The student council of the Durban University of Technology has voted to demand the university expel Jewish students who do not support the Palestinian cause.
The vote was rejected by university officials, but reflects extreme and growing levels of anti-Israel hostility in South Africa, particularly among young people. That hostility frequently bleeds into antisemitism.
In October, activists from the Congress of South African Students placed a pig’s head in a kosher meat section of a grocery store.
Responding to the recent vote, Natan Pollack (no relation to the author), chair of the South African Union of Jewish Students, told the Durban Daily News: “To discriminate against people because of their religious and political standpoint goes against freedom of speech.”
Durban hosted the notorious United Nations World Conference Against Racism in 2001, which became an orgy of antisemitic hate fueled by anti-Israel activists, and launched the “Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions” (BDS) movement.
That movement has spread to American campuses, including the University of California Davis, where a Jewish fraternity was recently vandalized by swastikas and Muslim students taunted pro-Israel students with chants of “Allahu Akbar.”
Senior Editor-at-Large Joel B. Pollak edits Breitbart California and is the author of the new ebook, Wacko Birds: The Fall (and Rise) of the Tea Party, available for Amazon Kindle.
Follow Joel on Twitter: @joelpollak