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December 6, 2023

College presidents’ obvious antisemitism and the rot at academia’s heart

By Andrea Widburg

Yesterday, if you had been sitting in the House, you might have been confused for a moment into thinking, not that you were in Washington, D.C., in 2023, but that you were, instead, in Berlin in 1933. That’s because the presidents of three of America’s most (ahem) respected academic institutions sat before Congress and said that, no, they really didn’t think they had an overarching obligation to act against calls for Jewish genocide. Harvard’s president is backpedaling today, but that’s not enough. The presidents should resign or be ousted, and the institutions broken up.

The news first broke with a tweet from Bill Ackman, a Harvard alum, reporting that the presidents of Harvard, MIT, and the University of Pennsylvania, two of which predate America’s founding, were called before Congress to testify about antisemitism. They were disrespectful, condescending, and non-responsive. They also made it clear that, on their campuses, calling for Jewish genocide was fine if nobody was the victim of actual genocide on the campus:

Here's more from Claudine Gay, Harvard’s president:

Normally, I won’t tell people to watch videos. This time, I will. Watch them. Apparently, “context” is everything. The three women are very clear that merely calling for Jews to be exterminated really isn’t harassment unless they’re actually getting killed in real-time. Elise Stefanik was awesome and said the right thing at the end, which is that every one of those women should resign.

In addition to the above footage, Stefanik also posted on her own website how Harvard’s president, Claudine Gay, avoided acknowledging that her institution is flooded with money from foreign entities that are all-in on antisemitism. For just a touch more of Gay’s testimony, here’s Gay on the Israeli versus the American flag, too:

And here’s Gay refusing to respond to whether Jews are even safe on her campus:

One of the things that shines through as you listen to or read Gay’s responses is her arrogance. Gay is obviously bothered that the little people in Congress, the ones representing the American people, are wasting her time.

Of course, Gay comes by her arrogance honestly. She attended Phillips Exeter Academy, Stanford, and Harvard. In terms of work, she never left the academy. She’s spent her entire life in the bastion of people who do and contribute nothing useful other than gathering academic credentials. As for her intellectual focus, if you look at her publications, despite her rarefied education and career, she’s never risen above her sense of victimization about her skin color. She is an exceptionally limited person.

Moving back to the larger issue, it’s important to note how different the standards at these institutions are for misgendering someone or embracing actual biology:

Hurting someone’s feelings can get you kicked out. Calling for the slaughtering of an entire race…meh! The LGBTQ+ cohort would do well to remember that the Nazis used the gays as they gained power, only to kill them later in the same death camps built for the Jews.

Thankfully, before we go full Nazi Germany (and do remember that every university in Germany was all-in on every aspect of Naziism, including the wholesale slaughter of the Jewish people, along with gypsies, homosexuals, and the handicapped, along with the enslavement of other “inferior” races), there has been pushback. Dave Portnoy has announced that Barstool Sports will blackball anyone from Harvard, Penn, and MIT until these three harpies resign their positions.

Other institutions should follow suit—but I’m willing to bet that companies such as Disney, Lionsgate, and Walmart, all of which are refusing to advertise on X because of the defamatory claim that Elon Musk is antisemitic, won’t do a darn thing about this. That’s because they don’t care about antisemitism. They care about the death of free speech, and they love the Hitler youth graduating from academia because those kids hate free speech, too.

Some students at the colleges, along with a growing number of lawmakers, are starting to call for these Hitler-esque frauleins to quit.

And while Sally Kornbluth, MIT’s president, and M. Elizabeth Magill, Penn’s president, despite being every bit as awful as Gay, have managed to stay out of the limelight, Gay is feeling the heat. I suspect that’s because of Harvard’s place in America’s imagination. She’s now backpedaling frantically:

That statement is way too little, too late, and anything from the other presidents will be, too. All were given repeated chances to make themselves clear—and they did: They’re fine with calls for genocide, while they’ll willingly silence and destroy anyone who impinges on their sexual and racial shibboleths.

All three women should resign. They can probably find work at the UN (and note that this comedy sketch used the word "context" before the academics got around to it in their House testimony):

Moreover, if it were up to me, those campuses would be shut down, and the properties and endowments then be given to the Native Americans who figure so strongly in the land acknowledgments academics constantly insist on making. Additionally, because all three institutions must inevitably have benefitted from money that originated with slavery, I’d also parcel out some of the wealth to blacks demanding reparations.

By the way, you may have noticed a change in tone in this post. One of the longstanding principles at American Thinker is that we do not engage in reductio at Hitlerum. That is, we’ve always been very careful not to say that everyone who disagrees with us is Hitler. However, since October 7, what’s been revealed in America is that there are people who have embraced the Nazi ethos that all Jews must die. Moreover, they’re increasingly less shy about voicing that ideology or, in the case of these three monstrous women, letting others voice the ideology for them. The Nazi analogy is no longer a stretch.

Image: Twitter screen grab.

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