(Washington) The president of the prestigious American University of Harvard, Claudine Gay, found herself under fire on Wednesday and faces calls for her resignation after a parliamentary hearing devoted to anti-Semitism on university campuses.
This is not the first time that Mme Gay and his institution are at the center of a controversy: the conflict between Israel and Hamas has unleashed passions at many of the most renowned universities in the United States, and Harvard in particular has been ordered by donors to clearly condemn groups of pro-Palestinian students.
Tuesday, Mme Gay and two other university presidents were questioned on this subject by a parliamentary commission whose stated objective was to “hold them to account” after “countless anti-Semitic demonstrations”.
The elected Republican Elise Stefanik assimilated the calls from certain students for the “intifada” – an Arabic term meaning “uprising” and referring in particular to the first Palestinian revolt of 1987 against the Israeli occupier – to an exhortation to a “genocide against the Jews in Israel and around the world”. She demanded from Mme Gay that she say whether this type of slogan was against Harvard’s code of conduct.
“We subscribe to a commitment to freedom of expression, even of reprehensible, insulting, hateful opinions,” replied Mr.me Gay. “When speech turns into behavior that violates our policies, including against harassment or bullying, we take action.”
An argument that was not to the taste of Mme Stefanik, who claimed that Mme Gay resigns “immediately”.
Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust memorial, said it was “dismayed that leaders of elite academic institutions are using misleading contextualization to minimize and excuse calls for Jewish genocide.”
“Any university, institution or society that can ‘contextualize’ and excuse calls for genocide is doomed to failure,” its president Dani Dayan said in a statement.
Republican senator Ted Cruz said on
The columnist and researcher Shadi Hamid also judged M’s responseme Gay “embarrassing,” but “because she accepted Stefanik’s postulate that saying “intifada” is tantamount to calling for genocide, which is ridiculous.”
Mme Gay was forced to clarify her comments in a short statement on Wednesday.
“Some have confused the right to free expression with the idea that Harvard condones calls for violence against Jewish students. I want to be clear: calls for violence or genocide against the Jewish community, or any other ethnic or religious group, are despicable,” she said.
These calls “have no place at Harvard and those who threaten our Jewish students will be held accountable,” she said.