"It Depends on the Context"

"This week demonstrated that Harvard cares more about avoiding legal risk than it does about student life, the promotion of democratic and pluralistic values, or a commitment to eradicating bigotry from campus."

Harvard Jewish Alumni Alliance

 

"The rot in the western world that has accrued in the past few years, revealed with particularly clarity since the Oct. 7 attack on Israel, showed its depth in a heretofore unparalleled manner this week in Washington, D.C. The presidents of MIT, Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania appeared at a congressional hearing to face questions about the rise of antisemitism on their respective campuses [a phenomenon duplicating itself across the academic landscape]."

"I watched the event unfold with the same sense of surreal disbelief that has surrounded me more and more frequently over the past decade, as the academic world and the broader culture it shapes have succumbed ever more completely to the faux-compassionate blandishments of the radical left." 

"But now, suddenly, this insistence ... appears to be fully disposable, as long as the speech in question is calling directly and viciously for the genocide of Jews. First to prevaricate was MIT's president, Sally Kornbluth. Demented smile plastered firmly on animus-possessed face, this dangerous excuse for a human being claimed, for example, that the increasingly strident campus-protester calls for intefadeh had to be interpreted "in context". I presume that the same applies to 'from the river to the sea'."

Jordan Peterson, Professor Emiritus of Psychology, author, speaker, activist

"[Decision to resign from Harvard's advisory committee based on] events on campus and the painfully inadequate testimony [at the congressional hearing]."

"[That] reinforced the idea that I cannot make the sort of difference I had hoped."

"Belittling or denying the Jewish experience, including unspeakable atrocities, is a vast and continuing catastrophe."

"[Most students at Harvard] wish only to get an education and a job, not prosecute ideological agendas."

Rabbi David Wolpe, visiting scholar, Harvard Divinity School

"[With thoughtfulness and candor, he [Rabbi Wolpe] has deepened my and our community's understanding of the unacceptable presence of antisemitism here at Harvard."

"We have more work to do and his contributions will help shape our path forward. Antisemitism has no place in the Harvard community, and I am committed to ensuring no member of our Jewish community faces this hate in any form."

Harvard President Claudine Gay

Liz Magill, formerly of Penn; Claudine Gay of Harvard; and Sally Kornbluth of MIT. (Washington Post illustration; photos by The Washington Post, Reuters and AP)

At the congressional hearing in question that precipitated both dismay and anger over the woke political stance of the three university presidents, representing the most elite institutions of higher education in the United States, President Gay responded to the question, "Does calling for the genocide of Jews violate Harvard's rules of bullying and harassment? Yes or No?" by responding: "It can be -- depending on the context." When the question was repeated, she once again responded "It depends on the context". 

The context, of course was the searing backdrop of a mass atrocity committed against Israeli Jews, innocent of any crime other than that they were Jews, citizens of a Jewish state, willing to and hoping to live in peace among neighbours overbearingly hostile to their very existence. A hostility whose crushing violence committed mass murder, mass rape, mass abductions on October 7, in response to which the Israel Defense Forces were dispatched to their duty, defense of Israel's citizens.

 

Further context is the Palestinian Hamas unleashing the full force of its publicity, with the ease that accompanies the world's oldest pathology, calling upon the world to witness the aggression once again committed by Israel against the Palestinian people in Gaza, and the deliberately impressionable acolytes in the West denying that Hamas 'fighters for freedom' would ever mass-rape, mutilate and murder Jewish girls and women, much less kill children and the elderly. The abduction of hostages was a 'desperate' move to defy the 'occupation'.

 

The plight of Palestinians Gazans upon whom their Hamas leadership provoked and unleashed Israeli rage over the slaughter of their population is the focus of university students and their administrators for its military moves to destroy Hamas's capacity to inflict such unsupportable wounds on a people whose only crime is that they are Jews. It is the vulnerability of Palestinian civilians to the backlash of the Hamas viciously cruel barbarity that fixes the interest and compassion of the antisemites, grateful for the opportunity to once again demonstrate their loyalty to terrorists versus Jews.

In response to the thoroughly discreditable conduct of the three presidents of the most prestigious academies of learning worldwide, thousands of alumni wrote to the board of the institutions demanding change while the congressional committee indicated its intention to investigate Harvard. Universities across the US., with good reason, stand accused of failing to protect Jewish students in the midst of growing antisemitism linked to the Oct. 7 Hamas attack.

Harvard Law School Professor Laurence Tribe describe President Gay's testimony before the House Education and Workforce Committee hearing, held to scrutinize antisemitism in the aftermath of the Oct. 7 attack and the ensuing Israeli invasion of Gaza, as "bizarrely evasive". The condemnatory tumult led Gay to a show of contrition in a Harvard Crimson interview. "I am sorry. Words matter. When words amplify distress and pain, I don't know how you could feel anything but regret", she averred; too little, too late.

 

Harvard President Claudine Gay, left, speaks as University of Pennsylvania President Liz Magill listens during a hearing of the House Committee on Education on Capitol Hill, Dec. 5, 2023, in Washington. (AP/Mark Schiefelbein)