(Michael M. Santiago/Getty)
Three decades ago, a conversation in one of my classes at the University of Tulsa turned to the topic of Ronald Reagan. “Can you believe he called the Soviet Union an evil empire?” a student remarked with evident scorn. To which a small voice from the back of the room replied: “Well, they were pretty evil.”
Even in the red state of Oklahoma, the American heartland and buckle of the Bible Belt, it took some courage to state the obvious in a university classroom when it offended conventional political pieties. But the students were always more sensible than the faculty.
I learned this shortly after 9/11, when I appeared on a university panel to discuss what was to be done. I told the packed room that we should hunt down the leaders of al-Qaeda and kill them. A professor who later received an appointment at a prestigious theological seminary immediately accused me of proposing to slaughter innocent people, the inevitable “collateral damage” of military action. After the panel, other, like-minded colleagues stopped speaking to me. But half a dozen students told me that they appreciated my comments, even though they didn’t share my views.
Some years later, the Muslim Students Association (MSA) invited a neo-Nazi from California to speak at one of their events. Leaders of the Tulsa Jewish community contacted me, but the university president refused to get involved. When one of the few Jewish students on campus told me that she was going to speak with the leader of the MSA, I assumed she would be rebuffed. Yet after their conversation, he agreed to cancel the event.
Those were the days. Progressive liberals have now given birth to a generation of demonic ideologues who excuse sheer evil. Reading the “Joint Statement by Harvard Palestine Solidarity Groups on the Situation in Palestine”, I can only hope that many Harvard faculty are appalled at the little monsters they’ve helped to create.
The statement, signed by 31 student organisations from Harvard College, the Divinity School, the Law School, the Medical School, and the Kennedy School of Government (including, incredibly, a group called “Harvard Jews for Liberation”), “hold[s] the Israeli regime entirely responsible for all unfolding violence”. That would include, as Victor Davis Hanson has written, “pulling Jewish elderly, women, and children out of their homes and executing them, and then throwing their bodies into the street” — atrocities last seen during the Holocaust.
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SubscribeThe Harvard apologists are pathetic. Simply pathetic. But censoring them or trying to de-platform them is not the answer (though they would surely love to do so to the likes of me and you). No, let them show themselves for what they are, as they have, pathetic, overprivileged, whining babies…
…who will one day be running the country.
G-d help you!
And working in newspapers reporting on our world. Their capture by the equality/anti discriminatory cult mirrors events in China 68 now.
One of them is Australia’s Minister for Home Affairs and Cyber Security (no less) Clare O’Neil. We have wall-to-wall lefty governments on every level.
Perhaps it is a mere coincidence that Clare O’Neil named her daughter Greta two years ago, perhaps it’s about what she stands for.
Clare O’Neil has been the MP for my electorate since 2013 and has chosen to ignore the criminality of our sole law-enforcement entity Victoria Police. She ignored my pleas for help to stop a stalker ex-coworker’s crimes against me since 2009 to this day (13.10.23.).
Uniform-wearing Victoria Police officers participate in the stalker’s crimes in broad daylight. Because they can.
Watching a woman squirm in pain and frustration because she would rather date Ebola than a married-with-children, middle-aged, highschool-dropout rockstar-wannabe IT Helpdesk Assistant showing off his risk-free criminality is endlessly entertaining for barbaric Australia’s vulgar thugs whether in police uniforms or not. Australia never had functional law-enforcement.
Clare O’Neil may have unleashed state-sponsored cyber-terrorism* on planet Earth via her harebrained hack-back idea, since no one can control insiders from the Australian Signals Directorate.
* https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/we-will-hunt-them-down-o-neil-signals-more-action-on-medibank-hack-20221113-p5bxsi.html
A country that will be a smouldering pile of rubble by the time they are finished with it.
Unmasking them would be sufficient. Cowards.
Unmasking won’t reduce their power.
They have had enough time to occupy powerful positions and to gain the necessary experience in contorting our laws/changing our laws to their advantage. Since information via major search engines is filtered through political agendas also*, sanity has little chance to return.
You need to use a minor language like Hungarian to find unfiltered information via the Internet.
* https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/44667183-the-madness-of-crowds
What happens when you ethnically cleanse white males form these institutions.
to be honest, I’d prefer to ship them to Hamas and dress them up as Jews and see how they like what would happen next.
Shipping them to Gaza at all would be bad enough – even a month ago, let alone now.
People should name them…a list of names of people expressing these views.
Everybody says there shouldn’t be blame games or naming and shaming-perhaps the time has come when we need more of it.
Absolutely agree, publish the names of all the students. If they are so certain of their views, let them defend them to the world. People hide behind their anonymity on the internet, but this is different. They represent a “prestigious” university and should be held accountable for their views.
These people are quick enough to name and “shame” anyone with opposing views. I say communities, employers etcetera have every right to know what fifth columnists are among them.
Why not hold a Nuremberg trial at Harvard? Where the f**k were any of you over the last 8 months, with +200,000 protesters every Saturday in Tel Aviv. Isreali’s fighting Isreali’s, because of King Bib’s power grab? Or Ultra-conservatives who claim gays are worse than ISIS or Hezbollah? Smacking their lips at the idea of making their exemptions from tax and military service permanent? Or ruling under theocracy? That should make the future of religious wars more insane than they already are in the Middle East. Are the Brothers and Sisters in Arms – Isreali reserve men and women who have fought for their country in various units of the IDF – also anti-semitic for being critical of the coalition King Bib has formed to weaken the courts, and make himself a dictator? Let’s start naming and shaming everyone, including those who benefit from what the corrupt leader of Isreal has been doing to divide Isreali’s. What Hamas did is pure evil. What I see is a coalition of Harvard students speaking their minds, and being critical of a regime run by a leader who has three separate corruption trials on him, he is far from being the good guy. If that makes them antisemitic, then I must be too, because I do not support dictators, especially those who threaten democracy. Netanyahu is as corrupt as the day is long. How about ending your lust to ruin some Harvard students lives and start doing your part to raise awareness of what has been happening to raise the alarm of 10,000 reservists who have been warning for quite some time about the threat from the inside.
I agree. Free speech is the disinfectant. Hearing this kind of thing makes it very clear who and what these people are. If they kept their views to themselves we would never know and we would go on believing that Harvard is ‘the best school in America’. When we see how they think and what they believe we cannot help but know otherwise.
One of the reasons universities have been allowed to become so dysfunctional and dangerous to society is because most people haven’t been paying attention. This incident has helped ordinary citizens realize what a threat universities really are.
Even a fool, when he holdeth his peace, is counted wise: and he that shutteth his lips is esteemed a man of understanding.
That already has been well established. What we need to expose is the funding from corporations and family endowments, who are funding the school that is essentially promoting and platforming these junior terrorists.
Bill Ackerman, the billionaire financier and Harvard graduate, is asking for a list of the names of the students who praised Hamas…he wants to make sure they will not be employed in Wall Street companies. Steps like these will be necessary to flush the evil out of the university system. We need to get tougher with Progressives and call them out on their immorality.
Refusing employment by Wall Street companies will be worn like a badge of honour: they will get employment in governments (see my comment re: Clare O’Neil Australia’s Minister for Cyber Security and Home Affairs), at the UN, etc. Less money but far more power.
Yes, being refused employment on Wall Street for expressing genocidal hostility towards Jews will only confirm them in their Protocols-of-the-Elders worldview.
Which doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be done of course; and perhaps now some of the Jewish wokeists will finally realise just how many of their fellow progressives are sublimely indifferent to their being murdered en masse and even are prepared to cheer it on. This seems to be happening to some extent with the head of the ADL calling out MSN on-air for refusing to term Hamas ‘terrorists’, and Sen. Scott Wiener deploring the DSA SF’s statement supporting the butchery. But equally possibly the memory will soon fade and progressive delusions will exercise a right-of-return to their hearts and minds.
Punish differences of political opinion as ‘immorality’? How very Iranian.
Know thy enemy, it’s the only way to assure victory. Freedom of speech is convenient in that way. The fanatics totally misunderstand it.
By the power of the network, these ideas on the campuses of Harvard today become the ideas in the corridors of power tomorrow. Slowly, but surely, the long march makes progress. It is not called progressivism for nothing.
The inhumanity of socialism yet again reveals itself. The prefix may change: National, International, Maoist, Marxist, Leninist, Soviet, Democratic, but the grand ambition remains undimmed. A new generation of socialists stands ready to tear apart institutions and nations, remake man and create a better society. It never is different. This time is no different. They again show their willingness to reduce millions to mere existence, to consign thousands to death.
Very few of these students are evil. Amongst them will be opportunists but most really do think they’re the good guys. That’s both the feature and the bug of socialism. As CS Lewis noted, “Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.”
Humanity is destined to repeat this experiment again and again thanks to socialism’s sincererity masking its tyranny. Worryingly for us here, this time it might be our turn to be the lab rats. As the rest of us watch hyper-educated people defend the vengeful beheading of children, we seem very far from the point that Harvard’s incubating leaders of tomorrow begin to realise that perhaps, maybe, they’re the bad guys.
Of course, it isn’t just socialist students and their elders like the UK’s former opposition leader Jeremy Corbyn submitting themselves to their collective ideology and defending the indefensible. We also have that other great submitting collective ideology known as Islam and tens of thousands of its adherents proudly went out on to the streets of the UK today to cheer the beheading of children. Demographics and democracy mean socialists are now irrevocably entwined with islamism. It is this dynamic that will propel the sickness we see in Harvard into the corridors of power.
Thinking you are the good guys doesn’t mean you are not evil.
Almost all of the most evil people in history thought they were the good guys. Very few people think “ha ha! I am evil!”
In fact, being evil is positively correlated with a conviction that you are the hero of the story of the world.
I expect Putin thinks he is the good guy. I’m sure Hitler did. And Mao. Stalin probably wasn’t too concerned.
And I am sure those who club Putin with Stalin, Map and Adolf……while sitting in the country that wrecked Iraq, Libya and Afghanistan, and pushed NATO all the way to Ukraine, and “encouraged” the violent overthrow of a legally elected Ukrainian president, and the attempted subjugation of the Donbass….
Also consider themselves to be the good guys.
Which merely suggests that anyone can be the self appointed good guys with a sufficient lack of self awareness.
Yeah yeah yeah same old same old idiotic and ignorant moral equivalence. Just had enough sense to leave out Israeli apartheid and/or war crimes at this time.
I know you’re equating Putin with the others but I don’t see it that way.
Maybe Putin is. Maybe Biden, Bibi and MBS aren’t.
And maybe there aren’t any ‘good guys’. Life isn’t a movie. These people follow their own ethnic, national, political and personal self-interest – just like you do.
Socialism is an ideology, a set of abstract ideals that when applied to human societies often ends in barbarism. But libertarianism, which thankfully has never been pushed to the same extent – yet, anyway – has just as much potential for human misery. Fascism and Islamism are other examples. No one set of ideas is uniquely evil. What is evil is the post-enlightenment myth that there is a set of abstract principles which can somehow be used to construct a utopia. Part of this myth is that when problems arise it’s simply because the abstractions have not been implemented rigorously enough. That is what is dangerous.
“But libertarianism, which thankfully has never been pushed to the same extent – yet, anyway – has just as much potential for human misery.”
Sorry but this arrant nonsense. You have just made this up. You have no evidence for this either in theory or in practice. The point of libertarianism is to follow JS Mill’s “harm principle”. That is all. Even if there were some nefarious ideology attached, no one has ever been persecuted, murdered, disenfranchised, imprisoned or sent to the Gulags by a libertarian. You can’t just make stuff up and expect to be taken seriously. That’s not even whataboutery because there’s nothing to say whatabout… it exists only in your head.
Socialists hate libertarians. But they have a hard time attacking it when you point out that, when all individuals decide on what their labour buys, it’s going to be hard to invade Ukraine.
You say of utopianism that “when problems arise it’s simply because the abstractions have not been implemented rigorously enough.” Yes, but I’d be more specific.
These problems are not merely abstract theories that defy this or that utopian ideology. They are infidels, heretics, oppressors, fools, rogues, adversaries–in a word, people who fail to see the Truth (even if there’s no such thing as Truth, only “our truth” vs. “their truth”). Every utopian ideology on the Left or the Right–and all are utopian–must persecute and ultimately eliminate these people as obstacles to the attainment of perfection, because their very existence endangers it.
When has anyone on the right talked about utopia? As far as I know they are the one group who understands it isn’t possible.
Whether ideologues use the word “utopia” or not, they refer to an ideal world of their own making. The Nazis were no different from any other utopians in this respect, resorting to totalitarian control, conquest and eugenics to achieve their goal. For those unfit to live in their ideal Volksgemeinschaft, they relied on euthanasia and death camps.
Sorry, but fascism is decidedly a left-wing ideology.
Yep, they always think this time they’ll get it right.
“But libertarianism, which thankfully has never been pushed to the same extent – yet, anyway – has just as much potential for human misery.” That is the most bizarre thing that I have ever heard. Have any proof for such strong and nonsensical statement? How is limited government a source of human misery. Not all ideologies are the same. Libertarianism is not a utopian ideology. They recognize that the evil nature of human beings, who are just animals after all, and limit the coercive powers of the state.
Disagree.
“Socialism is not a political ideology. It is a path to power.” — Lenin
These people are not socialists and don’t have a real ideology, they are only socialists to the extent the benefits them. They are nothing more then careerists technocrats who will support any government regulation or program that will benefit them, such as regulation creates a well paying job as some government entity or gives regulatory advantages to big firm that they one day hope to lead, or some NGO manager who wants to get government grants to keep the grift going. Whatever said ideology or causes they support, its all about their interests all the while giving legitimacy to themselves and giving an excuse not to feel guilty about their selfish behavior on false moral grounds, that being they want a centralized technocratic state that has power over all aspect of life and will be led by or influenced by hypereducated empowered supermen, Those people being like as themselves. Its no surprise we see this as Harvard, its a training ground for the elite at that scary because it shows’ for all their moral pretensions, these people are rotten to the core which explains why are ruling class is so awful.
You know what’s nearly as deadly as thinking you’re the good guys? Thinking that those you disagree with are the bad guys.
That’s why I think it’s generally more useful to think about the world in pragmatic terms. What are we trying to achieve and are we going about it effectively?
What are the students trying to achieve? Well, in the main, they probably want to see Palestinians and Israelis live peacably alongside one another. No? Do you really think that these people are incipient genocidaires and self-conscious antisemites?
What would be the best way to achieve peace and harmony in the Middle East? No-one knows – not me, probably not you either.
But, it almost certainly doesn’t involve uncritical support of the IDF to do whatever it wants – and yet, that is essentially what the US President has offered.
Seen in that specific context, a statement (incorrectly) laying the blame for this entire disaster at the feet of the Israeli Government can be seen as a rhetorical attempt to rebalance a public discourse which has understandably focussed on the immediate culpability of Hamas for its disgusting assault on civilians and which isn’t currently thinking as much about the policies which might have provoked (but not justified) it.
A sane well argued response
Nice tapdance. Completely ignores the fact that Hamas has once again specifically attacked, brutalized, and murdered defenseless innocents rather than mano-a-mano with IDF combatants clearly demonstrates their vicious cowardice – a feature of every “palestinian” attack.
Nothing like dragging young people by the hair, raping them and then murdering them to “raise your voice against oppressors”.
Frikken’ scum.
Horsefeathers. I am emphatically not excusing what I called Hamas’ “disgusting assault on civilians” (which is a war crime). I also stated that it was understandable that the public discourse was currently focussed on Hamas’ dispicable actions.
What I argued was that, at a time when the world’s powerful people have (rightly) lined up to condemn Hamas and (understandably) chosen not to dwell on Israel’s role in provoking (not causing) that crisis, it is understandable that a minority, would grotesquely overcorrect.
I’m not arguing that the students were correct, nor that their comments weren’t gross. They were wrong and gross. I am arguing that they were recognisably motivated by a discernible good intention – peace in the Middle East. And that, for the author of the original piece to suggest that they were evidence of an ancient and uninterrupted animus against Jewish people that can be traced through the holocaust and the protocols of the elders of zion and back into some ancient mythos is, at best, unserious.
A debate in which no-one was permitted to point out the fact that the Israeli Government bears any responsibility for this situation would be a great deal more dangerous than the present situation where a bunch of self-professed student radicals can talk bollocks and everyone can see that it’s bollocks.
The price we pay for a world in which people can discuss and disagree as to the the relative culpability of Israel and Hamas in the wider Israel Palestine problem, is that we will occasionally have to listen to people saying things that are both wrong and morally offensive. If you don’t think that’s a price worth paying, I don’t know what to tell you.
But you are ignoring the fact that Hamas and their supporters have as their goal the complete destruction of Israel and they will not stop until they are destroyed or they succeed
Actually, I’ve said nothing about Hamas exept that their actions are disgusting and dispicable. I’ve been talking about free speech.
FWIW, I am aware that the organisation’s goal is the destruction of Israel, but in practice whether that means the extermination of all Jews or simply the end of Israel as an Apartheid state (aka the one state solution) is, to some extent, an open question.
More to the point, not all Palestinians support Hamas – any more than all Israelis support the settlers’ violence in the occupied territories.
It’s not an open question any longer. We know that Hamas’s goal has been, and is now, to kill all Jews.
‘….. but in practice whether that means the extermination of all Jews or simply the end of Israel as an Apartheid state (aka the one state solution) is, to some extent, an open question.’ George Venning, you would be wise – but will almost certainly choose not to be – to reflect on how incredibly naive, stupid, blinkered, and, above all, self-damning your oh-so-insightful-and-learned reflections are. With a heavy, depressed, and not a little fearful, heart I thank you for so conclusively and unequivocally validating Jacob Howland’s thesis.
Ah the old Israel is an apartheid state canard. Revealing true colours always happens eventually.
You’re a useless lawyer. “I’m saying this, I’m not saying this … “, please. Do you or do you not call evil, Evil? This is the question.
If that was Hamas goal, they would use tactics other than hit and run raids. They would invade Israel if that was their ultimate goal. So far, only Israel as invaded Palestinian territory, not the other way around.
Great comments.
What you say, George, is interesting and useful but not complete and therefore not entirely accurate.
It’s true, I think, that most of those who support Hamas are not antisemites in the conventional sense: infected by some ancient, implacable and almost ineffable moral sickness. The current conflict has its own history and therefore its own context (although there is some overlap).
For one thing, the current conflict occurs at a time when morality is defined (in the West) almost exclusively in terms of power relations. This form of reductionism is an enduring legacy from Marxism). To have power, let alone to wield it, is in itself supposedly a sign of evil. By contrast, to lack power, or at least one kind of power, is in itself supposedly a sign of goodness. Most people feel sympathy for underdogs. This mentality is, in theory, the very signature of rectitude–notably, by now, of woke rectitude. But it wasn’t always so.
Ancient Israelites didn’t value tolerance, but they did come to value both justice and compassion for the downtrodden (as represented by prophets such as Isaiah). Ancient Romans disagreed. They did value tolerance and even pity or mercy for the downtrodden, to be sure, but not compassion. Christians continued the biblical pattern but, as history shows, their states didn’t always act accordingly.
One urgent task of our time, therefore, is to rethink the habit of equating power with vice and victimhood with virtue. Most religious traditions have long argued against these facile equations, which they elaborated in ways that eventually supported notions such as equal justice under the law, the presumption of innocence and due process.
Moreover, the current conflict over territory originated in the Middle East, a region with its own long history of religious, ethnic and political conflicts. It might well have developed even if the Israelis had been Christians (or some other minority group) instead of Jews. But the overlap that I mentioned earlier is revealing. During the 1930s, Arab hostility toward Jews increased exponentially due to the influence and mass publication of Nazi ideology.
Phew. OK. Lots here. I think you’re making a distinction between different kinds of antisemitism. I’m going to leave that one there, not because it isn’t true but because I’m not sure what you mean to say by it. But you’re also saying that, to confuse power relations with virtue is facile.
That’s your main point. Yes? Woke ideaology assumes that, because someone is the underdog, that they must be virtuous but, in fact, it is possible to be both powerless and wrong. Have I got you?
But the origin of this way of thinking is not Marxist reductionism but the new testament – most obviously in the sermon on the mount and the beatitudes.
You say that “One urgent task of our time, therefore, is to rethink the habit of equating power with vice and victimhood with virtue.” Maybe but, if so, then you seem to be arguing that our urgent task is to remove the underpinning of Christian ethics from Western governance.
I’m no Christian, but that’s a big claim.
Christian ethics does NOT ‘equate power with vice and victimhood with virtue’. Christ did indeed focus his attention on those who were marginalised and disregarded by ‘respectable’ society, and sought to turn the values of the materialistic secular world upside down, showing that material and worldly success were of little value compared with true holiness and goodness. However, he did not assume that all those in power were evil and all those who were lowly were good. Christian ethics goes beyond such simplistic equations. It is interesting that, in his parables, the lord of the manor often stands in for God, while those committing sins are often slaves or hirelings!
Again, a tap dance: Hamas is the elected government of Gaza. The people of Gaza openly celebrated the murders and violations of the helpless prisoners. Hamas is not anyone who can be negotiated with, reason with, trusted with anyone’s lives. Hamas deliberately places headquarters, rocket storage dumps, and tunnel entrances among (presumably) innocent civilian locations. The so-called “palestinian” culture is barbaric and loathsome.
End of story.
Hamas won the only election ever held in Gaza, in 2006. You will notice that Tony Blair is no longer the Prime Minister.
Many people in Gaza certainly celebrated Hamas’ attacks. If you want me to say that this was wrong – no problem. That was wrong.Spite is ugly – whatever the justification.
My point though, wasn’t actually about Hamas or the Gazans more generally.
My point was that a statement by a bunch of students to the effect that the Government of Israel bore 100% responsibility for the actions of Hamas should be seen as a stupid over-compensation rather than evidence of entrenched antisemitism.
Once again, Hamas bears immediate responsibility for what happened over the weekend – which was monstrous. However, Israel has shown little recent interest in a peaceful solution to a conflict that is now 70 years old. Let’s not get into counting the specific number of children murdered by by each side of the conflict. Can we agree it’s too many?
To be reductive, if I repeatedly poke you and call you offensive names in the pub, and you bottle me, the law will recognise that you were at fault but, it will recognise that I bear some responsibility.
However your friends would probably point out that I’m the idiot that started it and that it was therefore entirely my fault.
They’d be wrong but they wouldn’t be suffering a total breakdown of their ethical faculties – and their judgement would be recognisably motivated by affection for you rather than hatred of me.
Israel is the only party that has shown an interest in peace. The Palestinians have rejected every offer without making any counter offers. Your sentiments are clear.
Hamas was ‘elected’ 18 years ago. On the other hand, Israelis continue to elect Bibi and Likud, a party intent on taking Palestinian territory.
Yes well though we “occasionally have to listen to people saying things that are both wrong and morally offensive”, listening to Hamas has not resulted in a peaceful solution.
Do you think listening and reasoning with ISIS would have resulted in a peaceful solution?
Can you explain the difference between “provoking” and “causing?”
Weasel words
If you caused something, you made it happen. 100% probability.
If you provoked it, you made someone else do it and the probability is somewhat reduced.
If I punch someone, I started a fight – I caused it. If I tell a stranger his wife’s an ugly pig and he hits me, I provoked the fight but he caused it.
From the river to the sea, which you can bet most of these stupid kids blindly support, is not well intentioned. Nor is it about peace in the Middle East, other than a peace without an Israel and at the cost of a nation full of dead Jews. That’s the reality.
That’s Islamic bravery on display.
Almost all Israeli citizens have at some point served in IDF. They don’t see them as innocent.
What are the students trying to achieve? Well, in the main, they probably want to see Palestinians and Israelis live peacably alongside one another. No? Do you really think that these people are incipient genocidaires and self-conscious antisemites?
Unfortunately, yes. While it’s probably that some of them would like peace in the Middle East, one only has to listen to the majority talk, look at their posters, and read their writings, to realise that they really would like Jews destroyed. The more articulate will carefully distinguish between ‘Jews’ and Zionists’ in principle, but the ‘Gas all Jews’ meme is far more powerful.
Netanyahu said he would like to see all Arabs drowned in the sea.
“When peace comes we will perhaps in time be able to forgive the Arabs for killing our sons, but it will be harder for us to forgive them for having forced us to kill their sons. Peace will come when the Arabs will love their children more than they hate us.”-Golda Meir
I don’t know whether you regard this as a compassionate counter-point to Netanyahu’s remarks or a further example of an Israeli politician saying profoundly racist things.
To me, it is clearly the latter. But, judging by the relative reactions to your post and Claire M’s, it would appear that BTL doesn’t see it that way.
Strange.
Anyone who doesn’t see it that way should try reading it with the word Arabs replaced with Jews and Golda Meir’s name replaced with that of Ismail Haniyeh
You are an idiot. One side deplores that it has been forced to kill. The other side glories in it, habituated to violence by an annual ritual sacrifice of large animals, echoing an ancient bloodlust. Dont opine about things you dont understand. This is not about land but religion.
Now if this isn’t hate and bigotry I don’t know what is.
If that isn’t some mangled cope to justify their own violence and aggression against the Arabs.
I’m sorry, I’ve missed the last couple of meetings at the Harvard Arab Medical and Dental Student Association and the Harvard Undergraduate Nepali Students’ Association, so I haven’t looked at their posters, or listened to the majority of their members talk. If you have and they’ve been sending a lot of “Gas all Jews” memes around their WhatsApp groups then I’m willing to stand corrected.
Otherwise, as you appear to concede, the statement itself could be motivated either by a sincere desire for peace or an insatiable thirst for Jewish blood (probably not a “bit of both” though).
Call me naive if you want but I make it a deliberate policy not to assume the absolute ducking worst of people when there are alternatives available.
You are astonishingly and culpably naive. (If indeed you really are, and are not simply engaging in a dark and sinister clown dance)
Have you ever read the Koran? It tells you explicitly what Islam is about in the same way as Mein Kamf told explicitly what National Socialism was about. Which part of it don’t you understand?
Oh wow. The Koran as Mein Kampf
Look, the Koran has some nasty things to say about Jews and it has some broad ecumenicalism.
How about [5.69] “Surely those who believe and those who are Jews and the Sabians and the Christians whoever believes in Allah and the last day and does good– they shall have no fear nor shall they grieve.”
All good Semites go to heaven. No?
But elsewhere, it says that Jews and Christians are pals – and, as a muslim, you’re on the outs
“[5.51] O you who believe! do not take the Jews and the Christians for friends; they are friends of each other; and whoever amongst you takes them for a friend, then surely he is one of them; surely Allah does not guide the unjust people.
Which is pretty ironic, given what the Christian churches were going to say about Jews over the next 1,300 years.
Sure, there’s much worse in the Hadith, but, if we’re going to invoke all of that then, we’re going to have to take a look at what various popes have said over the centuries and even, you know, the role of the Vatican in the holocaust. And no-one emerges from that story looking too great.
The point is that Islam can be a religion of peace or it can be a religion of conquest. As can Christianity (ask an Inca)
Incas ! Bleeding colonialists , don’t talk to them .
I notice you swerve the obvious comparison between the lives and personalities of Muhammad and Jesus as shown in the respective holy texts of Christianity and Islam . And their likely influence as role models . Very wise of you to side track to some corrupt Borgia pope .
Although it’s worth bearing in mind that for Menachim Begin, and a significant section of Zionists , keeping control of the occupied territories was less about security than holding on to God’s original dispensation of Judaea and Samaria as his gift to the Jewish people .
(Meant for addition to my reply to PN below starting ‘the bien pensants’
You’re just another apologist. End of.
George. Your views are unpopular here. However, your manner has remained polite despite some pretty nasty retorts. For that you are to be commended. It seems that the crowd (here) only wish to hear Hamas is revolting. However many times you say that they don’t like And or But to follow
It’s easy to sit here in the comfort of our armchairs and call for “restraint” when we pay no price for Hamas’s savagery. Calls for restraint or peace after one side has been attacked reduces the costs of launching such an attack. Hamas can attack Israel at will, murder, torture and kidnap its women and children, rape them and parade their dead bodies naked through the streets whilst “innocent” Palestinians desecrate their bodies and take selfies safe in the knowledge that the international community of bien pensants, immune from such violence, will call for “restraint” or a “proportionate” response.
Before the age of the international community or world opinion, countries which were attacked as Israel has been would annihilate their enemy and that would be the end of it.
If America had retaliated with a proportionate response after Pearl Harbour and merely bombed a single Japanese harbour before withdrawing, do you think that would have ended the war in the Pacific and Japan would be the peaceful and prosperous nation it is today? No. Japan paid a heavy price for its belligerence and then chose a different path.
Hamas cannot be negotiated with. It seeks the destruction of Israel. There is no middle ground for them. But it is “restraint” and a “proportionate response” that incentivises Hamas to continue its battle, safe in the knowledge that it cannot be wiped out. The Palestinians themselves could get rid of Hamas and choose a path of peace but they don’t.
Pay no price?? Maybe not today, but there will be a very big price some day soon, when this fight further invades our shores and the insanity of these Harvard students is in full bloom.
Well said. At some point one has to consider the annilihation and complete supression of your enemy, no matter the cost. I feel the time has come. The U.S. did this on a global scale in WWII. Surely Israel can do the same in their backyard.
The Bien Pensants always choose to believe the foundations statements of Hamas and all literalist readings of the Koran are mere ‘rhetoric’ . Surely nobody really has a literal belief in religious texts in the modern world . Well actually they do . Why is it so surprising? The Enlightenment only happened around 300 years ago and gave the Muslim world a swerve .
Do they really, “in the main,” want Israelis and Palestinians (Arabs) to live together in peace? Maybe. Ask them what if, by implementing the one-state solution they typically approve, the resulting Arab-majority were to severely oppress the Jewish minority, in the same way or worse than the current misery they attribute to Israeli actions against Palestinians.
It’s a fair question, it’s undoubtedly the existential dread felt by Israelis at the thought of any kind of one-state solution. My guess is that the vast majority of these “caring” folks will be absolutely stumped by that question. Either that, or they will say that it’s only fair that such oppression would ensue, given how many years of suffering the Palestinians have endured. And if all Jews who couldn’t run fast enough were murdered? That’s just how it goes, right?
“If the Arabs put down their weapons today, there would be no more violence. If the Jews put down their weapons today, there would be no more Israel’”― Benjamin Netanyahu
Good. I’ve heard Zelensky say the same about Ukraine.
“If you are not prepared to use force to defend civilisation then you must be prepared to accept barbarism.” – Thomas Sowell
Hearing the students day in day out, most don’t want a peaceful coexistence of Israelis and Palestinians. They see Israelis as imperialists, and they are not keen to see any concessions granted to imperialists. Many want Israel punished for the alleged sin of imperialism, to settle the score. It’s actually a very childish view of the world but perhaps not unexpected from a generation who have had their childhood extended way into adulthood by a university system that increasingly resembles schooling.
I’m sorry. I disagree with anyone who demonically tortures and murders innocent human beings doing nothing but living in their homes. And raping women in public and parading their bloody bodies around in a truck. If you can’t agree that anyone who does not deplore that behavior is a “bad guy”, then you have a depraved mind.
Reread and edit your post please. You are accusing George of being deplorable. That is excessive
“Do you really think that these people are incipient genocidaires and self-conscious antisemites?”
Self-conscious? I don’t know. The human heart, like history, has many cunning passages, contrived corridors. But incipient genocidaires and antisemites? Absolutely. If you can’t see it now, your ideological goggles must be well-nigh impregnable.
Haven’t read CS Lewis for a long time… will have to again. You are right, socialism continues to rear its ugly head(also thinking of the “squad” in US congress. Our primary hope is that the past and future power broker graduates of Harvard see through the facade and capitalism marches on.
Western civilization no longer provides an heroic narrative so they’ve found other ones. I wish they’d be taught skepticism.
The socialists love Muslims until the Muslims correct them. https://assets.nationbuilder.com/parentchoice/pages/70/attachments/original/1691691086/2023_July_29_WS_Muslim_clerics_stand_their_ground_against_'progressive'_sex_teaching.pdf?1691691086
“hyper-educated” You surely mean hyper-endoctrinated. Because what they are getting there is NOT education…
Various influential Democrats spent the past seven years gaslighting US citizens ad infinitum by calling people they disagreed with “Hitler” or something akin to this.
And yet rank-and-file Democrats are mostly silent as we now witness far more deadly, far more real, far more organized, and completely untouchable Hitlerati in ascendence within the Democrat Party. There’s nary a whisper of real, tactical steps to weed out these Hitlerati from Democrat leadership, as well as their positions within powerful organizations.
Is it really surprising that the Hitlerati now tell us with impunity that the tortured and dying innocent Jewish victims in Israel are somehow the perpetrators of their own demise, and that the real perpetrators who both imagined and carried out this heinous violence against innocent people are somehow the victims?
“Woe unto them that call evil good, and good evil; that put darkness for light, and light for darkness; that put bitter for sweet, and sweet for bitter!”
Such a depressing state of affairs.
Yea, sort of makes those grade school parents in VA (called “Domestic Terrorists”) looks like scouts.
https://nypost.com/2021/10/25/ag-merrick-garland-white-house-owe-americas-domestic-terrorist-parents-an-apology-and-an-explanation/
It’s always baffled me why so much of the Western left is overtly pro-Palestinian when most of them would probably be arrested or killed almost immediately after setting foot in Gaza. Only in Israel (ironically) would they be allowed to spout their usual bile in the Middle East.
The problem here is that of so called “decolonisation”. I’m sure many of us who use Twitter saw excerpts from certain people mocking those who thought it would just be about “essays, journals and EDI workshops” among other things. Let’s make no mistake, the ideology behind decolonisation is the equivalent of fascism to our forebears of the 1930’s and 40’s and communism in the succeeding decades until that ideology crashed to the ground. We should consider it our moral duty to fight it everywhere.
It is wrong, but not that hard to understand. People love the underdog in a fight – and many don’t think much beyond the good-victim, bad-opressor fairytale.
This is unacceptable behaviour. We give students some latitude as a matter of course, as their passions can outrun their moral development. Even so, this is beyond the pale. I look forward with interest to see how the university authorities respond.
By contrast, British universities are taking an admirably robust line, by reporting errant student groups to the police.
I don’t mean to start an argument, but I don’t understand your comment. So many articles on Unherd extol the virtues of free speech and decry the phenomenon of cancel culture in universities and other public institutions. I understand a person profoundly disagreeing with the students who express solidarity with the Palestinians and characterize the Israelis as oppressors, but surely everyone has the right to express themselves without being reported to the police. Isn’t that an act of cancellation and suppression of speech as egregious as those we read about so often on Unherd?
It’s a fair point. The issue here is that, in the UK, Hamas is seen by the authorities as a terrorist organisation. It was proscribed in Nov 2021. This has legal implications for anyone who supports it. The penalties for supporting it are severe.
You can argue that the gulf between an unpleasant group of people and a terrorist organisation, in terms of free speech, is too large. If Hamas had massacred hundreds of people in Oct 2021, it’s British supporters could have rejoiced with impunity. Now, they can’t. If that’s your view, it’s a fair point and worth discussing.
I think that’s a rather strange argument. Do we strip people of their right to free speech when we designate them terrorists? Wouldn’t that create a rather dangerous incentive for people with the power to do the designating, to designate more people who disagree with them as terrorists?
Oh wait. Isn’t that a rather neat summary of the history of the past 20 years?
“Do we strip people of their right to free speech when we designate them terrorists”
that’s exactly what happens though
I know.
I’m saying that the demonisation of islamic fundamentalism opened the door for the suppression of free speech in ways that have subsequently spread into every corner of civic life.
And that this was a mistake.
We should certainly send them back from whence they came when they were given permission to stay based on their claims of persecution but then aim to create here exactly what they claimed to have fled from!
We should go a great deal further and deport them to Saudi Arabia.
We strip people of their free speech when they incite violence.
Totally agree. These imbeciles should be allowed to spew all the nonsense they like. In fact, I think it discredits them even more. They look like pampered limousine liberals with nonsense like this only hours after slaughter of innocent civilians.
But discredits them to what end? The pendulum has never swung back…..will never swing back. It’s a ratchet. What is the end game? What is supposed to happen when they are ‘discredited’? The US is still trying to do a deal with Iran. The gender ideologues are surely discredited every time they open their mouths, and yet their agenda is rolling out in schools, universities, hospitals…..The middle ground is dead….This is now a kinetic war for control of the institutions.
It is a fair point, but we do have laws in the UK against glorifying terrorism. I think several of the “protests” I’ve seen could be argued to cross that line. The police could do worse than make an example of a few Bobo white Liberals who think indiscriminate massacre is all in a days work decolonialising.
But, if you have special laws against “glorifying terrorism” (as distinct from, say, advocating genocidal murder) then what you actually get is an ever-broadening definition of both glorification and terrorism, until they end up coming to mean “saying things that powerful people don’t like”.
Haven’t we seen where this leads?
Do you think it should be legal to go out in the streets chanting “kill all jews” while making threats to actual jews who happen to be there?
this has been happening for quite a while, don’t be disingenuous. Just be upfront and say you tolerate that kind of stuff
No, clearly, I don’t. I specifically made a distinction between glorification of terrorism “and, say, advocating genocidal murder.”
I don’t think that free speech is or should be absolute, I think that the restrictions should be very limited and as precise as possible.
I’m pretty sure this illegal already.
I tried to argue here that absolute free speech was ideological nonsense when the discussion was cancel culture and ‘leftist’ progressives, but managed to get numerous down ticks. It was I think interpreted as support for cancel culture which of course it wasn’t. But the Elon Musk idea of absolute free speech is obviously absurd. Extreme Islamist ideology is beyond the pale as is overt hate speech against minority groups. A line has to be drawn it’s just where it is that is the problem.
Just say Blasphemy, not the absurd “hate speech”. People who say things you disagree with are blasphemers.
Ok perhaps you disagree with the expression. But I really don’t think a rich person in my town should be allowed to put up massive posters saying ‘Martin Butler is a bigoted cretin’. Anymore than they should be allowed to put up posters saying ‘All gay people should be exterminated’. I’m sure you can think of worse. Absolute free speech means that.
The UK Defamation Act of 2013 is quite adequate to control “absolute free speech”.
“English law allows actions for libel to be brought in the High Court for any published statements which are alleged to defame a named or identifiable individual in a manner which causes them loss in their trade or profession, or damages their reputation”.*
(*Wikibeast.)
Yes, but there’s one problem with libel laws. Even if we could assume non-biased courts (which is no longer something to be assumed in some cases), not all people can afford going to court.
I too hate ‘hate speech’. (I hope that is not hate speech.) But as I understand it, that is not at all the same as blasphemy; it is far wider and more insidious in its context.
Well said. The answer to bad speech is always a good rebuttal. Not cancellation.
The good rebuttal is what seems to be missing from universities currently, good argument and persuasion have gone.
Free speech doesn’t exist in universities, nor diversity of perspective….So we should fund them
I don’t mind them expressing themselves peacefully as it merely shows what idiots they truly are. It is when they act out their beliefs that I have a problem.
Free speech does not extend to inciting violence.
You know full well how the university authorities won’t respond.
If they don’t, then it’s up to corporate America. Employing able, educated people who have a defective moral compass sounds, to me, like a recipe for disaster. So a statement that Harvard graduates will no longer be hired should send the right message.
Mmm. Since when do businesses (in general) put moral compasses above profit? And I’m being polite.
Look at the names of these associations and it all makes sense. Why should our universities be any different from our cities? This is a problem of imported populations and unassimilated (probably unassimilable) cultures. Underneath the thin veneer of civilisation, these students are no different from the violent hordes you can see on our city streets.
When I was young, my instinctive sympathy was with the Palestinians. When I was older, I questioned this instinct. I realised that at an unconscious level, I identified with the Palestinians. My mother was an orphan and had cornered the market on both pity and sympathy, regardless of how bad my life was, and it was very bad, I had nothing to complain about. I projected my mother onto the Jews, nothing is ever as bad as the Holocaust, and myself onto the Palestinians who I perceived as being punished for the Holocaust. During the realisation, I had a therapist whose mother was a Holocaust survivor, I learnt how dangerous victim mentality is. I also realised the situation between the Israelis and Palestinians is much more complicated than my projections and identification represented it. During this time, I questioned my instinctive hatred of the Japanese, I had always thought it rather weird as I didn’t know any Japanese people and as far as I knew, at that time, had never met any Japanese people. I came to realise I had acquired this hatred in my pre-verbal years from my Chinese amah who had been a midwife prior to the Japanese invasion of Singapore; her hatred was probably justified. The sourcing of my inherited prejudice was like bursting a balloon: once I realised, the hatred was not mine, I no longer experienced any antipathy towards the Japanese, which is just as well as my son now has a half Japanese, half-brother. Rather than non-Muslims attending pro-Palestinian/anti-Israel demonstrations, the participants might be better employed questioning their own sympathies, and maybe Muslims should question their hatred of the Jews.
Thinking about that time has stirred up other memories I think are relevant and illuminating. During that time, a lesbian and her five year old daughter were staying with my family (we were living in North America) while she was splitting up with her long term partner. Together we had commissioned a costly picture; I had paid. After she moved out of our home and moved into the home of her new partner with her daughter, she came back to claim the picture. She said it was hers by right because I had written some poems and she had nothing. At the time, I accepted her reasoning as it was very similar to my mother’s: I had no needs so everything was hers even when I had worked hard to earn the money to pay for it. This woman, the lesbian, was studying at an Ivy League university, her undergraduate degree was philosophy and she was embarking on a masters in counselling. She told me she had come out in London, England, and then joined in every demonstration she could find, regardless of the aims of those organising the demonstration. After she moved in with her new partner, her daughter’s behaviour deteriorated. I suggested her daughter may have been adversely effected by the change of partners and disruption to her life. The woman was having absolutely none of it and said it was because it was time for her to start her formal education. I said nothing but noted her refusal to consider her behaviour might have negatively effected her daughter whilst blaming various different people in her past for the negative impact they had on her and her life. This woman is now a therapist and works as a career advisor at the same Ivy League university where she was an undergraduate. She effectively stole from me and justified the theft on the basis I was in some sense more privileged than her (I could write poetry). This thinking now drives and justifies rampant shoplifting and theft in general.
Until conservatives are willing to defund universities and other public bureaucracies that have been captured, we won’t get anywhere
The attacked are the aggressors and the aggressors are the victims. An old trick that has really picked up steam again. Unfortunately, self-censorship has become the norm among many universities.
A moronic porn star’s pro-terrorism comments draw more attention than an Israeli pleading for help to rescue their children who are being held hostage by terrorists.
I doubt any of these socially pampered students would survive in a hard islamic zelot dominated state. Perhaps they should learn about the “human rights” afforded by those systems. That’s not a fun fact though. Doesnt get any likes or attention or marxist “bravery” kudos for pointing those facts out.
Thanks. This expressed the issue perfectly: “The nation’s premiere university appears to be an echo chamber of moral vacuousness and antisemitic ideology.” Young monsters indeed.
As with the formerly useful universities in the UK – St Andrews, Oxford, Cambridge, Durham etc these now false seats of learning in the US only produce “graduates” capable of serving in the public sector and corporations dependent on that sector. So for the moment they are doing fine and may well have another generation of so’s worth of largesse to keep them in the life style they inherited. However because they are as economically unproductive as they are demonically vile they will ultimately succumb to the laws of economic gravity. Because they are unwilling to work and unable to steal they will cease to exist.
Young people will always have strong feelings of injustice, yet the IS tactics by the latest Hamas fighters show that this is a particularly vicious generation.
My instinct is that a paradigm shift is needed in the weapons used to manage such unpleasant parts of the world. That will give left-wing youth some genuine to think about – as well as Iran.
‘Some years later, the Muslim Students Association (MSA) invited a neo-Nazi from California to speak at one of their events.’ As terms like neo-Nazi are frequently attached to those whose views differ from whoever is using the term, it would be useful to be provided with some supporting evidence so readers can decide for themselves whether or not the recipient of the slur is deserving of the slur, and the subsequent cancellation warranted.
Those students learned their lessons well.
Look at how America has deteriorated for the last 30 years under the bipartisan “elite” regime of the Ivy League grads. The results speak to the incompetence, greed, and moral depravity of those universities and what they now produce.
Wasn’t always that way, but it has increasingly been so since the late 1960s.
The almost unconscionable ‘what aboutism’ is difficult to bear, faced with the barbarism of Hamas but I suspect bear it we must, to preserve liberty. The article focuses on America but we have the same thing in U.K.; a University of Sussex employee has publicly called the Hamas invasion ‘beautiful’.
The ‘line’ I suggest is not necessarily whether or not a particular statement is made, or protest held, but what the response is. Will university authorities utterly condemn the hate speech spewed; where that speech has broken laws, will they report that individual; will they protect and support those countering these lies? That would be powerful and meaningful; simply ‘banning’ the hate advocates will not help at all.
Don’t hold your breath!!!
I am not surprised to read of this disgusting “chamber of moral vacuousness” known as Harvard. The moral and intellectual decline of leftist universities has been in force for years. Apparently critical thinking is no longer taught.
The only news you will find is the president does not publicly support the views of “31 student organisations from Harvard College, the Divinity School, the Law School, the Medical School, and the Kennedy School of Government.” Of course she does not. Harvard is not funded by Palestine.
Medical students, really? supporting rape and murder of women and children?
Harvard and its alumni are too rich and powerful to take a hit. You can be sure that no MSM will expose them for the students they have created. The only recourse here is accountability. Every student name in every organization should be be publicly known. I want to see that list if I am an employer.
Soft people in a soft world. It’s not. It’s a hard world and that’s how we have to face it. If there is a god, he doesn’t want this kind of death. And, your political ideology means less than a rat’s constipated crap to the actual human suffering, on either side of the line.
These aren’t statistics, whatever Stalin said, these are human beings. There is no equivocation. There is no justification. On either side.
People are dying. And if you’re using them for your political aims, thousands of miles from where they’re dying, then f**k you.
It all comes down to the culture of fear on these campuses. The majority don’t support this but the activists dominate the room and silence all opposition. Faculty have allowed this happen – for which they should be ashamed.
Worse. Some faculty have incubated, enabled and incited it.
Not just this issue but others as well – gender ideology springs to mind.
Harvard’s own narcissism will be the death of the place. It’s self-infatuation and utter inability to see that it is not always “in the know” and not the source of wisdom on all things political and cultural has led to this state of affairs. Incubating ideologues is a perfect description. Meanwhile, the bolshevik aspirations of these spoiled brats are a sight to behold.
Within days there will be an outcry about how “disproportionate” the Israeli response to Hammas’s outrage has been. And the Holocaust denial and belittlement will continue, and every Jewish person, wherever they may be, will indiscriminately be associated with Zionism. When I frequented university campuses, maybe 30+ years ago, there was plenty of dissent in many arenas, but I did not sense systematic suppression of views. Which sometimes emanates from cowardice or loss of integrity when faced with potentially dangerous and threatening ideologues.
100 years ago, Harvard Admissions put a limit on how many Jews can attend the school. Now, Harvard’s students put a limit on Jews’ right to not be brutally slaughtered.
Re: [Joint statement by Harvard University Palestine solidarity groups:] “We, the undersigned student organizations, hold the Israeli regime entirely responsible for all the unfolding violence.”
I’ve never understood this reasoning: it seems like an exercise in pure evasion. Surely each individual is responsible for his/her own beliefs and actions, and this responsibility can’t be delegated to anybody else, nor to the state or any of its institutions. This was the finding of the war crimes trials at Nuremberg: if we commit atrocities, we can’t plead as a defense the fact that the state, the law, or our neighbours were okay with our actions at the time. Each of us is ethically responsible for knowing better.
Notwithstanding whatever status we may have as victims of poverty, oppression, or any of the world’s many injustices, we remain human agents responsible for how we exercise our agency. If someone bullies us, this confers on us no right to bully someone else in turn. If we think we’ve been unfairly treated by another ethnic or racial group, we have a right to bring our grievances to their attention–but not by mugging, shooting or bombing members of that group. The moment we knowingly commit an atrocity, we reveal our pretensions as supposed foes of atrocity to be the posturing of hypocrites.
This truth is so basic it’s hard to believe a Harvard student can’t grasp it. Failing to grasp it, or grasping it yet perversely rejecting it while claiming to side with morality and justice is incoherent. “We have met the enemy and he is us” is, evidently, a self-insight sadly lacking in at least some Palestinian solidarity groups, and the struggle for justice is worse off for it. One wonders how many non-Muslim Harvard students wishing to express their solidarity with Hamas, or any other cause, by going to Mecca themselves realize they wouldn’t even be permitted to enter the city. There’s diversity and inclusion for you, medieval style! “Are you Christian or pagan–Muslim or infidel?” Careful how you answer.
It’s ’emotionally-driven reasoning’. Contemporary psychology is increasingly finding that this is our default: the ‘new’ thinking-mind plays lawyer/PR agent for the ancient emotional mind, the passions; and it takes a lot of hard work, good advice and wisdom to counter this. In these hyper-individualistic, narcisstic times (you’re worth it!), much of the god work done over millenia is being reversed (it’s my truth! I feel it so it must be true).
It is becoming increasingly difficult to sort out one’s mind. There are so many experts, where as laymen ask themselves if they know enough about history or political facts to express any kind of view. And maybe we don’t. have any opinion. But we do have knowledge about being human, and that does not require any kind of «opinion», simply a recognition of that what people are going through in Israel is unacceptable.
In all this showing off of knowledge and competence and judging, human dignity and compassion are being sacrificed. We forget the absolute essential about being human: Showing love and care for each other. This time it is Israeli women, men and children who are suffering, We should suffer with them. Show solidarity with them – speak out on their behalf –no matter the official politics of Israel.
I ask myself what collapses the first: thinking or language, or are we just not brave enough?
Very well stated.
However, the line…”We forget the absolute essential about being human: Showing love and care for each other.” is not universally accepted. Not even close. It demonstrates a Christian worldview, which can be a lesson to both sides of this mess.
It is truly astonishing how persons, who otherwise seem normal and decent, can apparently hold, let alone express such views. It makes one wonder what kind of person one possibly has behind one, and perhaps not even know it,
The jewel is paste. It’s been clear for quite some time. If we’re serious about educating a generation of leaders we will need to look elsewhere. Dear alumni: there are many more deserving institutions to grace with your support.
Dear Alumni: there’s a crucial difference between loyalty to principles and loyalty to mere insignia.
As these people eirher do not understand the concepts of causation and moral agency or, which is worse, do understand yet repudiate them out of social fear, they are unfit to receive any kind of academic qualification.
When will the maskurbators finally realise how weird they look?
These people need to be named and exposed to the full glare of the opprobrium that should be heaped upon them. If Harvard had any guts they’d be expelled.
We’re learning that ‘diversity’ is not necessarily ‘good’.
Anti Semitism is an old mind virus. Unfortunately it does not kill those who harbour it, only harming innocent others. Expensive universities are now experiencing a severe outbreak. They must be fumigated.
not surprised. brave new world, and the fact the Ivy League has gone left real far. Not much use in attending thee schools as the entitled go here, or the new radicals /commies that feel sorry for the world.
It’s all fine when it’s a Marxist corrupt BLM, it’s all fine when it’s covid coercion and flawed science, now their demons. Let’s get this straight, higher education has been totally corrupted. There is no centre, and political debate on the ideologies such as gender has been completely shut down, freedom of speech is dead at these institutions. One way to fix it all, stop their funding, go back to free academic rigour and no outside investment linked to the output. Allow and flourish debates, teach tolerance and not hatred. Society at the moment in the last 3.5 years has been in a permacrisis, one that is manufactured by the powerful through their control of media. It will get worse. Academics are not free thinkers, and education is breeding non critical thinkers, one way that goes! Down!
There seem like awful people, but at the end of the day it’s only 31 awful people. In coming days once they realise Twitter’s against them and their future employment might be in jeopardy, many will probably recant.
I’m torn. There’s a part of me that suspects these sorts of things actually do matter, that they’re the tip of a sort of iceberg, but there’s another that suspects were all being had, and that this article is just another example of the worst thing about the internet; it’s ability to zero in an amplify the hateful views of a tiny minority to elicit a response.
No, it’s 31 student organisations = an awful lot of awful people
Young people- and young men in particular – are terrified of being thought unfashionable. Or not ‘cool’. It’s ‘cool’ to support Hamas. It might even be ‘edgy’. Even better.
However, rather than impose collective punishment on the people in Gaza, many of whom may effectively be hostages themselves, I would much prefer that the Israelis treat the terrorists as the psychotic criminals they are, and for Netanyahu to say ‘We know who they are, we can identify them from the videos. If it takes fifty years we will hunt down and punish every last one of them, just as we did the Munich assassins’.
The more Gazans die, the more money Hamas will raise, the stronger they will become. Treat them as criminals.
I very much appreciate the article but can I suggest you don’t link to videos showing people being desecrated?
Harvard’s president, Claudine Gay, circulated a new letter today condemning the attacks.
Too little too late.
Not sure I am getting the the reference to Polish villagers. Maybe your perspective gets a bit askew when you live in a country where freedom flashes only for a couple decades after century long nonexistence, and then is brutally taken away while you are abandoned by chief superpowers (neither France nor Britain came to Poland’s rescue in 1939, despite of international pacts) to be ravaged by the Nazis and the Soviets, Maybe you’d think differently about jumping to other’s help when the penalty is summary execution of you and your family (despite which more Jews were saved from the Nazis in the occupied territories than by all other nationalities combined). Six million Poles died in that war and nobody lift a finger, and when they finally did, they sold them down the river Stalin. Just a thought.
While Dr Jacob Howland provides some brief credentials, he is modestly hiding his most of his light under a bushel, being a visiting fellow of Tikvah, ‘a non-profit ideas institution committed to supporting the intellectual, religious, and political leaders of the Jewish people and the Jewish state. Tikvah runs and invests in a wide range of initiatives in Israel, the United States, and around the world…Their animating mission and guiding spirit is to advance Jewish excellence and Jewish flourishing in the modern age. Tikvah is politically Zionist…’
See this which I think is emblematic: https://youtube.com/shorts/foJgXiff3lg?si=tXQsX26EEZ1ALgXj
When someone shows you who they are, believe them.
It has been becoming more and more obvious, for some time, that universities, such as Harvard, are elite only in their cost and self-regard.
Business leaders are noticing, particularly with regard to the Hamas apologists, and some of these “future leaders” will have disqualified themselves from future opportunities.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/brianbushard/2023/10/10/billionaire-ackman-others-pledge-they-wont-hire-harvard-students-who-signed-letter-criticizing-israel/
Poor little Harvard is rotting on the vine, and eating its own young.
Just another historically illiterate rant. Read Israeli scholarship on Israel–Palestine; it’s far more serious than this microwave-reheated drivel.
Supporting a free Palestine is not an evil ideology, but supporting the state of Israel in its present form almost certainly is. The time has come for everyone of goodwill to work for a shared, unitary secular state of Palestine/Israel, and to unite against the religious extremists who oppose that aim.
Does anyone really believe that if everything was flipped it would play out differently? – I.e in some alternate universe Gaza was the home of the Jews and Israel was a well funded Palestinian state. Do we really think that the Gazraelis with their backs to the wall would not attempt exactly the same barbaric acts? Does this excuse the acts? Of course not. But let’s stop pretending we are dealing with people who are somehow anymore evil than the next man put in the same circumstances.
That might make sense if Hamas’s mission wasn’t ‘killing all Jews’, suggesting that this is more than a land issue.
And Iran’s involvement? Not a land issue.
“Not a land issue” is the most fabulously stupid statement I’ve seen on Israel–Palestine, necessarily on the back of an equally stupid argument
And if terrorism and atrocities were good enough for the Zionists and Israelis, why shouldn’t Hamas use it?
https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2017-07-16/ty-article-magazine/testimonies-from-the-censored-massacre-at-deir-yassin/0000017f-e364-d38f-a57f-e77689930000
https://mondoweiss.net/2019/10/it-is-time-to-break-the-silence-on-israeli-terrorist-campaign-in-lebanon-that-killed-100s/
People should never be proud of atrocities. There’s one real difference.
I’m not sure if there has ever been a war in which both sides did not commit them. Moreover, it’s one thing to carry them out with a ‘reasonable’ expectation/hope that it’ll support your case (a moral gray area for sure); another when there is almost zero chance this will help your people, and near 100% likelihood that it’ll be very bad for them – and to repeat this decade after decade.
The killing on either sided can’t be condoned but the Israelites don’t have a published mission to kill all Palestinians, Hamas has a stated mission to destroy all Israelites.
They have never done so in the past. Israel was not always well funded. They have got where they are today by sheer hard work & their own effort even while surrounded by screaming hordes set on their total distruction. Don’t you read history or do you just believe all Jews are rich so they must have funded Israel?
Wanting a Free Palestine is hardly antisemitic is it considering Palestinians ARE Semites! Which is more than can be said for the bulk of Zionists! It’s nice to be accurate.
Boring semantic red herring. Try harder.
Come on guys. Let’s not fall in with conflating anti-Zionism with antisemitism. Anyone aiming anything at anyone needs to make sure they’re not falling to some laager formation LCD otherwise moral high grounds will crumble fast.
Well it depends what you mean by a ‘Free Palestine’. Sounds unobjectionable at first, but when it demands the destruction of the Jewish state and all that that would entail, it begins to take on a different look.
It mean’s freeing the planet from traditional western ideas. Only way to do that is with a purge coinciding with/followed by indoctrination of the youth.
Just a reminder that Hamas does not act for all Palestinians, who are the oppressed minority in a country that was their own until not that long ago. Innocent civilians are without water and power, more than 700 Palestinians have been killed in retaliation to a terrorist attack. Israel is not acting appropriately or proportionately. When terrorists attack we shouldnt bomb civilians from the same ethnic or religious group. Hamas have taken some hostages, but Israel is holding more than 5000 Palestinians hostage. The only people innocent in this are citizens of Palestine and Israel caught up in the d**k swinging.
You are willfully ignoring all those cheering crowds.
You don’t see them in Israel as well? You don’t see their own government calling for the entire destruction of Gaza? Giving humans no time at all to relocate. They speak for all Israelis no more than Hamas and their sympathisers speak for all Palestinians. Hamas needs to be destroyed not Palestine.
War is always hideous and turns us into beasts. If you were among the 2 million people living in an open air prison tbat is Gaza and your ancestors were among the 750,000 massacred by the Israelis when they raised your villages between 1947 and 1949 to make way for their state, continuing to steal your people’s land year after year and treat you as little more than animals, then perhaps you would be grateful to these Harvard students who have the courage to stand up for you as you thrash out in blind suicidal rage.
They didn’t seem to mind when it was Jordan taking their land. If I were among the 2 million people living in Gaza, I imagine I’d be more annoyed at my feckless ancestors for repeatedly rejecting statehood because they were more interested in kicking out the Joos.
That is if they hadn’t already used me as a human shield or encouraged me to martyr myself on behalf of a 7th century pervert.
“They didn’t seem to mind when it was Jordan taking their land.”
Perhaps because they also tried to take Jordan’s land. The Jordanian army had to go to war against the PLO in 1970. Google “Black September”.
I see the Noam Chomsky randomly-generated bullsh*t comments dispenser is at maximum strength. With that kind of reductive insight, it’s surely only a matter of time before Novara Media comes calling.
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I can’t but agree with that. I would, however, dispute that Chomsky wouldn’t know the difference between “raised” and “razed”.
Not a popular line to take at the moment. But when the dust settles, I suspect that discussion will return to your point. Isreal has made a great deal of progress in the last ten years in terms of breaking out of its diplomatic isolation and establishing relations with the UAE, Saudi Arabia, etc. This dynamic offers the prospect of a broader peace in the long run. It is hard, however, to see this process as being compatible with Gaza as it has been the last twenty years: an open sore with a ghetto of two million impoverished Palestinian presided over by Hamas, a terrorist group. The current cycle of violence may set back the process by years. One way or another, however, in the long run Isreal will have to come up with a better solution than “imprisoning” two million Palestinians in Gaza. But these thoughts will be relevant perhaps a year from now and not today when outrage and a demand for revenge are the inevitable reactions to the massacre.
“It is hard, however, to see this process as being compatible with Gaza as it has been the last twenty years: an open sore with a ghetto of two million impoverished Palestinian presided over by Hamas, a terrorist group”
Why not? The Saudi treatment of Yemenis dwarfs anything the Israelis have done to the Palestinians.
I take your point – and you are being entirely logical – but I don’t think the world works that way. As Samuel Huntingdon pointed out, there is a tendency for people to empathise most with those of a similar background – or civilisation in his terms – when attacked by outsiders. As a result, Westerners will feel most empathy for the Israeli victims of the massacre by Hamas but e.g. Saudis may feel more empathy for the Palestinian victims of the ensuing Israeli retaliation. Perhaps individuals should not feel this way but it is observable they do. As a result, the Israeli / Saudi rapprochement will suffer a setback. In Huntingdon terms, the Yemeni conflict was intra Arab and therefore produced less visceral reactions despite – as you say – being conducted in a barbarous fashion.
Nice one, Simon. You’ve just given the Palestinians the moral agency of an amoeba.
How many Jews were massacred or expelled from their land after the breakup of the Ottoman Empire?
I’m sure you would prefer they had all died quietly, like every other middle-class English lefty.
We are all really impressed by your empathy for a group of people who massacred hundreds of unarmed kids at a music festival, raped the females then paraded their naked bodies in celebration of what they had done. People who execute homosexuals and are committed to genocide.
“How many Jews were massacred or expelled from their land after the breakup of the Ottoman Empire?”
And Armenians during the Ottoman disintegration.
And would you like the Palestinians to “die quietly”?
I am flabbergasted at the lack of perspective here.
Should anyone be interested I invite them to review the following articles:
https://www.middleeasteye.net/opinion/gaza-israel-west-hypocrisy-jailbreak-stomach-turning
https://open.substack.com/pub/chrishedges/p/palestinians-speak-the-language-of?r=o9a07&utm_medium=ios&utm_campaign=post
I’m surprised unheard allowed your comment. They deleted mine, too much truth and reality. There is clearly a confirmation bias going on here, and any criticism of King Bib and you’re an antisemite who supports terrorism.