In recent columns, I described disturbing cases of antisemitism in Arkansas. The first involved University of Arkansas-Fayetteville's King Fahd Center for Middle Eastern Studies Professor Mohja Kahf. She hung on her government office door vile invectives equating the Israeli viewpoint with some of history's worst racists, alongside the mantra calling for Israel's destruction: "Palestine, from the river to the sea."

I also detailed Kahf's poem--published just after the Oct. 7, 2023, massacre of Jews by Palestinian terrorists--in which she erases Jewish indigeneity; presents Jews as foreign interlopers in their own Biblical and historical homeland; and casts Israel's creation as an act of colonial theft by that nonexistent empire of post-WWII, largely unarmed, vagabond Jews who traveled on foot to board barely seaworthy pre-war freighters and steamers seeking--according to Kahf--to attack other Jews (those who lived in Israel since its Biblical inception).

The second instance featured the on-air fiction (presented as fact) from Val Emmons, producer on the Dave Elswick radio show, that Jews were offered multiple homelands prior to 1947. Never happened. Emmons included Madagascar on her fantasy-football list of free-to-Jews homelands--which, in reality, was a Nazi-proposed waypoint in Germany's extermination program. Just wow.

The third involved recently fired Fahdian director, Shirin Saeidi, whose posts and reposts included:

Ayatollah Khamenei, "[t]he leader who kept Iran intact during the Israeli attack, May god protect you and the Iranian people from the Israeli regime." (That one didn't age well.)

"To the Arkansas State Legislature: You were unable to punish me because of the Zionist proxies who give you money and know your secrets, and now you are attacking the Middle East Studies Center and my colleagues." (Classic antisemitic tropes. But she's right about one thing: Legislators didn't punish her. The university did.)

"Of course [the Legislature] want the syllabi........

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