爪哥按语：
上周，Harvard，MIT，UPenn 的校长，被满脸横肉的MEGA女议员 Elise Stefanik 下套，给出“政治不正确”answer的完整视频，俺从头到尾看完了。
wow~ ⊙o⊙，极右政客混肴是非，指鹿为马，颠倒黑白的丑恶行径，彻底刷新了俺的三观。
犹太权贵控制的绝大多数美国媒体，趁机浑水摸鱼，把美国老百姓的关注点，从以色列在加沙的genocide，转移到莫须有的美国校园反犹话题上。
不过，美国毕竟是民主社会。即使在犹太权贵一手遮天的新闻媒体界，还是会有极少数的有良心有独立人格的媒体人（包括正直的犹太人），能够不畏犹太权贵的疯狂打压，敢于说真话。
The Guardian 的这篇署名文章，就是有良心有尊严敢于说真话的媒体人的终极写照。通畅淋漓地说出了绝大多数美国老百姓的心里话，必须大大滴点赞！
The Harvard UPenn presidents walked
into a trap in Congress（ZT）
The presidents were asked about non-existent calls for genocide on American campuses, while the potential dangers of genocide in Gaza were ignored
Last week in Congress, Representative Elise Stefanik proved how well she can throw a dead cat.
Let me explain. During an hours-long hearing on 5 December, members of Congress grilled university presidents from Harvard, MIT and the University of Pennsylvania, some of the country’s most elite institutions of higher learning, about antisemitism on their campuses. But it was Stefanik’s questioning that grabbed the spotlight. She repeatedly asked the presidents essentially the same question: does calling for the genocide of Jews on your campus constitute harassment, yes or no?
The question is a trap, of course, and for several reasons. The first and most important reason is that there’s no evidence anyone since 7 October, or even in recent history, has called for the genocide of Jews on any American campus, public or private. Stefanik’s question implies that such calls are commonplace, but she offered no proof.
The second reason this is a trap is that the question can’t be answered with just “yes” or “no”. Public universities, as state actors, are bound by the first amendment, as are private universities which receive federal funding. And the vast majority of private universities guarantee freedom of speech and academic freedom as part of their core mission. The American university is, by tradition and design, precisely where abhorrent ideas can be uttered. So, if someone had called for the genocide of Jews, which they haven’t, that would be extremely disturbing but still protected speech.
The utterance alone does not constitute harassment. In fact, the utterance should be an opportunity to debate and debunk – and not silence – the worst ideas of our day. To rise to harassment, such conduct must be targeted at an individual and, as a 2019 supreme court case decided, be “so severe, pervasive, and objectively offensive that it effectively bars the victim’s access to an educational opportunity or benefit”. Context makes the difference, or as this 2011 article, published by the American Bar Association, says: “It is the context that matters, and the context helps to make the determination about whether conduct is actionable under school policy or protected by the First Amendment.”
The third reason the question is trap is that the situation is complicated by the overarching codes of conduct many universities have adopted, codes that I believe do often (wrongly) cross over into limiting speech. But here, too, Stefanik seems confused. Writing in the Wall Street Journal after the hearing, Stefanik ridiculed Harvard for requiring incoming undergraduates to take an online training session to help them identify language and behavior that could be considered hateful to others. But, while mocking Harvard’s approach, Stefanik – a rising Maga Republican – is at the same time demanding to be included in it. So, which is it?
To recap: all three presidents were asked how they would hypothetically punish hypothetical students for uttering hypothetical thoughts. They answered, albeit with lawyerly detachment. Yet their responses were deemed by many, from the White House on down, as callous and insufficiently protective of Jewish students. Following the hearing, all the presidents attempted damage control, but the University of Pennsylvania president has since resigned.
Meanwhile, not a word was spoken about the threats that Palestinian, Arab, or Muslim students and faculty (and their supporters) are facing. Billboard trucks drive around Cambridge, Massachusetts, and New York City and Washington, broadcasting the names and faces of Palestinian supporters and libelously labeling them “antisemites”. University leaders suspend campus groups such Students for Justice in Palestine in moves the ACLU has said “harken back to America’s mistakes during the McCarthy era, and in the months and years after 9/11”. Three Palestinian college students, speaking a mixture of Arabic and English, were shot in Vermont over Thanksgiving break in what was “absolutely was a hateful act”, the Burlington police chief told CNN. On 29 November, dozens of students and some faculty members at Trinity College, where one of the students is enrolled, walked out of a vigil for the injured student because they say the campus administration is downplaying their insecurity on campus.
But there is something even more ominous in Stefanik’s questions. “You understand that the term ‘intifada’ in the context of the Israeli-Arab conflict is indeed a call for … the genocide of Jews,” she asked the Harvard president, Claudine Gay. I’m not aware if Stefanik is an Arabic speaker, but I suspect she’s not since she’s wrong again. The term “intifada” literally means “shaking off”. It’s often translated as “uprising”, and there have been non-violent and violent periods of Palestinian uprisings against a brutal Israeli occupation. At no point, however, has the word ever stood as a call for the genocide of Jews. What a gross misrepresentation.
But Stefanik’s questions are aimed at backhandedly discrediting words like “intifada” and patrolling the language we use to describe the Palestinian struggle. (We see the same thing with the phrase “from the river to the sea”, a version of which incidentally forms part of the founding charter of Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party.) Needless to say, demonizing the Arabic language works to demonize Palestinians, Arabs and the world’s Muslims. And handing over the definitions of our political terms to partisan politicians would spell the death of free inquiry in this country.
Which brings us back to Stefanik’s dead cat. In politics, a “dead cat strategy” is used to divert attention away from one issue and on to another by metaphorically throwing a dead cat onto a dining room table in the middle of a dinner party. “People will be outraged, alarmed, disgusted,” is how Boris Johnson once described the strategy. “That is true, but irrelevant,” he continued. “The key point … is that everyone will shout, ‘Jeez, mate, there’s a dead cat on the table!’ In other words, they will be talking about the dead cat – the thing you want them to talk about – and they will not be talking about the issue that has been causing you so much grief.”
What Congress is not talking about is that the Israeli assault on Gaza has killed at least 17,000 people, over 7,000 of them children, and injured over 49,000. Israel has cut off regular supplies of food, water, fuel, electricity and medical supplies. Around 1.8 million Palestinians of Gaza’s 2.2 million have been displaced. More than 60% of the housing has been destroyed. Half the population is officially starving. Hospitals, historic mosques, essential libraries and the entire foundation of a society have been bombed into rubble.
Meanwhile, the US was again the sole UN security council veto for a ceasefire, and the state department invoked an emergency measure to expedite weaponry to Israel that will almost certainly kill civilians.
On 9 December, a group of esteemed scholars of genocide and Holocaust studies warned in a public letter “of the danger of genocide in Israel’s attack on Gaza”.
Elise Stefanik would have us believe that that we should be more worried about non-existent calls for genocide on American college campuses than with what many experts are warning is an actual genocide in Gaza, funded and supported by US bombs and political cover. So, all credit where credit is due. She really knows how to throw a dead cat.
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Moustafa Bayoumi is a Guardian US columnist
