Harvard, MIT and UPenn's Presidents Should 'Resign in Disgrace', Bill Ackman Says (businessinsider.com) 503
An anonymous reader writes: Bill Ackman has called for the resignation of Harvard, MIT, and the University of Pennsylvania's presidents following their congressional hearing on antisemitism on Tuesday. The billionaire singled out the three college presidents in a post written on X, formerly Twitter, after their testimonies on Capitol Hill. "The presidents' answers reflect the profound educational, moral and ethical failures that pervade certain of our elite educational institutions due in large part to their failed leadership," Ackman wrote on X. "They must all resign in disgrace," he added.
The three presidents were repeatedly asked by Rep. Elise Stefanik during the Tuesday congressional hearing if calling for the genocide of Jews violated their universities' rules on bullying and harassment. "If the speech turns into conduct, it can be harassment," said University of Pennsylvania president Liz Magill. Harvard and MIT presidents Claudine Gay and Sally Kornbluth replied similarly to Stefanik's question. "It can be, depending on the context," Gay replied when asked the same question. "I have heard chants which can be antisemitic depending on the context when calling for the elimination of the Jewish people," Kornbluth said earlier when Stefanik asked if she'd heard chants of "Intifada" on campus. The term is a reference to previous Palestinian uprisings in Gaza.
Ackman wrote in response to the clip: "If a CEO of one of our companies gave a similar answer, he or she would be toast within the hour. Why has antisemitism exploded on campus and around the world? Because of leaders like Presidents Gay, Magill and Kornbluth who believe genocide depends on the context," Ackman continued. The hedge fund manager added in a later post that the three institutions would be far better off if they ditched their presidents -- quickly. "The world will be able to judge the relative quality of the governance at Harvard, Penn, and MIT by the comparative speed by which their boards fire their respective presidents," he wrote on X.
More Info: Reactions continue to viral video that led to calls for college presidents to resign
The three presidents were repeatedly asked by Rep. Elise Stefanik during the Tuesday congressional hearing if calling for the genocide of Jews violated their universities' rules on bullying and harassment. "If the speech turns into conduct, it can be harassment," said University of Pennsylvania president Liz Magill. Harvard and MIT presidents Claudine Gay and Sally Kornbluth replied similarly to Stefanik's question. "It can be, depending on the context," Gay replied when asked the same question. "I have heard chants which can be antisemitic depending on the context when calling for the elimination of the Jewish people," Kornbluth said earlier when Stefanik asked if she'd heard chants of "Intifada" on campus. The term is a reference to previous Palestinian uprisings in Gaza.
Ackman wrote in response to the clip: "If a CEO of one of our companies gave a similar answer, he or she would be toast within the hour. Why has antisemitism exploded on campus and around the world? Because of leaders like Presidents Gay, Magill and Kornbluth who believe genocide depends on the context," Ackman continued. The hedge fund manager added in a later post that the three institutions would be far better off if they ditched their presidents -- quickly. "The world will be able to judge the relative quality of the governance at Harvard, Penn, and MIT by the comparative speed by which their boards fire their respective presidents," he wrote on X.
More Info: Reactions continue to viral video that led to calls for college presidents to resign
Is this what I think it is? (Score:4, Informative)
It... looks like Ackerman is trying to get a group of people whose job relies on them understanding what a citation is to effectively say that citing an instance of a hate crime is itself a hate crime... and if they don't he's going to accuse them of hate crimes.
Is that... correct?
Re:Is this what I think it is? (Score:5, Insightful)
I think he's implying that they are tolerating, or more actively supporting, a "hostile educational environment" in violation of civil rights laws.
These universities are all private (including Penn), so they are not strictly bound by the First Amendment, but the traditional US approach to freedom of speech, especially in universities, does allow people to argue stupidly racist ideas without being jailed or expelled. The answers that the university presidents gave are consistent because US courts have consistently said that action-rather-than-speech is the actual threshold for a hostile environment under civil rights laws.
Re:Is this what I think it is? (Score:5, Informative)
... but conversely, some of the protests have allegedly [foxnews.com] clearly crossed the line from speech into action -- with the MIT administration specifically walking back enforcement of their policies because of student-visa concerns for the students who acted out. Contrast with Columbia University [columbia.edu], which did enforce its policies.
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Deport the terrorists.
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This is not what a civilized country does with terrorists.
Showing these people "mercy" is telling them you're WEAK.
Terrorism needs to be met and eliminated.
Re:Is this what I think it is? (Score:4, Informative)
The answers that the university presidents gave are consistent because US courts have consistently said that action-rather-than-speech is the actual threshold for a hostile environment under civil rights laws.
Rather hard (and by hard I mean fucking ignorant) for these universities to claim a threshold has not been reached when they are forced to secure pro-Israel teachers behind locked doors in order to protect them from all that speech-not-action.
Quite frankly, there is another standing question that remains unanswered. IF the entire purpose of university and higher education in general is to prepare the next generation to enter society and the workforce, then why in the FUCK do they ignorantly assume that creating some kind of non-reality bubble on their campus selling indoctrination rather than education, best represents that charter?
These students are already being blackballed by corporations before they even land their first real job based on the delusional bubbles wrapped around university, which that corporate action represents actual reality. Freedom of speech does NOT come with freedom of consequence, which is exactly what universities are still trying to sell.
And we wonder why more and more grown-ass adults are not taking even a 22-year old degree-holding graduate seriously.
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Those slogans are hardly ambiguous when you ask those who created them and why. It's the entire reason university presidents (not students) are being called in front of Government to explain a problem with Anti-Sematic behavior (and not a discussion on Free Speech).
They are also a private university who has demonstrated (through considerable bias) on the past that they do not have to follow the US Constitution regarding Free Speech. They are literally free to do little more than claim they do.
Actions als
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Re:Is this what I think it is? (Score:4, Informative)
People have lots of different ideas about what counts as "hate speech". In the US, it is legally irrelevant: there are no law against hate speech. None of the exceptions [wikipedia.org] to the First Amendment include "hate speech" as a sub-category, which is why courts have applied the action-rather-than-speech threshold that I mentioned.
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Please do some research before posting next time.
What is happening on those campuses is not a bunch a kids sitting in the central quad writing letters to newspapers about Israeli policies.
They are calling for the complete genocide of all Israelis and some for all Jews. While physically threatening other students on campus for the crime of being Jews.
The whole "we don't hate Jews! Oh no! We only dislike Israeli policies!" is the modern polite form of Jew hating that formed when publicly calling for global
Re:Is this what I think it is? (Score:5, Insightful)
UN staff, various NGOs, the Red Cross, they all say that war crimes are being committed in Gaza by the IDF.
Terms like ethnic cleansing are somewhat subjective at this point, as it will only be clear with time if the Israelis do annex more of Gaza, but it certainly appears to be what they are doing in the north. There is also the on-going Israeli Settler terrorism and ethnic cleansing, which is happening right now. Yesterday another Palestinian village was bulldozed by illegal Settlers. And they are illegal, even under Israeli law.
But let's take a step back for a moment and look at what you are doing here. You want to be the arbiter of truth, the decider of what is and what isn't acceptable for people to say about Israel. That's probably more dangerous than anything a pro-Palestinian protestor has ever said at one of these events.
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Gee, I wonder why that is.
Do you think it's because the last election they had put Hamas in power, and they haven't bothered with subsequent elections?
Re:Is this what I think it is? (Score:5, Insightful)
It's funny how you are all about freedom of speech, until someone says something you don't like and then you bring out the blunderbuss.
It's telling that you include "false rhetoric" in your reasoning, because doubtless it's only false in your opinion. I see you rail against anyone who wants to be the arbiter of truth, unless it's you.
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Re: (Score:2, Flamebait)
Re:Is this what I think it is? (Score:4, Insightful)
Compromise went out the window with the mass gang rapes and mass murders of Jews these people celebrated when they saw the films of these atrocities.
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Re:Is this what I think it is? (Score:5, Insightful)
My first reaction was "Who the hell is Bill Ackman, and why should I care what he thinks?" Then I read the summary a bit further:
And I really stopped paying attention. I'm still watching what's happening in Israel, Gaza, and the West Bank. I'm paying attention to what's happening in response here at home. But the opinion of a billionaire hedge fund manager doesn't hold much sway to me, in almost any context, and X is a place for spouting opinions, not changing minds.
Damned if you do, damned if you don't (Score:2)
Call it antisemitism and you are islamophobic. Don't, and you're an antisemite.
Pick your poison. One thing's for sure, though, you will swallow it.
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False moral equivalents are false.
I don't know if there's a good answer (Score:5, Insightful)
At least, I don't know if there's a good answer that everyone is willing to live with. Our constitution does protect free speech, even heinous speech. But lots of people only support free speech when it's at least somewhat aligned with their own biases. And, frankly, I work on a campus and it's been pretty obvious the pro-Israeli and pro-Palestinan protestors are basically talking past each other, completely ignoring valid points raised by the other side.
I will say if I'd been on the committee (this is a thought exercise - no one would ever vote for me), I'd have been tempted to take some of the more hateful slogans and replace the words Jews/Zionists/Israeli with gays/women/immigrants, and asked the presidents if they would support the right for that speech to be freely made on campus. If they answered "yes", then they're at least being consistent.
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I can understand the plight of both sides here from a theoretical basis too, but there’s a pragmatic reality that needs to be acknowledged. Israel exists, and that’s not going to change. None of the people who are fighting for a return of “Palestinian” land were even around to experience displacement, thus it’s a learned hatred. This would be like indigenous reservation launching terrorist
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Where do you live? Has your people lived in that land since the dawn of time?
Unlikely.
Are you agitating to give up that land to the people you stole it from?
When you do, let us know and your same argument about other places can be taken more seriously than a college freshman's dorm debate talking point.
Re:I don't know if there's a good answer (Score:5, Insightful)
Our constitution does protect free speech, even heinous speech.
But strangely, the answers given by the presidents were not along the lines of "yes, students on our campus are saying terrible things. As much as we disagree with it, the 1st amendment gives them the right to do so."
Re:I don't know if there's a good answer (Score:4, Insightful)
I'd have been tempted to take some of the more hateful slogans and replace the words Jews/Zionists/Israeli with gays/women/immigrants, and asked the presidents if they would support the right for that speech to be freely made on campus. If they answered "yes", then they're at least being consistent
Exactly. (And you forgot "/blacks" in your substitute list.)
And you know perfectly well, of course, that their answers wouldn't be the same (if they were being honest, anyway).
Hateful slogans chanted against favored groups would result in forceful university leadership action and condemnation.
There is no principle behind the differences at all, other than "these groups are favored, and these are not".
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If you had been paying attention you'd know the Jewish students getting threatened and attacked on campus are not members of the Israeli government.
Crazy US lawmakers. (Score:5, Informative)
Curious (Score:3)
Free speech: Not OK.
Actual Genocide: OK.
Maybe he should resign as a war crime supporter.
so much for micro aggressions (Score:4, Insightful)
Well I suppose it is the death of having problems micro aggressions. :D
What is bullying and harrassment (Score:3)
The senator asked repeatedly about whether calling for genocide is bully or harrassment. That was the cause of the difficulty in response. Bullying and harrassment are specific things in law, with specific definitions. You can see all three of them trying to explain that the law makes clear that this is context dependent; you cannot be bully or harrassing in general, there has to be someone who is bullied or harrassed. In addition to these laws, there are also clear laws on free speech, which the Universities may have a legal obligation to uphold also.
If she had asked "is calling for genocide wrong", she would have got a much clearer answer. But, then I am sure she was aware of this, and this is the reason she asked the question as she did.
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If the same students said, "We don't think kids should be transed" they'd be drummed off campus by the same administrators because they preach that "words are violence". But when it comes to Jews they're ok with calls for genocide and threats against Jewish students.
Action has nothing to do with it. That's a red herring.
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Maybe, but that wasn't the question. I don't know the definitions in the US as it is not my jurisdictiion, but threatening someone with harm or death is not necessarily harrassment or bullying in the UK. It is, however, threatening behaviour and it is illegal. But again, this has to be against a specific person, it cannot be a general statement, although these kind of general calls could be considered hate speech, which is also illegal, but it's a different law. So, we have a legal minefield.
You are correct
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Who? (Score:3)
Why should I care what this guy thinks? I have no idea who he is, and the post describing him as a hedge fund manager makes me care about his opinion even less.
This isn't news. This doesn't matter. It has the same relevance as posting a Tweet from a Kardashian.
Re:Genocide (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Genocide (Score:5, Insightful)
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it confirms my belief that this site has also been run over by far left fascists
You really need to stop and ask yourself why exactly do you believe that the Israel / Palestine issue is in any way associated with political ideology?
At best, you might be able to show that a majority of religious people with a Judaeo-Christian persuasion will tend to favor Israel in any context, and that a majority of those people also tend to be on the political right, but that's incidental and says nothing about the political leaning of people who favor Palestine.
When you insist on looking at the world
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People can be both LEFT and Facists....
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Re: Genocide (Score:2, Insightful)
Re: Genocide (Score:5, Insightful)
The video is about Stefanik literally asking these Presidents if “calling for the genocide of Jews would be against the code of conduct of their University with respect to bullying and harassment”. And they response was generally that it depends, that it would only be so if it rises to the level of “conduct” (meaning actual genocide). These are the same people that will destroy your life for misgendering, or saying that girls should be able to compete among themselves, or supporting classes calling to “eliminate whiteness”.
Re: Genocide (Score:5, Insightful)
Essentially what they're saying is "anything up to actually having murdered someone is simply "speech".
It's only after the victims are DEAD that it becomes actionable.
These people are Evil.
Re: Genocide (Score:5, Insightful)
IN A WAR.
Did you hold the Allies to account for the Dresden firebombing?
No.
Also, Hamas isn't a legally constituted military.
They're a TERRORIST INSURGENCY.
They follow NONE of the rules of war, save to abuse them.
The rules for fighting terrorists differ mightily from the rules for fighting a legally constituted military force.
And let's face it. Israel has done everything humanly possible to preserve life.
What you're ACTUALLY asking for, whether you know it or not (and I think you do), is for Israel to just stand down and accept being attacked by terrorists without reprisal. Accept ANY outrage.
in other words, stand down and welcome the slaughter of their people by these death cultists.
There's only one response for that.
"Fuck That Noise".
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I don't require you to share my views.
I simply am making the argument that, given we don't live in a perfect world, you realize that disagreement with me (or me with you) doesn't make either of us "wrong".
There is NO war that is "clean and sanitary". War is always (ALWAYS, ALWAYS, ALWAYS) ugly and people die.
Seldom is it the people who DESERVE TO.
I put the blame right where it belongs.
On the assholes who STARTED the current round of conflict and their willingness to use THEIR OWN CITIZENS as human shields.
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Hamas attacked Israel without a proper declaration of war. That is a war crime.
Hamas ran indiscriminately killing civilians and mutilating bodies. That is a war crime.
Hamas raped women and children. That is a war crime.
Hamas took civilian hostages. That is a war crime.
Hamas has not provided the civilian hostages with international humanitarian aid. That is a war crime.
Hamas puts it's command centers under hospitals and uses Palestinia
Re: Don't engage Hasbara (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re: Don't engage Hasbara (Score:4, Insightful)
This is, of course, setting aside the veracity of the string of banal name-calling that you decided to respond to. I don't know why you decided to engage in this particular thread.
Garbage, and you KNOW it (Score:2, Interesting)
First, EVERYBODY knows that Israel has a very competent and well-equipped military... just ask any of the NATIONS they have defeated after being sneak-attacked. Their enemies complain about their capabilities, so this is simply not an issue.
Second, the people known as "Palestinians" live in the Gaza Strip (only 141 square miles) and the West Bank (only 2183 square miles). If one of the best military forces on Earth WANTED to eliminate all the people in a 2324sq mi area on their very border (i.e. no supply
Re:Garbage, and you KNOW it (Score:5, Insightful)
....and we've reached the "Palestinians arent real" stage of discourse.
Folks, welcome to the gutter. Leave your ration at the door, we're in mad bastard nationalist territory here.
I mean sure, the concept of "Palestinians" has been around since the 12th century BCE (According to records from the Rammasean dynasty of Egypt, about 700 years prior to the Second Temple), but sure, its a made up thing by propagandist. Whatever, everything and nothing is true now. Wheee.
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No, I think they're just saying that they too have the right of self-determination and self-identification regardless of what painful twists of logic and reason that dumbasses on the Internet try to employ to justify genocidal bullshit.
I don't understand this idea that it's ok for Israel to carpet bomb civilians because those civilians choose to self-identify as something that may or may not have historical roots going back mere decades, or centuries.
It doesn't fucking matter. They call themselves Palestin
Re:Garbage, and you KNOW it (Score:5, Insightful)
"illegal" by which law, precisely?
Because under all of the solutions proposed, a considerable part of that land is legally Israel. True, not all of it - Israel did expand its borders after being attacked, taking land from the defeated aggressors. Something that is not uncommon in history and has in general resulted in the conquered lands being de-jure accepted by the world as part of the victor's territory.
If you want to go by over 50 year old history, large parts of Poland should be given back to Germany for the same reason - an aggressor attacked his neighbour, was eventually defeated and lost land. You certainly don't argue for that, do you?
Re:Garbage, and you KNOW it (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm sorry, what happened in 1973 between Germany and Poland?
You want to say that prior to 1973 you would have said that Poland should give up the previously German land?
Then we can discuss how it would parallel the continuous land-grab that is the Israel annexation of Palestinian territories.
The actual question is: At what point in history do you accept that facts are established and have become de-jure ownership? You must draw the line somewhere, because otherwise you should demand all of the USA given back to the native americans and large parts of Europe should be ruled from Rome. That is obvious nonsense. So where do you draw the line?
Re:Garbage, and you KNOW it (Score:4, Interesting)
Maior Tomovich, there are no occupations by force that are legal since the UN charter has come into force.
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There's a question about how and to what extent property rights can be moral, but occupation by force of arms is definitely immoral.
And yet throughout history, it's exactly what happened again and again. Like it or not, it's a fact of the real world.
If you want to denounce occupation by force, then there is not a single legal country in the entire world. In that case, Israel or Palestine also is a question that doesn't matter, because Palestine wouldn't be any more legal than Israel.
The simple fact is that legally, the UN put down an arbitrary date, essentially saying after WW2 "from now one ..." - and that's ok. If you want to change t
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The people living on that territory you're speaking of were giving complete citizenship in the democracy they were brought under
Actually, lots of people there left and became refugees in what remained of Germany.
Also Poland after 1945 wasn't a democracy.
So try again.
(and of course these scenarios are not identical. The question remains: If you consider land now under Israel control as "rightfully Palestine", then why do you not apply that same standard to land now under Polish control? What is the thing that makes the difference in your eyes?
Re: Genocide (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: Genocide (Score:5, Insightful)
Two things can be true at the same time: Hamas can set up the preconditions for Israel to commit genocide, and Israel can then actually commit that genocide. The fact that Hamas commits atrocities in order to trick Israel into overreacting and carpet-bombing areas with large civilian populations does not mean that Israel is innocent when it kills those civilians.
Both the Israeli government and Hamas believe that they benefit from escalation. That doesn't excuse either side, it makes both guilty.
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If Israel was carpet bombing, how many dead Gazans would there be? A shit ton more.
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Dresden in WW2 was carpet-bombed.
It had 630,000 inhabitants before, and about 25,000 of them are estimated to have died in the bombing.
Extrapolating that to 2.2 mio. people in Gaza, you'd expect about 87,000 deaths. Probably twice that because the Nazis had built bunkers and other protection for the civilians.
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25k is the absolute low end number for Dresden.
https://www.britannica.com/eve... [britannica.com]
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Re: Genocide (Score:4, Insightful)
Israel has a right to its security.
If Palestinians want theirs maybe they should toss out Hamas. Hang them in streets perhaps.
Just a though.
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Israel has a right to its security.
If Palestinians want theirs maybe they should toss out Hamas. Hang them in streets perhaps.
Just a though.
Violence begets violence, no state, nor person, has a right to be unethical, immoral, genocidal or abusive.
If Israel desired peace, Israel would pursue justice. This is greed for other people's land and it is theft and murder.
People can choose to lie to themselves but the truth remains for all honest souls to see.
Re: Genocide (Score:5, Insightful)
If Israel desired peace, Israel would pursue justice. This is greed for other people's land and it is theft and murder.
Israel actually WITHDREW from the Gaza strip in the early 2000s, giving up control of that land. How does that fit into your narrative?
In the past decade, Israel has given work permits to thousands of Gaza citizens so they can earn money in nearby settlements in Israel. Many of them turned out to spy for Hamas and were in this capacity active members of the Oct 7th attacks.
People can choose to lie to themselves but the truth remains for all honest souls to see.
You mean the gang rapes and mass murder of civilians on Oct 7th? The beheadings and burning people alive? Or do you mean the civilians in Gaza who celebrated the whole thing (as seen on videos posted by themselves to social media) ?
What do you think an appropriate reaction to Oct 7th should have looked like, considering what transpired that day?
Re: Genocide (Score:5, Informative)
If Israel desired peace, Israel would pursue justice. This is greed for other people's land and it is theft and murder.
Israel actually WITHDREW from the Gaza strip in the early 2000s, giving up control of that land. How does that fit into your narrative?
In the past decade, Israel has given work permits to thousands of Gaza citizens so they can earn money in nearby settlements in Israel. Many of them turned out to spy for Hamas and were in this capacity active members of the Oct 7th attacks.
People can choose to lie to themselves but the truth remains for all honest souls to see.
You mean the gang rapes and mass murder of civilians on Oct 7th? The beheadings and burning people alive? Or do you mean the civilians in Gaza who celebrated the whole thing (as seen on videos posted by themselves to social media) ?
What do you think an appropriate reaction to Oct 7th should have looked like, considering what transpired that day?
Indeed, Ehud Barak offered the Palestinian authorities a state around the same time, HAMAS and Hezbollah responded with the second intifada.
Going to war with Israel has never gained the Palestinians anything, a lesson their neighbours managed to learn the hard way after losing significant tracts of land or at the very least, entire air forces. Peace is the way forward, however for HAMAS, peace is a death sentence because what need do the Palestinian people need with an organisation who's stated goal is the destruction of Israel when they have peace with Israel?
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The fact that Hamas commits atrocities in order to trick Israel into overreacting and carpet-bombing areas with large civilian populations does not mean that Israel is innocent when it kills those civilians.
YES actually it does make Israel innocent. Israel has an obligation to the safety of its people. It has a moral obligation to try and effect that with minimal harm to bystanders. If admin Hamas 'tricks' them that is an admission they are meeting the obligation to try and protect innocent lives. It is Hamas who is shirking its obligation to the safety of its citizens by intentionally placing them in harms way.
So it absolutely excuses Israel on the subject of killing innocent civilians. 100% free and clea
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Re: Genocide (Score:5, Insightful)
So... All Jews, everywhere in the world, are responsible for what Israel does?
Look if you wanna be a bigot just come out and say it. Don't hide behind dead Palestinians to do it.
Re:Genocide (Score:4, Funny)
Palestinians and Israelis are both Semites.
Antisemitism is when you say that they are two tribes of dick mutilators fighting over a patch of dirt.
Re:Genocide (Score:5, Interesting)
Maybe the rising antisemitism has more to do with Israel's ongoing genocide of Palestinians?
Such as deliberately destroying food stocks. This video [imgur.com] is from the Qalandiah refugee camp [imgur.com] in Ramallah. Last I checked, Ramallah is not in Gaza. Those are fresh eggs being taken from a store by Israeli occupation forces and being destroyed.
This video [imgur.com] is from the occupied West Bank and shows concrete being poured into a local spring so the Palestinian farmers can't get water.
This video [imgur.com] shows an Israeli terrorist openly admitting he's stealing Palestinian land and justifies it by saying if he didn't do it, someone else woud.
These are all from the last year or two. And people wonder why Palestinians are resisting Israeli occupation. What's funny is Israel is using the same tactics the Germans did and using the same justifications. The oppressed have become the oppressors.
Re:Genocide (Score:5, Interesting)
What bugs me in all of this is that speaking the truth about the founding of Israel is considered anti-Semitic, but speaking the truth about the holocaust is not considered anti-Germanic. Israel was founded via the brutally violent theft of a lot of land that necessarily required quite a bit of murder. 75 years later the descendants of the people this land was taken from remain huddled and trapped effectively stateless and at Israel's mercy in the West Bank and Gaza. Israel ignored the 1948 UN General Assembly Resolution 194 (III) to allow the return of the locals to their property or compensate them. In fact it did the opposite of what the resolution called for -- it bulldozed former non- Jewish villages entirely to make sure there was nothing to return to.
Note there was no concept of a "Palestinian People" at this time -- this concept was created to refer to the dispossessed after the fact. The Ottoman Empire state that they lived in was diverse and had extended all the way to modern day Turkey and their name comes from the post WWI choice of the British for the protectorate. The British split the Ottoman state with the French: https://upload.wikimedia.org/w... [wikimedia.org] . The British wanted Palestine precisely so a Jewish country could be created with the hope that all of the undesirable Jews of Europe would move there. Antisemitism was in no way unique to Germany in this pre-WWII era. The "Protectorate" in "Protectorate of Palestine" was quite a sick euphemism, the intention of the British had nothing to do with protecting the people they took charge of following WWI.
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This is a new one on me...
I always thought the White Supremacist hated the Jews?
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Jews are never "off the hook". Otherwise you have a strange idea of what is genocide.
Re:Why the anti Jew stuff? (Score:4)
I get this argument. There does need to be a point where you can say "Your ancestors (some still alive) caused this issue, are you ready to stop them doing it?"
At some point there needs to be a stopping point.
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For Hamas and Hezbollah, the stopping point is when all Jews are dead.
Completely confusing Jews with Israelis (Score:2)
There are two main problems with this argument.
First is that about half the Jewish people live in the US, and their government isn't doing anything directly to the Palestinians. Talking about "Jewish people choose not to stop their government" is meaningless.
Secondly, do you honestly think that any people in any country can directly stop their government from doing anything? That's just a meaningless call.
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Yes. I believe they can. Trump isn't in power, right?
Allow me to clarify "Jewish people in Israel". Better?
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I call for you to return the lands you live on that were stolen from others! You directly enjoy the fruits of your ancestors genocidal ethnic cleansing every single day.
Until you decolonize and return to your own native land and pay reparations including establishing a right of return for the people you illegally and immorally displaced you live in disgrace as the direct beneficiary of genocide and ethnic cleaning.
Remove the branch from your own eye before noting the splinter in someone else's.
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and now is committing genocide
You need to look up that word, it doesn't mean what you think it does.
We have actual genocides in this world to compare the Gaza war to. Against Armenians, for example. The Jews in Nazi Germany. A couple in Africa in the past decades.
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Well, then this is their big chance to complete the process. Why don't they just buldoze Gaza into the Med?
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> If Jewish people can stop their government from doing these things, then they are off the hook. If Jewish people choose not to stop "their" government from committing decades of atrocities, then I can see why it is a surprise people are starting to push back.
Same applies to the Gazans though. Hamas got elected (2005-ish), murdered any and all opposition. The population didn't push back. Now they're celebrating every dead jew. Not Israel army member. ANY jew.
Yes, I picked a side. I know which of those t
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Look up what is meant by genocide and what are the prohibited acts under the Genocide Convention of 1948, duly ratified by Israel:
(a) Killing members of the group;
(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
(d) Imposing measures intended to pr
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Well depicting cause events of Oct 7th.
Stay focused, folks - if leaders of frontier educational institutions muse upon conditional in the calls of eradicating Jews, things gone amok.
They actually ask for conduct to follow harassment, to tell it is such. Blowing mind.
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Very mysterious outburst of violence and its glorification, indeed. Hard to grasp.
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Yeah, I heard the senator, glorified by Harvard, MIT and UPenn, among others. An outrage!
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The text preceding that list matters somewhat:
'In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:'
https://www.ohchr.org/en/instr... [ohchr.org]
Intent, specifically. If ze Jews are acting with this intent then they're not doing a great job of it. Hamas is far more effective and clearly intentioned in their methods, albeit hindered by Israel having a vastly superior military capability. It's f
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What do you mean, not a great job? Palestinians have been cleared out of most of their internationally recognized territories. Whether you call it genocide or ethnic cleansing doesn't make a lot of difference to me, but to claim it was "without intent" is beyond ridiculous, it is just lying through your teeth.
And for a preacher that's a no-no.
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Are you equally concerned about Jews being ethically cleansed from most of the Arab countries in the Middle East?
Are you even aware that happened?
Israel is just late to the party and not very good at it.
Instead they supply free power, food, money, materials, jobs and energy to Gaza. That's the most incompetent genocide ever in the history of humanity.
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You mean the Exodus from Egypt? That, they say, is fake news that never happened, IIRC.
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No, the modern 20th century ethnic cleansing of Jews from Arab countries.
It's only funny when it happens to Jews, right?
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You mean the one that started about 1947? Roughly around the time the so-called Civil war in Palestine?
"Happens to Jews" is a bit of a misnomer for that one, I've heard it also happened a lot to the Palestinians at the hands of Israeli settlers.
Or is it only an "injustice" when it is done to the side you like better?
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Hm, a checklist of October 7th.
Fascist? Expecting consistency is "fascist"? (Score:5, Insightful)
These empires of modern education have for several decades been ramping up all their "tolerance" and "diversity" and "hate speech" etc rhetoric and punishing people for all sorts of WORDS and RHETORIC. if a professor, even tenured, says something that UPSETS (not physically harms, but simply UPSETS) members of various groups, these schools will cancel the tenure and fire the professor. If a student crosses many unpainted cultural lines and says any number of things (again, just WORDS) often things that are not even explicitly listed somewhere in a publicly accessible rule book, that student can be expelled.
Then, after decades of this stuff piling up, people show up on those very same academic playgrounds publicly calling for the completion of Hitler's effort to wipe out the Jews, and people start vandalizing Jewish places, and PHYSICALLY ASSAULTING Jews, and the administrators of these institutions go all mealy-mouthed and cannot clearly condemn this stuff. Now, if they had ALWAYS been consistently free-speech and defended ALL speech in all directions, this might be consistent and defensible (though they would certainly still be obligates to oppose the physical violence). These people have not, however been consistent, and their reaction to the antisemitism running rampant on their playgrounds exposes their complete dishonesty. They have played-up the concept that mere words, if upsetting to some minority group (ethnic, sexual, whatever), are HATEFUL and injurious and must be banned and speakers silenced...right up until the moment it was aimed at JEWS (exposing that the people of Harvard et al are simply old-school Jew haters).
How, on this green Earth, is it that a couple of very rich people (apparently the only ones left who can do this without getting flattened politically by the blowback) pointing out the double-standards and dishonesty at uber-rich (to the tune of BILLIONS of dollars) places like Harvard become ANY sort of "Fascism"??? Do you even know what "fascism" is???
Re:Fascist? Expecting consistency is "fascist"? (Score:4, Insightful)
In summary - based on the evidence of their own speech and actions, these academic leaders have shown they will work to suppress any hate speech except calling for the extermination of Jews.
There isn't any room to argue against that in good faith.
Re:Going full Elon Musk (Score:4, Insightful)
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Ovens.