Gotcha! Then and Now Part II

Members are reminded to abide by decorum of the House.

That little bit of irony was brought to us last year by none other than the queen of decorous behavior herself, Marjorie Taylor Greene, who while temporarily presiding over a session of the House of Representatives, admonished her colleagues to remain quiet during a speech. Her remark led to an outburst of laughter from the Democrats in the chamber, and no doubt several muffled guffaws from her fellow Republicans as well. You may remember it was Greene along with her partner in chaos Lauren Boebert who loudly heckled the President of the United States, interrupting his State of the Union Address last year, calling him a liar and chanting "Build the Wall!"

In the previous post I brought up how times have changed, politically speaking, in my life. When I was a child in the early sixties, there was anger and divisiveness among Americans to be sure. But the political divide among Americans today is perhaps at its greatest, most impervious point since the Civil War. Consider this: from a recent Economist/YouGov Poll, 38 percent of Americans responded they would not approve of one of their children marrying a member of a different political party. In 1960, that number was only about 4 percent, which also happens to be the percentage of current marriages between a Republican and a Democrat. 

Perhaps this explains why the deep-down respect Americans once had for the institutions of this country spelled out in the U.S. Constitution that made certain behavior, such as that of Greene and Bobert out of bounds, is sadly a thing of the past. 

All of that was thrown out the window during my life as a pall of cynicism, distrust and even outright hatred of fellow Americans with different opinions, has replaced the respect for those institutions meant to bring us all together.

That's not to say that as a society we don't respect anything anymore. I also pointed out in the post certain issues that are held sacred to many of us today such as equal rights for women. That in particular was a fringe issue sixty years ago, barely considered at all and when it was, it received the same kind of response then, as MTG calling for decorum on the floor of the House does now.

I guess we have to take the good with the bad.

Still, I have to say, where has all the decorum gone? 

The inspiration for this duo of posts was two recent incidents where public figures got into hot water over their inadequate responses to what could be considered "gotcha questions", that is to say, inquiries that are designed by the questioner specifically to discredit the respondent.

Many sources regard one of the first such questions directed at a public figure, thereby launching the era of the gotcha question, to be the one I mentioned in the previous post where in 1992 President George H.W. Bush was asked if he ever had an extra-marital affair. Such a question of a sitting president would have been unthinkable before.

We haven't looked back since. 

Neither of the two gotcha questions I speak of were asked by members of the press. One was made by a congressperson at a congressional hearing, the other by a private citizen. I'll start with that one.

A few weeks ago at a public forum in New Hampshire, Nikky Haley, a candidate for the Republican nomination for president, was asked the following: 

What caused the Civil War?

Haley responded ironically:

Now don't come with an easy question or anything...

Unless you're a Republican candidate for president from South Carolina (where the first shots of the Civil War were fired) as Haley is, this is not a difficult, let alone a gotcha question. It's not like asking for example, what caused World War I. 

No matter how much the good folks south of the Mason-Dixon Line want to claim that the causes for the American Civil War were complex, it is not a hard question at all, and indeed the question is possible to answer in one word:

Slavery.

After her comment about the difficulty of the question, Haley went into a familiar talking point saying the Civil War was:

basically [about] how the government was going to run [and] the freedoms of what people could and couldn’t do.

She did not mention slavery as a contributing factor to the Civil War. 

Nikky Haley knows better. Unfortunately, many of her constituents whose votes she's depending upon in order to win the Republican nomination, are those folks in Dixie, many of whom don't take too kindly to folks upsetting the apple cart by trashing the Confederacy and making claims that what they learned all their lives in school is a misrepresentation of history. 

So for Haley this was a question with no good answer, a classic gotcha question. Had she answered honestly that yes, the Civil War WAS about state's rights and that the right they were fighting for was the right to own people, she may have just as well thrown in the towel as she would have certainly lost any momentum she might have had in the Southern primaries, especially the one in her home state whose primary takes place on February 24th. 

Instead, she followed the line of the Cult of the Lost Cause, the movement that took place in the post-reconstruction period in the south, where among other things, history was re-written to paint a rosier picture of the Confederacy. It was no doubt what she was taught as a young person in South Carolina herself and that line of reasoning probably served her well as a Southern politician, until that fateful evening in New Hampshire.

The questioner followed up by mentioning his surprise at her omission of slavery.

At that point Haley threw gasoline on the fire by defiantly responding:

What do you want me to say about slavery?

To which the questioner said triumphantly: "Thank you, you've answered my question." 

Ouch.

Nikky Haley is a consummate politician which is perhaps her biggest weakness. In a previous post I wrote about her tendency to speak out of both sides of her mouth, taking the most convenient path depending upon whom she is trying to reach. That makes it difficult to know exactly where she stands on the issues.

Her grievous omission in New Hampshire probably won't be much of a factor in her unlikely bid to become this year's Republican nominee for president, but it will come back to haunt her if she ever finds herself on a national ticket, either as candidate for president or vice president.

It's hard to know the motivation for asking a presidential candidate what has to be considered an off-the-wall question about a historical event that was settled 159 years ago. On the other hand, the reaction to Haley's gaffe proves one thing, we're still fighting that war to this day, which makes the question quite relevant. 

Well played Mr. Private Citizen. 

By contrast, there is no question about the motivation of U.S. Representative Elise Stefanik's classic gotcha question to the presidents of three major American universities at a congressional hearing looking into antisemitism at American universities, as illustrated by rallies that took place in the days following the Hamas attack on Israel this past October 7.

Similar rallies across the planet celebrating that attack as a legitimate act of protest, drew the ire of every reasonable citizen of the world who was paying attention, as their timing immediately following a despicable act of brutal terrorism, quite reasonably called Israel's 9/11, displayed (quoting myself here) remarkable "heartlessness, ignorance, stupidity and yes, antisemitism."

Many of these rallies took place on American campuses and while protected by the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, nothing in that cherished document protects them or their participants from being criticized which sadly, few university presidents chose to do in the ensuing days.

In their defense I'd say that the October 7th terrorist attack took nearly the entire world by surprise, so the lack of preparation to deal with the reaction to it, regrettable as it was in a way, understandable.

Somewhat less understandable was the lack of preparation of the three presidents, Claudine Gay of Harvard, Liz Magill of the University of Pennsylvania, and Sally Kornbluth of MIT, when it came to answering what they had to know would be tough, politically charged questions at the congressional hearing in December, two months after the attack. 

Here's the gotcha question Stefanik posed to each of them, demanding a yes or no answer:

Does calling for the genocide of Jews violate [your school’s] rules on bullying and harassment?

Like the question about the Civil War, on the surface this shouldn't be too difficult to answer. After all, American universities tend to bend over backwards in protecting their students' rights to not be harassed, bullied or just made to feel uncomfortable. It's obvious that Jewish students would feel harassed when confronted by a group demanding that they, their relatives, and every person on earth who identifies with the same ethno-religious group as they do, should be exterminated. Therefore, the answer to this question, if the universities in question are truly honest about protecting students' "safe spaces", should be an unqualified yes.

But here's where that tricky little thing called the First Amendment gets in the way. Hate speech, which is really what Stefanik is referring to here, reprehensible as it is, is protected by the Constitution, so long as it doesn't represent a direct threat to someone. This is something that every school administrator understands and that is why the three university presidents equivocated when answering the question. "It depends" they all said in one way or other. 

Elise Stefanik, herself a Harvard alumna also understands this and knew exactly how the three would have to respond. She phrased her hypothetical question in as vague terms as possible so that it could cover, depending upon one's point of view, anything from Nazi skinheads carrying baseball bats while chanting "all Jews must die", to a group of students wearing Keffiyehs, chanting "Free Palestine." 

Understanding that the job of an administrator is to consider the minutiae of everything that comes her way along with the big picture, Stefanik preaching to the masses looking only to the convenient sound bite, set a trap for the three, into which they all fell.

Despite the prepared statements of Gay, Magill and Kornbluth on the evils of anti-Semitism, (excerpts of which can be found below), and their commitment to eradicate it and all other forms of racial and ethnic hatred at their institutions, all the general public heard was their failure to put calling for the genocide of Jews at least up there with, (borrowing a line from Sam Harris), other "crimes students at college campuses lose sleep about such as cultural appropriation and using the wrong pronoun."

Elise Stefanik may or may not be sincere in her concern about antisemitism, I have no idea. But as a newly minted MAGA culture warrior on the short list of candidates as Donald Trump's running mate in the upcoming election, she made no bones about the fact that she was gunning for these three administrators who represent in the minds of the Americans she's trying to connect with, the woke, elite enemy who must be put down at all costs. 

Shortly after her testimony to the Congressional Committee and the evisceration she received for her response to Stefanik's line of questioning, Liz Magill stepped down as the President of Penn. Responding to that, Stefanik commented on social media: "That's one down and two to go."

Meanwhile up in Cambridge, the Harvard Community as well as the university's governing board the Harvard Corporation, threw their support behind Claudine Gay until reports of sloppy research work in her past became public. Facing tremendous pressure and harassment, Dr. Gay stepped down shortly thereafter. Annie Karmi of the New York Times, wrote that Stefanik, taking full credit for the administrator's demise, took a "victory lap" after Gay's resignation.

So far Stefanik has been denied the opportunity of dancing on the professional grave of Sally Kornbluth who remains president of MIT. Perhaps Stefanik's claim that Kornbluth is an antisemite has fallen upon deaf ears since Kornbluth is Jewish while Stefanik is not.

Crazy world we live in, no?

The good news in all of this is that the principle actors of this story with the exception of the guy who asked the Civil War question, are all women of tremendous influence, something that would have been unthinkable 60 years ago. 

Ever since I was a child, I've been told that the world would be a much better place if women were in charge. That always comforted me as the writing had been on the wall that women would be gaining more and more influence as time went on.

The bad news is that despite women of influence being eminently capable of leadership, strength, wisdom and insight, they are also just as capable of messing things up as men.

I guess that's what equality is all about. 

Happy 2024.

CODA: 

It would be a grave injustice for the three university presidents to be remembered primarily for the soundbites of their responses to a question designed specifically to discredit them. 

What follows are excerpts from each of the prepared statements of Claudine Gay, Liz Magill and Sally Kornbluth that were read before the House committee's hearing on antisemitism on December 5, 2023. 

Claudine Gay:

The free exchange of ideas is the foundation upon which Harvard is built, and safety and well-being are the prerequisites for engagement in our community. Without both of these things, our teaching and research mission founder. In the past two months, our bedrock commitments have guided our efforts. We have increased security measures, expanded reporting channels, and augmented counseling, mental health and support services.

We have reiterated that speech that incites violence threatens safety or violates Harvard’s policies against bullying and harassment is unacceptable. We have made it clear that any behaviors that disrupt our teaching and research efforts will not be tolerated, and where these lines have been crossed, we have taken action.

We have drawn on our academic expertise to create learning opportunities for our campus community. We have begun examinations of the ways in which anti-Semitism and other forms of hate manifest at Harvard and in American society. We have also repeatedly made clear that we at Harvard reject antisemitism and denounce any trace of it on our campus or within our community.

Antisemitism is a symptom of ignorance, and the cure for ignorance is knowledge. Harvard must model what it means to preserve free expression, while combating prejudice and preserving the security of our community. We are undertaking that hard, long term work with the attention and intensity it requires.

Liz Magill:

To ensure that our Jewish students have a direct channel to share their experiences with me, I’ve created a student advisory group on the student experience. Today’s hearing is focused on antisemitism and its direct impact on the Jewish community, but history teaches us that where antisemitism goes unchecked, other forms of hate spread, and ultimately can threaten democracy.

We are seeing a rise in our society in harassment, intimidation, and threats toward individuals based on their identity as Muslim, Palestinian, or Arab. At Penn, we are investigating all these allegations for members of our community and providing resources to support individuals experiencing threats, online harassment, and doxing.

We will continue to deploy all the necessary resources to support any member of the community experiencing hate. As president, I am committed to a safe, secure, and supportive educational environment so that our academic mission can thrive. It is crucial that ideas are exchanged and diverse viewpoints are debated.

 Sally Kornbluth:

I strongly believe that there is a difference — between what we can say to each other. That is what we have a right to say and what we should say as members of one community. Yet as president of MIT, in addition to my duties to keep the campus safe and to maintain the functioning of this national asset, I must at the same time ensure that we protect speech and viewpoint diversity for everyone.

This is in keeping with the Institute’s principles on free expression. Meeting those three goals is challenging and the results can be terribly uncomfortable, but it is essential to how we operate in the United States. Those who want us to shut down protest language are in effect arguing for a speech code.

But in practice, speech codes do not work. Problematic speech needs to be countered with other speech and with education. And we are doing that. However, the right to free speech does not extend to harassment, discrimination or incitement to violence in our community. MIT policies are clear on this. To keep the campus functioning, we also have policies to regulate the time, manner and place of demonstrations.

Talking Point Number Two: Anti-Zionism = Antisemitism

This is a subject wrought with pain and strife, one that not being not Jewish, I probably have no business talking about. But that doesn't stop anybody else so why should I be different?

Like all forms of bigotry, intolerance and racism, antisemitism is a blight on humanity, even without considering one of the darkest moments of history, the Holocaust. I think blight is a good metaphor because the primary use of the word is to describe a disease. This is definition number one of blight from Merriam Webster:

a disease or injury of plants marked by the formation of lesions, withering, and death of parts (such as leaves and tubers)

First and foremost, racism of any kind is a disease of the human condition, but not an anomaly. We are a social animal, but also a tribal one. By nature, we are distrustful of members of other tribes, one of the survival mechanisms our early ancestors picked up along the way. However, humans not only survived but thrived primarily by our ability to learn. One thing the species Homo sapiens has learned over nearly ten thousand generations of our existence is that we can accomplish much more and suffer much less by cooperating with members of other tribes, rather than fighting them. Yet we haven't quite learned how to get over our primordial instincts to distrust and hate one other. Consequently, our inability to see each other as fellow human beings, rather than as members of different tribes, whether they are defined by race, ethnicity, faith, ideology or whatever, has resulted in countless lesions, withering and death, caused by fear and ignorance fueled by our primitive instincts. As we now have the technological ability to wipe out our entire species along with all the others on the planet, with the possible exception of those belonging to the order Blattodia, the blight of racism may prove fatal to us all.

Antisemitism, the distrust and hatred of the Jewish people, has been a blight on humanity for thousands of years. It is particularly raw today because the effects of it including discrimination, oppression, segregation, ethnic cleansing, violence and genocide are still fresh in the memory of people still with us who lived through it not very long ago.

And it has not subsided.

It's been two months since the depravity of the Hamas attack on kibbutzim and a music festival in Israel just beyond the border with Gaza. 10/7 was the most devastating attack on the Jewish people since the Holocaust. It came as a surprise to exactly no one that the Israeli government responded swiftly, resolutely, and brutally, leaving a catastrophic humanitarian crisis in its wake.

 

In the two months of war following the atrocity, the same talking points come up again and again from supporters of both sides of Israeli/Palestinian conflict. One of these is the conflation or conversely the differentiation of anti-Zionism and antisemitism. Yesterday the U.S. Congress passed a resolution equating the two. The inspiration behind the resolution were the hundreds of rallies in the United States, several of them on college campuses in support of the Palestinian cause. Many of these demonstrations took place immediately after the 10/7 attacks with the protestors openly expressing their support for Hamas and for their actions on that dreadful day.

Let me say unequivocally that I was as appalled as anyone by people who should have known better, celebrating the torture, rape, kidnapping and butchering of innocent people, many of whom were on the same ideological side in regard to the Palestinian cause as the protestors. As guaranteed by the First Amendment, the protestors were within their rights. But their rights do not extend to immunity from being called out for their heartlessness, ignorance, stupidity and yes, antisemitism. In a televised presidential debate the other night, candidate Nikki Haley indirectly compared the demonstrators to the Ku Klux Klan. She is not off the mark. They should be ashamed of themselves.

Let me also say unequivocally that supporting the Palestinian cause in itself should not be equated with antisemitism.  

Neither should criticism of Israel. 

Most supporters of Israel are quick to point that out by the way, but I'm not 100 percent convinced they all believe it.

So what's the deal with Zionism and what does it all mean today? Frankly I'm a bit confused. As I wrote in an earlier post, Zionism was the aspiration of a homeland for an oppressed and dispersed people, the Jews. It was a movement that had existed in different forms for several hundred years at least. 

Zionism became more than an aspiration when Great Britain during their mandate over Palestine between the two World Wars, declared its support of a homeland for the Jewish people in that land. And it became reality 75 years ago with the establishment of the State of Israel.

With the aspiration becoming a reality, where does that leave Zionism and anti-Zionism today?

Here's a statement I've heard practically my whole life, the entire time of which I've never known there to be no Israel: "I'm not against the Jewish people, I'm against Zionism."

It is said that today, anti-Zionism is the denial of Israel's right to exist, an idea which plenty of groups advocate, and many more like Hamas are trying make a reality. That is precisely the implication of the catch phrase "from the river to the sea" which U.S. Congresswoman Rashida Talib was rightfully excoriated for using recently. But beyond the obvious antisemitic tone of that sentiment, when you think of it, isn't denying Israel like denying the United States' right to exist, or for that matter all the nations in the Americas, and many scattered throughout the world, whose "founders" conquered the land causing displacement, great suffering, and even death to the indigenous people of those places, much like the founding of Israel?

If there ever was a quixotic enterprise, denying an established, sovereign nation it's right to exist is surely high on the list. Israel is here to stay, like it or not.

The first person I heard make the comment above about Zionism was my father. I'm not sure he even knew what Zionism actually was, as I never heard him mention his opposition to the state of Israel. To my old man, Zionism was a nefarious movement that involved a conspiracy at the hands of the Jewish elite who had control of the world's banks, the press, popular culture and many other institutions that had a great influence on people's lives. The end goal of course was world domination. 

Politically as a child I was much more under the influence of my mother, so I always thought my dad's ideas were unique to him or at best, shared only by a few other kookie folks, until I learned they are commonly held, especially among my father's fellow Europeans. Not even the horrors of World War II could diminish them. Sure, others may not have been as blatant in public as my father was at home with his family, but there were always the telltale signs bringing up a certain group of people not mentioned by name, (but "you know who they are"), and conspiracies. Silly me but I didn't realize until fairly recently how prevalent those ideas were stateside until all the fuss about George Soros and his supposed Zionist plot to disrupt the American political system by changing its demographics, otherwise known as the great replacement conspiracy.

This shit never grows old apparently.

Let's face it, making the point of saying you're anti-Zionist but not antisemitic, is really just putting lipstick on a pig. If you feel the need to point out that you're not antisemitic, or any other kind of racist for that matter, you probably are. And you're in good company because none of us are truly immune from the blight of racism.

So yes, in that sense, anti-Zionism and antisemitism go hand-in-hand. 

What about pro-Zionism today? To many, with the stated goals of Zionism already accomplished, the term refers not simply to the preservation and security of the State of Israel, but to the expansion of Jewish settlements into Palestinian territory, the continuation of Israeli occupation of the West Bank, and the treatment of the Palestinian people in Israel as second-class citizens, all of which has been condemned by much of the world as well as the United Nations.

Is this condemnation antisemitic? 

What if a person thinks as I do that the ideal, perfect world solution to the Israeli/Palestinian conflict is a one state solution, where Jews and Palestinians would live together in a State of Israel, all with the same rights and opportunities, as a true democratic republic? This would mean technically the end of Israel as an exclusively Jewish State, but not the end of it as a Jewish homeland. It would instead be a shared homeland. Does that make me an antisemite?

Admittedly this one state solution is little more than a pipedream, one that has about as much chance of happening as pigs flying on the twelfth day of never.  It would require a constitution (which Israel currently lacks), which while maintaining majority rule, unequivocally guarantees minority rights, in other words something like what we have in the United States. Even more important, it would require a population that's all on board with it.

 

Aye, there's the rub.

As we've seen lately in the United States, our democratic republic and Constitution, two of our most cherished institutions, are under attack in a country whose divisions are a mere speck compared to what they are in the Middle East. If democracy has a chance of collapsing here, think of its chances over there.

I stated in an earlier post that I am neither on the side of the Israelis nor the Palestinians in this conflict but rather on the side of peace. Does that make me Islamophobic (an essential but misleading word as I'll point out in a subsequent post) as well as antisemitic?

If it is, so be it.

As we've seen, both Zionism and its antithesis anti-Zionism are highly charged and ambiguous terms, speaking to the past but having little practical relevance today. Just as the State of Israel is no longer an aspiration and is here to stay, so too are the Palestinian people. Maybe it's time to retire those terms and at the very least, keep our accusations of racism on both sides to a minimum. 

They are not helpful.

While my father shared his European culture's prejudices as we saw above, he was fond of saying something that was a truism yet deeply profound, something in my heart of hearts I think he truly believed. I've mentioned these words time and again in this space, but they too never grow old:

People are people. 

Despite my own prejudices, and there are more than I'd like to admit, I've tried my hardest to live by those words which I'll take to my grave. 

They should serve to guide us all in this difficult, complicated world.