On unfair attacks – Randall Kennedy in LRB:

“A recent front-page article in the New York Times referred to Gay’s ‘tepid response to antisemitism on campus’ and her ‘disastrous’ congressional testimony. This is now the received version of her performance – an assessment which, if accurate, might well seem to justify her removal. However, the assessment is wrong. Gay’s testimony should have been commended for reasons that have been overlooked in the most influential journalistic accounts. She said repeatedly, and with conviction, that she finds antisemitism abhorrent. She didn’t refuse, as she is accused of doing, to condemn the rhetoric of the student activists who evinced no concern for the victims of Hamas’s violence. She denounced it as ‘thoughtless, reckless and hateful’. But, at the same time, she was careful to emphasise her commitment to freedom of expression – even when it’s wholly objectionable.
For many of Gay’s most fervent detractors, her gravest failing was her unwillingness to state unequivocally that to call for genocide would be in violation of Harvard policy – which would have meant that anyone deemed to be calling for genocide would be subject to discipline, including, presumably, expulsion. Here two points need to be made. First, the talk about genocide was abstract; no one at Harvard had expressly called for genocide. Second, it should be recognised that what Stefanik was attempting to do was to stigmatise as genocidal some of the rhetoric used by pro-Palestinian activists. That is the backdrop against which the exchange took place.
Gay insisted that attention had to be given to the precise context in which such an utterance was made. The Harvard Law School professor Charles Fried, who served as solicitor general in Ronald Reagan’s administration, defended her position. Supreme Court doctrine, he pointed out, holds that even the ugliest, most menacing speech is protected against punishment so long as it is what the court terms ‘mere advocacy’ and falls short of inciting unlawful action in circumstances likely to produce such action. Many Americans are ignorant of the extent to which American law protects speech, even hate speech. But the question posed in the hearing was not about what the boundaries of free speech should be but about what they are. Some complained that Gay had answered Stefanik’s question in a legalistic fashion. But Stefanik’s question was itself legalistic. It seems that Gay’s mistake was to take the questions seriously and answer them precisely – in other words, to act like an academic.”

(…)

“Why was the (false) narrative of rampant campus antisemitism, soon consolidated as ‘fact’ through constant repetition, questioned so little by those in a position to make a difference to the construction of public discourse? For one thing, many good people want to avoid being (or being seen as) soft on prejudice. Bigotry towards Jews is ancient and widespread, and has often been deadly. Anti-Jewish prejudice has a history at Harvard. The notorious Abbott Lawrence Lowell, university president between 1909 and 1933, imposed a covert quota on Jewish enrolment and nourished an antisemitic animus that burdened Jews at Harvard for decades. And there have been episodes recently in which students have reportedly been mistreated because they are Jewish. On a campus housing several thousand young people (alongside thousands of academics and administrators), conflicts will erupt in which prejudice surfaces. Antisemitism, however, is not a widespread and powerful presence at Harvard. Over the past half-century, the university has offered refuge and encouragement to Jewish students, professors and administrators and has decisively marginalised antisemitism. That work is not undone by the small number of antisemitic incidents that are endlessly invoked as evidence of a supposed ‘epidemic’ or ‘resurgence’ of anti-Jewish mistreatment. The question is whether such incidents speak of an institution in which anti-Jewish bigotry is common, or one in which anti-Jewish bigotry is an outlier. There is no question but that at Harvard today anti-Jewish bigotry is an outlier.”

(…)

“What is happening at Harvard is part of a cultural struggle of long duration, one that has no end in sight. The congressional demagogues who staged the antisemitism hearing are now demanding that the university turn over all documentation bearing on its internal investigation of the plagiarism accusations against Gay. Their success in ousting her has encouraged them to encroach further on the university’s autonomy. They are threatening its tax-exempt status, for example, and its suitability to receive government funding. They do not currently have the political power that would be needed to carry through those threats. But this is an election year in which the leading Republican presidential candidates have indicated that they would happily participate in Harvard’s evisceration. Even if the worst is avoided, the assaults on the university are already prompting internal discussion about the need to rein in the academic left, recruit from the academic right and adopt a stance that is more accommodating to those who wield financial and political power.
‘Among the many convenient targets that Republican politicians and intellectuals have at their disposal,’ Richard Rorty wrote in an essay called ‘Demonising the Academy’ in 1995, ‘the one at which they direct their fire with perhaps the most delight is the academy.’ This delight has been on full display during the humiliation of the three university presidents. What’s urgently needed are academic leaders who, while willing to be self-critical, are better able to defend themselves against unfair attack.”

Read the article here.

It’s clear that anti-Semitism has been used as a weapon against certain minorities, in Europe especially against Muslims. This serves two purposes, it whitewashes European history and it disguises xenophobia and Islamophobia as a fights against this ugly specter of antisemitism.
This doesn’t mean that antisemitism doesn’t exists among Muslims. It exists also there, but that’s not the point.
The congressional hearing of the three (female) presidents was unfortunate, it was a public relations disaster for the presidents, who seemed to be unable to do more than delivering legalism after legalism.

This article and some other articles as well make clear that this perception is unfair.
It doesn’t mention the culture of victimhood, and the competition among real or perceived victims which is one of the roots of the spectacle we all could see.

Needless to say, all this was closely connected to the debate about Israel and Palestine, which is among other things also about the question, who is the victim, who is the real victim? The fact that ugly speech is protected against punishment is something that should not be taken lightly. A Ministry of Truth is as unpleasant as a Ministry against Ugly Speech. That doesn’t mean of course that words are innocent, quite the opposite, but the medicine is often worse than the illness.

Not every uttering that is unpleasant or even deeply unpleasant should be taken as a sign that the environment is unsafe and the existence of this or that minority is under threat.
Resilience means also that you are able to pick your enemies wisely. Not everybody is worthy of being your enemy. After all, an enemy is strangely intimate, almost like a lover.