Last Thursday evening, I went to a cult meeting. I did so not out of ideological curiosity (as I had already thoroughly studied this particular cult’s teachings, and discussed their finer points with some of its most fervent devotees), but rather in order to take a few notes so that I could relay my impressions here, in this article. My interest in reporting on the cult is personal, as many of its members would like to see one of my favorite countries — a country where I have both dear friends and close family — wiped off the map.

The country, of course, is Israel (what other nation’s destruction is considered an acceptable political objective on a university campus?). The cult itself bears no title, but its acolytes populate the ranks of student groups on our campus such as the Muslim Student Awareness Network (MSAN), the ironically named Coalition for Justice in the Middle East (CJME) and Students Confronting Apartheid in Israel (SCAI). On Thursday, two of these groups hosted a lecture by Norman Finkelstein here at Stanford. As is so often the case at these gatherings, which elevate intellectual aggression against Israel into a form of organized worship, the event began with rote recitations of praise for the cause’s most venerated idols: the introductory speaker first invoked the spirit of Noam Chomsky, “one of the greatest intellectuals of today, and of the twentieth century.” Following this, he read lengthy quotations from the writings of Edward Said (Apollo to Chomsky’s Zeus, Lenin to his Marx). Through the words of these holy teachers, the invited speaker was sanctified before the assembled crowd. Chomsky and Said had approved Norman Finkelstein; so now must we.

And in large part, we did. To be sure, I saw many students in the audience who I sincerely hope had come merely out of curiosity, or at the request of a friend. But between the talk’s many organizers and a pugnacious gang of gray-haired, never-lapsed hippies who always emerge from the woodwork for lurid rhetoric like Finkelstein’s, it was easy to get the feeling that few people in attendance were not on the same page. Indeed, my sense was that much of the lecture would have sailed over the head of an audience member who was not already thoroughly with the program, right from the point where the lecturer began his speech with the assertion that “if you look at the past, the present, and the future, the conflict is really not very controversial at all.” What may one infer from Norman’s casual failure to specify which conflict he was talking about, except that he fully expected his audience to know what he was going to say before he said it?

Throughout his whole talk, this same, totalitarian message persisted: all of us are already with the program, except for you. Despite furious note scribbling, I literally lost count of the number of times he used turns of phrase that asserted the total impossibility of thinking differently than he does about Jews holding sovereignty in the land of their ancestors. To list only a few: “there’s no dissent, no debate, no dispute,” “they all agree,” “complete and total unanimity,” “no controversy whatsoever,” “no legitimate disagreement” etc. Many members of the audience helped to reinforce this message by providing the example of how one should behave if one is, indeed, already on board. One should laugh knowingly when Norman points out the “extraordinary coincidence that each new Arab leader who threatens Israel is compared to Hitler,” never wondering whether people might have made those comparisons because of something an Arab leader said about wanting to pave Arab roads with Jewish skulls, or something he did to help organize Muslim SS divisions in Bosnia during World War II. One should tsk disgustedly when some bigoted fool is quoted making the outlandish claim that European Muslims are anti-Semites, never asking why it is that French and Belgian Jews fear to wear their skullcaps on the streets of Paris and Antwerp. One should boo derisively at the mere utterance of the name of Alan Dershowitz, never doubting the unredeemable evil of the youngest professor to ever be tenured at Harvard Law School. And, most important of all, one should applaud vehemently at the suggestion from one audience member that all of Israel is an illegal Zionist occupation that should be dismantled, never once questioning the morality of such an appealingly final solution to the problem of Zionism.

A debate always swirls around people like Finkelstein, and whether or not what they say is anti-Semitic. Rather than come down on one side or the other of this dispute, it is my hope now to try to say something slightly subtler. Few people recall that the term “anti-Semitism” itself is a much newer thing than hatred of Jews. The end of the nineteenth century in Western Europe was an era of Enlightened secularism, and of romantic notions of race. As the Church’s power waned, Europe’s deep-seated cultural animosity towards Jews could no longer be justified on religious grounds (Hitler himself later wrote in Mein Kampf that he viewed persecution of Jews as Christ-killers to be backward, ignorant behavior). It was in this context that some Europeans began to develop a new framework, in which Jews were seen to be the enemy because of their demonic racial qualities. The common thread connecting the older anti-Jewish sentiment to the newer was that both were based on an elaborate fantasy about Jewish crimes in an imaginary world that inspired many people to support or participate in violence against actual Jews in the real world.

Today, the Jews have a state: one that Norman thinks was founded through “morally indefensible” crimes against humanity that it continues to perpetrate in the present day. When all is said and done, I personally am not interested in whether or not we call such a preposterous denunciation an anti-Semitic one. What matters to me is that everything Norman Finkelstein says has that same common thread worming through it: he lives in a fantasy world where Israeli soldiers “indiscriminately fire into crowd[s]” in the service of an “Apartheid” Jewish State whose very existence is a crime, and the anger that this fantasy inspires leads him and his head-nodding disciples in CJME, SCAI, and elsewhere to champion the cause of people who long ago demonstrated that they want nothing more than to blow up actual Jewish children on real buses.

Though few of us study history, we live in a world laden by the weight of it. Anti-Semitism and Nazism are nasty words today because their historical conclusion was an orgy of mass-murder so tremendous as to be almost incomprehensible. Yet, we must remember that, once upon a time, a great many in the Enlightened European elite proudly called themselves anti-Semites. During the same period, across the Atlantic Ocean, Nazi thinkers were welcomed to teach their theories at America’s top universities in what was surely a sad and ignoble chapter in the history of American academia. With that chapter written, and its lessons apparent, it grieves me very much that organizations at Stanford like SCAI and CJME are so intent on writing another one that is equally shameful.

Jeremy England is a second year graduate student in the physics PhD program. He was a 2003 Rhodes Scholar.