On Wednesday’s broadcast of NewsNation’s “Elizabeth Vargas Reports,” Vice President of the Anti-Defamation League’s Center on Extremism Oren Segal stated that antisemitism and support for terrorism are “deeply seated” on college campuses and that the support for terrorist ideology and antisemitism isn’t surprising “when you think about some of the student groups” that have existed on campuses for a while.
Segal said, “I don’t think somebody wakes up and sees what happened on October 7 and then decides, all of a sudden, to glorify and legitimize the violence against Jews and Israelis. This is not a spontaneous reaction that normal people have. It speaks to the fact that some of this antisemitism and support for terror is deeply seated, not only in our public discussion, certainly online, but even in the sort of bastions of free speech that we would think that sort of language and rhetoric would not be normalized.”
He added, “[W]hen you think about some of the student groups who have been on these campuses for a long time, it actually shouldn’t be such a surprise. Because the normalization of support for terror group ideology and isolating Jewish students because they are considered to be somehow pro-Israel, no matter what their personal ideas are, that is actually not a new thing.”
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