On December 5th, the House Education Committee held a hearing about antisemitism on college campuses. The chair of the committee, Virginia Foxx (R-VA), called the presidents of Harvard (Claudine Gay), MIT (Sally Kornbluth), and UPenn (Liz Magill) to testify on Capitol Hill regarding virulent Jew hatred and activities on their campuses. This issue has come to the world’s attention since October 7th, but as the public learned from sworn testimony, it has plagued American education for years and has been institutionalized.
As per Representative Elise Stefanik (R-NY), all three presidents refused to say whether “calling for the genocide of Jews” is bullying and harassment according to their respective schools’ codes of conduct.
Dr. Kornbluth said, concerning chants for the intifada, “[They] can be anti-semitic depending on the context.”
Magill, smiling, said, “If the speech turns into conduct, then it can be harassment. It is a context dependent decision.”
There has been “conduct.” So what will it take for UPenn to act? Literal gas chambers?
But back to the hearing. Dr. Gay said calling for genocide “can be [harassment]depending on the context.”
Stefanik asked, “what’s the context?”
Gay said it’s when a student is “targeted as an individual.”
Stefanik retorted, “It’s targeted at Jewish students. Jewish individuals. Do you understand your testimony is dehumanizing? This is why you should resign. Unacceptable answers across the board.”
The presidents’ responses are especially insulting considering three long years of DEI being crammed down our throats predicated on a lie. Right after George Floyd’s death, Gay was quick to voice her outrage and demagogue the race issue. She wrote, ”I watch in pain and horror the events unfolding across the nation… triggered by the callous and depraved actions of a white police officer.” The unrelenting targeting of Jews elicits no such response.
Things became even more dystopian when Representative Burgess Owens asked Kornbluth about “Chocolate City,” a blacks-only dorm.
“Is it okay for whites to set up a whites only dorm?”
Kornbluth explained, “It’s positive selection.”
Owens decoded this to mean, “It’s okay to make whites feel excluded. Is it okay for whites not to let blacks feel included on your campus? We’re talking about segregation which is happening on your campuses.” In other words, it seems like Kornbluth is cool with segregation, which has been illegal in America since the days of Jim Crow.
As feckless and morally bankrupt as these presidents’ testimony was, their actual Jewish students’ testimony was equally courageous and inspiring.
For example, Talia Khan from MIT, daughter of a Jewish mother and a Muslim father, and president of the MIT Israel alliance, explained, “70 percent of MIT’s Jewish students polled say they feel forced to hide their identity. An Israeli student…whose personal identity was sold online for a bounty has not left his dorm room in weeks.”
One wonders, if “conduct” is what it required for antisemitism to be harassment, is this not enough “conduct”?
Meanwhile, Bella Ingber, of NYU, detailed how “being a Jew at NYU is being surrounded by students and faculty who support the murder and kidnapping of Jews.”
Jonathan Frieden from Harvard Law lamented, “I walk by mobs of people chanting ‘From the river to the sea’, ‘We have you outnumbered’, and ‘We will globalize the intifada.’” Frieden added that when he was studying, “a mob of 200 people, many of whom were not only not law students, were not Harvard affiliates. They got into our building, marched down the halls, Jews took off their kippahs, and I watched someone hide under a desk.”
These stories are bone chilling, and something must be done to fix the rash of antisemitism that made them possible. To that end, firing the likes of Gay, Kornbluth, and McGill is a good start, but it is by no means the solution. What’s more, only firing them would likely do more damage by disguising the “root cause” which is “systemic,” to borrow the terms one hears in Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) seminars. And speaking of DEI, let’s admit the obvious: the only reason these presidents have jobs is because the boards which actually run these universities brought them in for the sake of “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion.” Therefore, it’s more apropos to think of these presidents as Trojan horses: bagmen, whose disappearances won’t address the true culprits, or the ideology which now motivates them to look the other way at the suffering of Jewish students.
How do we fight it, then? Well, there are three things that can and must be done to reclaim education and American students; first, we must ban DEI; second, we must ban foreign money; third, normal people must refuse to send their children to these universities until the merit-based system which they followed in the past is fully restored.
It’s sad that any of this is necessary, but if you want to know why it is, then blame the foreign money. Americans used to be, bar none, the largest donors to American schools. Now, it’s Arab countries like Qatar, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Kuwait and Egypt. Ivy league universities are among the top recipients of $8.5 billion in Arab funding. The CCP (Chinese Communist Party) also donates colossal amounts. As per the NY Post, “[U]Penn has received more than $50 million in foreign funding, including more than $14 million in anonymous gifts from China and Hong Kong. That’s on top of the more than $60 million Penn received since the Biden Center launched in 2017.” Foreign actors with Communist and Islamist ideologies have only one reason to interfere with American education: upending Western civilization by targeting the youth. Specifically, targeting them with DEI, wokeness, and the rest of the Left’s phony religion.
As Victor David Hanson writes, ”The almost immediate posting after October 7 of the BLM poster glorifying the hang-gliding murderous entry into Israel only confirmed what most of us knew anyway. Black Lives Matter and the entire diversity/equity/inclusion conglomerate rabidly hate Jews. Their response to October 7 revealed their pseudo-education in ‘anti-colonialism’, ‘white supremacy’, and ‘settler’ oppression.”
The American educational complex resembles a Hamas outpost not because of not enough DEI but because of DEI. December 5th’s hearing exposed what a brain drain these formerly “elite” universities have become.
There are two questions that remain. First, do parents still want, and will they pay, for their children to go to these formerly hallowed institutions? Second, will Fortune 500 companies and top firms hire graduates from so many of these top schools? It is those questions, more than anything else, that will determine whether the steps can be taken that will grant freedom and safety not only to Jewish students, but students interested in contributing to Western civilization rather than tearing it down.
