THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 2, 2023
Scarborough doesn't listen: Not long ago, Harvard president Claudine Gay offered some good, sound advice.
It was part of a longer statement about events in Israel and in the Gaza Strip. The good, sound advice went like this:
"We will all be well served in such a difficult moment by rhetoric that aims to illuminate and not inflame."
That was Claudine Gay's advice. She graduated from Harvard in the class of 1998, became president just last year.
We thought Gay offered good, sound advice. In our view, Joe Scarborough and his "recitation chorus" have been strongly inclined to take things down a different, louder road.
Echoing Mike Barnicle, Scarborough offered some incoherent remarks about Harvard—and therefore, presumably about Gay—on his Halloween morning shoutfest.
Tomorrow, we'll show you what he and Barnicle said. To see what the two fellows said, you can just click here. In our view, their highly imprecise ranting didn't serve to illuminate, but may well have served to inflame.
So it went on that "cable news" show, where The Guests All Say The Same Things. In an alternate vein, we recommend the Washington Post news report which appeared in print editions today beneath this regrettable headline:
DC-area schools report more bias incidents against Jews, Palestinians
Elwood and Asbury did the reporting. Their report started as shown:
Students on K-12 campuses throughout the Washington region have reported finding antisemitic graffiti in bathrooms, hallways and parking lots since the Hamas attack on Israel on Oct. 7, and Palestinian students recount being called terrorists and feeling unwelcome in their school communities.
It’s difficult to quantify the number of incidents that students are experiencing. Fairfax County Public Schools, Virginia’s largest school district, does not keep data on the types of hate or bias incidents reported in its schools, and police say they receive reports for only a small number of the episodes that do occur. Montgomery County Public Schools, Maryland’s largest school district, did not provide data on the number of incidents.
Still, community organizations have seen a surge in reports. The Jewish Community Relations Council of Greater Washington said it has experienced a “dramatic uptick” in requests for assistance from students, parents and teachers since the Oct. 7 attack, said Guila Franklin Siegel, the associate director of the organization, which serves students in Maryland, Northern Virginia and D.C. And the Council on American-Islamic Relations reported a surge of complaints, with more than 770 since the attack—the largest wave the organization said it has seen since December 2015, when former president Donald Trump announced he would pursue a “total and complete shutdown” of the entry of Muslims into the United States.
Presumably, we don't want any kids, or any teens, subjected to threats or harassment. We want Jewish kids to feel safe and respected in their schools, Palestinian kids as well.
In our view, Elwood and Asbury did a good job supporting the ancient dream of Jewish and Palestinian kids together. The general atmosphere has been quite different on the daily Scarborough show. In our view, these very, very, very rich people are often just amazingly dumb, unimpressive, blind.
Claudine Gay offered good, sound advice. MoJo has featured few takers.
Jews and Palestinians should live as equals in one state. I am Corby.
ReplyDeleteThey did live as equals in one state. But then Zionists came from Europe, and fucked it up.
DeleteWhere else should refugee Jews have gone after WWII?
DeleteThere was a two-state solution in 1948 but the Arab nations fucked that up by attacking Israel and losing their war.
Delete@6:30 PM
DeleteAfter WWII? They should have gone home, I suppose.
Or, to take over your mommy's town, and kick your mommy out of her house? Is that what you'd prefer?
Other nations would not accept them, including the USA.
DeleteHome, 9:42 AM. Home, to their own nations. Poland, Germany, Yugoslavia, Austria, etc. Where they lived before the war. Where all those who weren't Zionists had returned.
DeleteYes, 1:05 PM, you got it.
DeleteYes, to rebuild their own villages and to reclaim their own houses.
Not to raze other people's villages. Not to take other people's houses. Not to conquer "lebensraum" thousands of miles away.
And yes, that would have worked out well.
This is what Jews were supposed to go home to:
Deletehttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Jewish_violence_in_Poland,_1944%E2%80%931946
Yes, 11:18 PM, staying home in Poland, where you may have to (allegedly) occasionally call the cops, is totally, totally unbearable.
DeleteBecoming a militant racist thug ethnically cleansing and colonizing Palestine is so much more exciting.
Thank you, I can see it clearly now.
"Ir was part of a longer statement about events in Israel and in the Gaza Strip. The good, sound advice went like this:
ReplyDelete"We will all be well served in such a difficult moment by rhetoric that aims to illuminate and not inflame."
Somerby provides no link to this statement. That means we cannot know when it was said, nor in what context. She might have been talking about anything and it may be long enough ago that it wasn't said about Israel/Gaza at all but about some entirely different situation.
When people say something, a person quoting them should give a cite or a link so that we can know what they were really talking about.
Why does Somerby not do this? He prefers to use other people's words for his own purposes. He wants to pretend Gay was talking about Scarborough or Israel, when she may have been talking about something unrelated to Somerby's latest agenda, something that she herself was concerned about. Unfortunately, we cannot know what that may have been, because Somerby does not provide a link or a cite.
If Somerby did this in a term paper at Harvard, he would get an F on it. Here, he is just being dishonest. Note that he does link to Elwood and Ashbury, Scarborough and Barnicle. Those guys all get links. Not Gay.
The point is that Somerby should have provided the link.
DeleteSomerby does not link to Gays.
DeleteGeorge, that’s not the statement. It’s a report about the statement, quoting a few words. I am not Corby.
DeleteOK gang, here it comes: Somerby is correct.
ReplyDeleteThough there is some solid reporting to back
up the Joe Gang’s pronouncements, he was at his, if not frothing worst, his frothing pretty bad this morning. To be fair, he also notes that the other side can come in for similar abuse, on campus and off.
We would also note that Bob’s own posts on the campus reactions lean to the same sort of grandstanding, albeit in a different style.
Morning Joe is given to this sort of thing, and NOT always leaning towards “our tribe.”
Peirs Morgan, who I have never previously liked. has been doing quality work on the crisis. He lets both sides stake their ground, sometimes (to my ear) not in their sides best interest.
Anonymouse 5:49pm:
Delete“Peirs Morgan, who I have never previously liked. has been doing quality work on the crisis. He lets both sides stake their ground, sometimes (to my ear) not in their sides best interest.”
I thought leftists call that now obsolete practice of journalism “bothsiderism”.
No, Cecelia. “Bothsiderism” is NOT presenting both sides of an issue. It means the practice of bringing up issues not directly related to a story to make both sides (Republicans and Democrats) seem equally inept, corrupt, etc. Did you seriously not know that?
Deletemh, that would include me and most of the free world not knowing that limited definition.
DeleteThe term is bandied about whenever the media allows someone to express a position that is counter some shibboleth of the left.
Oh for God’s sake. Look it up. It’s also called false balance:
Deletehttps://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_balance#:~:text=False%20balance%2C%20also%20bothsidesism%2C%20is,viewpoints%20than%20the%20evidence%20supports.
“ False balance, also bothsidesism, is a media bias in which journalists present an issue as being more balanced between opposing viewpoints than the evidence supports.”
Have you learned something?
Nope, because it’s also widely used as a designation for false equivalency.
DeleteAs in the leftwing reproach that the media allowing the concept of color blindness to be expounded upon concurrently with DEI is bothsiderism.
Cecelia, you're very confused. That is never how bothsiderism is used in my experience.
DeleteSan Bankman-Fried is guilty.
ReplyDeletehttps://www.reuters.com/legal/ftx-founder-sam-bankman-fried-thought-rules-did-not-apply-him-prosecutor-says-2023-11-02/
Not San. Sam.
DeleteBob Somerby is an Other, but I respect him.
ReplyDeleteThe UN general assembly says we should end our blockade of Cuba. We say buck off. Only Israel votes with us. Ukraine abstains.
ReplyDeletehttps://apnews.com/article/cuba-us-economic-embargo-resolution-condemn-20bceb7216fe3eea18bec8d81372c15b
Today Iran's envoy was selected to chair a U.N. human rights council meeting in Geneva. IIMO the UN today does more harm than good.
DeleteMaybe we could just end our embargo on Cuba?
DeleteRepublicans will not be satisfied until they turn Harvard into Hooterville. They already own the airwaves and have the media so cowed they are afraid of their own shadow. It just frustrates them that they don't control our universities yet, but don't worry, it is coming. Take a look at what Ron DeSanctimonious is doing in Florida.
ReplyDelete