Stefaniuk asked a very straightforward, easy to answer question: “Is calling for the Genocide of Jews a violation of univeristy policy against harassment and abuse?”
Not one of the college presidents would give a straight answer. They all equivocated. I think the reason is that they are afraid of their own students and the more radical professors, and maybe even a lot of the staff. Hey don’t want to become the subject of the kind of harassment and demands for firing that would certainly follow if they made an unequivocal statement that the protests were wrong.
In the twisted logic of these people, a microagression is a serious thing that could lead to expulsion, but calling for the deaths of an entire people, some of whom are students at the school, is ‘nuanced’ and needs ‘context’.
I wouldn’t send my kid to Harvard or Yale or Penn on a free ride. There may come a time when people who went to Harvard won’t want to admit it.
Yes, it really boils down to the fact that the right hates Muslims more than they hate Jews. And I would go further than your final sentence by saying that they believe conversely that it is anti-Semitic to not be Islamophobic .
How does this follow? In what way does the existence of the state of Israel prevent Pogroms. If Putin decides that Jews are to blame for losing the war in Ukraine and starts sending them to the gulag how is Israel going to prevent it? Isreal provides a safe haven so that if a Pogrom occurs those oppressed Jews have a place to escape to, but I don’t see how it prevents Pogroms for occurring. In think the main reason Pogroms have stopped is that state level antisemitism has gone out of style at least for now. The only countries that appear to have enough critical mass of anti-semetism to initiate a pogrom are in the middle east, and in those cases it is the existence of Israel that brought that condition about.
Note that this isn’t to argue against Israel’s existence but just with the specific quoted sentence.
Is that situation particularly different than any of the other colonized peoples who threw off the British yoke? Genuine question, I don’t know much about that slice of history.
Most (British) colonized peoples didn’t win their independence in a war against the British. They generally lost any uprisings they tried, and the actual independence came a little later or was orchestrated by different groups from the violent insurrectionists. The Irish (mostly) won theirs, though.
Never. Not as long as having a degree from Harvard gets you into exclusive circles of power and influence.
My ancestors who came to the US might dispute that. Sure, the US wasn’t paradise and there was discrimination but there weren’t systematic, state-sponsored pogroms. They weren’t taxed extra for not being of the state religion. And so on. The trick was getting to North America in the first place.
Jews wound up all over the world because quite a few of them moved on when threatened. Expelled from Spain? Go to North Africa. Or maybe South America, that “New World” everyone has been talking about . The Romans kicked you out of Jerusalem? Head north through Italy, keep going north, wind up in Eastern Europe. Eastern Europe got dangerous? Go to North America. Not the most secure circumstance but it did allow them to survive as a people over the centuries.
The US pulled off a successful uprising against Great Britain. It was a couple centuries back, though.
The reason these college heads can’t readily condemn anti-Semitism is because some people have skillfully blended “Israel” and “Jews” together so that any anti-Israel condemnation becomes seen as anti-Semitic.
And when Israel is seen as an oppressor, and these college campuses are very anti-oppression, well, it becomes even harder. You have to be anti-Israel in order to fight on behalf of the oppressed, so goes the logic.
Yes, as I stated in my post, Israel is useful as a fall back if pogroms occur. But the sentence I quoted implied that the existence of Israel was the only thing preventing Pogroms from happening in the first place, and I don’t see that those who want to get rid of Jews would decide against it just because most of them would escape to safety. To me the sentence sounded like the equivalent of saying that without seatbelts there would be more auto accidents.
But maybe this is just semantics and Rittersport didn’t intend to imply that Israel was the only thing preventing pogroms from happening, but instead was saying that Israel is important because in all likelihood at some point there will be another pogrom and it will be necessary to have a homeland.
As there were everywhere else, but the Middle East is unique in the world in terms of having a strong majority of the population being anti-Semitic (74%) as compared to the rest of the world which peaks at around (34%). It is undeniable that most of this difference is due to the formation of the state of Israel.
It makes sense to me that a people who created a country to protect their faith and race would feel their very faith and race directly threatened when their country is.
I don’t believe it’s a sensible way govern, but then The United States legally mandates signs on doors to keep firearms out of my child’s daycare so we ain’t doing too hot ourselves.
I disagree strongly, and I do not have a favorable opinion re: Ms. Stefanik. She was certainly hoping for a gotcha and the presidents served it up on a silver platter.
I suspect if the presidents handled this softball properly (“Of course a call for genocide of any people would be considered harassment and bullying!”) she was prepared to follow with “Then how do you explain permitting chants of ‘From the river to the sea!’?”
And she would have had zero interest in engaging in a reasoned debate about how the phrase means different things to different people in different contexts.
But the question posed has really only one right answer, and it’s a really easy one to come up with. It wasn’t a vague question at all.
The Middle East also has more sectarian violence in general, for example. There are tons of Muslims of one variety killed by Muslims of another variety every year - far more than you see among Christian sects nowadays, for example. Surely that’s not also Israel’s fault? And what about the Assyrians, Kurds, the so called “Swamp Arabs” who were apparently descended from Mesopotamians, or most of all, the Yazidis? None of them have their own country to justify hatred against them, yet all have been murdered en masse by Middle Eastern nations. If Israel didn’t exist, you don’t find it likely that Jews in at least some middle eastern nations would have shared that fate?
I think widespread antisemitism and widespread sectarian violence and many other issues faced by the Arab world stem from the same root cause. That root cause isn’t Israel; And before the Islamophobes out there get too excited, that root cause isn’t anything inherent to Islam, either. You can find easily find times in history where the Islamic world was stable while Christians massacred one another over religious minutiae.
Poverty; oppressive regimes; religious institutions clinging to power; foreign empires pitting ethnic and tribal divisions against each other to weaken their subjects.
Did you read my post? I said the exact opposite. Your argument is the one that relies on coincidence.
If we grant that the antisemitism is all Israel’s fault; why do Sunnis and Shias kill each other many times more often than Catholics and Protestants? Why do Yazidis get murdered en masse? Is that Israel’s fault, too? Or is it a coincidence that the Arab world hates Jews because of Israel and hates other religious minorities just by chance?
Or are there environmental factors that make bigotry, especially religiously motivated bigotry, so much more common?
Am I the only one who read the OP? College administrators can’t say that calling for genocide isn’t necessarily wrong. Well, of course. Calling for genocide is necessarily wrong. I can’t say that it isn’t.
(Pro tip: If you’re going to be stringing a bunch of negative clauses together, make sure to count how many you have. Or better yet, rephrase it so you don’t have a bunch of negative clauses strung together.)
The genesis of this thread would make a great Onion headline: Congresswoman, whose party actively courts Christian Dominionists, white supremacists, and actual Nazis, asks college heads why they are anti-Semitic.
Well, no one said I should work for the Onion, but I think my point is clear.
I did read your post and understand your argument and agree to some extent, but still think that the vast majority of the beef that the Islamic world has with Jews stems from the creation of Israel, and the Palestinian issue. That isn’t to say it is in any way justified or that its Israel’s fault, just that there is a clear connection.