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Harvard University President Condemns Genocide Against Jews After Backlash for Equivocating on Issue

Pro-Hamas students rallying at Harvard University. Photo: Reuters/Brian Snyder

Harvard University president Claudine Gay on Wednesday issued a statement walking back and clarifying remarks she made the prior day in which she suggested that calling for the genocide of Jews did not necessarily constitute bullying and harassment on campus.

“There are some who have confused a right to free expression with the idea that Harvard will condone calls for violence against Jewish students,” Gay said in a statement posted to X/Twitter by Harvard. “Let me be clear: Calls for violence or genocide against the Jewish community, or any religious or ethnic group are vile, they have no place at Harvard, and those who threaten our Jewish students will be held to account.”

Gay’s statement came after she received a wave of criticism for her testimony before the US House Committee on Education and the Workforce regarding campus antisemitism, which has been surging since Hamas’ Oct. 7 massacre across southern Israel. For three hours, Gay and the presidents of the University of Pennsylvania and the Massachusetts of Institute of Technology evaded questions about their plans to combat an alarming spike in antisemitic incidents, including demonstrations calling for Israel’s destruction and the intimidation and harassment of Jewish students at college campuses across the US.

In one tense exchange during the hearing, all three presidents gave indirect answers when asked by Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-NY), a Harvard alumnus, whether calling for the genocide of Jews constituted bullying and harassment. Stefanik referenced the chanting of slogans such as “globalize the intifada,” “there is only one solution, intifada revolution,” and “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free”— all widely interpreted as calls for violence against Jews and the destruction of Israel.

“We embrace a commitment to free expression even of views that are objectionable, offensive, hateful — it’s when that speech crosses into conduct that violates our policies against bullying, harassment, and intimidation,” Gay said, refusing to provide a definitive answer.

“Does that speech not cross that barrier? Does that speech not call for the genocide of Jews and the elimination of Israel?” Stefanik asked, visibly disturbed by Gay’s answer.

“We embrace a commitment to free expression and give a wide berth to free expression even of views that are objectionable, outrageous, and offensive,” Gay responded. She also said that calls implying the genocide of Jews and Israelis “can be [considered bullying or harassment] depending on the context.”

Gay’s equivocating sparked outrage across social media, with Jewish leaders and non-Jewish allies calling for her to resign from her position.

“You refused to state that calling for the genocide of the Jewish people would violate Harvard policies,” Harvard Law School alumnus Ben Badejo wrote in a letter to Gay that was posted on X. “In so doing, you betrayed the most fundamental values of our country and of all decent people.”

StopAntisemitism, a watchdog that documents antisemitic incidents across the world, said Gay’s more recent statement from Wednesday should have been stated during her testimony to Congress.

“Then why didn’t you say this during your congressional hearing yesterday!?” the group said. “Step down. You are a failure.”

Arsen Ostrovsky, CEO of the International Legal Forum, added, “Why was Claudine Gay unable to say this at the hearing and it took universal outrage and condemnation for you to issue this clarification?”

Since Hamas’ Oct. 7 massacre, Gay’s tenure has been beset by accusations that she is not sympathetic to the Jewish community’s concerns about rising antisemitism and has provided refuge to Harvard students who cheered Hamas’ violence.

For several days, Gay waited to condemn the Hamas atrocities, and when she did, her statement said nothing about antisemitism. When 31 Harvard student groups, led by the Palestine Solidarity Committee, issued a statement blaming Israel for Hamas’ brutality, Gay defended their right to free speech and said they should not be punished or barred from being hired at prestigious businesses and firms after completing their education.

Following weeks of criticism, Gay eventually denounced Harvard students’ chanting of “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” last month and announced a campus initiative for fighting antisemitism.

“Harvard was founded to advance human dignity through education,” Gay said. “We inherited a faith in reason to overcome ignorance, in truth to surmount hate. Antisemitism is destructive to our mission. We will not solve every disagreement, bridge every divide, heal every wound. But if we shrink from this struggle, we betray our ideals.”

Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.

The post Harvard University President Condemns Genocide Against Jews After Backlash for Equivocating on Issue first appeared on Algemeiner.com.

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Doorstep Postings: The unbearable lightness of Justin Trudeau’s final Hanukkah as prime minister

This is a special year-end edition of Doorstep Postings, the periodic political commentary column written by Josh Lieblein for The CJN.

You all know the story that we tell this time of year: a group of Jews decided they were done with Jewish particularism and said, “Let us go an make a covenant with the nations around us” (1 Maccabees 1:11) and decided to gaslight the rest of the community into seeing things their way—and it ended very, very badly for them.

As such, Hannukah is a time for the revealing of secrets, the banishing of shadows, and the airing of grievances. Having recently reached a milestone age associated with acquiring Jewish wisdom, my own personal miracle is that after enduring 40 years of threats/promises of the imminent collapse of society and sweeping revolution, 40 years of lectures about the moral and physical decay of the West, 40 years of the most obnoxiously self-righteous folks walking the planet breathlessly informing us all of the latest irreconcilable contradiction within capitalism, I’ve finally gotten to the point where I can’t muster anything more than an eye roll anymore. 

This is because, just like every year before it, 2024 was a year of unmitigated disaster for our self-appointed reformers. I’m not just talking about Trump’s resurgence, Ukraine’s persistence, the overthrow in Syria, Hamas’s withering away, proclamations that we have reached ‘peak wokeness’, the rise of artificial intelligence and the tech bros, and the failure of centrist electoral projects everywhere but here in Canada. This was the year where the left willingly and gleefully discarded the one thing they had going for them: their tenuously held moral authority.

The success of any left-wing project hinges on successfully convincing a critical mass of undecideds that they are not like the amoral and callous right who wants you to die for their profit motive. They’ve got your best interests at heart. They’re going to sit down and hear you out and govern with joy and hope and kindness, which are alien concepts to those weird, cruel, genocidal and greedy conservatives. 

Now those of us who have been on this merry-go-round for a few turns know that it’s not that simple. Plenty of left-folks want to actively harm the rich and those they deem to be colonizers, bigots, and other associated ruling class bootlickers. The violence perpetrated by those in power justifies violence in return. This is a somewhat difficult platform to get elected on, however, because people have a bad habit of hardening their hearts in response to being threatened. And so we need suitable empty vessels to try and convince the voters that the radicals are just that: loud angry voices on the margins. The political operatives charged with laundering the baser left-wing impulses must carefully use language to make it seem that there is some daylight between them and the ends-justify-the-means crowd. 

This is a difficult task to perform because it involves not only fooling a plurality of people, if not all of the time, then for as long as the particular political project lasts. First, the operatives must trick themselves into believing in their own unimpeachable moral authority. Only once they have convinced themselves that they are the most empathic and equity-minded folks to ever draw breath can they engineer the rise of someone like Justin Trudeau. Anyone who was paying attention a decade ago could see the parallel rise of two movements: lifelong Liberals working on earned media pieces announcing the return of the Trudeau dynasty, and mostly anonymous lunatics on Tumblr who were still licking their wounds from the failure of the Occupy Movement, claiming that it was literally impossible to be racist against white people because ‘racism’ against white people wasn’t systematic. 

And as it happened, a lot of the self-proclaimed radicals bought the hype, because they saw in Trudeau something they know all too well in themselves. The desire to be loved and celebrated and told they are good, kind and moral despite, and in many cases because of, their own desire to commit and justify violence in the name of creating a better and more equal world. The Trudeau of 2015 was no less authoritarian than the figure clinging to power at the end of 2024. All that’s changed is that the radicals can no longer excuse Trudeau’s narcissism while holding out for him to bring about a world that is more equal—which is to say, a world where they have the power to do harm to their enemies. These days, Mr. Grow the Economy From the Heart Outward seems more interested in trying and failing to implement GST holidays while forcing Canada Post workers back to actual work. 

Still even as the Liberals try to envision a future without Trudeau, they remain engaged in other muddled projects, such as trying to sell the idea that Canada is engaged in an ongoing genocide but must somehow endure lest we be absorbed into the sucking Trumpist hellhole directly below us. Clearly, the Liberal Party is no longer a place for voters who are into sexy CEO-murderers, or who think Oct. 7 was an act of righteous resistance to oppression, or take China’s claims of imminent world domination seriously while denouncing Elon Musk’s similarly ridiculous pronouncements. 

But even though both the more and less radical wings of the progressive movement have had an off year and are barely speaking to one another again, we can rest assured that so long as they have to convince themselves of their own goodness they will continue to try and split this atom. Attempts to reject binaries will lead to more black and white thinking. Progressive governments will fall back into the status quo. Tumblrs will give way to Blueskys. Trudeau will fall out of favour for a few years only to be asked back after a few years of Poilievre—or some other Liberal saviour will rescue the brand. They will cast about for a new podcast hero or a leftist version of the Hawk Tuah Girl. They will insist that senile politicians are fit as fiddles, anoint barely literate fan-fiction writers as cultural arbiters, and cast lawbreakers as secular saints while vilifying anyone who’s afraid of being attacked on the street or public transit.

If the past 40 years are anything to go by, they will be as confused as ever as to why capitalism persists, why people don’t accept carbon taxes, why the world fails to condemn Israel to their liking, why poor and rural folks don’t “vote their interests”, why voters fall for Poilievre’s slogans, and why there are attempts to draw an equivalence between CEOs who condemn people to death and the people who kill those CEOs. The answer to all these questions are the same, and it’s that impure oil just burns differently—and trying to pass it off as holy can only come off as gaslighting. 

Josh Lieblein can be reached at joshualieblein@gmail.com for your response to Doorstep Postings.

The post Doorstep Postings: The unbearable lightness of Justin Trudeau’s final Hanukkah as prime minister appeared first on The Canadian Jewish News.

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Doorstep Postings: The unbearable lightness of Justin Trudeau’s final Hanukkah as prime minister

This is a special year-end edition of Doorstep Postings, the periodic political commentary column written by Josh Lieblein for The CJN.

You all know the story that we tell this time of year: a group of Jews decided they were done with Jewish particularism and said, “Let us go an make a covenant with the nations around us” (1 Maccabees 1:11) and decided to gaslight the rest of the community into seeing things their way—and it ended very, very badly for them.

As such, Hannukah is a time for the revealing of secrets, the banishing of shadows, and the airing of grievances. Having recently reached a milestone age associated with acquiring Jewish wisdom, my own personal miracle is that after enduring 40 years of threats/promises of the imminent collapse of society and sweeping revolution, 40 years of lectures about the moral and physical decay of the West, 40 years of the most obnoxiously self-righteous folks walking the planet breathlessly informing us all of the latest irreconcilable contradiction within capitalism, I’ve finally gotten to the point where I can’t muster anything more than an eye roll anymore. 

This is because, just like every year before it, 2024 was a year of unmitigated disaster for our self-appointed reformers. I’m not just talking about Trump’s resurgence, Ukraine’s persistence, the overthrow in Syria, Hamas’s withering away, proclamations that we have reached ‘peak wokeness’, the rise of artificial intelligence and the tech bros, and the failure of centrist electoral projects everywhere but here in Canada. This was the year where the left willingly and gleefully discarded the one thing they had going for them: their tenuously held moral authority.

The success of any left-wing project hinges on successfully convincing a critical mass of undecideds that they are not like the amoral and callous right who wants you to die for their profit motive. They’ve got your best interests at heart. They’re going to sit down and hear you out and govern with joy and hope and kindness, which are alien concepts to those weird, cruel, genocidal and greedy conservatives. 

Now those of us who have been on this merry-go-round for a few turns know that it’s not that simple. Plenty of left-folks want to actively harm the rich and those they deem to be colonizers, bigots, and other associated ruling class bootlickers. The violence perpetrated by those in power justifies violence in return. This is a somewhat difficult platform to get elected on, however, because people have a bad habit of hardening their hearts in response to being threatened. And so we need suitable empty vessels to try and convince the voters that the radicals are just that: loud angry voices on the margins. The political operatives charged with laundering the baser left-wing impulses must carefully use language to make it seem that there is some daylight between them and the ends-justify-the-means crowd. 

This is a difficult task to perform because it involves not only fooling a plurality of people, if not all of the time, then for as long as the particular political project lasts. First, the operatives must trick themselves into believing in their own unimpeachable moral authority. Only once they have convinced themselves that they are the most empathic and equity-minded folks to ever draw breath can they engineer the rise of someone like Justin Trudeau. Anyone who was paying attention a decade ago could see the parallel rise of two movements: lifelong Liberals working on earned media pieces announcing the return of the Trudeau dynasty, and mostly anonymous lunatics on Tumblr who were still licking their wounds from the failure of the Occupy Movement, claiming that it was literally impossible to be racist against white people because ‘racism’ against white people wasn’t systematic. 

And as it happened, a lot of the self-proclaimed radicals bought the hype, because they saw in Trudeau something they know all too well in themselves. The desire to be loved and celebrated and told they are good, kind and moral despite, and in many cases because of, their own desire to commit and justify violence in the name of creating a better and more equal world. The Trudeau of 2015 was no less authoritarian than the figure clinging to power at the end of 2024. All that’s changed is that the radicals can no longer excuse Trudeau’s narcissism while holding out for him to bring about a world that is more equal—which is to say, a world where they have the power to do harm to their enemies. These days, Mr. Grow the Economy From the Heart Outward seems more interested in trying and failing to implement GST holidays while forcing Canada Post workers back to actual work. 

Still even as the Liberals try to envision a future without Trudeau, they remain engaged in other muddled projects, such as trying to sell the idea that Canada is engaged in an ongoing genocide but must somehow endure lest we be absorbed into the sucking Trumpist hellhole directly below us. Clearly, the Liberal Party is no longer a place for voters who are into sexy CEO-murderers, or who think Oct. 7 was an act of righteous resistance to oppression, or take China’s claims of imminent world domination seriously while denouncing Elon Musk’s similarly ridiculous pronouncements. 

But even though both the more and less radical wings of the progressive movement have had an off year and are barely speaking to one another again, we can rest assured that so long as they have to convince themselves of their own goodness they will continue to try and split this atom. Attempts to reject binaries will lead to more black and white thinking. Progressive governments will fall back into the status quo. Tumblrs will give way to Blueskys. Trudeau will fall out of favour for a few years only to be asked back after a few years of Poilievre—or some other Liberal saviour will rescue the brand. They will cast about for a new podcast hero or a leftist version of the Hawk Tuah Girl. They will insist that senile politicians are fit as fiddles, anoint barely literate fan-fiction writers as cultural arbiters, and cast lawbreakers as secular saints while vilifying anyone who’s afraid of being attacked on the street or public transit.

If the past 40 years are anything to go by, they will be as confused as ever as to why capitalism persists, why people don’t accept carbon taxes, why the world fails to condemn Israel to their liking, why poor and rural folks don’t “vote their interests”, why voters fall for Poilievre’s slogans, and why there are attempts to draw an equivalence between CEOs who condemn people to death and the people who kill those CEOs. The answer to all these questions are the same, and it’s that impure oil just burns differently—and trying to pass it off as holy can only come off as gaslighting. 

Josh Lieblein can be reached at joshualieblein@gmail.com for your response to Doorstep Postings.

The post Doorstep Postings: The unbearable lightness of Justin Trudeau’s final Hanukkah as prime minister appeared first on The Canadian Jewish News.

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IDF Releases Investigation into Discovery of 6 Hostages’ Bodies

i24 News – The IDF released on Tuesday the investigation into the murder of six abductees at the end of August: Carmel Gat, Eden Yerushalmi,

Goldberg-Polin, Alexander Lubnov, Almog Sarusi, and Sergeant Ori Danino.

According to the findings of the investigation, when the IDF operation began in the area of the tunnel, Major General Nitzan Alon did not believe abductees would be in the area. As the operation continued, the military assessment said the probability was even lower.

The abductee who was extricated, Qaid Farhan Alkadi, was found alone, as neither he nor additional terrorists taken from the area provided indications to the additional abductees.

In the absence of new information, the operation continued in the area, the investigation said. Only then did the forces locate the bodies of the six abductees. In addition, forensic findings were found indicating that Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar had been there. It remains unclear whether he gave the order to murder the abductees himself. No signs of struggle during the murder were found in autopsies.

IDF Spokesperson Daniel Hagri visited the tunnel and described the harsh conditions in which the six abductees endured. “They were heroes who were cold-bloodedly murdered by terrorists who build tunnels under children’s rooms,” he said. “We will hunt them down and know exactly who they are, we will find the one who murdered them. The teams here collect all the evidence from the scene.”

“We didn’t know the exact location of the hostages in the tunnel. They were killed before we could reach them. We are investigating the incident of their names being leaked prior to their rescue. This is a very serious event that is harmful to the families and the security of the forces on the ground.”

The post IDF Releases Investigation into Discovery of 6 Hostages’ Bodies first appeared on Algemeiner.com.

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