Friday, October 20, 2023

Hello, Left. Now Do You Believe There’s Cancel Culture?

Timothy Noah
NEW REPUBLIC
Thu, October 19, 2023 



“We, the undersigned student organizations, hold the Israeli regime entirely responsible for all unfolding violence.” Thus spake 34 signatories of the Harvard Palestine Solidarity Groups on the Situation in Palestine on the night of Hamas’s October 7 massacre of 1,400 unarmed civilians. Now the undersigned have gone underground. You can still find the letter on the website of The Harvard Crimson, but not any sign of which groups endorsed it. The Crimson explains: “This statement was co-authored by a coalition of Palestine solidarity groups at Harvard. For student safety, the names of all original signing organizations have been concealed at this time.” The Harvard Palestine Solidarity Committee, meanwhile, is blocking public access to its own website.

It’s a depressing sign of the times that when your public statement causes offense, you can retract authorship in lieu of retracting the statement itself (though “at least” five signers, the Crimson reported, retracted the old-fashioned way by renouncing their endorsement). Another sign of the times is that trying to hide the names of groups that previously went public with a controversial statement isn’t very effective. It’s a big internet, and one can still, with a little effort, locate that list. I was curious to know which student organizations signed on because I wanted to see whether they included any I belonged to during the late 1970s, when I was a Harvard undergraduate. They did not. What would I have done if they did? Registered private annoyance, probably, and left it at that. Possibly I’d have sought an opportunity to argue, publicly or privately, with the student organization in question, though I’m already on record stating my own, very different, view of Hamas’s Jew-killing spree.

What I absolutely would not have done is try to leverage any influence I might have (virtually none, in this instance, but set that aside) to punish the student groups, or the individuals within them. That’s what conservatives call “cancel culture,” a phenomenon that many on the left pretend doesn’t exist. But it does exist, and it’s being deployed right now with a vengeance against that portion of the left that’s trying to explain away the events of October 7 as a blow for resistance and freedom.

dozen business leaders have demanded, Joe McCarthy–style, that Harvard release the names of students who belong to the organizations that signed the Hamas letter, “so as to insure that none of us inadvertently hire any of their members,” according to Bill Ackman, CEO of Pershing Square Capital Management. Moreover, Ackman wrote, “the names of the signatories [i.e., the individual students, not the student groups] should be made public so their views are publicly known.” He said all this on the social platform formerly known as Twitter.

Ackman’s position is outrageous, for a couple of reasons. First, blackballing a bunch of college students based on their political views is abhorrent. The reasons should be obvious, but I’ll state them anyway:

a) They’re college students, for Christ’s sake.
b) Even if they weren’t, they’d have a right to express their opinions.

Are there limits to what potential employers should tolerate? Should Company X refuse to hire Person Y because he’s made overtly antisemitic or racist or similarly toxic statements outside the workplace? Company X has that legal right, but it should be exercised with extreme reluctance. That’s not what’s been happening lately. The high-profile cases tend to be left-wing witch hunts, but the more common cases are right-wing witch hunts. A childhood friend of mine, for instance, got fired by Goodwill Industries for being a Communist. Even the worst political associations should be considered in context. Recall that Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black and West Virginia Senator Robert Byrd served their country honorably despite their youthful (and much-regretted) participation in the Ku Klux Klan.

Another reason Ackman’s demand is outrageous is that it’s hypocritical. “I have been asked by a number of CEOs if Harvard would release a list of the members,” Ackman tweeted. Who are these CEOs? Why should these big shots enjoy anonymity when, if Ackman had his way, Harvard students would not? We know these corporate vigilantes number one dozen only because that’s what the New York Post reported, based on responses to Ackman’s tweet that it found on X and elsewhere. Here are their names:

Jonathan Newman, CEO of Sweetgreen
David Duel, CEO of EasyHealth
Ale Resnik, CEO of Belong
Jake Wurzak, CEO of DoveHill Capital Management
Michael Broukhim, CEO of FabFitFun
Stephen Ready, CEO of Inspired
Hu Montague, founder of Diligent
Martin Varsavsky, tech entrepreneur
Michael McQuaid, head of decentralize finance at Bloq
Art Levy, head of strategy at Brex

That’s actually 11, including Ackman, but never mind. Duel went the extra mile, posting individual student names online, prompting LinkedIn to suspend his account. Duel told Fox News he was unrepentant: “We need to make sure these students pay a price and that their neighbors, friends, and employers know that they harbor these beliefs.” The right-wing group Accuracy in Media hired a “doxxing truck” to drive around Harvard Square billboarding the names of student members of the organizations that signed the Hamas letter under the words “Harvard’s Leading Antisemites.” Whatever happened to picking on somebody your own size?

That wasn’t the end of it. The shipping magnate Idan Offer and his wife, Batia, who have donated, according to their spokesperson, “substantial funds” to the university, quit the executive board of Harvard’s Kennedy School because they didn’t like Harvard’s response to the massacre. The university’s statement was a little slow in coming, as former Harvard president Larry Summers pointed out two days after the massacre. But cut Harvard President Claudine Gay a little slack. She was installed only three months ago, and after the prod from Summers she released one statement that distanced Harvard from the student statement and condemned “terrorist atrocities perpetrated by Hamas” and then a second statement condemning Hamas’s “barbaric atrocities.” The Wexner Foundation, a Jewish philanthropy that had funded a multimillion-dollar Kennedy School program for Israeli government officials, followed the Offers’ lead.

Not to be outdone, seven congressional Republicans who were Harvard alumni sent Gay a letter Friday condemning her for producing “too little too late.” As Maryland Representative Jamie Raskin, Democrat of Maryland and a Harvard alum, told the Crimson, these same Republicans who are in such a hurry to denounce Harvard’s too-weak response to the Hamas raid couldn’t bring themselves to “condemn the violent insurrection that overran the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021.”

These Republican members of Congress weren’t trying to cancel Gay, exactly, because they know they lack that power. They were just grandstanding to reassure their hard-right constituents that they aren’t those type of Harvard graduates. But if “to cancel” means “to bully to the point of causing real harm,” then the 11 business leaders—especially Ackman and Duel—are cancelers, and so are the Offers and the Wexner Foundation.

So are various University of Pennsylvania donors, including Marc Rowan, chief executive of Apollo Global Management, and Dick Wolf, producer of TV’s Law and Order, who are calling for the resignation of President Liz Magill because she didn’t speak out about Hamas quickly enough to suit them. They were also enraged by a September festival on Palestinian culture that the university hosted (but didn’t sponsor). Before the festival, Magill acknowledged (in response to a letter from the Anti-Defamation League) that several of the speakers held views about Israel or about Jews that were “deeply offensive.” But she also pledged, appropriately, “Penn’s commitment to open expression and academic freedom.” That may cost her her job.

Ronald Lauder hopped on the bandwagon this week, saying, “Let me be as clear as I can: I do not want any of the students at The Lauder Institute, the best and brightest at your university, to be taught by any of the instructors who were involved or supported this event.” Let me be clear as I can: Whoever teaches students at the Lauder Institute, a management and international studies program at Penn’s Wharton School, is none of Lauder’s goddamned business. He’s a donor, not a dean. So far as I know, Lauder has not called for Magill’s resignation, but his temper tantrum put Magill’s job in peril. So did a related decision this week from the wealthy former Utah Governor Jon Huntsman Jr., to cut off donations to Penn. Magill is reduced to issuing a series of escalating apologies that don’t seem to do her any good.

The impulse to cancel also surfaced at the Frankfurt Book Fair, where, The New York Times reported last week, an award ceremony to honor the Palestinian novelist Adania Shibli was (quite literally) canceled “due to the war in Israel.” Shibli’s novel Minor Detail apparently is based on the true story of a 1949 rape and murder of a Palestinian girl by Israeli soldiers, and the ceremony was going to celebrate the book’s winning a prestigious German book prize. Now the ceremony will be delayed until the Frankfurt Book Fair is over. As the Times’ Pamela Paul observed Wednesday, “taking a side in a war does not require taking positions on a work of fiction,” and the decision not to host the ceremony “amounts to demonizing a fiction writer and stifling her viewpoint.”

“Cancel culture isn’t real,” Sarah Hagi wrote four years ago in Time. “It’s time to cancel this talk of cancel culture,” A.J. Willingham wrote for CNN two years later. Cancel culture is “a myth,” Kathryn Lofton wrote this past March in The Yale Review. I don’t understand this fashionable denialism. The truth is that speech is being suppressed on all sides by organizations that are either insanely ideological (read: red state school boards) or terrified of controversy (read: every university in America). Yes, it’s worse when state government does it. And yes, the term “cancel culture” gets abused by the hard right, which uses it to shield hateful utterances that somehow became more socially acceptable after Donald Trump became president.

But people are getting ostracized or bullied into silence, and it’s got to stop. If you don’t like this article, go ahead and argue with it. But please don’t question my character, or endanger my safety, or try to get me fired, just because you disagree. It’s especially urgent not to apply such tactics in a university setting, because that’s where ideas come from. Let’s have more discussion, please, and less shouting. We might learn something.

Doxxing campaign against pro-Palestinian college students ramps up


TESFAYE NEGUSSIE and NADINE EL-BAWAB
Fri, October 20, 2023 

Tensions rise on Harvard campus over Israel-Gaza conflict

The man leading the doxxing campaign of pro-Palestinian Harvard students said his group is going to take it a step further.

Adam Guillette, 42, the president of Accuracy in Media, a conservative organization dedicated to holding "public and private officials accountable," according to its website, facilitated a truck displaying the names of Harvard students who signed onto a controversial letter denouncing Israel in the wake of the Oct. 7 attack by Hamas. Hamas has been designated by the United States as a terrorist organization.

The debate on campus has made Harvard a microcosm of sorts, reflecting the national debate on the conflict.

Guillette, who is Jewish, said his organization’s next move, which has already started, is to create online domains essentially using the students’ first and last names to create sites identifying them as antisemitic.

"I think it's incredibly important for people to know who the antisemites are on their campus and in their community," Guillette told ABC News. "Ideally, I'd love for everyone to abandon any hateful beliefs they might hold. I'd love for them to apologize for the antisemitic proclamation that they signed."



The statement that Guillette is referring to was released by the Harvard Palestine Solidary Committee hours after the attack by Hamas. It said that Israeli policies are "entirely responsible for all 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," the statement from the Harvard Palestine Solidarity Committee read.

Days later, the pro-Palestinian student groups released a second statement saying they were opposed to violence "against all innocent life" and lamented "all human suffering." The groups also affirmed their initial stance and said they have been "flooded with racist hate speech and death threats," and alleged that "hundreds of students have been persecuted" on campus and online.

MORE: Tensions rise on Harvard campus over Israel-Gaza conflict

"When they apologize, we remove them from our billboards and from our website immediately," Guillette told ABC News.

Students ABC News talked to asked that their names not be used, saying they are scared and facing intense backlash, including death threats, doxxing and harassment.

"Falling into the old trope of conflating valuing Palestinian lives with antisemitism is an unfortunate and lazy response, and I condemn it," a Harvard law student, who is a member in one of the groups that signed onto the statement, told ABC News. "Of course, I feel for the students being intimidated into silence."

When asked what his thoughts are on how Israel has dealt with Palestinian issues over the last 75 years, Guillette said it was a nuanced situation and he wasn’t a foreign policy expert. According to Guillette, his group isn’t intimidating anyone, rather they are amplifying their message.

MORE: Wave of critical comments hit Harvard Palestinian student group

"Targeting civilians for rape and murder is never acceptable," Guillette said. "And the fact that these student leaders, despite that, hold Israel directly responsible for the actions of butchers makes it clear that they're antisemites."

Guillette believes that his organization isn’t doxxing anyone because they are only sharing names and photos that they gathered from the Harvard school newspaper, The Crimson, and the students’ LinkedIn pages.



A Harvard Kennedy School student told ABC News that these CEOs and public individuals speaking out "mobilizes more people" [to do the same.] The student said the backlash and harassment students have been facing has been scary from a safety perspective and said "I have my career on the line."

Harvard students who spoke to ABC News said one of their colleagues lost a job offer due to the statement released by the pro-Palestinian student groups.

"There is like a level of 'you did something wrong for this to be happening to you, you did commit some kind of crime and you are kind of like deserving of this happening to you,'" one of the students said.

Guillette believes that the university didn’t do enough to discipline the students who signed on to the letter. When asked, he didn’t elaborate on what the disciplinary measure should be, saying it’s up to Harvard and their rules.

A student at a different Harvard college said they think speaking out is worth the potential consequences.

"The situation is too great to stay silent. And there are repercussions, but although there are doors that I'm sure will close, there are also many doors that are going to open," the student said. "I truly believe that there are a lot of people looking at the situation right now. And knowing it's messed up and are just scared to say something."

Doxxing campaign against pro-Palestinian college students ramps up originally appeared on abcnews.go.com

Progressive college students thought they had the upper hand in our culture. They lost it this week


Jennifer Graham

DESERET NEWS

Thu, October 19, 2023 

Supporters of Palestine gather at Harvard University to show their support for Palestinians in Gaza at a rally in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on Oct. 14, 2023. Thousands of Palestinians sought refuge on Oct. 14 after Israel warned them to evacuate the northern Gaza Strip before an expected ground offensive against Hamas, one week on from the deadliest attack in Israeli history. |

 Joseph Prezioso, AFP via Getty Images

Just like it’s hard to feel sorry for the tanking New England Patriots, it’s hard to feel sorry for Harvard students under fire.

Like professional football players who are paid eye-popping salaries to work out regularly and play a game, students at Harvard and other elite schools are widely regarded as the crème de la crème of their generation, poised for social and professional success on a track that seems to have been greased for them, if only by their own hard work.

But watching the doxxing of young people over their statements of support for Hamas is unsettling after the all-too-human sense of schadenfreude passes. It feels like some tenuous thread of cancel culture has snapped, plunging us all into darker territory.

As The New York Times reported, pro-Palestinian students who issued a statement “holding the Israeli regime entirely responsible for all unfolding violence” have been subjected to doxxing and hatred over the past 10 days. Even though the statement was attributed only to “Harvard Palestine Solidarity Groups,” angry people obtained the names of students associated with the groups and posted their personal information online. Several Wall Street executives asked Harvard to release the groups’ rosters to ensure “that none of us inadvertently hire any of their members.”

Additionally, the Times reported that “a truck with a digital billboard — paid for by a conservative group — circled Harvard Square, flashing student photos and names, under the headline, ‘Harvard’s Leading Antisemites.’”

This is no hanging of suspected witches, as took place 25 miles north of Cambridge in 1692. But the vitriol spilling out on Harvard’s campus and beyond is a potentially dangerous manifestation of what we lightly call cancel culture, with ramifications that will linger. And it comes at a time in which tensions are roiling internationally, as well as in our own families.

There is a sharp generational divide in how Americans view the Hamas attack and Israel’s response, and it’s playing out not only at Harvard but other schools in the Ivy League. At Columbia University in New York City, student groups issued a statement calling Israel “a settler-colonial oppressor” and the Hamas attack a “historic moment for the Palestinians of Gaza, who tore through the wall that has been suffocating them in one of the most densely populated areas on Earth.”

It’s tempting to think that these statements, issued before the savagery of the attacks was fully known, were the work of a handful of students who acted impulsively, as young people often do in their naïveté and zeal. But they are representative of a trend.

In a poll conducted last week, just 48% of Americans under the age of 45 said America should publicly support Israel in the war, compared to 78% of those 45 and older.

Two years ago, even though American evangelicals as a whole have been staunch supporters of Israel, a survey of evangelicals ages 18 to 29 found that 33.6 % sided with Israel, 24.3% with Palestinians and 42.2% were neutral. It was, as the Times of Israel reported, a “significant shift” from three years prior, when 69% of young evangelicals sided with Israel, 5.6% with the Palestinians.

As the events of the past week have shown, we’ve been sitting on a powder keg of political and generational tension about Israel and Gaza for years, and it’s exploded on our campuses, where young progressives had begun to think they had the upper hand on the culture. College students have, in recent years, had success in blocking speakers they found objectionable and forcing a national conversation about pronouns, but until now, no lives were at stake in their causes and the backlash has been mild.

University faculty and administrators have also found themselves caught up in the fray, because of celebratory statements about the Hamas attack or silence about their students’ actions. Former Harvard President Lawrence H. Summer, in particular, has sharply criticized the current administration’s lack of leadership during what he rightly called “this time of moral testing.”

But he has taken a measured approach when it comes to the censure and blacklisting of students, saying on Bloomberg’s “Wall Street Week Daily” that many of the Harvard students who belonged to the pro-Palestinian groups either didn’t know about the statement or didn’t fully understand what they were signing up for when releasing it.

“Some I’m sure were naïve and stupid,” he said. “I don’t think this is a time for individual vilification. It’s not a time for demonizing Israel, and it’s not a time for demonizing students who weren’t careful or who were silly in what they did.”

Now, as the world watches and prays over events most of us have no control over, it’s tempting to “cancel” the young and the foolish for their statements about terrorist acts in Israel, which all people should resolutely condemn.

But this is not the cancel culture that existed prior to Oct. 7, when we were canceling each other over promotional beer cans and allegedly transphobic tweets. This is different; the tension palpable, the air more flammable. And the way we respond to each other right now will affect how we relate to each other in coming years. We all need to be the grown-ups, not the kids.


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