Survey Shows Majority of Muslim College Students Hate Jews

Campus antisemitism is a problem, but reports focus on the experiences of Jewish students rather than the identity of the perpetrators. Media reports hesitate to name anyone. Jewish organizations zero in on campus hate groups like Students for Justice in Palestine, but that only tells us so much about why antisemitism has become so widespread at certain universities.

Brandeis University’s Center for Modern Jewish Studies recently conducted a survey asking college students about their views of Jews and Israel. And the results are revealing.

66% of students, the vast majority, did not hate Jews or Israel.

While leftist students only make up 14% of overall students (less than the 17% who identify as conservative), they made up a full 43% of students who were hostile to Israel. The remaining 46% of those hostile to the Jewish State identified as “liberal”. Those activists associated with campus encampments and other forms of harassment are a small minority of leftist extremists who have used student organizations and political complicity to wield disproportionate power.

Liberal Jews have embraced diversity as the solution to hate, but diversity causes antisemitism.

White students were surveyed as the least likely to hate Jews. Twice as many black, Hispanic and Asian students as white students ranked as “hostile to Jews”. While black students were slightly ahead in the small “extremely hostile” group, Asians were slightly more hostile to Jews than any other minority group. This may reflect academic competition between Jewish and Asian students, Chinese government support for Hamas or some Muslim students being grouped together with Asians.

Only 10% of white students were hostile to Jews, however 23% of Asian, 22% of black and 22% of Hispanic students were hostile to Jews. That meant they agreed with statements such as “Jewish people talk about the Holocaust just to further their political agenda” and “Jews should be held accountable for Israel’s actions”. 26% potentially held favorable views of Hamas.

And that brings us back to the question of which group of students hates Jews the most.

Christian students were overall the least hateful toward Jews and Israel. (4% of Christians were more antisemitic than the average but this may reflect the inclusion of some minority students or the impact of ‘Groypers’ and other social media influencers like Candace Owens.)

72% of Christian students, 65% of atheists and agnostics and 60% of ‘other religion’ students were not hostile to Jews or Israel, so that majorities of every belief system were not antisemitic.

Muslim students were the only group where the numbers were the exact opposite.

65% of Muslim students either hated Jews or Israel. Only 29% were non-hostile.

These numbers represent a complete break from those of any other group. No single group on campus, even leftists, hates Jews nearly as much as Muslims do.

Revealingly, more Muslims hate Jews than hate Israel.

36% of Muslim students, over a third, hated Jews, 29% hated Israel, and 6% hated both making it clear that this is not about politics, territory or Gaza: it’s really about Islamic antisemitism.

The wholly artificial distinction between anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism falls apart here as it has throughout the general normalization of assaults and harassment of Jews after Oct 7.

Not even a third of Muslim students were tolerant of Jews. What does this mean on campus?

While hard data on Muslim demographics at universities with the largest antisemitism problems are hard to find and even more difficult to break down, we know that Muslim student populations have increased sharply, in some cases doubling within a decade. Muslims now make up 2% of the students at the University of California, 3.7% of Yale’s undergrads, 2.4% of Princeton seniors, 2.7% of students at the University of Michigan, and 3.6% at colleges overall.

These may be relatively small percentages (and some are out of date) but they represent over 75,000 students concentrated at key campuses. A previous survey found that encampments and other pro-terrorist activity has been concentrated at elite universities. Some of those same universities draw in large number of Jewish and Muslim students. What does it mean when a disproportionately antisemitic group grows its share of the student population?

The growing Muslim student demographics lead directly to hostile campuses for Jews.

At Harvard, the number of Muslim students in the freshmen class increased from 2.6% in 2013 to 3.9% in 2021. During that same period, the number of Jewish students fell by 2%. Would the harassment of Jewish students at Harvard have played out the same way if the number of Muslim students hadn’t been rising and the number of Jewish students weren’t falling?

At Yale, the number of Muslim students doubled from 1.5% in the oughts to over 3% in the previous decade. During this same period, the Jewish student body also declined.

Muslim immigration, sharp population growth and foreign students are changing campus demographics. A decade ago, there were twice as many Jewish students as Muslim students at UCLA. The numbers are likely reversed now. And that helps explain what happened on campus.

The sustained harassment of Jewish students is not just ideological, it’s racial and religious.

Ideological leftist opposition to Israel has come together with the traditional Islamic antipathy to Jews, and the propensity toward dislike of Jews among more ‘diverse’ minority groups in an alliance of hate. Political extremism, support for terrorism and antisemitism have come together in a toxic atmosphere where Communist and Hezbollah flags fly side by side and black nationalist and third worldist academics explain why Hamas and Oct 7 are progressive.

Muslim students and Islamist organizations tie together an alliance between white leftists who want to destroy America, Europe and Israel, as well as some black, Latino and Asian students who ethnically and racially detest Jews by drawing on the destructive tendencies of both worlds.

Where white people have learned to feel guilty about hating others, minority ethnic nationalists take pride in their racism. Critical race theory, third world discourse and orientalism are just ideological permission structures for bigotry. The moral inversion of terrorism turned the Marxist and then Islamic perpetrators into victims and the victims into perpetrators who had it coming.

Islamic nationalism, hate and even genocide are portrayed as moral because they are the work of the oppressed even if the oppressed are a racist, totalitarian majority of over a billion people persecuting not only Jews and Christians, but also Buddhists, Hindus and nearly every religion.

While anti-Zionist discourse pretends that Israel was created and sustained by a few European immigrants, the majority of Israel’s population (and the vast majority of its nationalist voters who have kept Netanyahu in power) are Middle Eastern Jewish refugees fleeing Muslim oppression.

Muslim antisemitism is why Israel exists and why it’s still subjected to Islamic terrorism.

The same hate faced by Jewish students on campus led a million Jews to flee Muslim countries for Israel, America, France and other parts of the free world. That hatred is not a response to Gaza, to the Six Day War or to any events more recent than the rise of Islam.

Islamic antisemitism is at the heart of the Koran and Islamic scripture. Islam was born in part out of the ethnic cleansing of Jews from Arabia. And it teaches that Jews are its primal enemies.

Muslim students are far more hostile to Jews than any other group of students because of religious prejudice. That prejudice has been around for over 1,000 years of Islamic oppression and will not disappear no matter what negotiations take place in the Middle East.

Liberal Jews have long championed diversity, but a diverse population is statistically more antisemitic. Combining diversity with a free pass for bigotry aimed at the ideologically deserving white people and Jews is turning university campuses into no-go zones for Jews.

And what’s true of campuses is also true of American cities.

The multicultural and immigration policies of liberal Jewish organizations led directly to this crisis. It’s time for them to look at the numbers and do the math before it’s too late.

Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine.

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