The war in Gaza, and the massacres perpetrated by Hamas on Oct. 7 that instigated it, have provided the political right with what it considers its best opportunity in decades to leverage Israel/Palestine divisions within the Democratic Party and among its constituents. One of Republicans’ perennial targets has always been our system of higher education, which they see as fostering the liberal and enlightened attitudes that pose an existential threat to right-wing conservatism as a whole. The heated, often ugly arguments unfolding on college campuses about the war in Gaza, and the rhetoric some students are expounding towards Israel in particular, has given conservatives special solace, because it allows them to distract from the fact that (most recently thanks to Donald Trump), many of their most ardent supporters are in fact established, virulent, and violent antisemites.
The narrative the right has now apparently settled on? Our country’s most prestigious universities are led by folks who would condone the genocide of the Jewish people. This is apparently an equal opportunity consensus: They may be women, they may be Black, they may even be Jewish, but they’re all allegedly contributing to the same general atmosphere of antisemitism on college campuses. At least that’s what one Republican congresswoman—Rep. Elise Stefanik—would have us believe. And while she’s never before given the slightest sign of caring about anything but her own advancement within the Republican Party, she’s suddenly and miraculously developed an acute interest in antisemitism on college campuses. In fact, she seems intent on bringing down the entire edifice of higher education in this country—a favored scapegoat of the pro-Trump political movement—to prove her point.
Stefanik, who’s shapeshifted from a so-called moderate Republican into a devoted Trump acolyte almost overnight, is riding quite high right now, basking in the spotlight she’s created for herself. Inquiries are being made; investigations are being conducted. Donors to universities are screaming for the heads of their presidents. And Democrats are trying to figure the best way to respond to this cynical opportunist as she attacks universities who fail to crack down or prohibit what she characterizes as genocidal speech.
But at least one Democratic Congressman—who possesses more authority on the issue of antisemitism than Stefanik—thinks that this Congresswoman has already forfeited any authority on this subject and is essentially a raging hypocrite.
Elise Stefanik is not Jewish. But Maryland Rep. Jamie Raskin is, and he has experienced antisemitism firsthand. Unsurprisingly, he has several opinions about Stefanik’s motives, or lack thereof. In a conversation with MSNBC’s Ali Velshi on Monday, he set them out.
As reported by Sarah Fortinsky, writing for The Hill, Raskin dismissed Stefanik’s self-righteous stance as cynical pandering of the worst type.
“Where does Elise Stefanik get off lecturing anybody about antisemitism, when she’s the hugest supporter of Donald Trump, who traffics in antisemitism all the time?” Raskin asked during an interview with MSNBC’s Ali Velshi.
“She didn’t utter a peep of protest when he had Kanye West and Nick Fuentes over for dinner,” Raskin said. “Nick Fuentes, who doubts whether Oct. 7 even took place because he thinks it was some kind of suspicious propaganda move by the Israelis.
“The Republican Party is filled with people who are entangled with antisemitism like that,” Raskin added, “and yet somehow she gets on our high horse and lectures a Jewish college president from MIT.”
On Friday, Donald Trump’s favorite dinner guest Fuentes doubled down on his antisemitism, as reported by Tim Dickinson in
Rolling Stone.
Nick Fuentes, the hate leader who dined at Mar-a-Lago last year with Donald Trump and Kanye West, is calling for a genocide of “perfidious Jews” and other non-Christians. “When we take power,” he said a Dec. 8 livestream, “they need to be given the death penalty, straight up.”
The Stefanik section of Rep. Raskin’s interview is cued up below, although the whole interview is worth watching.
No doubt contributing to Rep. Raskin’s ire is the fact that Stefanik has incorporated one the common antisemitic tropes of far right (and neo-Nazis) known as “The Great Replacement” theory into her own campaign ads.
As reported in 2022 by Annie Karni, writing for The New York Times:
[A]fter the deadly mass shooting in Buffalo, where a heavily armed white man is accused of killing 10 Black people at a supermarket in a racist rampage, Ms. Stefanik is under scrutiny for campaign advertisements she has circulated that play on themes of the white supremacist “great replacement” theory. That belief, espoused by the Buffalo gunman, holds that the elite class, sometimes manipulated by Jews, wants to “replace” and disempower white Americans.
RELATED STORY: Rep. Elise Stefanik promoted 'great replacement' conspiracy cited by Buffalo terrorist
As reported in The New York Times on Saturday, this was the offending colloquy between Republican Rep. Elise Stefanik and Liz Magill, the then-president of the University of Pennsylvania during congressional hearings last week.
“Calling for the genocide of Jews,” Ms. Stefanik asked, “does that constitute bullying or harassment?”
Ms. Magill replied, “If it is directed and severe, pervasive, it is harassment.”
Ms. Stefanik responded, “So the answer is yes.”
Ms. Magill said, “It is a context-dependent decision, congresswoman.”
Ms. Stefanik exclaimed: “That’s your testimony today? Calling for the genocide of Jews is depending upon the context?”
As a result of her response to Stefanik’s inquisition, Magill was forced to resign her position as president of the university. It’s reasonable to assume that the uproar among university donors who accepted Stefanik’s framing of her questioning contributed to her resignation.
Raskin appears to agree that Magill’s response was certainly inadequate. Here, as reported by Mediaite, is what he said specific to her testimony.
“I’m thinking about it as a father, as a parent. I mean, if my kids had been sent to college at great expense, like millions of people across the country, I want to know that, if somebody is actually calling for the genocide of the Jews or anybody else on campus, that we’ve got a college president who will say quickly get campus police over there, that person could be a danger to other people around them.
“Especially in the age of the AR-15, when we’ve had, you know, genocidal-style language being used, but also massacres taking place like at the Tree of Life synagogue, in Pittsburgh, or at the Buffalo supermarket. Those are right-wing antisemites who talk about the great replacement theory. We had a guy at Cornell, who was making death threats towards Jews, and we had three Palestinian college kids who were shot in Burlington, Vt., of all places.”
Raskin makes the point that yes, if someone is actually calling for genocide, there should be a swift response by the university. And the surge in antisemitic language and incidents on college campuses is undeniable. But he also stresses that demonstrable, repeated acts of violence have predominantly emanated from the antisemitism propagated by the right, the same people whose rhetoric Stefanik has eagerly embraced without evidencing any concern about it. He goes on to flag that the GOP’s insistence on lax gun laws certainly doesn’t help in any of these situations.
While Magill’s response may have been clumsy, hyper-technical, and insensitive, the reality is that she simply fell into a trap that Stefanik had intentionally laid for her. The demand for a “yes or no” answer from a presumably hostile witness—utilized by Stefanik here—is a classic trick, most often used by lawyers but also camera-savvy politicians who are more interested in creating soundbites for themselves than in actually paying attention to what the witness is saying.
In fact, Stefanik gave that much away after Magill’s resignation, implicitly acknowledging she knew exactly what she was trying to accomplish, no matter what type of response she received.
NBC News:
“One down. Two to go,” Stefanik wrote on X. “This is only the very beginning of addressing the pervasive rot of antisemitism that has destroyed the most ‘prestigious’ higher education institutions in America.”
“This forced resignation of the president of @Penn is the bare minimum of what is required,” she added.
Stefanik, in her newfound role as a scourge of alleged antisemitism, next trained her sights on the president of Harvard University, Claudine Gay, using the same “yes” or “no” tactic which worked so well with Magill.
As reported by Brian Bushard, writing for Forbes:
Stefanik had asked Gay the hypothetical question: "Does calling for the genocide of Jews violate Harvard's rules on bullying and harassment?"
Gay responded, "The rules around bullying and harassment are quite specific and if the context in which that language is used amounts to bullying and harassment, then we take, we take action against it."
This response was of course unsatisfactory to Stefanik as well, as was a similar response by MIT’s president, Sally Kornbluth, who happens to be Jewish. As reported by Lexi Lonas, writing for The Hill, Kornbluth’s response was similar to that of Magill and Gay—she refused to play Stefanik’s “yes or no” game.
Kornbluth was asked by Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.) if a call for genocide against Jewish people would constitute harassment on MIT’s campus.
Kornbluth said it would have to be targeted at individuals and pervasive, as well as require an investigation.
The cynical nature of Stefanik’s tactic is that it really didn’t matter what the witness said.
The game goes like this: If the respondent insists that the question requires a more complex and nuanced answer than a simple “yes” or “no,” implying that the question itself is unfair, the questioner feigns outrage and continues to insist on a “yes” or “no” response: “Can’t you answer my simple question with a simple yes or no? What’s the matter with you?”
That’s exactly what Stefanik did here. Had Magill, Gay, or Kornbluth answered “yes,” Stefanik’s next question would be, “Then why hasn’t the university cracked down on such protests? Why aren’t such students expelled?”
But as all of these university presidents realize, a blanket policy of “cracking down” on student groups and expelling students who articulate sentiments that one group considers abhorrent means that any student who says something another group considers offensive or abhorrent becomes fair game for expulsion or other punishment from that point forward. Before even taking such drastic steps as prohibiting speech there has to be some consideration of the context, because the university’s purpose is not furthered by becoming an arbitrary tool of speech enforcement.
Consider students chanting “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.” The fact that not all students may actually equate such a slogan with the “genocide of Jews” illustrates the difficulty in such prohibitions. Israelis (and many Jews) may consider the slogan as advocating “genocide” but many other students simply conflate it with expressing support for Palestinian rights. Or the term “intifada,” which as Daoud Kuttab, writing for the Los Angeles Times, points out, does not mean “genocide” at all (as Stefanik claimed) , but is a reference to Palestinian resistance to Israeli occupation. It’s not the job of universities to police naïveté or ignorant beliefs; it’s to educate and inform students to examine and hopefully move away from such beliefs. And so their “job” is necessarily dependent on, yes, context and investigation.
Rabbi Jay Michaelson, writing for The Daily Beast, explains the distinction:
[W]hat about when someone makes a statement in a classroom or a college lecture? If someone insists, in a classroom discussion, that Israel as a country is an illegitimate colonial outpost and should be “wiped off the map”?
That sounds like a political statement to me, not an act of bullying or intimidation. But if a mob marches into a Shabbat service and shouts the same slogan, then that’s clearly harassment and in violation of the policy. Context matters.
Of course, this is the subtlety one would expect from a university president, and also what we would expect a would-be demagogue to exploit, which is exactly what Stefanik did.
Michaelson explains that if a group of torch-carrying student Nazis, for example, stomped through the campus saying, “Jews will not replace us,” that would be explicit bullying and harassment, worthy of expulsion. Or if an anti-trans group explicitly advocated the extermination of transgender people, or (as he suggests) even if a Pro-Palestinian group vandalized buildings and disrupted classes, that would be harassment and bullying as well. What all of these university presidents said was that it was necessary to first determine whether violence or harassment was the intent, and that determination requires investigation.
But policing speech writ large in the way Stefanik implies means punishing and prohibiting any speech that she deems inappropriate, and that is not a university’s function. Admittedly that is an extremely painful pill to swallow for parents and donors whose consider themselves and their children targeted by such speech. It’s quite understandable that they would want the president—the symbol of the university itself—fired or else they’ll withdraw their donations, which is certainly their right (and many have done so).
As she so clearly stated, that was Stefanik’s intent from the start.
But as Raskin clearly conveys, Stefanik focuses on anti-Israel speech because she is a cynical political demagogue and understands the political value of that to her personally, not because she or the Trump-dependent party she represents have any actual antipathy to antisemitism. And so whether one happens to agree or disagree with any of the university presidents’ responses, one should also take into account whether Stefanik’s questioning was honest in the first place.
Or rather, was it simply, as Raskin clearly believes, just cynical theatrics of the worst possible kind?
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