| Really. Because she couldn’t possibly be the evil person she sounds like. |
Gay and the presidents of UPenn and MIT have been eviscerated for telling congress yesterday that calls for the genocide of Jews do not violate their codes of conduct.
After ferocious backlash and a donor boycott, Gay released a statement today insisting she'd been misunderstood.
'There are some who have confused a right to free expression with the idea that Harvard will condone calls for violence against Jewish students.
'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,' she said.
Neither UPenn nor MIT have corrected their president's comments.
It came as the White House joined condemnation of the women's remarks.
'It’s unbelievable that this needs to be said: calls for genocide are monstrous and antithetical to everything we represent as a country.
'Any statements that advocate for the systematic murder of Jews are dangerous and revolting — and we should all stand firmly against them, on the side of human dignity and the most basic values that unite us as Americans,' Deputy White House Press Secretary Andrew Bates said in a statement.
Gay and the other two leaders was asked repeatedly and unequivocally yesterday if calling for the genocide of Jews amounted to bullying or harassment.
She said the words themselves while 'abhorrent', didn't rise to the level of a rule violation.
It would only be actionable, she said, if the hate speech crossed into 'conduct'.
Today, students from the schools along with some of the shocked Republicans present at the hearing say it is clear that all three must resign.
The boards of each school - which ultimately decide whether the women will remain in their positions - are yet to make their positions clear.
And while donors including Bill Ackman have expressed their disgust with the remarks, other prominent alumni and donors like Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg
...the Peewee Herman clone who owns Facebook. He's got more money than Croesus and thinks he should be regulated by the government because it does such a nifty job with all the other stuff it regulates....remain silent on the issue.
The Harvard Board of Overseers is yet to respond to inquiries on Dr. Gay's remarks, as is its Alumni Association. UPenn and MIT have been equally silent.
Penn president says she was ‘not focused’ during Congress hearing on campus antisemitism
| Seriously? Because being focussed is a primary component of her job. |
"In that moment, I was focused on our university’s longstanding policies aligned with the US Constitution, which say that speech alone is not punishable," she says in a video posted tonight (Wednesday). "I was not focused on, but I should have been, the irrefutable fact that a call for genocide of Jewish people is a call for some of the most terrible violence human beings can perpetrate. It’s evil — plain and simple."
"I want to be clear, a call for genocide of Jewish people is threatening—deeply so. It is intentionally meant to terrify a people who have been subjected to pogroms and hatred for centuries and were the victims of mass genocide in the Holocaust. In my view, it would be harassment or intimidation," she adds.
She says the university would "initiate a serious and careful look at our policies."
"In today’s world, where we are seeing signs of hate proliferating across our campus and our world in a way not seen in years, these policies need to be clarified and evaluated," she says.
White House raps US university heads for refusing to say calls for genocide of Jews are harassment
[IsraelTimes] The White House appears to rebuke the presidents of three top American universities, who refused to explicitly say that calls for genocide of Jewish people violate campus rules on harassment and bullying during a congressional hearing yesterday.
Asked if such calls are against the codes of conduct of Harvard University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Pennsylvania, all three presidents said the answer “depends on the context.”
“We just witnessed the worst massacre suffered by the Jewish people since the Holocaust, the latest atrocities in a heartbreaking, genocidal pattern that goes back thousands of years,” White House spokesperson Andrew Bates says in a statement, weighing in on the growing controversy surrounding the hearing.
“It’s unbelievable that this needs to be said: calls for genocide are monstrous and antithetical to everything we represent as a country,” he says.
“Any statements that advocate for the systematic murder of Jews are dangerous and revolting – and we should all stand firmly against them, on the side of human dignity and the most basic values that unite us as Americans,” Bates adds, while avoiding direct mention of the university heads.
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Claudine Gay: 2023-12-06 Billionaire Harvard fund manager sez Harvard president Claudine Gay must GO ! (and Ivy heads testify to Congress)
Claudine Gay: 2023-10-16 Pro-Hamas protests show how higher education has finally crossed the line
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