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    What I would have told Congress if i were in Nemat Shafik’s shoes | Francine Prose

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    Surely I’m not the only person who has wondered what I would say if I were one of the college presidents who has been summoned to testify before the House committee on education and the workforce. How would I answer their unmistakably hostile questions about how the war in Gaza has been affecting campus life – and about how the university administration is dealing with the divisive and threatening atmosphere that the conflict has created among students and faculty?After two presidents – Harvard’s Claudine Gay and the University of Pennsylvania’s M Elizabeth Magill – lost their jobs this winter, at least partly because of their responses to the committee’s interrogation, I imagined that I might have tried to sound more thoughtful, more human, less lawyered up, more cognizant of the difficulties and complexities inherent in these issues. But both women seemed to be repeating what they’d been instructed to say. They claimed that their response to an openly antisemitic statement would depend on context, a word that – they must have known – was wide open to the misinterpretation, dissatisfaction and mockery it almost instantly engendered. I even imagined appealing to the lawmakers’ decency and intelligence, to their sense that we were all working to find a way to end this brutal war. But, as time has shown, that would have been an absurd idea.Now that the Columbia University president, Minouche Shafik, has been called before the committee to testify about her administration’s handling of campus unrest – disciplining protesters, prohibiting demonstrations, considering whether or not to fire professors who have been accused of being overly zealous in their support of Israel or Palestine – the circumstances surrounding the subject have changed.The war has been going on for months. More than 30,000 people have died as we sign letters and petitions, block roadways, give speeches and post on social media even as we feel (and prove to be) increasingly powerless to end the carnage. So I have come to imagine a somewhat different response to the committee’s questions:“With all due respect, esteemed committee members, let me get one thing straight. The war that you are approving and partly funding is understandably causing division and anguish and a sense of crisis on my campus – and you are blaming me? Are we surprised that the massive bloodletting which the average American citizen feels powerless to staunch might be causing tensions to run high in a community – an academic community – whose members have strong political and religious loyalties and which, as an institution, values free speech?“Is it so hard to imagine that a war that we taxpayers are partly supporting might wind down if our government took a stronger position against it? Again, with all due respect, don’t you think there’s something shameful about using the deaths of more than 30,000 human beings as an excuse to go after our universities and try to exert control over those bastions of the ‘liberal elite’. And aren’t such places – for all their flaws, their expansion plans that have razed low-income neighborhoods, their reprehensible investment policies, their ties to morally sketchy corporate and private donors – nonetheless dedicated to the principles of education, which (at least some of us think) is a good thing.“Excuse me if I can’t remember when precisely the government was authorized to oversee the policies of private universities and determine the punishment of those who offend certain standards determined by politicians.“And while we’re on the subject of professors being censured and possibly fired for making (allegedly) extremist statements” – Shafik has apparently agreed to terminate the contract of a tenured professor accused of being pro-Hamas – “shouldn’t the same standards and penalties be applied to members of this very committee who, in their virulence, have outdone the most outspoken faculty members?“Though he later attempted to amend and explain his statement, the Michigan Republican representative Tim Walberg suggested that the proper response to the war in Gaza might be to simply nuke the territory. ‘It should be like Nagasaki and Hiroshima. Get it over quick.’ Nor was Walberg alone in his suggestion about how to deal with Gaza. Senator Lindsey Graham proposed that we should ‘level the place’.”Meanwhile, the killing goes on, and we – that is, our government – continue to condone and support it. The war has caused every negative aspect of human behavior to bubble to the surface. The rhetoric of rancor and hatred has spiked. Antisemitic incidents have risen at a terrifying rate. Three Palestinian students were shot on the streets of Burlington, Vermont.My ultimate answer to the US representatives currently interrogating Shafik would be this: “Throughout history, wars have begun and ended. This one too will have to end. Leave our educational institutions alone. The conflict in the Middle East is not their fault. Were we to join together in working toward a peaceful resolution to the slaughter and famine in Gaza, I can almost promise you: the rancor, the unrest, the division in academia is not a permanent situation that anyone expects or desires to perpetuate. It’s not conducive to learning. Broker a viable solution to the conflict, and the rage and misery on our college campuses will disappear on its own – as soon, or very soon after, the war ends.”
    Francine Prose is a novelist. Her memoir, 1974: A Personal History, will be published in June More

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      Columbia president assailed at highly charged antisemitism Congress hearing

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      The head of a prestigious US university clashed with members of Congress today in highly charged hearings over a reported upsurge in antisemitism on campus in the wake of Israel’s war in Gaza.Minouche Shafik, the president of Columbia University, appeared beleaguered and uncertain as one Congress member after another assailed her over her institution’s supposed inaction to stop it becoming what one called “a hotbed of antisemitism and hatred”.Wednesday’s hearing follows months of rising tensions between pro-Israel and pro-Palestinian demonstrators on the Columbia campus, amid disputes over what constitutes antisemitism and controversy about whether it should encompass anti-Zionism and opposition to Israel as a Jewish state.The hearing of the House of Representatives’ education and workforce committee is being staged under the emotive title of “Columbia in Crisis: Columbia University’s Response to Anti-Semitism.” A group of Jewish academics at the university have denounced the hearing in advance as heralding “a new McCarthyism”.At the hearing Shafik was repeatedly asked to explain the continued presence of one faculty member, Joseph Massad, after he had reportedly praised Hamas’s attack last October that left around 1,200 Israelis dead.In one particularly aggressive line of questioning, Elise Stefanik pushed Shafik to commit to removing Massad as chair of an academic review committee.Stefanik also pressed a harried Shafik, who became Columbia’s president last July, into changing her testimony after she earlier told the Democratic representative Ilhan Omar that she was not aware of any anti-Jewish demonstrations at the university.Pressing relentlessly, Stefanik effectively drove a wedge between Shafik and her three fellow senior Columbia colleagues, David Schizer, Claire Shipman, and David Greenwald – all members of the university’s antisemitism taskforce – by leading them to testify that there had in fact been aggressive and threatening antisemitic statements in campus demonstrations.Earlier, Shafik – trying to straddle between condemning antisemitism and permitting statements that some defined as free speech – struggled when confronted by Lisa McClain, the Republican representative from Michigan over the slogan “from the river to the sea” and support for a Palestinian intifada (uprising).“Are mobs shouting from the River to the Sea Palestine will be free or long live the infitada [sic] …antisemitic comments?” McClain asked.“When I hear those terms, I find them very upsetting,” Shafik responded.“That’s a great answer to a question I didn’t ask, so let me repeat the question,” McClain persisted. Shafik answered: “I hear them as such. Some people don’t.”“Why is it so tough?” McClain pressed. In answer, Shafik said: “Because it’s a difficult issue because some hear it as antisemitic others do not.”She eventually appeared to fold under pressure, answering “yes” and laughing nervously after McClain posed the same question to the president’s fellow Columbia staff, all of whom agreed that it was antisemitic.The hearing was something of a reprise of the committee’s previous cross-examination of the heads of three other elite universities, Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, last December.That hearing led to the resignation of the University of Pennsylvania’s president, Elizabeth Magill, after she gave what were deemed to be over-legalistic answers to pointed questions from Stefanik over whether her institution’s rules on free speech permitted slogans that supporters of Israel interpret as calling for genocide.It also intensified the pressure on Harvard’s then president, Claudine Gay, whose responses to Stefanik were similarly criticised. Gay survived the immediate outcry over the hearing but stepped down weeks later over plagiarism allegations.Columbia has set up a taskforce on antisemitism but its members have declined to establish a firm definition.Rightwingers have painted the university as a hotbed of antisemitism, while opponents have accused the institution’s authorities of disproportionately punishing pro-Palestinian students who criticise Israel. The university last year suspended two groups, Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voice for Peace, over their protest activities.Shafik – an Egyptian-born, British-American economist and former deputy governor of the Bank of England – had reportedly prepared assiduously for Wednesday’s event in an effort to avoid the pitfalls of her fellow university heads.Writing in the Wall Street Journal on the eve of the hearing, Shafik said legitimate expression should occur “within specific parameters”.“Most of the people protesting do so from a place of genuine political disagreement, not from personal hatred or bias or support for terrorism,” she wrote.“Their passion, as long as it doesn’t cross the line into threats, discrimination or harassment, should be protected speech on our campus.“Calling for the genocide of a people – whether they are Israelis or Palestinians, Jews, Muslims or anyone else – has no place in a university community. Such words are outside the bounds of legitimate debate and unimaginably harmful,” the op-ed continued.Her remarks appeared aimed at avoiding the criticism drawn by Magill and Gay over their appearance before the committee, when both responded to Stefanik’s questions about theoretical calls for genocide by referring to context.In an effort to bolster Shafik, 23 Jewish faculty members wrote an open letter published in the campus newspaper, the Columbia Spectator, criticising the premise of the hearing.“Based on the committee’s previous hearings, we are gravely concerned about the false narratives that frame these proceedings to entrap witnesses,” they wrote. “We urge you, as the university president, to defend our shared commitment to universities as sites of learning, critical thinking, and knowledge production against this new McCarthyism.”The academics also questioned the credentials of Stefanik – an outspoken supporter of Donald Trump – on antisemitism, saying she had a history of “espousing white nationalist policies”.As Shafik and her colleagues testified, the unrest that has characterized university life over the past six months was on display on Columbia’s campus, where students set up approximately 60 tents on the campus’s south lawn in the early hours of Wednesday. The tents, many of which were covered in signs that read “Liberated Zone” and “Israel bombs, Columbia pays”, were set up to urge the university to divest its ties from Israel.The university perimeters were lined with metal barricades and a heavy police presence, and the campus, which is usually accessible to the public, was restricted to Columbia ID holders.Members of the media were prohibited from entering the university, instead restricted to a barricaded pen near a bus stop outside the campus as student chants could be heard from inside the grounds. “Say it loud, say it clear, we don’t want no Zionists here,” some students chanted, according to the Columbia Spectator. A handful of protesters also crowded around the university’s main gates, with many shouting: “We say no to genocide!”
      This article was amended on 17 April 2024 to correctly identify the school where Elizabeth Magill resigned as president last year. The school was the University of Pennsylvania, not Pennsylvania University. More

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      US university presidents face firestorm over evasive answers on antisemitism

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      The presidents of three of the nation’s top universities are facing intense backlash, including from the White House, after they appeared to evade questions during a congressional hearing about whether calls by students for the genocide of Jews would constitute harassment under the schools’ codes of conduct.In a contentious, hours-long debate on Tuesday, the presidents of Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) sought to address the steps they were taking to combat rising antisemitism on campus since the beginning of the Israel-Hamas war. But it was their careful, indirect response to a question posed by the Republican congresswoman Elise Stefanik of New York that drew scathing criticism.In an exchange that has now gone viral, Stefanik, a graduate of Harvard, pressed Elizabeth Magill, the president of UPenn, on Tuesday to say whether students calling for the genocide of Jews would be disciplined under the university’s code of conduct. In her line of questioning, Stefanik appeared to be conflating chants calling for “intifada” – a word that in Arabic means uprising, and has been used in reference to both peaceful and violent Palestinian protest – with hypothetical calls for genocide.“If the speech turns into conduct, it can be harassment,” Magill replied, in a reference to distinctions in first amendment law. “It is a context-dependent decision.” Stefanik pushed her to answer “yes” or “no”, which Magill did not.The backlash was swift and bipartisan.“It’s unbelievable that this needs to be said: calls for genocide are monstrous and antithetical to everything we represent as a country,” said Andrew Bates, a White House spokesperson. “Any statements that advocate for the systematic murder of Jews are dangerous and revolting – and we should all stand firmly against them, on the side of human dignity and the most basic values that unite us as Americans.”The White House was joined by several Jewish officials and leaders in condemning the university presidents’ testimony before the US House committee on education and the workforce, at a hearing called by Republicans titled Holding Campus Leaders Accountable and Confronting Antisemitism.Josh Shapiro, the Democratic governor of Pennsylvania, said the simple response was “yes, that violates our policy.” Speaking to reporters on Wednesday, Shapiro urged UPenn’s board to meet soon, as a petition calling for Magill’s resignation garnered thousands of signatures. According to CNN, Penn’s board of trustees held an “emergency meeting” on Thursday.The liberal Harvard law professor Laurence Tribe noted that he rarely agreed with Stefanik, a far-right Trump ally, but wrote: “I’m with her here.”The Harvard president Claudine Gay’s “hesitant, formulaic, and bizarrely evasive answers were deeply troubling to me and many of my colleagues, students, and friends”. Tribe added.Republican presidential candidates also seized on the episode, folding it into their broader criticism of the US’s elite institutions as too “woke” and liberal.In an interview with the conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt on Thursday, Ron DeSantis, who has led the rightwing crackdown on higher education as Florida’s governor, said the college presidents’ lack of moral clarity was a reflection of the liberal orthodoxy permeating higher education.“I think what this has revealed is the rot and the sickness that’s been festering inside higher education for a long time,” said DeSantis, a graduate of Harvard Law School who is running for president. He continued: “They should not be these hotbeds of anti-Americanism and anti-Semitism. But that’s what they’ve become.”Amid a surge in youth activism around the conflict, university leaders have struggled to balance the free speech of some pro-Palestinian activists with the fears of Jewish students who say the rhetoric crosses a line into antisemitism. In a number of cases, schools have responded by banning campus groups supportive of Palestinian rights.During their appearances, Magill, Gay and Sally Kornbluth of MIT all expressed alarm at the rise of antisemitism and Islamophobia on college campuses, some of which have triggered federal investigations by the Department of Education. In response, the presidents said they had taken steps to increase security measures and reporting tools while expanding mental health and counseling services. They also said it was their responsibility to ensure college campuses remain a place of free expression and free thought.In a new statement on Wednesday, Gay stated: “There are some who have confused a right to free expression with the idea that Harvard will condone calls for violence against Jewish students. Let me be clear: calls for violence or genocide against the Jewish community, or any religious or ethnic group are vile, they have no place at Harvard, and those who threaten our Jewish students will be held to account.”Magill also sought to clarify her remarks to the committee in a video statement, in which she said her response to Stefanik’s question was an attempt to parse the university policies stating that speech alone is not punishable. But in doing so she said she failed to acknowledge the “irrefutable fact” that such speech represents a “call for some of the most terrible violence human beings can perpetuate.“I want to be clear, a call for genocide of Jewish people is threatening – deeply so,” she said, adding: “In my view, it would be harassment or intimidation.”In the video, posted to X, Magill said the university’s policies “need to be clarified and evaluated” and committed to immediately convening a process to do so.Some free speech advocates expressed alarm at the possibility that universities may respond to the backlash by adopting speech-restrictive policies that depart from the protections of the first amendment, which governs government actors including public schools. But the universities at issue in Tuesday’s hearing are all private. Fire, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, called Magill’s comments on re-evaluating Penn’s policies a “deeply troubling, profoundly counterproductive response” to the anger.“Were Penn to retreat from the robust protection of expressive rights, university administrators would make inevitably political decisions about who may speak and what may be said on campus,” it said in a statement. The result of placing new limits on speech, it said, would mean “dissenting and unpopular speech – whether pro-Israeli or pro-Palestinian, conservative or liberal – will be silenced”. More

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      Members of Texas Republican party free to associate with Nazi sympathizers

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      Members of Texas’s Republican party are free to associate with Nazi sympathizers without worries of violating internal policy after they held a vote on Saturday.In a 32-29 vote, the party’s executive committee decided against excluding from their organization those “known to espouse or tolerate antisemitism, pro-Nazi sympathies or Holocaust denial”. A proposal to ban such individuals was included in a resolution supporting Israel as it wars with Hamas in Gaza.Although the resolution passed, the clause banning members from associating with Nazi sympathizers did not make it in.Some members of the executive committee argued that the clause was too vague.One was committee member Dan Tully, who maintained that the clause “could put you on a slippery slope”.Committee members in favor of the clause expressed their disappointment of the vote to the Texas Tribune.Rolando Garcia, a committee member who drafted the language of the clause banning ties to Nazi sympathizers, said its removal from the approved resolution “sends a disturbing message”.“We’re not specifying any individual or association,” Garcia said. “This is simply a statement of principle.”Morgan Cisneros Graham, another committee member in favor of the clause, said she did not understand how some of her colleagues “don’t have the discernment to define what a Nazi is”.Some members of the board also tried to prevent evidence of the vote, the Texas Tribune reported.The vote was held shortly after the Texas Tribune photographed the Republican state representative Jonathan Stickland meeting with white nationalist Nick Fuentes.Fuentes is an avowed admirer of Hitler, whose regime murdered 6 million Jews during the Holocaust around the time of the second world war. He has also previously called for a “holy war” against Jews.After news of the meeting, the committee debated dissociating with Stickland’s political action committee Defend Texas Liberty. Instead, the clause aiming to ban antisemitism was added into the resolution.The vote in Texas came after Israel launched war in the Palestinian city of Gaza after Hamas’s 7 October attack on Israel killed at least 1,200 people. The number of Palestinian people killed by Israeli strikes and bombardments that followed has surpassed 15,200, according to the Gaza health ministry.Israel – one of the US’s closest allies – has long been supported by the American Republican party.Nikki Haley and Chris Christie are among the 2024 Republican presidential election hopefuls who have voiced support for more US military aid to Israel in its war with Hamas.The Republican frontrunner Donald Trump has been less clear about his approach to Middle East foreign policy, but the former president has said in the past that there had been “no better friend or ally of Israel” than his White House.Florida governor and Republican presidential candidate Ron DeSantis said he would “stand with Israel and treat terrorists like the scum they are” if he was elected to the Oval Office.The Texas state Republican party did not immediately respond to a request for comment. More

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      Attack on Aipac president’s home in LA investigated as hate crime – reports

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      A protest outside the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (Aipac) president’s Los Angeles home is reportedly being investigated as a possible hate crime after social media videos showed demonstrators igniting smoke devices and spattering fake blood.According to reports by the Los Angeles Times and other news outlets, Aipac president Michael Tuchin’s home in the Brentwood section was vandalized Thursday on Thanksgiving by protesters who also pounded pots in the driveway and held up a sign that read: “Fuck your holiday, baby killer.”The Los Angeles police department (LAPD) confirmed it had responded to the block where Tuchin’s house is. The department posted on X – formerly known as Twitter – that protesters “caused a disturbance” weeks after the Israel-Hamas war that erupted in October.“West LA officers responded [and] took crime reports for vandalism/hate crime [and] assault [with a] deadly weapon,” the department added. “Investigations are on-going. No arrests have been made at this time.”The Los Angeles mayor, Karen Bass, added in a separate post that she has spoken with Tuchin – an attorney by profession – about the “disturbing” case.Bass wrote: “Hate and violence will not be tolerated in our city. LAPD will continue to work with city and business leaders to keep Angelenos safe.”Bass later removed Tuchin’s name from the post, saying it was “for the safety of those involved”. Police said they do not identify the victims of possible crimes and declined to formally identify Tuchin as the target of the demonstrators.Video posted by Sam Yebri, a former Los Angeles city council candidate, showed smoke billowing in the street as people yelled.Yebri said that “pro-Hamas activists committed a terroristic hate crime in Brentwood, throwing smoke bombs at [and] vandalizing the home of the national president of one of America’s leading Jewish organizations”.“This is what happened in Nazi Germany before the ovens and [crematoriums],” Yebri said, clearly referring to the murder of 6 million Jews in the Holocaust during the second world war.A neighbor of Tuchin’s told NBC that when he realized the private property was being attacked by demonstrators he – as a Jew – felt compelled to intervene.“They put red paint on the car, on the driveway, on the windows,” the neighbor said. “They were terrorizing our neighbor.”The neighbor, who declined to be identified, said that during the confrontation he was hit from behind with a steel pole. Police officers called to the scene made the demonstrators march back down the street.On Friday, the police department declared a citywide tactical alert “to ensure sufficient resources to address any incident”. There were more pro-Palestinian protests planned that day.Groups protesting against the war Israel launched in Gaza in response to Hamas’s deadly 7 October attack against Israel have criticized how authorities and media have addressed the protest at the home of Tuchin, who led a successful bankruptcy-related restructuring of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer.“Media is in lockstep with LA elected officials & the LAPD to spin this protest as an ‘antisemitic hate crime,’” J-Town Action と Solidarity – which describes itself as a local grassroots collective – wrote on X. J-Town accused news organizations and officials of downplaying Tuchin’s role with Aipac.Los Angeles, home to large populations of Jews and Palestinians, has seen increasing tensions over the Israel-Hamas war.Earlier this month, the parking lot of the iconic Canter’s Deli was defaced with “Free Gaza” and “Israel’s only religion is capitalism”. Similar messages were also scrawled close to a nearby synagogue and condemned by Bass as an “unacceptable rash of hate”. More

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      Musk ‘believes in America’: DeSantis defends X owner after antisemitic post

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      Ron DeSantis defended Elon Musk as “a guy that believes in America” on Sunday as the Florida governor refused to condemn X’s billionaire owner for an antisemitic post that caused numerous key advertisers to desert the social media platform.In an interview Sunday on CNN’s State of the Union, the Republican Florida governor claimed he had not seen the message on the platform that was formerly known as Twitter. The message – in which Musk said an X user who accused Jewish people of hating white people was speaking “the actual truth” – was denounced by the White House on Friday as “abhorrent”.Instead, DeSantis dedicated his remarks on CNN to exalting Musk as a banner carrier for free speech. And he dismissed other prominent right wingers who have expressed antisemitic positions as “fringe voices”.“Elon has had a target on his back ever since he purchased Twitter, because I think he’s taking it into a direction that a lot of people who are used to controlling the narrative don’t like,” said DeSantis, whose campaign for the Republican 2024 nomination continues to crater. “I was a big supporter of him purchasing Twitter.”When State of the Union host Jake Tapper brought Musk’s widely condemned “actual truth” message to the screen, DeSantis said he had “no idea what the context is” and said he would not “pass judgment on the fly”, although he said he stood against antisemitism “across the board”.“I know Elon Musk,” DeSantis said. “I’ve never seen him do anything. I think he’s a guy that believes in America, I’ve never seen him indulge in any of that. So it’s surprising if that’s true.”Critics have previously accused the governor of being slow to condemn rallies by neo-Nazis in his state, some carrying flags with the words: “This is DeSantis country.” He has attempted to portray the criticism as a “smear campaign” by political opponents while a campaign aide posted a “reprehensible” tweet suggesting DeSantis’s Nazi supporters were actually Democratic party staffers.After Sunday’s CNN interview, senior Democrats were skeptical of DeSantis’s insistence he hadn’t seen Musk’s message. The message drew headlines globally and prompted disgusted major companies – including Apple, Disney, IBM and Warner Brothers – to suspend advertising on X.“The guy’s running for president, and Elon Musk [posted] that on Wednesday. It’s Sunday. So this is four days later, and he has not had the chance to read what Musk wrote? That is very hard for me to believe,” Democratic US House member Jamie Raskin of Maryland told Tapper.“You showed it to him, and he still refused to condemn it. If you’re serious about condemning and confronting antisemitism, and racism, and these bigotries, which are the gateway to destruction of liberal democracy, you’ve got to be explicit and open and full throated about it when you’ve got [the opportunity] to denounce antisemitism and racism across the board.”DeSantis has vocally supported Israel since its war with Hamas began in October. On Sunday, he urged greater US support for the Israeli’s military’s onslaught against Hamas in Gaza.“We need to let Israel win this war,” DeSantis said. “We should support them publicly and privately to actually finish the job, because if you just do some glancing blows, Hamas is going to reconstitute itself and we’re going to end up in the same cycle going forward.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“Israel’s in a situation where they suffered the biggest attack on Jews since the Holocaust. You have an organization, Hamas, that wants to wipe Israel totally off the map. This is not just some minor dispute. This is an existential threat to the survival of the world’s only Jewish state [and] they have to do whatever they can to protect their people.”DeSantis pointed to his ban of a pro-Palestinian student group from Florida’s university campuses, a policy challenged in court this week on free speech grounds, as an example of standing up to terrorists.“We have Jewish students fleeing for their lives because you have angry mobs,” he said. “I have constituents in Florida whose kids don’t even want to go to campus … because of such a hostile environment.”Tapper, in a thinly disguised dig at DeSantis’s well publicized previous attacks on minority students on grounds of race and gender, replied: “Absolutely Jewish students, just like Muslim students, Black students, gay students, or all students, should feel safe on campuses.” More

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      Pittsburgh synagogue gunman who killed 11 people gets death penalty

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      A jury imposed the death penalty on a man who spewed antisemitic hate before fatally shooting 11 worshippers at a synagogue in the heart of the Jewish community of Pittsburgh.Robert Bowers, a truck driver now 50 years old, perpetrated the deadliest attack on Jews in US history on 27 October 2018. Entering the Tree of Life synagogue, he opened fire with an AR-15 rifle, shooting everyone he could find in a mass murder clearly motivated by religious hatred.Bowers raved on social media about his hatred of Jewish people – using a slur for Jewish people some 400 times on a social media platform favored by the far right – and remains proud that he killed Jews.“Do not be numb to it. Remember what it means. This defendant targeted people solely because of the faith that they chose,” Eric Olshan, US attorney for the western district of Pennsylvania, said during the court case.In federal capital cases, a unanimous vote by jurors in a separate penalty phase is required to sentence a defendant to death. The judge cannot reject the jury’s vote. If jurors are unable to reach a unanimous decision, the offender is instead sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of release.On Wednesday, the same jury that convicted Bowers on 63 criminal counts recommended he be put to death. A judge was due to formally impose sentence later.The family of 97-year-old Rose Mallinger, who was killed in the attack, and her daughter, Andrea Wedner, who was wounded, thanked the jurors, saying “a measure of justice has been served”.“Returning a sentence of death is not a decision that comes easy, but we must hold accountable those who wish to commit such terrible acts of antisemitism, hate and violence,” the family said in a statement.Victims’ families were divided on whether Bowers should be sentenced to death.As described by the Death Penalty Information Center, “the New Light and Dor Hadash congregations, including Rabbi Jonathan Perlman, who was wounded in the attack, and Miri Rabinowitz, whose husband was killed, urged [US attorney general Merrick] Garland to forego the death penalty and instead seek a life sentence.”On Wednesday a statement from Stephen Cohen and Barbara Caplan, co-presidents of New Light Congregation, which lost three members in Bowers’ attack, said: “Many of our members prefer that the shooter spend the rest of his life in prison, questioning whether we should seek vengeance or revenge against him or whether his death would ‘make up’ for the lost lives.”But the congregation as a whole, Cohen and Caplan wrote, “agrees with the government’s position that no one may murder innocent individuals simply because of their religion … New Light Congregation accepts the jury’s decision and believes that, as a society, we need to take a stand that this act requires the ultimate penalty under the law.”Bowers’ lead defense attorney, Judy Clarke, declined comment.Attorneys for Bowers argued that he has schizophrenia, a serious brain disorder with symptoms including delusions and hallucinations, and that he attacked the synagogue out of a delusional belief that Jews were helping to bring about a genocide of white people by coming to the aid of refugees and immigrants. The defense also presented evidence of a difficult childhood.Olshan disputed the diagnosis of schizophrenia, asserting Bowers was not suffering psychosis but had chosen to believe white supremacist rhetoric. Acknowledging there was no question Bowers had been a depressed, neglected child, Olshan downplayed its significance, noting Bowers held jobs, paid bills and was an otherwise functioning adult.“He was not a child, he was a grown man. He was responsible for his actions, not his family and things that happened decades earlier. He was, he is responsible for his actions,” Olshan said.Prosecutors presented witnesses and evidence to show Bowers carefully planned the attack and deliberately targeted vulnerable elderly worshippers.Seven people were wounded, including five police officers. Bowers was shot three times before surrendering when he ran out of ammunition.Under Donald Trump, the federal government restarted executions and oversaw a rush of cases, with 13 executions in his final months in the White House.No federal death sentences have been carried out under Joe Biden, who said during his campaign he would end the practice but who has not taken steps to do so once in power. More

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      Into the Bright Sunshine: how Hubert Humphrey joined the civil rights fight

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      Seventy-five years ago this month, at a fractious Philadelphia convention, Hubert Humphrey delivered a famous challenge: “The time has arrived in America for the Democratic party to get out of the shadows of states’ rights and to walk forthrightly into the bright sunshine of human rights.”In a new book, Into the Bright Sunshine: Young Hubert Humphrey and the Fight for Civil Rights, Samuel G Freedman helps explain the influences and experiences that led Humphrey, then a 37-year-old midwestern mayor, to take on segregationists in his own party.Humphrey won passage of a bold civil rights platform, triggering southern delegates to nominate Strom Thurmond as a “Dixiecrat” candidate for president. The same year, Humphrey won a race for Senate from Minnesota, launching a national career that culminated in his nomination for president, and defeat by Richard Nixon, in 1968.Freedman describes how Humphrey, who was born in South Dakota, saw Jim Crow up close as a graduate student at Louisiana State University.“Given the deliberate and scrupulous erasure of Black people from LSU, it required not flagrant bigotry but mere passivity for a white student to accept segregation as something like natural law,” Freedman writes. “Humphrey’s eyes were already too open for such obliviousness.”A sociology professor and German émigré, Rudolf Heberle, had a particularly important role in shaping Humphrey’s outlook. As Freedman recounts: “The Nazis’ regime of murderous extremism came to power, in Heberle’s analysis, not by a coup from the armed fringe but thanks to ‘mass support … from middle layers of society’. Reasonable people were entirely capable of acting in morally unreasonable ways and rationalizing away their actions. Heberle had seen and heard it during his fieldwork.”Heberle was suggesting that “the Jew in Germany was the Black in America”.After LSU, Humphrey returned to Minneapolis, where two locals – one Jewish, one Black – helped stiffen his resolve: Sam Scheiner, an attorney who led the Minnesota Jewish Council, and Cecil Newman, founder of the Minneapolis Spokesman newspaper.“There were people from throughout [Humphrey’s] life who recognized something in him – skills, yes, but something larger, a kind of destiny – more than he recognized it in himself,” Freedman writes. “He was their vessel and their voice, the vessel in which to pour their passion for a more just America and the voice to amplify that passion insistently enough to affect a nation whose soul was very much at stake.”Minneapolis’s track record on race has been in the news again. Last month, the US justice department said the 2020 police murder of George Floyd was part of a “pattern or practice” of excessive force and unlawful discrimination against African Americans.Nearly 80 years earlier, Humphrey tried to combat racism and antisemitism in the city.Minneapolis was infamous for antisemitism. In the 1930s, Freedman points out, a homegrown fascist group, the Silver Legion of America, called for “returning American Blacks to slavery and disenfranchising, segregating and finally sterilizing American Jews”. In 1946, the editor of the Nation, Carey McWilliams, called the city “the capital of antisemites”.After running for mayor in 1943, Humphrey mounted another run in 1945. In the year American soldiers defeated Hitler’s forces in Europe, gangs attacked and robbed Jews in Minneapolis, sometimes yelling “Heil, Hitler!” Local leaders were ineffective. But Humphrey, Freedman writes, “plainly shared the Jewish community’s belief that the problem went way deeper than mere hoodlums. For the first time in Minneapolis’s decades-long history of racism and antisemitism, a political candidate was placing those issues at the center of a campaign.”Humphrey offered a five-point plan, including the creation of an organization to combat bigotry. He won. Two months into his term, he was confronted with the wrongful arrest of two Black women. Newman, the Black newspaper publisher, called Humphrey at home. The mayor ordered the women released and the charges dropped.Later, Humphrey won passage of an anti-discrimination law and established a council on human relations, to investigate discrimination against racial and religious minorities. For his efforts, he faced an assassination attempt and threats from Nazis. But Humphrey turned the city around.“Minneapolis stood as virtually the only city in America where a wronged job applicant could count on the government as an ally,” Freedman writes.Humphrey used such work as a springboard, championing civil rights for the nation.“My friends, to those who say that we are rushing this issue of civil rights, I say to them we are 172 years late,” he said at the 1948 convention, adding: “This is the issue of the 20th century.”In a 2010 documentary, Hubert H Humphrey: The Art of the Possible, former president Jimmy Carter, who was 23 when Humphrey spoke in Philadelphia, called the speech “earth-shattering, expressing condemnation of the racial segregation that had been in existence ever since the end of the civil war. And he was the only one that was courageous enough to do so”.When Humphrey got to Washington, he found himself ostracized by southern Democrats who dominated the Senate. As he recalled, “After all, I had been the destroyer of the Democratic party, the enemy of the south. Hubert Humphrey, the [N-word] lover.’ … I never felt so lonesome and so unwanted in all my life as I did in those first few weeks and months.”But he continued to champion equal rights, an effort that culminated, as majority whip, with breaking a southern filibuster to help win passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.Humphrey became vice-president, to Lyndon Johnson, then ran for president himself. But “for the rest of his life,” Freedman writes, he “kept the tally sheet on which he had marked the senators’ vote on cloture, the procedure that ended the filibuster and brought the bill to its successful enactment.”
      Into the Bright Sunshine is published in the US by Oxford University Press
      Frederic J Frommer is the author of books including You Gotta Have Heart: Washington Baseball from Walter Johnson to the 2019 World Series Champion Nationals More

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      Robert Kennedy Jr’s racist, antisemitic and xenophobic views go back decades, report says

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      Robert Kennedy Jr, a long-shot Democratic candidate for US president, has a long history of racism, antisemitism and xenophobia, and should be denied a national platform, according to a damning report seen by the Guardian.Kennedy, who provoked anger last week when he was filmed falsely suggesting that the coronavirus could have been “ethnically targeted” to spare Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese people, is due to testify at the US Capitol in Washington on Thursday.The Congressional Integrity Project, a political watchdog, called for Republicans to disinvite Kennedy after releasing a report that details his meetings with and promotion of racists, antisemites and extremist conspiracy theorists.“Kennedy embraces virtually every conspiracy theory in existence,” the report states. “His horrific antisemitic and xenophobic views are simply beyond the pale, and he has frequently met with and promoted antisemitic conspiracy theorists. Kennedy’s anti-vaccine conspiracies go back decades and have had deadly real world consequences.”Kennedy, an environmental lawyer, is running against Joe Biden in the Democratic presidential primary and has drawn big and enthusiastic crowds and polled as high as 20%. But the Project’s document argues that Kennedy’s recent comments about Jewish and Chinese people, which were quickly hailed by neo-Nazis and Holocaust deniers as “100% correct”, were not an aberration but fitted a long pattern.Earlier this summer Kennedy touted a meeting with Ice Cube, a rapper who issued bizarre antisemitic tweets, and publicly defended musician Roger Waters, who was embroiled in controversy after donning a costume intended to evoke Nazi attire at a concert in Germany.The report says Kennedy has also repeatedly promoted and praised fringe online broadcaster James Corbett, a Sandy Hook and 9/11 conspiracy theorist who has claimed that “Hitler and the Nazis were 100% completely and utterly set up”.Kennedy has often allied himself with the National of Islam leader, Louis Farrakhan, who regularly unleashed tirades about alleged Jewish control of media and government. Kennedy met Farrakhan at his Chicago home in 2015, with Farrakhan later tweeting that they discussed “a vaccine that is designed to affect Black males”.The Project details how Kennedy himself has frequently invoked Nazi Germany when pushing debunked theories about vaccines. He put out a video that showed the infectious disease expert Anthony Fauci with a moustache reminiscent of Adolf Hitler and used the word “holocaust” to describe children he believes were hurt by vaccines in 2015.Last year, at a Washington rally organized by his group Children’s Health Defense, Kennedy complained that people’s rights were being violated by public health measures that had been taken to reduce the number of people sickened and killed by Covid-19. He said: “Even in Hitler’s Germany, you could cross the Alps to Switzerland. You could hide in an attic like Anne Frank did.” He later apologised.For years, the document says, Kennedy has targeted a particularly dangerous form of vaccine denial at Black people. In 2021 at the height of the Covid-19 vaccination campaign, he released Medical Racism, a film that promoted disproven claims about the dangers of vaccines and explicitly warned communities of color to be suspicious of “sinister” vaccination campaigns.Several doctors and experts who participated in the film later denounced it and said they felt used and misled about the message of the documentary. Richard Allen Williams, founder of the Association of Black Cardiologists, called Children’s Health Defense “absolutely a racist operation” particularly dangerous to the Black community.In 2017, as a measles outbreak devastated Minnesota’s Somali-American community due to low vaccination rates, Kennedy continued to push his false claims that “science and anecdotal evidence suggest that Africans and African Americans may be particularly vulnerable to vaccine injuries including autism”.In a 2020 interview, Kennedy asserted without evidence that “People with African blood react differently to vaccines than people with Caucasian blood. They’re much more sensitive.”The following year, amid the Covid-19 pandemic, Kennedy recorded a webinar encouraging Black people to be skeptical of vaccines, claiming: “There has been abundant evidence … beyond any dispute that Blacks are disproportionately harmed by vaccine injury,” adding: “Blacks react completely differently to vaccines … we now know it’s just one huge experiment on Black Americans, and they know what is happening and they are doing nothing.”The report also argues that, from the earliest days of Operation Warp Speed, Kennedy has built “an anti-vaccine juggernaut” around opposition to Covid-19 vaccinations, which he has called “the deadliest vaccine ever made”.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionHe has sought to frame Covid vaccines as an elaborate conspiracy to enrich the medical establishment and big pharmaceutical companies. In a YouTube video, Kennedy accused Bill Gates of developing an “injectable chip” to enable the tracking of human movements and attempting to “genetically modify” humanity to “the flow of global information”.Kennedy has even accused his former anti-vaccine ally, Donald Trump, of selling out to Pfizer by developing vaccines.Such anti-scientific views go way back. Kennedy has claimed that fluoridated water is “drugging” children, HIV does not cause Aids and chemicals in the water are making people gay or transgender as well as pushing nonsensical conspiracy theories about wifi and 5G cellular networks.As the son of former attorney general Robert Kennedy, and nephew of former president John F Kennedy, Kennedy has caused anguish to one of America’s most storied political dynasties with his toxic views.In 2019 three relatives wrote an opinion column for the Politico website condemning his anti-vaccine advocacy, which they held partially responsible for a measles outbreak.The Congressional Integrity Project contends that Kennedy is a “Republican stooge” who is being embraced by the far right in an attempt to damage Biden. He has become a regular guest on Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News and other rightwing outlets. Far-right provocateurs Roger Stone, Steve Bannon, Alex Jones and Michael Flynn have praised him.Now Republicans have invited Kennedy to Congress. On Thursday he is due to address the House of Representatives’ select subcommittee on the weaponization of the federal government during a hearing to examine “the federal government’s role in censoring Americans”. The panel is chaired by the Trump loyalist Jim Jordan, who has been criticised for launching bogus investigations into Biden.Kyle Herrig, executive director of Congressional Integrity Project, said: “Giving RFK Jr a platform to spread dangerous conspiracy theories and xenophobic and antisemitic rhetoric is a new low for Jim Jordan – and that says something.“Jim Jordan should stop the charade and disinvite RFK Jr immediately. Allowing this hearing to go forward is shameless and beyond the pale. Maga Republicans’ desperation is on full display this week, proving once again that they have no credibility to conduct legitimate investigations.” More