Americans have been shocked at the level of antisemitism expressed on elite college campuses since Hamas attacked Israel.
“We’re seeing this in university campuses around the country,” says Donald Sweeting, Ph.D., chancellor of Colorado Christian University. “There’s this celebration of Hamas on the one hand, and then the administrators are quiet about it. The college presidents generally aren’t speaking out about it. And this, to me, it’s unconscionable, but it also reveals that we’ve been teaching stuff and promoting things in the universities that are bearing a bitter fruit.”
Sweeting decried what he said is a shift from traditional secular liberalism to a “neo-Marxist worldview” on many campuses, one that divides the globe into the oppressed and the oppressor. It’s a worldview that clumps Israel and Judeo-Christian tradition in with the negative and groups such Palestine and Hamas into the other more favored camp, he said. This is a particularly troubling dynamic, experts such as Sweeting say, because it’s an inversion of the reality happening on the ground.
“Hamas is committed to the obliteration of Israel,” he said. “It’s calling for global jihad for the obliteration of Israel.”
Although he said many colleges empower the wrong information, schools such as his, Colorado Christian University, support Israel. “I think evangelical universities have a general predisposition of saying, ‘Look, we believe the Bible and Israel’s important to us. The Jews are the relatives of the Lord Jesus Christ.’”
To avoid ideological chaos backing Hamas and other similar rhetoric — and know how to refute it — Sweeting encourages parents to teach their kids the Bible, something they’re not getting in many schools today
“There’s good, there’s evil,” he said. “You gotta take evil seriously. Ideas have consequences.”
–Alan Goforth | Metro Voice