The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

The Ivy League Is Decadent and Depraved

Posted on | October 27, 2023 | Comments Off on The Ivy League Is Decadent and Depraved

“Amid backlash” is an interesting phrase, as is the euphemistic reference to an “Israel statement.” One might make any number of statements about Israel without finding oneself “amid backlash.” The language in the Harvard Crimson headline, of course, is a sort of journalistic DARVO (Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim and Offender) tactic, meant to convince the readership that what’s really wrong — the offense that should inspire outrage — is not that a coalition of student groups signed an open letter endorsing the slaughter of Israeli civilians by Hamas, but rather that these students have been “doxxed.” Let’s quote a bit of this dishonest article by Michelle N. Amponsah (Class of ’26):

Harvard will establish a task force to support students experiencing doxxing, harassment, and online security issues following backlash against students allegedly affiliated with a statement that held Israel “entirely responsible” for violence in the Israel-Hamas conflict.
The new task force will be in operation until Nov. 3, at which point the task force will reassess its efforts to ensure that its work meets student needs, according to an email obtained by The Crimson. The message, dated Tuesday, was sent to doxxed students by Dean of Students Thomas Dunne.
“We are truly grateful for all the tremendous work that students have put forth in supporting each other through this most difficult time, and we appreciate the collaborative spirit in which students, faculty, and staff have come together to repel this repugnant assault on our community,” Dunne wrote.

(Y’know, Dean Dunne, if you want to talk about communities that have suffered a “repugnant assault,” perhaps you should investigate what Hamas did in Kibbutz Be’eri or Kibbutz Kfar Aza, because I’m pretty sure your precious Harvard students have never experienced anything like that.)

Aside from serving as a single point of contact, the task force will communicate proactively with students to share available resources, ensure the coordination of services, hear student concerns and suggestions, and communicate with residential staff and other College administrators.
The formation of the task force comes more than two weeks after more than 30 student organizations drew national backlash for signing onto the controversial statement, which was penned by the Harvard Undergraduate Palestine Solidarity Committee. . . .
In the weeks that followed, students have faced doxxing attacks on websites, social media, and a billboard truck displaying group members’ names and faces and describing them as “Harvard’s Leading Antisemites.”

For the sake of clarity — to be sure everyone understands what we are talking about here — let’s quote the “controversial statement” in full:

Joint Statement by Harvard Palestine Solidarity Groups on the Situation in Palestine
We, the undersigned student organizations, hold the Israeli regime entirely responsible for all the unfolding violence.
Today’s events did not occur in a vacuum. For the last two decades, millions of Palestinians in Gaza have been forced to live in an open-air prison.
Israeli officials promise to “open the gates of hell,” and the massacres in Gaza have already commenced. Palestinians in Gaza have no shelters for refuge and nowhere to escape. In the coming days, Palestinians will be forced to bear the full brunt of Israel’s violence.
The apartheid regime is the only one to blame.
Israeli violence has structured every aspect of Palestinian existence for 75 years. From systematized land seizures to routine airstrikes, arbitrary detentions to military checkpoints, and enforced family separations to targeted killings, Palestinians have been forced to live in a state of death, both slow and sudden.
Today, the Palestinian ordeal enters into uncharted territory. The coming days will require a firm stand against colonial retaliation. We call on the Harvard community to take action to stop the ongoing annihilation of Palestinians.

You see that I have quoted this statement verbatim, complete with the boldface emphasis in the original — screencapped from the student group’s own Facebook page — and I have done so for two reasons: First, because almost no media outlets have quoted the statement in full, but instead keep recycling a few phrases taken out of context; and second, I want everyone to see the full statement so that you cannot disagree when I call this what it actually is: Hamas propaganda.

Gaining admission to Harvard University should guarantee that a student has a high degree of reading comprehension, and sufficient acquaintance with history, current events, etc., to be able to distinguish between an objective, factual description of circumstances, on the one hand, and a tendentious one-sided piece of inflammatory propaganda, on the other.

Is anyone confused about what this Harvard statement is? Readers can quibble over the details about the “open-air prison” of Gaza and the reasons why residents there have been “forced” to live in squalor. As for the general pro-“Palestinian” argument, I’ll refer you to my old buddy Marty Seiff’s book The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Middle East (and collect a small commission if you purchase that book through my Amazon Affiliate link). My point is not to argue about the policies of the Israeli government, but rather to make clear that the statement these Harvard students signed could not have been more one-sided and deliberately provocative if it had been written by Hamas itself (which, for all I know, maybe it was). So I’m extremely skeptical of any suggestion that the Harvard students who signed onto this message were merely naïve, or that the “backlash” against them is irrational. As for the claim that the students are victims of “doxxing,” Ace of Spades says:

It’s not doxxing. They signed a public statement.
[Liberals] claim LibsofTikTok “doxxes” people with their posted statements and TikToks, too. No — all she did was expose it to a wider audience than the Circle of Affirmation the poster was hoping for. That’s not making private information public, which is what doxxing is. That’s taking public information and sharing it with more of the public. . . .
The people who have been calling everyone “Nazis” now say it’s “harassment” to be properly identified as “Antisemites.” Got it.

Got it, indeed. What is truly important here is the revelation (or perhaps better to say confirmation) that our “elite” universities are cocoons of extremist left-wing hivemind groupthink, where students are indoctrinated with radicalism so thorough, with so little pushback from any well-informed critic of this monolithic worldview, that they’ll sign onto literal terrorist propaganda and then be shocked to discover that not everyone agrees that Jews deserve to be murdered by Hamas.



 

Category: Israel, The Ivy League Is Depraved and Decadent

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