Page 27 - Issue 63

Vol.1 Issue 63 January 2024Vol.1 Issue 63, May 2024
Islamophobia since the start of the war,
the committee has only focused on
campus antisemitism. Also, the
arguments of the committee have been
hollow and misleading. During the
hearing the representative of New York,
Elise Stefanik, asked Sally Kornbluth of
MIT whether using the word Intifada is
calling for genocide. <Yes or no: Calling
for the genocide of Jews does not
constitute bullying and harassment?=
asked Stefanik. When Kornbluth replied
that she had not heard any calls for
genocide in the campus, Stefanik asked
whether she had heard the word
<Intifada=, which Stefanik considers it to
be a synonym of genocide, just for being
correlated with Palestinian resistance.
Stefanik then went to Lizz Magill of the
University of Pennsylvania and Claudine
Gay of Harvard, <does calling for the
genocide of Jews violate rules or code of
conduct? Yes, or no?= Both refused to
give a one-word answer and said it
depended on the context. Magill
responded that if speech were <directed
and severe, pervasive, it is harassment,=
and that whether a student would be
punished is <a context-dependent
decision.=
Both Magill and Gay have tried to be
what a conservative, republican
dominated congress would accept as
neutral, but they failed. Magill
apologized for its comments just a few
days after the hearing. And a few weeks
before the hearing, Claudine has
condemned the Pro-Palestinian slogan,
27
<from the river to the sea, Palestine will
be free,= calling it a <hurtful phrase= as it
ElITE
<imply the eradication of Jews from
Israel and engender both pain and
existential fears within our Jewish
community.= These phrases are what
the committee considers as calls for
genocide. Magill and Gay were, indeed,
biased when they answered that calls for
genocides violates rules of conduct
when translated into action. The truth is
there were no such calls, just as
Korbluth said.
The thing is antisemitism was not
what the congress was actually going
after. It was the institutions. For
decades, the academic sector has been
considered leftist-biased and intolerant
of conservative speakers and their ideas.
Though this has been the case since the
90s, the gap between members who
identify themselves as liberal or leftist
and those who identify themselves as
right or moderate has widened sharply
(Check the chart below created by The
Economist.) The republican party has
thus saw this as a chance to strike two
birds: to silence calls for ceasefire and to
crack down the institutions.