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CLEVELAND — This week’s lesson in the difference between courage and cowardly equivocation focuses on John Fetterman, Democratic senator from Pennsylvania, and three presidents of elite American universities.
Fetterman has come in for his share of criticism, here and elsewhere, for his often far-left views and his bizarre idea of what constitutes appropriate dress on the Senate floor.
In short, he’s the one of the last guys whom I’d expect to be celebrating for his wisdom and courage. But that’s what can happen when you think you know all you need to know about somebody and automatically mark him down as a knucklehead.
The subject is Israel and Hamas.
After the unspeakably brutal Hamas attack on Israeli civilians on Oct. 7 and Israel’s offensive against Hamas in Gaza were followed by a nationwide outpouring of antisemitic demonstrations and invective largely from the left, many of Fetterman’s Democratic colleagues tiptoed around the debate over how Israel should respond and what our country’s role ought to be.
Not Fetterman. He immediately and unapologetically called out the Hamas attack for the despicable terrorist outrage it was, undeterred by pro-Palestinian protesters who came out in force and closed down the street in front of his office.
The freshman senator, whose first elected office was as mayor of Braddock, Pennsylvania, just a few miles down the road from Squirrel Hill, the site of the 2018 attack on a synagogue that killed 11 people, has been a consistent defender of Israel and opponent of antisemitism. Last week he doubled down, saying in an email interview with the Washington Examiner that he fundamentally believes destroying Hamas is the only pathway to a real solution.
“And it’s not at all at odds with my other beliefs,” the newspaper quoted from his email. “Hamas has systematically used rape and murder as part of its war, brutalizing Israeli women. It’s horrifying. We cannot pretend that Hamas is a rational entity.”
None of that is to say, and Fetterman did not, that Israel is all in the right and the Palestinian people are all in the wrong on the many issues that have made Gaza and the West Bank such a tinderbox. But he draws a bright line between those disputes and the terrorism tactics of Hamas.
“I am on what I believe is the right side of this issue,” he told the newspaper. “I’m not concerned about a label. Israel is our key, closest ally, and we need to support them in this fight. If we want peace and we want a two state solution, then Israel needs to be able to destroy Hamas.”
If only more Democrats would show the clear-eyed judgment that Fetterman has on this.
On the other end of the courage scale, I give you Claudine Gay, Elizabeth Magill and Sally Kornbluth, presidents of Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, respectively.
The three administrators appeared before the House Education and Workforce Committee Tuesday at a hearing on antisemitism on college campuses, questioned aggressively by U.S. Rep. Elise Stefanik, a New York Republican, among others.
When asked whether students calling for genocide against Jews and the elimination of Israel (which Stefanik said was implied by “chants for Intifada” on their campuses) violated rules against bullying and harassment, the three university presidents couldn’t even bring themselves to say more than: It depends.
“When speech crosses into conduct … we take action,” said Gay, but refused to directly state that rallying for Intifada constituted a violation of Harvard’s Code of Conduct.
This is a woman who presides over a place where, after a professor stated on a Fox News panel two years ago that biology determines whether a person is a man or a woman, a diversity, equity and inclusion officer led a harassment campaign so bad the professor had to take a leave of absence, the Washington Examiner reports. And Gay can’t take a stand against students rallying for genocide, beyond saying she finds it “personally abhorrent?”
In an op-ed for The Wall Street Journal on Friday, Stefanik, who was the most aggressive questioner at the hearing, called the “lack of moral clarity” from the three presidents “shocking. If only it were surprising.”
“What constitutes bullying and harassment at Harvard?” she wrote. “A mandatory Title IX training last year warned all undergraduate students that ‘cisheterosexism,’ ‘fatphobia’ and ‘using the wrong pronouns’ qualified as ‘abuse’ and perpetuated ‘violence’ on campus.
“But when I asked Harvard President Claudine Gay at a congressional hearing whether calls for the genocide of Jews violated the university’s rules on bullying and harassment, she answered: ‘It depends on the context.’”
The hearing, which Stefanik said has become the most-viewed congressional testimony in history, has sparked deserved outrage across the country, with widespread calls for the resignation of all three.
Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, for one, called Magill’s statements “shameful.”
“If that doesn’t violate the policies of Penn, well, there’s something wrong with the policies of Penn, that the board needs to get on, or there’s a failure of leadership from the president, or both,” said Shapiro, a Democrat. (Magill has resigned as president, the University of Pennsylvania board of trustees announced Saturday.)
Switching out such unmoored leaders would be a beginning, but the problem goes much deeper than that, as evidenced by the crowds of students led like so many sheep to calls for hatred and violence against the hated and violated.
Once again: There is no question that neither side in the Israel/Palestine dispute has clean hands. But Hamas is in a despicable category all by itself. The instinctive reaction by so many against Israel following the Oct. 7 attack continues to defy logic, or any sense of human understanding.
Look at the difference in the recent prisoner exchange between the two: Hamas was releasing mostly young children, old women and immigrant workers. Israel was turning over people who have stabbed, bombed and murdered Israeli soldiers and citizens.
And as more information has emerged about what was done to Israeli citizens and the bodies examined, particularly those of women, on Oct. 7, the barbaric nature of the attack becomes ever more difficult to comprehend.
I won’t repeat them here, but you can find some of the horrific details at this website, if your stomach is strong enough: https://tinyurl.com/cnnviolence.
If I were president of one of the above universities, I would compel the antisemitic students to read the information CNN has compiled on that website, and to sit through a video with images and descriptions you cannot imagine in your worst nightmares.
If they can do that, and still go out and rally for Hamas, well … I’m ashamed to share the same country with them.
Ted Diadiun is a member of the editorial board of cleveland.com and The Plain Dealer.
To reach Ted Diadiun: tdiadiun@cleveland.com
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