FUUWM
Well, THIS has kind of come full circle. Back in the 1960’s, when I was an employee on the campus there, the campus radicals were all Jewish kids from New York, who came to the Madison campus because it was a “party school” for them. Because I had frequent direct contact with them, I was well aware of their attitudes and what were, frankly, prejudices.
They widely embraced the Soviet line in just about every particular, and were against the Viet Nam war because it was “unjust”, i.e., the US was trying to prevent establishment of Communist government over ALL of Viet Nam at the time, but it was also the days of Kennedy, and the South Vietnamese were supposed to institute an “ethical” government. This in the middle of a war. When Ngo Din Diem was assassinated in 1963, there was wild cheering among these campus radicals of the time, but one may only now try to imagine the huge wave of grief that swept these same radicals when JFK himself was assassinated scarcely a month later. And when it turned out the presumed assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, was a Communist sympathizer, these kids literally fell ill.
Talk about a god that died. But the spirit was quickly reignited when it was concluded that the “wrong people” had been in charge of bringing socialism to the masses, and that is perhaps about the time that allegiances were being switched to “get rid of the Shah of Iran”. The fervor was merely relocated from Communism to Islam, and since the Shah was much too secular for their tastes, the Shah had to go. It took nearly fifteen years, but the effort was successful, and that set in motion the resurgence of the radical left, now as supporters of Islam, which in many ways, resembles Communist Socialism doctrine, but includes a “religious” element.
And the “religious” element is what is so anti-Israel in this whole mess.