When ‘from river to the sea’ is wrong, but ‘Bharat tere tukde honge’ is right: Of ‘free speech’, duplicity and hypocrisy

The pushback in the United States against rabid antisemitism in universities that calls for the genocide of Jewish people and obliteration of the state of Israel is nothing short of spectacular. Heads are rolling, progressives are getting bashed, the toxic DEI program in universities is coming under increasing focus and donors are demanding accountability, pulling millions of dollars in planned funding from universities for failing to ensure the safety of Jewish students and punish those who indulge in pro-Hamas activism. The shocking conduct of the three Ivy League college presidents during their recent testimony before a US House of Representatives committee on antisemitism, where the trio was grilled for over five hours for failing to stop antisemitic acts on their polarized campuses, has become a lightning rod for an unprecedented blowback against the shape-shifting ideology — known variously as wokeism, progressivism, critical race theory, postcolonial theory, queer theory or even identity-Marxism — that has captured all the elite and critical institutions in the US. Former New York Times opinion editor Bari Weiss, known for taking on the monoculture of woke orthodoxy, summarises it well in a piece for The Free Press: “It started with the universities. Then it moved on to cultural institutions—including some I knew well, like The New York Times—as well as every major museum, philanthropy, and media company. Then on to our medical schools and our law schools. It’s taken root at nearly every major corporation. It’s inside our high schools and even our elementary schools. The takeover is so comprehensive that it’s now almost hard to notice it—because it is everywhere.” The extent of the problem became evident when presidents of three elite colleges — Harvard, MIT and the University of Pennsylvania — were called to the Capitol Hill at a hearing before the House’s Education and Workforce Committee, and despite repeated urgings for clarification on whether calling for the genocide of Jews violates the policies of their institutions, Claudine Gay of Harvard, Liz Magill of the University of Pennsylvania and Sally Kornbluth of MIT failed not only to give a clear answer but even worse, tried to contextualise the calls for violence against Jewish people. In well-briefed, coordinated and wooden responses that shocked the entire world and made video clips of the hearing go wildly viral on social media platforms, Gay and Magill were seen smilingly rebut questions from House members on the safety of Jewish students (nearly 70% of whom were exposed to antisemitism this year) with stock replies that showed a disdain for the process, the lawmakers and insensitivity towards the concerns of students who had been threatened, among other things, with bodily harm. For instance, on a specific question from Republican lawmaker Elise Stefanik “Does calling for the genocide of Jews violate Harvard’s rules on bullying and harassment?”, Harvard president Gay replied, “It can be, depending on the context.” The exchange drew widespread condemnation for the moral rot at the heart of American elite universities, the ethical failures and the bankruptcy of leadership qualities on display, held hostage by the totalitarian campus Left. Stefanik was so taken aback by the conversation that in a subsequent post on X (formerly Twitter), she wrote, “Dr. Gay was asked by me 17x whether calling for the genocide of Jews violates Harvard’s code of conduct. She spoke her truth 17x. And the world heard.” The fallout was swift. Penn president Magill ‘voluntarily’ stepped down from her role after the fiasco followed by board chair Scott L Bok who also resigned, and made it clear in a letter that the decision was directly related to the hearing where Magill made a very “unfortunate misstep” and her position “was no longer tenable.” Gay is hanging on to her job, for now, as the Harvard board and faculty members have rallied around her but she is under tremendous pressure with 74 members of the US Congress, among others, demanding her resignation in a letter to the governing board members along with other notable voices such as former US assistant treasury secretary Monica Crowley, who called Harvard “a corrupt Marxist indoctrination factory that traffics in evil” and “keeping Claudine Gay as President means you condone anti-Semitism, racism and plagiarism.” These views were echoed by members of the US National Association of Scholars, a nonprofit that seeks to reform higher education, for Gay’s “promotion of racist policies” and “record of plagiarism”, an allegation that has snowballed into a major controversy , and billionaire hedge fund owner Bill Ackman, a Harvard alumni who said the university threw its weight behind Gay because “otherwise it would look like they were kowtowing to me.” The stark irony is lost on none. These higher educational institutions that are a hotbed of Leftist agendas, shut out contrarian and dissenting voices over ridiculous concepts such as “trigger warnings”, “safe spaces” and “microaggressions” to leave space only for the totalitarian ideology that leads to even justifying terrorism, but on the safety of Jewish students, Asian students, antisemitism or Hinduphobia, their leaders take recourse to “free speech absolutism”. The penny is finally dropping. The fallout of the Israel-Hamas war, the pro-Palestinian demonstrations where calls such as ‘from river to the sea, Palestine will be free’, ‘intifada’, reverberated on American colleges — normalizing and even justifying the worst attack on Jewish people since the Holocaust, and the stunning hypocrisy and moral vacuity on display during the testimony by the Ivy League college leaders have led to an aftershock that is now forcing the American polity to sit up and take notice, including the Democrats. Politico reported that Magill, who was ousted as president of UPenn, “faced scorching criticism from top Democrats in her state and other lawmakers” including senators Bob Casey, John Fetterman, who said Magill’s testimony was “embarrassing” and Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro, a first-term Democrat.” The Biden White House weighed in, terming the “calls for genocide” “monstrous and antithetical to everything we represent as a country. The Education Department has launched an investigation against 21 schools across the US for possible violations of ‘Title VI’ of Civil Rights Act of 1964, which protects students from discrimination based on race, color or national origin. The greatest pressure has been applied by angry donors, many of them Jewish, who are pulling funding worth millions. In fact, UPenn lost $100 million the day after the testimony. BBC reported that major donor Ross Stevens was aghast at Magill’s handling of the questions. According to Ackman, who has been relentless in calling for accountability from the university boards, Harvard president Gay’s lack of leadership has cost the university more than $1 billion. And that’s not all. Washington Post reported that more than 70 members of US Congress on Friday signed a letter urging Penn, MIT and Harvard to remove the incumbents, and a 21-year-old Jewish student Eyal Yakoby, 21, a senior at Penn, is suing the university to hold the students and faculty responsible for breaking policies and law. The offices of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI), the font of the cultural dogmatism that is largely behind the institutionalization of the toxic ideology in college campuses, have attracted the greatest scrutiny. American states that vote Republican, such as Texas, have outlawed DEI offices. As Weiss writes in the piece mentioned above, “DEI, and its cadres of enforcers, undermine the central missions of the institutions that adopt it. But nothing has made the dangers of DEI clearer than what’s happening these days on our college campuses—the places where our future leaders are nurtured… It is there that professors are compelled to pledge fidelity to DEI in order to get hired, promoted, or tenured.” I have gone at some length in cataloguing the extent of the blowback against the normalization of genocide and violence against the Jewish people. It could be because the West, especially the US, is in a collective shock over the leadership failures of elite universities in banning the calls for mass killing and threat of physical abuse against Jewish students and faculty. Non-enforcement of the law is a unique moral failure in institutions that disseminate knowledge and build future leaders. Influential people, including the liberal media, seem to have experienced a collective epiphany. As Harvard president Gay, suitably chastised, told student-run Harvard Crimson on Thursday, “I am sorry… Words matter.” Yet amid all the outrage, some of which is necessary to clear the cobweb of political agendas on American college campuses, the duplicity in applying the principles of free speech and recognizing its boundaries is equally stark. Free speech principles cannot be applied selectively. If, as Fareed Zakaria writes in CNN, “it is understandable that Jewish groups would wonder, why do safe spaces, micro aggressions, and hate speech not apply to us? If universities can take positions against free speech to make some groups feel safe, why not us?” There is an increasing recognition in the US that the campus Left orthodoxy has gone too far and must be put in check. Calls for genocide against Jewish people cannot be justified under the principles of ‘free speech’ and the state of Israel has the right to retaliate against forces that calls for its extinction through slogans such as “from river to the sea”. The context here is immaterial. If the students are mature enough to issue such threats, they should also be ready to face the consequences. And yet, when the stage shifts from the US to faraway India in the Global South, then suddenly these principles are applied differently. Voices that recognize that threats of violence against a nation and its people on American campuses is wrong, suddenly turn preachy, take an absolutist stand and indulge in sermonizing claptrap against India that seeks to deal threats of violence by students on its college campuses with an iron hand. In 2016, when then student leaders at JNU Kanhaiya Kumar, Umar Khalid and Anirban Bhattacharya were arrested and a sedition case filed against them in a 1200-word chargesheet for allegedly raising anti-India slogans at an event on Jawaharlal Nehru campus in February 2016, ‘activists’ in America and western media laid on to India with unqualified support for the perpetrators and acerbic commentary against the government. The JNU students were chargesheeted under IPC Sections 124A [sedition], 323 [voluntarily causing hurt], 465 [forgery], 471 [using as genuine, forged document], 143 [punishment for unlawful assembly], 149 [unlawful assembly with common object], 147 [rioting], 120B [criminal conspiracy], according to a report in The Hindu, and Delhi Police furnished “more than 10 pieces of video evidence and testimonies of 90 eyewitnesses,” for raising incendiary slogans against the Indian state for its execution of Parliament attack convict Afzal Guru, a terrorist who met his fate after a prolonged legal battle that reached a denouement in Supreme Court. The students, according to media reports, had allegedly termed the hanging of the Parliament attack convict as “judicial killing”, casting aspersions on the judicial process where Afzal received all possible legal aid, and raised slogans such as “Shaeed Afzal Guru” (martyr Afzal Guru), Tum kitne Afzal maroge, ghar-ghar se Afzal niklenge, Pakistan zindabad, Kashmir ki azaadi tak, jung rahegi-jung rahegi. Three years later, Delhi Police cited forensic evidence of video footage to confirm that slogans like ‘Bharat tere tukde honge, inshallah inshallah’ were raised at the JNU, where over 50 people had gathered in 2016 to protest the Supreme Court’s upholding of convicted terrorist Guru’s death sentence. New York Times in an editorial wrote that “the circumstances of Muhammad Afzal’s trial and execution remain controversial” and in a display of supreme arrogance, demanded that the Narendra Modi drop the charges of sedition against the offenders, who were termed “advocates of freedom of speech”. Khalid was later arrested again for his alleged role as one of the key conspirators of the New Delhi riots in 2020. The Delhi high court a month later rejected his bail plea after a trial court in Delhi had denied bail to Khalid stating that there were “reasonable grounds” to believe that the accusations against him were prima facie true, as The Hindu had reported. Interestingly, in March 2021, the US State Department released its 2020 report on human rights that mentioned Umar Khalid’s arrest. The New York Times report in 2020 that covered the riots claimed that “Delhi police had turned against Muslims.” The Guardian report made Khalid, who was charged the anti-terror law Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act (UAPA), appear as a messenger of peace, love and goodwill. This duplicity isn’t new, of course. But every act of pious indignation against the campus Left in the US that has sought to normalise violence against the Jews will be accompanied by a completely different set of standards when students at an Indian university issue threats of dismemberment of the Indian state and promise attendant violence. Voices in the West that are sensitive to the concern of Jews towards antisemitism on American campuses or in society and promise corrective action, show complete disregard for the concerns of India whose central, post-Independence identity is built around the trauma of Partition, not to speak of the civilizational memory of waves of Islamist invasion and violence. Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely that of the author. They do not necessarily reflect Firstpost’s views. Read all the  Latest News ,  Trending News ,  Cricket News ,  Bollywood News , India News  and  Entertainment News  here. Follow us on  Facebook,  Twitter and  Instagram.