US Justice Department sues UCLA alleging antisemitic educational environment

[u/awaythrowawaying]

https://www.reuters.com/world/us-justice-department-sues-ucla-alleging-antisemitic-educational-environment-2026-05-26/

[u/justafutz]

Reminder for those denying the above that a federal judge opened his opinion on this subject like this:

“In the year 2024, in the United States of America, in the State of California, in the City of Los Angeles, Jewish students were excluded from portions of the UCLA campus because they refused to denounce their faith. This fact is so unimaginable and so abhorrent to our constitutional guarantee of religious freedom that it bears repeating, Jewish students were excluded from portions of the UCLA campus because they refused to denounce their faith. UCLA does not dispute this.”

[u/notapersonaltrainer → u/justafutz]

The casual normalization and contempt about the push back is the freakiest part.

No progressive campus would tolerate arab/muslim exclusion zones that force students to denounce Islam while chanting "Globalize the Crusade" "There is only One Solution, Crusade revolution!" or "From the Caucasus to the Red Sea, Mesopotamia will be free!". No one would unironically stick up for this with "but but Crusade just means 'taking the cross'". Or defend leadership condoning "context dependent arab genocide" on national television.

There would be mass expulsions, department purges, and careers nuked for life if a fraction of this targeted any other ethnicity or religion.

There is only one ethnic superminority for whom this kind of farcical treatment is normalized, defended, and celebrated while its whistleblowers are the ones treated as the problem.

It is so normalized that many can't even conceive the valid & overdue lashback without unapologetically invoking more antisemitic "string pulling" tropes.

[u/Mantergeistmann → u/notapersonaltrainer]

unironically arguing "Crusade just means 'taking the cross'"

That one at least has a bit of scholarly argument in support of it, but I'd imagine the vast majority of Deus Vult-Bros have never engaged with it, and certainly would not undertake any difficult or dangerous task in the name of penance themselves, "for the remission of sins".

the faithful went to war to defend Christians, to punish the attackers, and to right terrible wrongs. As Riley-Smith has written elsewhere, crusading was seen as an act of love—specifically the love of God and the love of neighbor. By pushing back Muslim aggression and restoring Eastern Christianity, the Crusaders were—at great peril to themselves—imitating the Good Samaritan. Or, as Innocent II told the Knights Templar, “You carry out in deeds the words of the gospel, ‘Greater love has no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.’”

But the Crusades were not just wars. They were holy wars, and that is what made them different from what came before. They were made holy not by their target but by the Crusaders’ sacrifice. The Crusade was a pilgrimage and thereby an act of penance. When Urban II called the First Crusade in 1095, he created a model that would be followed for centuries. Crusaders who undertook that burden with right intention and after confessing their sins would receive a plenary indulgence. The indulgence was a recognition that they undertook these sacrifices for Christ, who was crucified again in the tribulations of his people.

[u/notapersonaltrainer → u/Mantergeistmann]

Yes, today's Western Crusades curriculum basically ignores the context that the Middle East was largely Judeo-Christian and was conquered through centuries of Islamic crusades, along with swaths of Europe, before Christendom cooperated and mounted a far more limited counteroffensive. But since crusade is white-coded and jihad brown-coded, the only the crusaders are the baddies.

But that's a whole other tangent in the historical double-standards rabbit hole I didn't want to go down for brevity.

[u/Kawhi_Leonard_ → u/notapersonaltrainer]

That is undoubtedly the worst map I've ever seen. Where's the Reconquista? Where's the Byzantine campaigns in Anatolia? What about the Baltic Crusades or the numerous battles across the Russian Steppe?

[u/Plastastic → u/notapersonaltrainer]

That map is so ridiculous, you only count (some) major crusade battles and you counter with every minor skirmish in which muslims were involved.

EDIT: You might also want to ask Jews in the 11th century how 'Judeo-Christian' the Middle-East was considering the fact that there were more pogroms than you could shake a stick at.

[u/Mantergeistmann → u/Plastastic]

It also seems to be limited to a certain number of Crusades... I believe it was the 4th Crusade that sacked Constantinople? Plus I think some various Eastern European Crusades.

[u/Plastastic → u/Mantergeistmann]

The Northern Crusades, yeah. You could also count the Hussite wars and the Albigensian Crusade.

If you really want to be fair and adhere to the same standards as the 'Muslim conquest battles' there's countless other conflicts you can include as well.