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I'm in grad school at Penn, which has recently hit the news for former Penn president Liz Magill's responses to the congressional hearing on anti-Semitism (even making it to the SNL cold open!!). The question about genocide wasn't even supposed to be the "gotcha" question in the hearing; the follow up was going to be "is the river to the sea advocating for genocide", which was where things were going to get dicey. Instead, Liz and the presidents of Harvard and MIT did not get past the first question.
Liz was under fire for a bit, starting with the "Palestine Writes" festival back in September. The recent confessional hearing was more so the straw that broke the camel's back, as it were. Since September, we've lost almost $1b in donations, from donors with names adorning buildings such as Huntsman, Lauder, and more. The most recent is $100m joint venture that included a non-discrimination clause, and a lawsuit by two Penn students about their experiences (which, even before Oct. 7, included swastikas drawn on campus buildings and an individual breaking into the Jewish center on the campus; we had a day of solidarity on campus to stand against antisemetic hatred, and the progressives who participated have all quietly removed those pictures from their social media).
Liz's administration has also refused to show the pro-Palestine movie "Israelism" and has changed certain policies to make an ongoing pro-Palestine "teach in" more difficult at Houston Hall. The middle east director resigned in protest. It isn't that Liz is pro-Palestine; she's just... Not doing a good job of attempting neutrality.
Penn is ranked the second worst school for freedom of speech by FIRE, a ranking that focuses less on stated policies and more on students' subjective experiences. Liz will stay on until a replacement is announced, and remains a tenured law professor at Penn regardless.
The new YikYak, known as sidechat, has provided a not-so-scientific look into the undergrads' anonymous processing of events. The following stand out to me:
It baffles me how much students (specifically, students without a personal connection to the conflict; those with a personal connection I completely understand) are getting so emotionally frothy about a conflict halfway around the world that Penn has zero influence over. Instead, we are able to influence how students, here on campus, are treated, and we are willing to sacrifice that to rant about the Middle East. Why?
Alright, I'll say it. Advocating for genocide is political speech. It does not incite imminent lawless action. It should not be categorically banned. Genocide could conceivably be a good policy option in certain hypothetical situations. Also most things labeled "genocide" are actually ethnic cleansing or forced assimilation.
I take a view that "genocide" rhetoric has been diluted to be meaningless.
No moral politics can accept genocide. But nowadays genocide is thrown about so casually that it's a meaningless term. The Jewish genocide, the Palestinian genocide, the Xinjiang genocide, the white genocide, the trans genocide.
Genocide is the mass slaughter of people based purely on their ancestral heritage. No one--not Israelis, and not Hamas--either publically or privately wants or plans for genocide. There are bad things outside genocide different sides may want, but they are desires centered on power, not murder as an end in itself. The fact that Hamas wants an Islamic caliphate from river to sea (to sea and sea again) is about as far from actual genocide as can be imagined: if Jews peacefully accepted Islamic dominance (and ideally converted), Hamas would be plenty content and wouldn't kill anyone.
Israeli culture, despite its flaws, is better than Palestinian culture, so many people want it to win. But they're uncomfortable acknowledging that some cultures are better than others, so they feel the need to frame Israeli desires as desires to avoid genocide. They're not: they're a desire to maintain Israeli dominance over Palestine because the alternative is worse, and that's a good thing.
Hamas's charter publicly advocates for genocide.
Note that's a direct quote from an Islamic hadith.
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