Just four months into 2024, the Guardian published a leading candidate for most preposterous column of the year. Veteran Democratic operative Robert Reich has well earned this nomination for his article claiming that the ongoing protests at Columbia University in New York are ‘not expressing anti-Semitism’, ‘not engaging in hate speech’ and ‘not endangering Jewish students’ (his emphasis).

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Protesters at Columbia have been chanting: ‘Remember 7 October? That will happen not one more time, not five more times… but 10,000 more times.’ Yet still Reich claims that this does not express anti-Semitism. You couldn’t find a better illustration of George Orwell’s observation on the ignorance of intellectuals: ‘One has to belong to the intelligentsia to believe things like that: no ordinary man could be such a fool.’