What was Stefanik talking about?

THURSDAY, DECEMBER 7, 2023

Also, a painful profile: We'll start with a pair of questions we asked in yesterday's post. With renewed apologies for the need to ask, our questions went like this:

Have people on the Harvard campus been "calling for the genocide of the Jewish people?"

If that's been happening at Harvard, why haven't we seen the videotape of such remarkable conduct? 

We asked those questions after watching (some) videotape from Tuesday's congressional hearing about antisemitism on college campuses. In particular, we'd watched the videotape which was aired during an inexcusable, deeply unhelpful segment on yesterday's Morning Joe.

For our money, the program's behavior has been appalling this week, right on through today.

In the excerpts shown on yesterday's Morning Joe, Rep. Elise Stefanik is shown asking the presidents of Harvard and Penn if calls for the genocide of the Jewish people violate their schools' codes of conduct. If you watch the Morning Joe tape, the first question Stefanik asks is this:

"And Dr. Gay, at Harvard, does calling for the genocide of Jews violate Harvard's rules of bullying and harassment? Yes or no?"

Harvard's president, Claudine Gay, offers a fuzzy reply. She doesn't say yes and she doesn't say no—but that's the question Stefanik has asked.

Yesterday, we continued to wonder. Have people on the Harvard campus really been calling for the genocide of Jews? 

In search of an answer, we watched the relevant sections of C-Span's tape of the hearing. As we did, we learned what Stefanik actually had in mind as she kept asking such questions. 

Needless to say, Morning Joe's edited tape didn't include what follows. But early in her grilling of Gay, Stefanik had offered her own definition of a highly evocative term:

STEFANIK (2/5/23): Let me ask you this. You are president of Harvard, so I assume you're familiar with the term "intifada," correct?

GAY: I have heard that term, yes.

STEFANIK: So you understand that the use of the term "intifada" in the context of the Israeli-Arab conflict is indeed a call for violent armed resistance against the state of Israel, including violence against civilians and the genocide of Jews. Are you aware of that?

Gay offered a fuzzy response; she didn't agree or disagree with what Stefanik had said about the use of that term. Thus enabled, Stefanik was soon saying this:

STEFANIK: So based upon your testimony, you understand that this call for intifada is to commit genocide against the Jewish people in Israel and globally, correct?

Gay offered another fuzzy response. But at least we now understood the meaning of Stefanik's highly evocative questions.

According to Stefanik, if students use the term "intifada," they're calling for the global genocide of the Jewish people. So it goes when people like Stefanik perform at congressional hearings.

(To watch that exchange, click here, then move ahead to 1:30.)

In our view, Tuesday's hearings, and their aftermath, have been a full-blown disaster. In our view, three different parties have been at fault:

In our view, the problem starts with the routinely horrible Stefanik. In her "grilling" of the three college presidents, she behaved in all the ways which have become standard at such hearings.

She asked fuzzy, inflammatory questions, then routinely interrupted the witnesses as soon as they tried to respond. In the childish manner of such hearings, she kept demanding "yes or no answers" to questions which plainly called for more detail. These demands were accompanied by the standard insults, and by the standard calls for the targets to resign.

The problem started with Stefanik, but the college presidents were also grossly at fault. They seemed almost wholly unprepared to respond to Stefanik's admittedly inflammatory questions.

We'd give Stefanik a failing grade, but so too with the hapless presidents. Worst of all were Joe and Mika and their hand-picked assortment of echoes and hacks. In our view, their conduct has been disgraceful all week—disgraceful and deeply unhelpful.

We refer to the way they've presented this congressional hearing, but also to the two separate programs on which they savaged Rep. Pramila Jayapal for some wholly innocuous statements on Sunday's State of the Union program. More on that to come.

The woods are lovely, dark and deep, but our floundering nation is in major trouble. That said, House hearings have been a clown show for years. So too with cable news broadcasts.

As for the college presidents, their work was astoundingly poor. 

In fairness, it isn't easy for witnesses to perform well at our clown-car congressional hearings. That's even true when experienced Washington insiders are subjected to the behaviors which are common at these made-for-TV events.

Even given those caveats, the college president performed remarkably poorly. There skill levels seemed to be almost wholly nonexistent.

At any rate, we now know what the gruesome Stefanik was actually talking about. We also know why we've seen no videotape of people on the Harvard campus "calling for the genocide of the Jewish people" as that highly inflammatory phrase would normally be understood.

Stating the obvious, this should have been explained on Morning Joe. Instead, the program's highly performative stars staged a clown show of their own.

You can be fairly sure of one thing: Joe and Mika had no real idea what Joe was shouting about. Almost surely, they hadn't performed the basic prep. Instead, they and their ducklings postured and posed, in a way which is indistinguishable from what's being said on Fox.

What has been happening at these colleges? On Tuesday, people like the gruesome Stefanik made no attempt to find out. Ditto for Mika and Joe and for the handpicked guests who all sing from their songbook.

We'll offer more in the next day or two. We've been appalled by what we've seen on Morning Joe all week.

Can a large modern nation really function this way? Almost surely, the answer is no.

Meanwhile, what has been happening at those colleges? Has anyone tried to find out?

Tomorrow: Tears of rage! A brilliant, painful front-page profile in today's New York Times