This goes to something very important. In the Middle East there are a lot of very bloody wars. There is a lot of chanting about death to Jews. There are a lot of recriminations and blaming. There is blaming for colonialism and the Cold War. There is misery and the leaders do all the wrong things. Reading yesterday neither Hamas or the PA have had an election in years. The majority of Palestinians feel they do not have any government.
The US and Europe have a very important thing to face. Calls for death to enemies so common in Arab communities must not be allowed here. Students calling for murder even when it is not specified whose murder should immediately be expelled. Does not matter their emotional state or historyâŠthat might even be more of a reason to expel the student. There is no real excuse. No one cares what the next personâs culture is or whatever other excuse.
That stated known terror groups should be targeted by our government and we know that.
We do not allow students to target each other or to spread hate speech. Certainly not in the guise of peace or hateful rationalizations. Immature people can not have some sort of say that it is alright.
Considering democratic republics and the alternativesâŠit is our way or the highway.
The college presidents decide the policies and implementation of policies on campuses. These leaders are letting nonspecific death threats go. Those threats are based on religious prejudice. If you have a job at the top of an Ivy League school or MIT you might want to do your job. Or get fired? Low standards are a garbage way to maintain a job where threatening murder is going on.
Arab student rationales on this are utter crap. The scapegoating of everyone else for tin-pot dictators needs to be stopped. It does not belong here. It is not just Jews or Israelis it is all of us who are blamed. Saudi press talks of how evil nonbelievers are. It is endless BS.
Most university professors hold a far-left world view, and it is presented in students 20-25 most clearly in the protest against the IDF vs Gaza. Magill was walking a line between calling for direct individual threats against Jewish members and a generalized call against Jews. Itâs all about âcontextâ remember was the damaging reply that she had to walk back. However, the point of reference for Magill and the far-left is the dialectic good/evil, or better oppressed vs oppressor. If the call is portrayed as genocide oppressors and freedom for the oppressed, then that is a âcontextâ.
This is not to say that I agree with the far-left or their view of Israel, but their view of Israel or the worldview of oppressors versus oppressed is a point of reference. Israel is an oppressor, end of discussion with them. The question was whether the call for genocide of Jews would violate Pennâs code of conduct, she was asked multiple times, and her answer wound up close to âit dependsâ. If the question was different, and oppressor was taken out of the equation I think the answer would have been a clear âYesâ. If Elise Stefanik asked, âA call for genocide of gays and homosexuals would this violate Pennâs code of conductâ. Yes!
I didnât say that Palestinians are left of center-left Jews, I said that a large population of college students are far left and have viewed Israel with contempt for years. This is Ironic! And⊠Jews have been at the center of the controversy about Israel on college campuses. In fact, there are many far left Jews in academia that view Israel as an oppressor.
There are different degrees of leftness. There is the liberal such as Clinton or Obama. Over the last decades academia has been moving more left, which I see as more Marxist and race based. In the new context, Israel is viewed as âwhite colonialistâ. Both are negative terms. This surprises older, more traditional liberal Jews who have not been following the shift left. While younger Jews are familiar with the rhetoric, they are surprised by the underlying anti-semitism.
The thing that is liberal is democratic republics. The indoctrinations from dictators that blame are far right.
The irony of calling Israel âwhite colonistsâ is horrible because academics are supposed to do one thing above all else. One thing!!
Get the facts right.
Israel is 55% Sephardic. Meaning from the Middle East, North Africa, Spain, and Latin America. Only 45% were Ashkenazi, meaning from Northern Europe.
The big irony is how NYC Ashkenazi does not understand Sephardic points of view and let the support for Israel wallow as a result.
Push has come to shove in this world and the better logic has come forward.
An important thing to note is that no matter how crazy Hamas is there can be a surrender and peace process at any time. This is important because the treatment of Israeli women has no reason nor cause and is continuing. One way or another this will end but the waste and terror are wanted by Hamas.
Back in October Michelle Goldberg had a column in the NYT about her fellow left-wing progressives.
On Tuesday evening, I was drinking on the porch of my friend and neighbor Misha Shulman, the Israel-born rabbi of a progressive New York synagogue called the New ShulâŠ
Of all the people he spoke to, he said, those most devastated were either people who had lost close friends or family, or young Jews âcompletely shattered by the response of their lefty friends in New York,â who were either justifying Hamasâs atrocities or celebrating them outright.
âŠthe way keyboard radicals have condoned war crimes against Israelis has left many progressive Jews alienated from political communities they thought were their ownâŠ
Conservatives reading this might take a jaundiced satisfaction in what some surely view as naĂŻve progressives getting their comeuppance. But part of what makes the depravity of the edgelord anti-imperialists so tragic is that a decent and functional left has rarely been more necessary.
BS. We are dehumanizing 50 years of occupation, and believe the history started on Oct 7th and ended on Oct 7th. The killing by Israeli Army is indefensible, it violates every single rule, norm on military engagement. They bomb apartment complex, houses, hospitals, kill journalists, doctors, turn off oxygen on a Children ICU and instantly killing all those childrenâŠ
Media doesnât talk about it, politicians donât talk about it. All we want to do is how many more billions we can send, how much more weapons we can supply⊠When kids say something, people are so offended and want to shut them.
History will not and should not hold US kindly for its blind support to this madness.
And killing by other armies is defensible?
Yemen? I donât see mass protests on college campuses "Free the Houthi "
Mosul? carnage? US vs ISIS. Kurdish intelligence believes a staggering 40,000 civilians perished in the complete destruction of Mosul. US Military confirmed at least a quarter of that number. US Military blamed the high casualty number was due to ISIS holding thousands of civilians there, that they were held by ISIS as human shields during the fighting.
Sound familiar?
Where were the student campus protests over Mosul. Did you write any OpEds condemning the US and Kurdish forces?
But when the Jews defend themselves against existential imminent threat theyâre inhuman.
I assume youâve written an OpEd condemning Oct7 and the Palestinian horrors performed. Itâs hard to think of anything in Western History that didnâ;t get blamed on the Jews.
The media has been talking about all of it. Power was cut not oxygen to babies in ICU. But why waste an opportunity for sympathy instead of peace?
Hamas can surrender.
As far as the 50 years, Palestinians that came to the table in 1948 are Israeli citizens with sympathies for the rest of the Syrian tribesmen. Palestinians who really never come to the table bought into the end of Israel. That is a position of open warfare. It is acted upon.
Again Hamas can surrender.
This could have been negotiated many times over. Check your demands. Those demands are insufferable deaths based on religious hatred.
Israel has a right to exist.
The other thing that immediately needs to change in the Arab world except Jordan is every leader should resign immediately as illegitimate. I am discussing Aristotleâs writings on legitimate governance. Arab governments are not above criticism. The Arab governments get off far too easily. Far too easily. The scapegoating of Jews, Israel, the West etcâŠeveryone who is not Muslim is causing a lot of harm and death to people across the world. We can look at the Indian subcontinent.
Regardless of who is innocent as most people are leadership matters. None of the Arab leaders outside of Jordan should be in place. It is arrogant among human beings their being in charge.
As for Netanyahu, he has been elected many times over. The Sephardic case for Israel is different than that of the Ashkenazi case in NYC. If one thinks of actually living under one of the criminal Arab dictators one sides entirely with Netanyahu. Letâs get the Arab press to report that openly.
Arab Muslim lives matter a great deal. Letâs look at the crimes in Lebanon, Syria, Somalia, Sudan, and Yemen. Then letâs truly cast stones. The pointing away from those countries is to scapegoat Israel.
One last thing if you are ArabâŠyou are not stepping foot outside of an Arab nation without facing this. Jewish scribes wrote the text. If you are Arab your ancestors were all Jewish. If you find that offensive time to get out of your bubble. Honest facts are never offensive. Make-believe is make-believe.
This is an ignorant time in the Muslim worldâs leadership. That is all history will remember.
I take your statement to be scapegoating the US now. Next it will be colonialism then back to the Cold War. It never stops with an Arab leader being absolutely worthless and criminal.
It is a bit more nuanced. Here is the relevant dialogue as presented in the linked article.
At the hearing, Representative Elise Stefanik, Republican of New York, said that students had chanted support for intifada, an Arabic word that means uprising and that many Jews hear as a call for violence against them.
âCalling for the genocide of Jews,â Ms. Stefanik asked, âdoes that constitute bullying or harassment?â
Ms. Magill replied, âIf it is directed and severe, pervasive, it is harassment.â
Ms. Stefanik responded, âSo the answer is yes.â
Ms. Magill said, âIt is a context-dependent decision, congresswoman.â
Ms. Stefanik exclaimed: âThatâs your testimony today? Calling for the genocide of Jews is depending upon the context?â
Stefanik characterized chants for âintifadaâ as âCalling for the genocide of Jewsâ, implying that the demonstrating students should be punished for threatening Jews. The UPenn prez said that the university response to such should be context-dependent, which at the risk of sounding anti-Semitic seems like a reasonable position. Did the students mean what Stefanik alleges? This looks to me like a rhetorical trap sprung successfully.
Should the term âintifadaâ be banned and made illegal on university campuses? Hate to bring up slippery slopes but there is the potential for one here. How about âcrusadeâ as meaning genocide against Muslims or âabortionâ as genocide against fetuses? This looks like a free speech issue.
Yes - but I think for a different reason that you are talking about.
Note your formulation. That itâs relevant what the students saying the speech meant, rather than the impact on the other students hearing the speech.
Thatâs the trap that critics of campus treatment of speech were trying to lay - the disparate treatment of some speech based on the effect it has on the speaker (such as speech that speakers donât intend to be discriminatory but is perceived by other groups as discriminatory, or even a "micro-aggression), but not this type of speech.
I think Stefanik was shocked that the Presidents didnât say that this speech violated campus speech codes. She was clearly setting up to contrast with speech that makes black or trans or gay students feel uncomfortable or threatened as a matter of selective enforcement based on looking at the speaker instead of the listener.
I now wished I had seen more of the hearing instead of the ânaughty bitsâ that the main news sites showed over and over. I never heard that contrast from her at all. Thanks for providing that context!
Aside from supporting intifada, what did the demonstrating students say? Is supporting intifada alone sufficient to ban that speech?
Should someone who supports apartheid or eugenics or anything else the majority finds very distasteful be thrown off campus?
Threatening violence to a specific group is unsupportable (though I suspect most Americans would look the other way at demonstrators chanting death to Al Qaeda). It gets more difficult when the threat is not specific, as advocating ârevolutionâ or âsocial uprisingâ. Does âintifadaâ fall into this latter category or is it more specific (like being pro-Apartheid)?
