3 university presidents were called in to testify about the crisis of antisemitism at their campuses, and all 3 actually
made themselves look repulsive, because they wound up acting as apologists for it.
Only now, after the initial testimonies, are they actually backtracking:
The presidents of Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania on Wednesday sought to contain the damage from congressional testimony a day earlier in which they struggled to say whether calls on their campuses for genocide against Jews would violate school policies.
The stuttering testimony before a US House of Representatives committee by Claudine Gay and Elizabeth Magill, the leaders of Harvard and Penn, respectively, stirred outrage — particularly among Jewish alumni and donors — and added fuel to calls to replace them. By Wednesday evening, an online petition calling for Penn’s board to sack Magill had garnered more than 4,500 signatures from students and donors.
In a video address released on Wednesday, a sober-looking Magill said she had erred by taking an overly legalistic approach when responding to the question posed by Elise Stefanik, the New York Republican representative, who pressed the academics to say plainly whether calling for the genocide of Jews on their campuses violated their codes of conduct of harassment policies.
What took place was worse than harassment. It was support for murder and sexual violence. Such behavior is serious enough to warrant police enforcement to arrest any and all offenders, and even the college presidents themselves should be arrested and imprisoned for failure to report/prevent crimes. Even the part about "legalistic" is DS. Why, if that's how they're going to address anti-Israeli hostility, who knows how they'd respond if 9-11 victims were the subject?
Stefanik panned the so-called apology:
Rep. Elise Stefanik, R-NY, blasted the president's video, calling it a "pathetic PR clean up attempt."
"This pathetic PR clean up attempt by Penn shockingly took over 24 hours to try to fix the moral depravity of the answers under oath yesterday," Rep. Stefanik wrote in a post on X. "And there was not even an apology. By the way, the questions were asked over and over and over again."
"No statement will fix what the world saw and heard yesterday."
The Ivy League president said that a call for genocide of the Jewish people would be classified as harassment or intimidation, despite her previous comments saying that it would "depend on the context."
"Depend" is another pathetic wording Magill employed. In the meantime, all concerned should stop donating to these monster factories, should not take classes there, and should also file police reports against the management as much as against the offending alumna themselves. Seriously, there is grounds on which to prosecute university managements, and it's something that should also be done when it comes to cases like
the transsexual male creep swimming against female swimmers at these institutions in the past year or so. Yes,
Riley Gaines should by all means file a legal case against even the offender himself over that matter.
Update: some local sources are speaking out against this academic abomination. For example,
the Yad Vashem chairman:
"It's appalling but not surprising," he said. "I visited these institutions, spoke with presidents, provosts, and deans, as well as with the incredible Jewish leaders who are the silver lining there. These Jewish leaders feel ostracized. In a Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion class, they put all the Jews in a separate room to 'protect' them. I spoke with the presidents and provosts, and they have no idea what is going on."
"The problem is in the faculty, which is developing, article by article, a policy that calls for the elimination of the Jewish state. Such a protocol is not logical, but it is doubtless driven by other things, such as the Qatari investments some of these institutions are receiving," he explained.
"The presidents of these universities respond by citing the First Amendment about freedom of speech. I say to them - if such a doctrine were to be developed calling for the ostracization of the LGBTQ+ community or targeting people of color, that too would be protected by the First Amendment, but that professor would be fired the following day. The same professor calling for the elimination of the state of Israel has a good chance of being promoted."
He added: "This is a cancerous process. I saw it starting five to ten years ago when there were reasonably easy steps that could have been taken against the BDS referendums. We are now in stage two cancer, and more aggressive treatments are needed - treatments I am not optimistic to see from the current administration. At stage three and four, it will be terminal - but for the universities, not for the Jews."
Dayan says that he believes that claims of history repeating itself are more than hyperbole. "For the first time, I see the similarities between what happened then and what is happening now. The people who burned books in Berlin in the 1930s were not the ignorant masses but the professors and students of the most prestigious universities in Germany. Virtually, the Zionist books in the university libraries are already being burned."
He sees distinct similarities between Hamas and the Nazis: "The cruelty displayed by Hamas is the same cruelty displayed by the Nazis, and the intentions are the same genocidal intentions. Whether to call them Nazis can be debated, but there can be no doubt about their intentions."
[...] Dayan believes that the denial of the massacre mandates action by his institution. "Denial of the Holocaust started in the 40s. Denial of Oct. 7th started on Oct. 8th. Denial of antisemitism and the state of Israel is growing as well and costing Jewish lives. Yad Vashem traditionally doesn't deal with modern antisemitism because six million Jews murdered in the Shoah are entitled to an institution that is exclusively for them. The situation now, though, calls for exceptional actions, and so now we will be active in combating modern antisemitism too."
Here's some
more on the Algemeiner:
Antisemitism on American college campuses is comparable to Stage 2 cancer, and if allowed to progress to Stage 4, academia will be “doomed,” the chairman of Yad Vashem, Israel’s national memorial to the Holocaust, told The Algemeiner a day after presidents of elite US universities refused to issue a condemnation of genocidal calls against Jews and Israel.
According to Dani Dayan, institutions of higher education are becoming increasingly filled with “pseudo-academic theories advocating for genocide of the Jewish people,” and the leadership of those colleges are supporting them, “either by action or inaction.”
Dayan said he explained to University of Pennsylvania president Elizabeth Magill — who drew outrage in September for refusing to cancel an anti-Zionist festival featuring speakers accused of promoting antisemitic conspiracies and violence against Israel — that antisemitism was a “cancerous process” that wasn’t stopped at Stage 1 by universities when it would have been “relatively easy” to do so.
“Now we are in Stage 2, which is much more difficult, and necessarily takes harsher steps,” he said.
“But if we don’t take those steps now, we will reach Stage 3 and Stage 4, which is terminal,” he added, clarifying the problem would be lethal “not for the Jews, but terminal for the university. They will be doomed if they continue this way.”
Well this is why any university that allows such repulsive ideologies to take hold cannot be bankrolled anymore by sane people's money, period. Nor can Jewish students continue to learn there. They'd do well to save their hard-earned money.
Update 2: since the the subject of the Holocaust during WW2 came up here,
see also this article about Miss Puerto Rico Michelle Colón revealing she had relatives who were murdered during the Holocaust.
Update 3:
rabbi David Wolpe resigned from the Harvard antisemitism investigation committee after Gay's catastrophous failure of responsibility.
Update 4:
Magill has resigned on the 9th of December as president of UPenn. What she did was truly repulsive, and she should be ostracized by sensible people for excusing the seriousness of the topic.
