discussed before on the show, all supported by the media, by The New York Times, by The Washington Post in the 1930s and 40s, and today, the abandonment of the Jews, it is all right here, but the American media buried by “The Times,” it’s all right here by the American media, beyond belief, all right here about the American media.

College campuses, the American media, the propaganda, the defense of antisemitism, the covering up of antisemitism, the covering up of Jew hatred, attacks on Jews, and extermination.

Where do you see this in one form or another or one degree or another? You see it on MSNBC and CNN. You see it in today’s “New York Times” and “Washington Post.” Where do you see this on the campuses? In over 200 American campuses.

You see it in the streets. You see it with the professors who are outspoken. You see it with the student groups. You see it with the students. You see it with their posters and their flags, you see it all.

There is a whiff of the 1930s and 40s in the air. It is a stench. It is covering our country in a dark cloud.

The Democratic Party is part of it just as the Democratic Party was part of it in the 1930s and 40s under Franklin Roosevelt, who refused to bomb the rail lines in to Auschwitz, refused to allow Jews trying to escape shore extermination in Europe from coming to the United States, and the list goes on and on and on.

Bernie Sanders trashing Israel. Rashida Tlaib trashing Israel. Resolutions to condemn antisemitism, half the Democrats in the House vote against it. You have individuals in our media, who are effectively spokesman for Hamas, and Intifada and antisemitism, and then they cloak themselves in free speech and academic freedom.

Ladies and gentlemen, it was once said by a great Supreme Court Justice, that the Constitution is not a suicide pact. We hear over and over again, when it comes to Donald Trump that free speech has its limits. But apparently, if you’re a Jew-hating antisemite at a poison Ivy League college, or you’re a host or a guest in one of these corrupt news media platforms, apparently you’re free to say whatever the hell you want to say.

Follow Jeff Poor on Twitter @jeff_poor

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