<]:^D wrote:thank you GD - interesting that Magill says exactly what i criticised them for - her focusing on the free speech protection rather than whether calls for genocide were permissible
It's so clearly an argument that wouldn't be made if the genocide of any other ethnic minority group was being bellowed on campus by shrieking maniacs which is why even the New York Times of all newspapers was critical of how transparently obvious the faux support for free speech is and how weak the answers were.
I think the paywall kicked in on the previous link so
I've linked the no paywall link instead.Whilst it was a Republican politician doing the grilling, it thankfully didn't get polarising responses from the White House or Democrats who also were highly critical of the answers provided:
“It’s unbelievable that this needs to be said: Calls for genocide are monstrous and antithetical to everything we represent as a country,” said a White House spokesman, Andrew Bates.
Josh Shapiro, the Democratic governor of Pennsylvania, said he found the responses by Elizabeth Magill, Penn’s president, “unacceptable.”
Even the liberal academic Laurence Tribe found himself agreeing with Representative Elise Stefanik, Republican of New York, who sharply questioned Harvard’s president, Claudine Gay:
“I’m no fan of @RepStefanik but I’m with her here,” the Harvard law professor wrote on the social media site X. “Claudine Gay’s hesitant, formulaic, and bizarrely evasive answers were deeply troubling to me and many of my colleagues, students, and friends.”
“It should not be hard to condemn genocide, genocide against Jews, genocide against anyone else,” Governor Shapiro said on Wednesday in a meeting with reporters. “I’ve said many times, leaders have a responsibility to speak and act with moral clarity, and Liz Magill failed to meet that simple test.”
“There should be no nuance to that — she needed to give a one-word answer,” he added.
By Wednesday afternoon, a petition calling for Ms. Magill’s resignation had grown to more than 3,000 signatures. Marc Rowan, the chief of Apollo Global Management and the board chair at the Wharton School of Business at Penn, asked the board of trustees to rescind their support for Ms. Magill.
“How much damage to our reputation are we willing to accept?” he wrote in a letter to the trustees.
Governor Shapiro, who is a nonvoting member of Penn’s board, urged the trustees to meet soon. University sources, speaking on background, said that efforts were underway to hold a board meeting by phone this week. The university did not respond immediately to a request for comment.
Senator Bob Casey, Democrat of Pennsylvania, did not mince words. “President Magill’s comments yesterday were offensive, but equally offensive was what she didn’t say,” he said in a statement. “The right to free speech is fundamental, but calling for the genocide of Jews is antisemitic and harassment, full stop.”
Senator John Fetterman, a Pennsylvania Democrat, described the testimony as “a significant fail.”
“There is no ‘both sides-ism’ and it isn’t ‘free speech,’ it’s simply hate speech,” he said in a statement. “It was embarrassing for a venerable Pennsylvania university, and it should be reflexive for leaders to condemn antisemitism and stand up for the Jewish community or any community facing this kind of invective.”