“Context”

Congresswoman Elise Stefanik (R, NY) asked a question of three university presidents, Claudine Gay of Harvard, Elizabeth Magill of Penn, and Sally Kornbluth of MIT, a simple, straightforward question at last week’s House Committee on Education and the Workforce hearing regarding campus antisemitism:

Does calling for the genocide of Jews violate Penn’s rules or code of conduct, yes or no?

Magill’s answer, smirk on her face:

It is a context-dependent decision, Congresswoman.

Gay repeated the claim:

It can be, depending on the context.

Kornbluth tried to dodge the question altogether:

I have not heard calling for the genocide of Jews on our campus.

Stefanik called her on that…misinformation:

But you’ve heard chants for intifada.

Kornbluth’s response:

I’ve heard chants which can be antisemitic depending on the context when calling for the elimination of the Jewish people.

Wednesday after the hearing, Magill attempted to clarify:

In that moment, I was focused on our university’s longstanding policies aligned with the US Constitution, which say that speech alone is not punishable. I was not focused on, but I should have been, the irrefutable fact that a call for genocide of Jewish people is a call for some of the most terrible violence human beings can perpetrate. It’s evil—plain and simple.

A couple of things about that. At the hearing, Magill spoke from what was in her heart. Further, as a talented academic and a university president, words are her stock in trade. She knew exactly what she was saying, she knew exactly what she was focused on in real time—and she focused and said those words deliberately and consciously. This statement, coming as it does later, after the outpouring of opprobrium, can hardly be taken as sincere. All Magill is doing now is covering her academic and political behind.

The other thing is that, in that statement’s second half (not quoted above, but it’s a two-minute video) Magill made the sotto voce admission that calls for Jewish genocide are not against Penn’s current rules. With that tacit admission, she “promised” to work with the Provost to adjust Penn’s rules. Sometime. She was careful to not offer a timeline for this effort, not even a general one, nor did she commit to what those “adjustments” would look like.

One more thing about Stefanik’s question and those presidents’ answers. An obvious follow-up question is “In what context would such calls for the genocide of Jews be acceptable in any legal way?”

Stefanik did put that question to Gay:

What’s the context?

Gay’s answer:

Targeted at an individual[.]

Stefanik followed up on that “individual” evasion, and Gay then refused to answer beyond repeating her claim if targeting an individual. Apparently, at Harvard, calling for the destruction of groups of Jews is acceptable.  One or two at a time, maybe not.

These are three school presidents who need to be fired for cause—not passively allowed to resign—and these are three schools that need to have all Federal funds headed their way canceled until those schools show, over a suitable number years, that they have corrected their behavior.

Distinctions

A letter writer in The Wall Street Journal‘s 4 December Letters section drew a distinction between Israel’s treatment of civilians during Hamas’ war on Israel and Hamas’ treatment of civilians.

Just like Israel warned Gaza City residents to leave before its airstrikes, Hamas tried repeatedly to get Israelis to avoid the concert near the border and leave the nearby kibbutzim, right? Wrong, of course, and therein lies a fundamental distinction. Israel would have been glad to see Gazan civilians evacuated to safety to avoid its airstrikes, but Hamas would have been bitterly disappointed if those Israeli civilians hadn’t been around to be slaughtered.

That brings to mind a broader distinction between civilized nations (especially those of the West) on the one hand and terrorist entities on the other.

In WWII, the Allies deliberately and indiscriminately attacked the enemies’ population centers and infrastructure in an attempt to cow those populations into surrender. It didn’t work, and in the aftermath, those western nations recognized the both the politico-military ineffectiveness of the strategy and especially its immorality. Ever since, western civilized nations have been at pains to minimize collateral damage—especially including accidental deaths to civilians, from both direct and indirect causes—and they have set high standards regarding the definition of “unavoidable” and “accidental” civilian deaths. These nations have set similarly high standards regarding collateral damage to or destruction of infrastructure unrelated to an enemy’s war effort.

Terrorists, on the other hand—of which Hamas (and its junior partner, Palestinian Islamic Jihad) and Russia are current exemplars—deliberately target population centers and civilian infrastructure in the prosecution of their wars. Their targeting has nothing to do with any attempt to cow the targeted population into surrender; it is a core part of terrorists’ war aims: the extermination of those populations and the erasure of those populations’ nations from the world.

Federal Intimidation

The Progressive-Democrat President Joe Biden now is trying to cow school districts into pushing Progressive-Democratic Party gender identity and sexual orientation ideology by threatening to withhold Federal funding from the districts’ free and reduced-price school lunch programs.

This is Party using children as hostage in its push for that destructive claptrap. Those programs often provide the only healthy meal those children get in a school day, and denying those children is a blatant attempt to intimidate those districts into compliance with Party ideology. Party’s ransom demand is the surrender of those children to Party diktat.

Aside from that deep immorality, the move also is illegal. South Dakota v Dole made clear that the Federal government cannot use threats of withholding funding in order to coerce compliance with Federal diktats regarding intra-State, or local, behaviors. Dole was a case in which the Federal government withheld a percentage of Federal highway funding from South Dakota over its refusal to comply with a then-recently enacted alcohol drinking age limit, and South Dakota objected to the withholding. The ruling held that the Feds could, indeed, withhold a percentage of Federal funding, but it could not do withhold a high enough fraction to be coercive. Withholding all of the school lunch funding is plainly coercive, and it’s intended to be so.

Not Radicalized

Recall the…incident…a few days ago in which a Hillcrest High School teacher was terrorized, solely for her support of Israel during the current Hamas-instigated war against Israel, and driven into a locked room for her own protection when 400 of the high school’s students rioted and targeted her, threatening to kill her, while waving Palestinian flags.

New York City Schools Chancellor David Banks is vociferously denying that those students were radicalized; he’s insisting, instead, that

This is a really good school with wonderful young people. And I’m so taken aback by this notion that these kids are terrorists…or radicalized.

Say Banks’ claim is true, and these antisemitic, terrorist-supporting, rioting students aren’t radicalized. What does that say about what is going on in Hillcrest High, one of the NYCSchools for which Banks is responsible, that their antisemitism, their support for terrorism, their rioting actually is their normal behavior?

What does that say about Banks that he considers their behavior to be unradicalized?

Chickens….

This move by Progressive-Democrat President Joe Biden and his FLOTUS Jill Biden really sinks low.

Recall the utter immorality of the Bidens’ so-long refusal to acknowledge their granddaughter Navy Joan, daughter of the Bidens’ son Hunter. Recall further, how they made that refusal explicit during last year’s Christmas season hanging of stockings from the State Dining Room fireplace mantle—stockings carefully labeled with the names of their other grandchildren, but no stocking for Navy.

Now, despite finally having acknowledged their little granddaughter—Jill and I only want what is best for all of our grandchildren, including Navy—apparently that best doesn’t include a place on the mantle. In fact, Jill and I‘s disdain for their granddaughter extends to the point that they’ve chosen not to hang Christmas stockings at all, so they can continue to deny Navy a place.

That really is a chickenshit move by Joe and Jill. (For those of you pedants who squawk that Christmas decorations are a FLOTUS task, you know full well that POTUS, at the very least, has serious input into such things. Especially where his granddaughter is concerned.)