Graduations should be a time during which students are congratulated for the efforts that led them to that day, and, if they’re lucky, an inspirational speaker gives them wisdom about how to live their lives well in the post-college world. However, because leftism and antisemitism are mind viruses that leave people incapable of viewing anything without those filters, America’s hard-left colleges routinely see their graduations used as forums to preach leftism—including, since October 7, virulent antisemitism in the guise of “anti-Israel” or “anti-Zionist” sentiment.
MIT’s graduation was no exception. In a disgusting display of this trend, MIT’s class president appeared at graduation attired in a keffiyeh, the Arab version of a Nazi armband, and hijacked the event to attack Israel as a genocidal nation:
MIT class president Megha Vemuri dedicated her commencement speech to Palestine at the University’s graduation on Thursday.
Vemuri wore a kefiyyah on top of her robe and stated that “MIT wants a free Palestine.”
“You called for a permanent ceasefire in Gaza, and you stood in solidarity with the pro-Palestine activists on campus. You faced threats, intimidation, and suppression coming from all directions, especially your own university officials. But you prevailed because the MIT community that I know would never tolerate a genocide,” she continued.
What an extraordinarily selfish thing for someone to do, but not a surprising one, given the complete overlap between leftism and malignant narcissism. Jewish students properly understood that they were the victims of an antisemitic attack every bit as vile as the medieval canards about Jews using the blood of Christian children to make their Passover matzo or poisoning wells to start the plague:
Jewish students stormed out of their graduation ceremony Thursday after a Massachusetts Institute of Technology commencement speaker accused the prestigious institution of supporting the erasure of “Palestine from the face of the Earth.”
Megha M. Vemuri, president of the Class of 2025, sparked a mixture of boos and cheers as she started her controversial speech praising her classmates for protesting Israel immediately after Hamas launched a deadly terrorist attack on the Jewish state on Oct. 7, 2023.
MIT, if it had any moral decency and courage, would have immediately rescinded Vemuri’s degree, leaving her uncredentialed. But this is the leftist Ivy League, so all that happened was that MIT’s Vichy administration expressed its disapproval.
Because Vemuri made defamatory claims, I’ll rebut them with this summation of how Israel fights its wars, and it’s not genocidally. (And this response doesn’t even mention the 32,000 rockets Hamas and Hezbollah have rained down on Israel’s civilian centers for 18 months.)
Here are some simple truths for you. No one else will tell you them; so I will.
— Hillel Fuld (@HilzFuld) May 29, 2025
- There is no genocide in Gaza.
- There is no famine in Gaza.
- There was never an Arab Palestine and there never will be one.
- Every single death in Gaza without exception is on Hamas.
-…
With some independent research, you can confirm that every one of his factual statements is accurate. But while rebutting the foul vomit from Vemuri is worthwhile, I want to focus on something different: Why is American academia so antisemitic?
Well, to start with, academia in America was under pressure to become leftist beginning in the 1930s and 1940s, a trend that got a boost in the 1960s, and that exploded in the 21st century. So, it’s a given now that America’s colleges and universities are bastions of Marxism.
There’s also no doubt that Karl Marx himself was a virulent antisemite. His comments on Jews are indistinguishable from much of what Hitler himself said and wrote. The reality, though, is that most of the leftists in academia haven’t read all, or even any, of Marx’s writings, because he’s a horrible writer, turgid, pompous, often impenetrable, and always boring. In any event, Marx wrote and died long before Israel’s existence, so it doesn’t explain the laser focus on Israel that occupies America’s educational institutions.
I’ve long said that leftists hate Israel because it’s associated with the Bible, and leftists hate the Bible the way vampires hate crosses. The Bible stands for a moral universe headed by a power that they cannot touch. It is the ultimate threat to their secular totalitarianism.
But it turns out that there’s a simpler reason than Marx’s writing or Biblical symbolism for academia’s hostility to Israel. In April 2022, Richard Kemp wrote that it was the Soviet Union, as part of a Cold War strategy, that fomented the modern left’s claim that Israel is a nation as evil as apartheid South Africa or Nazi Germany.
Kemp explains that, in 1948, the reborn nation of Israel, needing help both from the West and the Soviet bloc as it faced down the sea of hostile Arabs around it, aimed for a policy of non-alignment. However, given Israel’s socialist government, the Soviets considered this non-alignment policy to be a betrayal. Eventually, though, Israel, in part swayed by the open antisemitism in Russia (a product of both Marxism and Tsarism), sided with the West.
The Soviet Union, therefore, marked it for destruction. Writes Kemp:
The Kremlin understood that conventional attacks against Israel could not succeed, so instead focused on using Arabs as terrorist proxies, directing, training, funding, and arming groups like the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), PFLP-General Command (PFLP-GC), Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (DFLP), and Fatah to carry out attacks against Israeli and Jewish targets, including wave after wave of aircraft hijacking.
General Ion Pacepa, chief of Romania’s foreign intelligence service, played a significant role in Soviet bloc operations directed against Israel and the US. In 1978, he became the highest-ranking intelligence officer ever to defect from the Soviet sphere and, among many secret revelations, provided details of KGB operations against Israel. Pacepa says the chairman of the KGB, Yuri Andropov (later Leonid Brezhnev’s successor as General Secretary of the Soviet Communist Party), told him:
We needed to instill a Nazi-style hatred for the Jews throughout the Islamic world, and to turn this weapon of the emotions into a terrorist bloodbath against Israel and its main supporter, the United States.”
And,
Islam was obsessed with preventing the infidels’ occupation of its territory, and it would be highly receptive to our characterization of the US Congress as a rapacious Zionist body aiming to turn the world into a Jewish fiefdom.
In other words, he knew that the Arabs would be easy tools in the anti-Israel propaganda war and were already playing their part. Their work only needed to be focused, intensified, and funded.
To achieve its objectives, the Kremlin devised Operation SIG, a disinformation campaign intended “to turn the whole Islamic world against Israel and the US.” Pacepa reported that by 1978, under Operation SIG, the KGB had sent some 4,000 Soviet bloc “agents of influence” into Islamic countries to help achieve this. They also printed and circulated vast amounts of anti-Israel and anti-Jewish propaganda, including the fabricated, antisemitic text The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, translated into Arabic.
There’s more...much, much more...in the essay, which I urge you to read. In it, you can see the origin of everything that’s happening in American academia. Given this, it’s no surprise that an indoctrinated student would destroy an MIT graduation ceremony.
The Soviet Union may have fallen, but the toxins it injected into the lifeblood of the West continue to do their destructive work.
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