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“The cheerleading for Hamas on many campuses has led wealthy donors to suspend their financial support, but it has also precipitated a shattering moment of moral clarity. Quoth one major donor to Harvard: “We are stunned and sickened by the dismal failure of Harvard’s leadership to take a clear and unequivocal stand against the barbaric murders of innocent Israeli civilians.” – Roger Kimball
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This week’s Communiqué Isranet is Appeler un chat, un chat: les ONG humanitaires et l’ONU sont les alliés du Hamas
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OUTRIGHT LIES
University Presidents’ Abhorrent Hypocrisy on Anti-Jewish Speech: The Editors, National Review, Dec. 6, 2023 — All of a sudden, America’s elite universities have started to sound like John Stuart Mill. Asked yesterday by Representative Elise Stefanik (R., N.Y.) whether students who call for “intifada” or shout “from the river to the sea” were acting “contrary to Harvard’s code of conduct,” Harvard’s president, Claudine Gay, struck a notably enlightened pose.
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Hamas’s Barbarity Heightens the Crisis in Higher Education: Michael R. Bloomberg, WSJ, Nov. 17, 2023
Hamas and Retaking Higher Education: Roger Kimball, The Spectator, Nov. 14, 2023
Hamas: Made in the U.S.A.: Andrew C. McCarthy, National Review, Nov. 25, 2023
Hate in America: Our Universities have been Incubators for Years: Penny Pance, Washington Times, Nov. 28, 2023
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Hamas’s Barbarity Heightens the Crisis in Higher Education
Michael R. Bloomberg
WSJ, Nov. 17, 2023
“Instead of issuing statements on selective issues, college presidents should adopt the policy the University of Chicago has stuck to since 1967, when it declared: “The university is the home and sponsor of critics; it is not itself the critic.”
The barbaric attack by Hamas against Israel—the intentional slaughter of defenseless civilians, including children and babies, and the taking of hostages—should have been a unifying moment for America. Shamefully, it has become something else: a wake-up call about a crisis in higher education.
It has been painful to watch students at elite colleges implicitly or explicitly endorse Hamas’s attack. They aren’t old enough to remember 9/11, and it’s clear they never learned its lesson: Intentionally targeting civilians for slaughter is inexcusable no matter the political circumstances.
For Americans, this isn’t a matter of defending Israel but of defending our nation’s most sacred values. One can support the Palestinian people and still denounce the intentional slaughter of civilians.
Why have so many students failed to do so? The answer begins where the buck stops—with college presidents. For years, they have allowed their campuses to become bastions of intolerance, by permitting students to shout down the voices of others. They have condoned “trigger warnings” that shield students from difficult ideas. They have refused to defend faculty who run afoul of student sentiment. And they have created “safe spaces” that discourage or exclude opposing views.
College presidents have also allowed campuses to become institutions of conformity. In a 2014 commencement speech at Harvard, I warned that many of America’s top colleges had become Soviet-like in their lack of viewpoint diversity. As I noted, 96% of donations from Ivy League faculty and staff in the 2012 presidential election went to Barack Obama, while only 4% went to another Harvard alumnus, Mitt Romne. … [To read the full article, click here]
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Hamas and Retaking Higher Education
Roger Kimball
The Spectator, Nov. 14, 2023
‘The real change, if it comes, will be the loss of widely shared social legitimacy that this revolution-by-major-donors may precipitate.”
Maybe there is something for which we have to thank Hamas after all. That savage terror group epitomizes the latest form of murderous, antisemitic brutality. The world — most of it — has been sickened and appalled by the spectacle of burnt, mutilated and headless corpses. Aiming at maximum shock, the terrorists made no distinction between young and old, male and female, Israeli and foreign national.