This Week's Sneak Peek

The best college professor I had back in my salad days was a tough grader.

The course was on medieval European history, and the first paper he assigned was to critique a particular scholarly book on the topic. What we students did not know ahead of time was that the professor thought the book was poorly researched, drew incorrect conclusions, and was a complete hack job.

None of us who simply regurgitated the content of the book got an A on that paper. A wishy-washy synopsis that might have gotten an A in high school was lucky to get a C+ in this course.

Throughout the semester, he assigned contemporaneous accounts of medieval European history and demanded that we reach conclusions that were not explicitly contained in them, which involved determining facts that their authors assumed as common knowledge or sense. Only the essays which spotted the hidden clues and reached the same conclusions as our professor — or, as never happened, convinced him he was mistaken — deserved the top grade.

There has been a lot of Monday morning quarterbacking of the wishy-washy responses three university presidents gave in response to the gotcha questioning of Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-NY) last week. Everybody who was not being grilled in front of her congressional committee knows that when asked whether advocating genocide of Jews was against university policy, the correct answer was "yes, of course."

I would go further.

The university presidents ought to have asked Stefanik to point out examples of students or faculty calling for genocide of Jews. If the congresswoman had seen people demanding genocide that the academics had not, it is absolutely necessary that she let these presidents know who they are.

The news media I have seen may have decided not to lend their airwaves, newsprint, and pixels to proponents of genocide, but I'm sure that Ms. Stefanik has seen on right-wing media exactly what genocidal speech there was. 

"Death to Jews" is genocidal speech.

"Freedom for Palestine" is not.

Defending the October 7 terrorist attack is genocidal speech.

Pointing out that recent policies in Israel, the U.S., and the Arab World ignoring Palestinians' situation made Palestinian violence inevitable is not.

If "From the river to the sea" is genocidal speech, then so is "Eretz Yisrael."

Context indeed matters. So does subtext. And, of course, text.

Even if they don't fit in a protest chant or on a picket sign.

Hey, hey, ho, ho.