December 7th, 2023
By Rep. Elise Stefanik
Ask yourself one simple question: should calling for the genocide of Jews be considered harassment and bullying?
Anyone with a sliver of decency knows the answer is emphatically ‘Yes’.
Yet when the university presidents of Harvard, MIT and Upenn testified this week under oath to Congress as I questioned them over the rampant and unabated antisemitism infecting their institutions, I could barely believe what I was hearing.
Rightly, their moral depravity has shocked the world.
I asked each of the three presidents – Claudine Gay (Harvard), Sally Kornblut (MIT), Elizabeth Magill (Upenn) – a simply question, one that a child let alone the leaders of our finest universities could have answered.
Does ‘calling for the genocide of Jews’ fall foul of their respective institutions’ codes of conduct?
Each of them squirmed and evaded.
MIT’s Kornbluth said that such depravity would only be considered harassment depending on the ‘context’ – if it was ‘targeted at individuals, not making public statements’ and if it was ‘pervasive and severe’.
I pointed out that not only does her rhetoric dehumanize Jewish people but it also implies that calling for the annihilation of Jews is ‘not severe’. Yet still she refused to change her tune.
UPenn’s Magill was similarly infuriating, smiling smugly as she said: ‘It is a context-dependent decision’.
Deeply disturbed, I pushed for clearer answers. But Magill’s response was shocking in the extreme: ‘If the speech becomes conduct. It can be harassment.’
‘Conduct’ meaning ‘committing the act of genocide’?’ I asked appalled, giving one more opportunity for her to correct the record. She couldn’t.
Finally, I turned to Harvard President Gay. But depressingly, her answer was the same – that whether calls for the mass murder of Jews at her university constitutes harassment ‘depends on the context’.
My God – in what ‘context’ is calling for genocide ever OK?
It doesn’t take a Harvard degree to see the problem here.
It is now all-too-clear that heinous antisemitism has taken root on Ivy League campuses.
Higher education has long been a hotbed of Leftist hatred, engendering woke groupthink in the next generation. And here’s proof that it’s coming directly from the top, from university presidents who are unwilling to stand up for anyone who doesn’t fit their warped world view of what constitutes a ‘victim’ – in this case, their own oppressed Jewish students.
This congressional hearing should never have been complicated or controversial. Yet in failing to stand up for American Jews, we can only assume that these three presidents are apathetic to the egregious antisemitism they couldn’t condemn.
In the days following the hearing, millions have joined my call for them to be fired.
As pressure mounted across the globe, President Gay backtracked, insisting in a statement that her words had been ‘confused’.
President Magill went one step further, releasing a pathetic video address ‘clarifying’ her position, which pointedly lacked any apology.
MIT’s Kornblut has so far remained silent – and perhaps rightly so. After all, no amount of desperate PR can clean or cover up the shame.
If Harvard, MIT, and UPenn want to restore any shred of legitimacy, these institutions must find their moral clarity.
That starts with the immediate dismissal of these three pathetic presidents.
The world is watching and waiting.
