We have been over this, but again -
No one had said that globalize the intifada is a call for genocide. It’s clearly not. But it clearly is a call for violence.
From the river to the sea is the genocidal slogan (genocidal towards the Jews living in Israel). Globalize the Intifada is about regular violence, not genocide.
Hope that helps clarify things because you are not the first to make that mistake.
…uh, there’s somebody in the thread that did say just that
The quibbling over definitions and context keep reminding me of the most famous line from Ghostbusters:
Hopefully the college president’s exam no longer allows partial credit for answering “It depends on context” to the question “Is genocide wrong?”.
I can’t believe that no one has posted this yet - SNL parodied the hearing on their Cold Open (and made fun of both the college presidents and of Stefanik).
As I have alluded to before, part of the cause for the overlawyered answer was to prevent the follow-up: “So, can I have you commit here that any individuals and organizations that are recorded speaking of the things I am defining as calls for genocide, will face penalties?”
As others have mentioned, they should have stated, “if/when we are brought evidence of an actual call for genocide, that is out of bounds, and we’ll surely act about that.”
They were NOT asked “is genocide wrong”. They were asked “these things that a large segment of public opinion feels are calls for genocide, are they banned by your schools?”
Great, so have that terminology debate THERE, where it makes your opponent look boring. Don’t give them the headlines they wanted.
Well, they were about to be asked that. As you point out, and as I mentioned earlier, I suspect Stefanik expected her follow-up would be the gotcha after the presidents properly handled the softball she tossed them. Something like, “Aha! There are videos of students on your campus chanting ‘From the river to the sea.’ Can you explain why they weren’t rounded up, expelled, and perp-walked off the grounds?”
I think Stefanik (like SNL “Stefanik”) probably couldn’t believe her good luck when those three dopes couldn’t answer the easy one right. “Wait a minute, am I actually winning this exchange?” Really.
Exactly.
So they should get partial credit because it was a trick question?
It’s a phenomenon many of us have observed — you go on the stage repeating to yourself “don’t say X, don’t say X, don’t say X…”
… you will say “X” and probably in the worst way.
Like the former Chair at Penn said, they gave a lawyerly answer to what was a “moral” line of questioning. They could have said “direct threats against ANY community have no place in ours” and then “the specific consequence for an individual will be handled in a manner that respects everyone’s rights”.
…
BTW I most definitely do not like the notion private university leaders will serve at the pleasure of hedge fund managers and Senate chairs. (Donors can and should withold their money if they object to their actions, but the “one down, two to go” expressions that went around betray an animosity beyond the official issue itself.)
Who do you want them to serve at the pleasure of?
The University community. If the hedge funder is a donor or alum, then sure in that quality s/he has skin in the game as much as any other. The university offends you? Take your money and leave and make noise as to why, fair game.
But I guess that’s pretty much what I thought was happening here: donors say they’ll take their money and leave, and make noise as to why — and, at that point, The University community says, whoa, hey, hold on, let’s decide whether that person who’d been serving at our pleasure will now stop serving at our pleasure. Oh, look at that: we’ve decided they’ll now stop serving at our pleasure.
If they so two-step the process, would it be, uh, fair game?
The slogan “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” is also not automatically implying genocide of Jews.
Mind you, I certainly wouldn’t claim that nobody who’s ever said it has ever meant it that way. But, again, we’re talking about rhetoric that has been commonplace in Palestinian opposition to israeli occupation for decades, and has been frequently discussed as such without automatically being interpreted as a call for genocide of Jews.
So I am not convinced that the sudden recent insistence on the interpretation that anybody who utters those words must necessarily and indisputably be calling for Jewish genocide is totally sincere.
Right, we can wilfully ignore the last few thousand years of history and pretend that if Palestine was “free” from the river to the sea the Jews would be just fine. And when if that turns out not to be the case the world will respond like this:
This is quite the claim. Do you have a cite for the idea that it hasn’t previously been seen as genocidal?
The phrase has been common, but so has been the backlash from people like me, who know what the phrase means.
This is the first time I have seen it commonly used among people who I think might not realize that it is genocidal in intent, which is why I have been calling it out this time around.
But that doesn’t really pertain to my claim, which is that the University of Pennsylvania is not a liberal school. If you want to split hairs about liberalism vs. progressivism vs. the left, I’m open to you defining these things, but for me I’m kind of dumping them all into the bucket of “everything Republicans hate.” I’m not saying all things liberal are good, that would be a straw man. I do think my alma mater at the time I attended was the best of liberalism, but I’m more than aware of how it can go wrong.
What I’m saying is that the University of Pennsylvania is not a liberal school. Cries of hypocrisy make no sense. It’s a more convenient narrative to imagine Ivy League schools as the bastion of liberal elitism, but many are just bastions of… well, elitism, who lean conservative and more or less allow students to do what they want without really thinking about diversity as more than an obligation to fulfill for certain donors. They have a CYA mentality, not a progressive outlook. They certainly aren’t trying to leverage their diversity for social change, which would be the liberal thing to do (or progressive, or whatever.) And when I say they are conservative I mean it in the classic sense, as in, resistant to change.
If University of Michigan was doing the same shit, or Berkeley, or an actual liberal college, then you’d have an argument.
Again, there is nothing recent about calling out this hateful phrase. And let me note, I am posting links that call out “from the river to the sea” to show that this is not a recent phenomenon; that does not mean I endorse the links or their content.
Some examples:
Archived version of a page from 2021 describing the phrase as hateful:
CNN commentator fired for using the phrase in 2018:
Article about this incident from 2018:
Claiming that this phrase has only started getting called out “recently” is simply revisionist history.
Oh, I’m not claiming that the phrase “from the river to the sea” has NEVER been interpreted that way before a few weeks ago. But the recent propaganda push to insist that it can have only one possible (genocidal) interpretation and must therefore be totally suppressed is new AFAICT.
It also seems a bit shaky to hang the insistence on the genocidal interpretation on predictions of what would or might happen IF Palestinians had full rights throughout their historical homeland. “I predict that freedom for the disprivileged group would be followed by vengeful slaughter of the privileged group, therefore I assert that calling for freedom for the former is automatically an exhortation to slaughter the latter” is not an indisputable interpretation.
“Exterminate the Amalekites”, for example, is an indisputably genocidal slogan. “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” is not. That doesn’t mean that the latter slogan is automatically A-ok and must be assumed to be innocuous in all circumstances. But treating it as inherently equivalent to a call for Jewish genocide is IMHO disingenuous.
As an Israeli, I have never seen it interpreted in any other way.
And I’m not saying it can’t be. I’m saying that if you look at the context - the fact that this phrase originates with the PLO in ways that were explicitly genocidal, for example - then in context of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict it is genocidal.
Sorry, what? The quote isn’t PalestinIANS will be free. The quote says absolutely nothing about the rights of Palestinians. I wouldn’t fine “Palestinians will be free from the river to the sea” nearly as objectionable, for example, because that’s a pretty uncontroversial statement - Palestinians should be free, whether they live in Israel, Palestine, Jordan, Egypt, the US, etc…
But the phrase is about PalestINE, the nation; and nations, unlike people, are mutually exclusive. If PalestINE stretches from the river to the sea, there is no Israel.
Ignoring the context of the phrase - hundreds of years of history, its origins with the PLO charter, etc - is IMHO disingenuous and extremely dangerous.
In my experience, Americans have a hard time telling the difference between individual rights and national rights, how a person can be free without the collective they see themselves as being part of being free, and vice versa. You see it every time they invade some country supposedly for its own good - claiming to “free” a country while not understanding that that country’s definition of “freedom” is to be oppressed by one of their own rather than by a foreigner.
I think it’s because Americans don’t really understand nationalism.