The Rotten Ivy League

By Sha’i ben-Tekoa

The Peabody Museum at Yale University. From The New-York Sketch-Book of Architecture, No. X: page 263. October 1874. Photo by J. Cleaveland Cady, Public Domain, Wikipedia

At the Divinity School of Yale University on 18 May, the Year of Our Lord, 2026, the female president of the University, Maurie McInnis, bestowed on a Canadian woman, Ingrid Mattson, the honorary degree of Doctor of Divinity, who in June 2025 signed a letter to Canada’s prime minister accusing the Jews in Israel of genocide, in effect, of doing to the “Palestinians” what the Nazis did to them; in effect, accusing the Jews themselves of morphing into Nazis.

And for sure, up in Heaven beyond the pearly gates, Ezra Stiles, seventh president of Yale College (1778-1795) during the American Revolution, and today the name of one of Yale’s fourteen colleges, is looking down from on high at his school with tears in his eyes.

Ezra Stiles was a minister in the Congregationalist church. In fact, most of today’s Ivy League universities began as seminaries for the education and ordination of future ministers that required all students during their four-years to study Hebrew so they could read the Jewish Bible in the original. As Protestants, they had jettisoned the Roman Catholic practice of assassinating anyone who translated the official Vulgate Latin text into a language parishioners could understand, e.g. the life and death by burning at the stake of William Tyndale (1525–1536).

Studying Hebrew was so important in these American seminaries, at Harvard, after four years, the valedictorian was a student chosen not for having the highest grade-point average but his excellence in Hebrew. For its first 150 years, the valedictorian at Harvard delivered his valedictory speech at graduation and ordination in Biblical Hebrew.

Stiles, during his presidency of Yale, also once warmly hosted a guest from Hevron in the Holy Land, Rabbi Raphael Chaim Yitzchak Karigal, a shaliach soliciting funds for yeshivas in Hevron. The two became friends, conversed in Hebrew and later via mail corresponded long-distance in Hebrew.

John Adams (1735-1826), the second president of the United States, whose father was a deacon in the Congregational Church, was steeped in the Jewish Bible and praised it to the skies as the finest social and legal system known to man.

Today, though, at Yale, an honorary degree of Doctor of Divinity was bestowed on a woman arguably insane for having converted to Islam. A woman in the Judeo-Christian West who chooses to live as a woman in Islam has got to have her head examined.

And notice this news item is not only about this female Jew-hater being honored but the female president of Yale and any other factotums in her administration involved in calling this delusional antisemite, this former president of the Islamic Society of America, a Doctor of Divinity.

In 2024, Matson also signed a letter calling on the Canadian government to arrest leaders of the Israeli government, presumably to put them on trial for the crime of genocide.

In her letter of 2025, she called for an embargo on weapons to Israel at the moment being attacked on seven fronts by Muslims bent on killing all Jews in the world. She also called for the end of Canada-Israel trade relations and referred to “the Occupied Palestinian territory including Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem and Israel,” which can be understood to mean those specific areas and the rest of Israel too. It is all “occupied territory” in the minds of the savage Muslims she supports. In their universe, Israel has no right to exist at all.

She has called for sanctioning Israeli leaders and key government officials “suspected of responsibility for genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes.”

Someday, I need to read up on the Salem Witch trials between February 1692 and May 1693 when more than 200 people were accused. Thirty were found guilty, nineteen were executed by hanging.

Today’s hysterical Jew-hatred has the flavor of such mob hysteria, with one of its most fascinating features being the response of the Jew-haters to what Hamas did on Oct. 7, which was to say nothing against their satanic cruelty to Jews that day.

Instead, they say Israel is the perpetrator of mass murder, torture, horrible sex crimes. Today’s Jew-haters expend not one calorie on hating what Hamas did to thousands of Jews; all their calories burn on hating Jews for allegedly committing horrible crimes worthy of the Muslims.

The Jew-hatred coursing through America’s elite schools now is a frightening omen for the future. Masses of students stunningly ignorant of the history of Zionism and the birth of Israel call for the destruction of the world’s only tiny Jewish state. They know nothing of the history of the country as it was in 1897, Year One of the Zionist movement. Even a generation of forty years earlier, in 1857, the country was described as a “caked…depopulated Hell” by American novelist pilgrim Herman Melville.

There is no record, no remnant, no evidence of any “Palestinians” ever living in what only Jews and Christians knew as “Palestine,” a synonym for the Bible’s Promised Land. Muslims never knew of a country with that name, let alone its geography. When the Arab Legion (latterly the Jordanian Army) crossed over from the east bank of the Jordan River in May 1948, they had no name for the hills in front of them, and for the next two decades, the New York Times called the area “the western bank of the Jordan River.” Not until 1968 did the name “West Bank” become common, but still only as a sterile, topographical label lacking any association with any people living there. Indigenous peoples commonly give names to their country’s mountains, hills, rivers, lakes, so the very name “West Bank” is unintentional evidence that there never was a “Palestinian people” living here. To this day “West Bank” is a no-name name.

Indeed, Muslims today call themselves the “indigenous” people of Palestine, but if so, why do they call it Palestine? That is a name invented in the year 135 BCE by a non-indigenous, Western imperialist, Emperor Hadrian of Rome. For two centuries before then, the Romans in occupation of the Land of Israel called it Judea, but after two expensive and bloody rebellions by the Jews, Rome had had enough and was bent on genocide, meaning the extermination of not only the Jewish nation, but any record of their history in this land. Hadrian not only made up the Latinate name “Palaestina,” he renamed the Jews’ holy city “Aelia Capitolina.”

And when the illiterate Muslim horde invaded Jerusalem in 638 and asked the locals its name, they answered “Eliya,” its name for five centuries. The Muslims then retained the name “Eliya” for the next five centuries. Only in the Crusader period did the Muslims start calling Jerusalem “Al-Quds,” short for “the holy city.” An authentic, indigenous people would name their capital city in their language, so the very term “Palestinian” is more proof there never was a “Palestinian” people living there.

Today, in the best Ivy League universities, they teach that the Arabs can have 21 states and the Muslims can have 56 officially Muslim states. But the Jews cannot have even one Jewish state.

That is what “Free, Free Palestine!” a chant popular on Ivy League campuses, means. The yahoos who chant this believe all the land in the State of Israel was stolen from the “Palestinians” and that is why Israelis must suffer the fate of many Jews in history; they must be driven from their homes and become homeless refugees once again.

The antisemitic Muslim mayor of New York City hawking his lies recently spoke of the “Nakba” (catastrophe) in 1948 in which Muslims claim they were the victims of the Jews — and never mind that in 1948, five Arab armies invaded Israel; Israel invaded no Arab state. The Arabs started the war and therefore are responsible for any Arab war refugees.

This liar said the Zionists drove 700,00 “Palestinians” from their homes, when in 1948-49, the overwhelming number of Arab refugees who fled were migrant laborers from all over Araby who had come into Mandatory Palestine (1922-1948) looking for work and there was nothing “Palestinian” about them. And they fled the war because they had no immovable property to worry about.

That is why the UN and even all Arab and Muslim states called them generically “the Arab refugees” and did so for ten years after 1949 until Gamal Abdel Nasser had the idea of alchemically rebranding this mixed mob into the “Palestinian entity.” (No, Yasir Arafat did not invent the “Palestinian entity.” Nasser did.)

The ignorance of Jew-haters in any generation is understandable among people lowest down on the educational spectrum.

But not in the erstwhile best universities. The ignorance and lack of critical thinking in evidence in the best schools these days regarding Israel is frightening, another symptom of the overall degeneration in American culture and betides an unnerving future for the country apart from Israel.

The American political system became markedly corrupt with the presidency of William Jefferson Clinton (1993-2001) performing perverse sex acts with a woman young enough to be his daughter and in the Oval Office no less.

Today’s recent news items regarding the fleecing of billions of dollars of taxpayers’ money is another face of a corrupt and decaying nation.

Decadence abounds no less in entertainment, whose product nowadays contains filthy language and sadistic violence. Common speech is now riddled with words never heard in polite society in American generations past.

The American government over decades has also funneled billions of dollars to Planned Parenthood engaged in performing intrauterine infanticide millions of times, as demographers report Americans are not producing.

American physicians have also mutilated scores of thousands of males and females to create the illusion that a person has morphed into the opposite sex.

Males “identifying as females” are allowed to compete against women in sports and deprive the best female athletes of first place.

So, one need not be surprised that this societal gangrene has infected the universities no less.

Harvard and Yale began in awe of the Jewish Bible; today these institutions have become fetid cesspools of Jew-hatred.

G-d bless President Trump for fining these institutions for tolerating antisemitic poison fit for German universities in the 1930s.

But his time in office will soon end, and then what?

PHANTOM NATION: Inventing the “Palestinians” as the Obstacle to Peace is available at Amazon.com in hard cover or a Kindle ebook. His podcasts can be heard on www.phantom-nation.com and www.israelnewstalkradio.com