Brandeis University logo. Photo: Brandeis University.

The Brandeis University administration professes to be deeply concerned about the rights of black Africans.

In the 1980s, it divested its holdings in companies that did business with the South African apartheid regime. In 2000, it invited Bishop Desmond Tutu to give its commencement address, despite Tutu’s long record of hostile statements about Jews and Israel.

So when the news broke April 14th that 100 black schoolgirls in Nigeria had been kidnapped by an Islamist militia “to use as cooks and sex slaves” (as The Associated Press put it), one would have expected the Brandeis campus to be up in arms.

Eager students should have been circulating petitions in front of the cafeteria and collecting spare change to purchase food packages to send to the hostages.

High-minded professors should have been digging out their magic markers to create picket signs demanding action to save the girls from their Islamist abductors.

Amateur folksingers should have been holding impromptu concerts in the middle of campus to raise awareness of the plight of these “cooks and sex slaves.”

The Brandeis administration should have been announcing that it would be giving an honorary degree to an African woman who has been outspoken against Muslim extremist violence against black women in Africa.

Oh, wait. They did that already.

And then they canceled the degree when some other Muslim extremists complained.

Think about the cruel irony. First Brandeis announced it would give an honorary degree to Ms. Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the world’s leading spokeswoman against the Islamist victimization of black girls.

Then the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) and other Islamist extremists protested, saying that Ms. Ali has been giving Islam a bum rap by focusing attention on Islamist victimization of black girls. Frightened Brandeis administrators quickly dumped Ms. Ali.

And then, right smack in the middle of the public controversy over Brandeis University’s surrender, the Islamists have proven Ayaan Hirsi Ali to be right, by doing exactly what she has accused them of doing.

It’s one of those horrible ironies that would be too coincidental to be believed if it hadn’t actually happened.

The Brandeis administration — and its many supporters among the students and faculty — deny that they are insensitive to black female victims of Islamist violence. They claim the problem is that Ms. Ali has been too sweeping in her criticism of Islam.

Really?  Well, here’s their opportunity to prove it. As you read these words, 100 little girls in Nigeria are being held captive and forced to become “cooks and sex slaves.” Where are the protests by Brandeis administrators, faculty, and students? Where is the outrage, where are the petitions, where are the impassioned demands to rescue the girls? When black girls were being oppressed by white South Africans, the Brandeis community was outraged. Will they display the same indignation when the oppressors are Muslims?

Moshe Phillips is president of the Religious Zionists of America, Philadelphia Chapter; Benyamin Korn, the former executive editor of the Philadelphia Jewish Exponent, is chairman of the RZA-Philadelphia /http://www.phillyreligiouszionists.org.