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On the bird site (or is it the letter site now?) I'm seeing increasing calls to oust Harvard President Claudine Gay. Famously, during her recent Congressional testimony she was asked this question:
"Dr. Gay, at Harvard, does calling for the genocide of Jews violate Harvard’s rules of bullying and harassment, yes or no?"
Her memeworthy reply was: "It can be, depending on the context".
This of course, is pretty weak sauce considering that Harvard is ranked dead last out of 245 institutions for Freedom of Expression according to the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression. It would appear to an outside observer that Harvard's standards of what is acceptable speech vary greatly depending on who is doing the speaking.
Bill Ackman, billionaire and Harvard alum, didn't pull any punches tweeting "Resign in Disgrace".
Predictably the scandal has caused people to dig into Ms. Gay's academic work, and accusations were made that she plagiarized parts of her thesis. Nevertheless, many have come to her defense with more than 650 Harvard faculty signing a letter of support for Dr. Gay, who became the institution's first black President earlier this year.
It would appear that Harvard is in a no-win situation.
If they fire Dr. Gay, they will have fired a black, female President and will enrage the social justice left who constitute the vast majority of Harvard's students and staff.
If they don't fire her, they will have proven that Harvard has no consistent free speech principles and, furthermore, that calls for genocide are acceptable as long as they are against the appropriate targets.
There is perhaps a third option, in which Dr. Gay cracks down hard on anti-Semitic speech and makes an example of a few students or staff who crossed the line, thus blaming it on a few bad apples and going back to the status quo.
Whatever happens, I think that Harvard's reputation has been damaged by this incident. There is an opportunity for another school in the elite ranks to set itself apart as the "sane" alternative and perhaps capture Harvard's crown at the top of the academic food chain.
As always, I believe that donations to elite institutions are harmful and the donors should be laughed at, taxed, and shamed.
Ordinarily I have little sympathy for people who get hauled before committees because generally they deserve it. And a bunch of presidents of extremely wealthy universities who have spent the past few years licking the shoes of the wokies gets even less sympathy from me.
But that was a real "have you stopped beating your wife?" question there.
There's two parts to it, and the answers are "yes" and "no" respectively.
"Is calling for the genocide of Jews... bullying and harassment?"
Well, yeah. Who (apart from the usual suspects) is going to stand up in public and say "I'm all for genocide of the Jews, me!"
The second part of the question, though, is "Is what is going on with campus protests calling for genocide?" and that is the Remains To Be Proven part.
In which case, a bunch of idiot kids chanting slogans does not "violate Harvard’s rules of bullying and harassment", so the answer there is "no". Because if it is, then all the idiot kids (and lecturers and professors) chanting slogans and marching in protests over the past few years about White Supremacy and the rest of it is "calling for genocide" and there were no committees investigating that.
It can't be "it's okay if it's about whites, but the Jews are special" unless you want to open a whole can of worms about The Global Jewish Conspiracy and puppetmaster elites pulling strings and so forth.
The condemnation, as Nybbler says (and again this is in Ackman’s Twitter post) is because they’re unwilling to actually commit to freedom of speech. They want their exceptions for discourse around trans issues or HBD, but then when it’s POC vs Jews, they want to be able to sit back and say they’re just following the spirit of the first amendment.
You can't divorce the discussion from the fact that Israel is slaughtering thousands of Gazan civilians, and it's especially rich that Jews have been able to force the discourse on an alleged call to genocide with a run-of-the-mill propaganda slogan like "Palestinians will be free in Palestine," when such slogans are common to every war in human history. We should be left in awe that they've been able to steer the discourse to pearl-clutching around that slogan while they openly endorse an ongoing ethnic cleansing. None of the hypocrisy you are trying to identify here between "POC vs Jews" on the free speech question can possibly hold a candle to the hypocritical Elite support for Zionist brutality. The fact this has been made an issue proves Jews are on the top of the pyramid, above and beyond the POC, and the kvetching over this controversy is just proof of that fact and not at all proof that Jews are put upon.
Well ‘the Jews’ just failed to oust Harvard’s WOC president despite making up a majority of its most generous donors, which would suggest otherwise. Israel isn’t ‘slaughtering’ Gazan civilians, casualty rates in Gaza are within expected parameters for fighting in a dense, highly populated urban environment and don’t suggest any large scale targeting of non-combatants unaffiliated with Hamas.
Not only do Hamas’ own casualty figures fluctuate in a deeply suspicious way, but even if they were accurate they’d suggest a less than 1% civilian death rate, which again is extremely low in historical terms for the invasion of a dense city (or even in general). Gaza’s population is three times that of Dresden before it was bombed, and yet in two months of heavy bombing and a ground invasion, even Hamas argues that fewer died than did in a single allied bombing there.
Israel is slaughtering Gazan civilians, it is building settlements to ethnically cleanse the West Bank. It is Apartheid by any reasonable standard, with Gazans as functionally less-than second class non-citizens of Israel. Using Dresden as a benchmark for whether or not we can consider there to be a slaughter of civilians is revealing of just how motivated you are to deny the reality of the situation.
Why not just embrace the Richard Hanania approach of supporting it rather than denying that it is actually happening?
On the one hand, you don't think we can call this a slaughter of civilians because the death toll isn't at the level of Dresden, but on the other hand you are Very Concerned that students on campus are saying that Palestinians should be free. Like I said, we should be left gasping in awe at the inversion of reality we are watching unfold at the pinnacle of the Ivory Tower, and even here.
Dresden is considered a controversial case and had a casualty rate either an order or multiple orders of magnitude higher than the current conflict depending on who you believe, sure.
But that reminds me, you’ve argued that extraordinarily high civilian death rates on the Eastern Front in WW2 were merely sad realities of warfare (rather than any deliberate extermination), but less than 1% of Gaza’s population (a substantial part of which is armed combatants) dying in an invasion is a “slaughter”? More Jews died at Iasi in a few days than civilians have died in Gaza since October 7th.
If killing sub-1% of the civilian population in collateral damage during an invasion is a “slaughter”, then the term applies to almost any major military action to the extent it’s almost redundant.
I’m not Israeli, but if I were I’d be far harsher and less compromising. Perhaps that would make me a bad leader. I advocated right here, as I recall, that Israel should start executing fighting age men until the will to fight back is eliminated, for example.
Not at all. I have few real opinions about freedom of speech, given neither I nor those I consider hostile to me support it. But, as a citizen of present day America, I would run a university as the presidents promised this week (or last, I forget) in Congress, without any restrictions on legal speech by faculty or students.
I have never contested that the high mortality due to war reality, reprisals etc. certainly constitutes a "slaughter of civilians", and again, I don't know why you insist on pointing to particularly notable examples of this and insisting they are a minimum benchmark for acknowledging the reality of what is happening on the ground. What is happening right now in Gaza is a reprisal.
You don't appreciate how fragile Israel is. It only exists by the pathological grace of European people. It's been an albatross around the neck of the White world. The Jews haven't built an inspiring outpost of civilization. It's an embarrassment in every regard: politically, ideologically, aesthetically, geopolitically. It's been a massively destabilizing force geopolitically, it has costed the United States immense wealth, blood, and prestige on the world stage to such an extent as to actually threaten its hegemony.
The real reason why propaganda slogans are so threatening is because they threaten an erosion of Western support for Israel, which is absolutely terrifying for them, and rightfully so. It has nothing to do with "muh genocidal rhetoric". It's about clamping down on campus opposition to Israel.
If the West stopped caring either way about Israel tomorrow, what do you suppose would happen to it?
Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Iran successfully invade?
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