What Happened Today: December 12, 2023
Israel and Russia; Harvard sticks with plagiarist president; Hamas’ funding network
The Big Story
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu spoke with Russian President Vladimir Putin on Sunday, expressing his displeasure with the “anti-Israel positions” taken by Russia at the United Nations and with the Kremlin’s increasingly close cooperation with Iran. That cooperation, as The Scroll has previously reported, has deepened since the start of Russia’s war in Ukraine, as Moscow has leaned on Tehran to supply it with cheap battlefield drones to supplement the efforts of Russian defense manufacturers, which have struggled to source Western-made components for aircraft and weapons systems. In late November, Russia returned the favor, finalizing arrangements for the delivery of Russian-made Su-35 fighter jets and attack helicopters to Iran (according to Iranian media, that is—Russia has not publicly confirmed the deal on its side).
So what could Bibi possibly be discussing with Putin, given that Russia, despite its historic attempts to maintain relations with all sides in the Middle East, seems to have lately thrown in with the Iranian Axis of Resistance? One geopolitical analyst we spoke to via email, who asked not to be named, helped The Scroll make sense of the call. The rest of today’s Big Story is his analysis:
What’s important here is that this contact was public, meaning that Putin wishes to be seen as a player in Gaza, which in turn means being perceived as having leverage with both sides, which he does.
Putin’s relationship with Iran, while not yet at a strategic level—Russia can make its own drones and has its own relationship with Syria if it needs more orcs—has been growing by leaps and bounds, to include drone factories, drone operators, etc. He received [Iranian President Ebrahim] Raisi in Moscow, where a Hamas delegation also visited, and he has planes and ships in Syria. While Russia hardly needs Iranian oil or “technology,” making Russia a “pariah” necessarily pushes it toward the network of other pariah states and their mechanisms for evading sanctions, especially financial controls.
On the other side, Putin’s long-standing relationship with Bibi is arguably an Israeli asset, particularly as Israel must weigh the possibility of war-fighting in Lebanon, which will necessarily bring Syria into play and put pressure on the Israeli-Russian deconfliction mechanism that governs Syrian airspace. Israel cannot afford to endanger that asset beyond what the Americans absolutely demand of it.
However, Putin’s purpose in framing the perception of his influence “with both sides” has much less to do with anything happening on the ground in the Middle East than it does with the war in Ukraine. Hamas’ attack on Israel coincided not only with the U.S. push for a Saudi-Israeli peace deal, but also with the failure of Ukraine/the CIA’s much-heralded spring-summer offensive and accompanying information war dedicated to toppling Putin. Both offensives having failed miserably, the Biden administration is left trying to convince a balky U.S. Congress to write another giant $70 billion—i.e., blank—check to Ukraine with no clear endgame, while Putin once again seems reasonably secure in power.
For Putin, therefore, the Gaza war came at an excellent moment, because it diverted bandwidth and resources from Ukraine to the Middle East while at the same time putting additional cards in his hand.
Simply making the fact of Putin’s global influence clear to everyone is itself a win that seems likely to undercut pro-Ukraine hard-liners in the West while strengthening proponents of a deal, a category that at this point includes everyone sane.
By talking to Bibi, Putin also smoothly undercuts the attempt of the Biden people to leverage $14 billion in U.S. military aid to Israel, which is widely popular in Congress, to pass $70 billion in aid to Ukraine, which is increasingly unpopular in Congress and especially with American voters, by making the Israelis and AIPAC lobby for one bill. Widening the gaps in the D.C. shotgun marriage between Israel and Ukraine is smart politics by Putin.
Winner: Putin
Loser: Ukraine
Survivor: Bibi
IN THE BACK PAGES: Berkeley’s Julia Schaletzky on college presidents’ selective enthusiasm for free speech
The Rest
→Harvard is standing by President Claudine Gay amid mounting donor pressure and new plagiarism allegations. Although the university has reportedly lost $1 billion in donations since Gay’s Dec. 5 testimony, it announced in a Tuesday statement that Gay would be keeping her job. The announcement came after The Washington Free Beacon on Monday revealed 20 potential instances of plagiarism in Gay’s published academic work, in addition to those publicized by Christopher Rufo and Chris Brunet on Sunday. The plagiarism in the Free Beacon article is even more extensive—and more damning—than the instances we wrote about yesterday and include examples of Gay lifting entire sentences and even paragraphs from other scholars. The Free Beacon identified potential plagiarism in four of Gay’s 11 published articles, including her dissertation—which won Harvard’s Robert N. Toppan Prize for dissertations of “exceptional merit.” That means that more than one-third of her lifetime scholarly output contains potential plagiarism. Harvard, however, announced that it had conducted an independent review of Gay’s scholarly work and found “no violation of Harvard’s standards for research misconduct,” merely “a few instances of inadequate citation.”
→IBM CEO Arvind Krishna said he was tying executive bonuses to discriminatory hiring practices, in likely violation of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, during a 2021 meeting, according to leaked footage published Monday night by James O’Keefe. Krishna said that he expected company executives to increase the proportion of women and “underrepresented” racial minorities among their employees by one percentage point per year until the company’s workforce matched the racial and gender makeup of the country as a whole. Lest anyone fail to get the point, Krishna was explicit: “For Blacks we should try to get towards 13%, on Hispanics you gotta get into the mid-teens.” He also clarified that “Asians are not an underrepresented minority in tech.” To help motivate employees insufficiently enthusiastic about hiring based on racial and gender bean-counting, Krishna said that executives who met the one-percentage-point-per-year goal would receive large bonuses, while anyone who failed to meet the quota would see their bonus docked.
Watch the video here: https://twitter.com/JamesOKeefeIII/status/1734374423124176944
→Joe Biden said on Tuesday that Israel’s governing coalition needs to “change” and that the Jewish state is losing international support due to its “indiscriminate bombing” in Gaza. The remarks, reported by The Times of Israel, came at a campaign fundraiser in Washington, D.C., hours before the president was slated to meet at the White House with the families of Americans held hostage in Gaza. The previous night, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had reiterated his opposition to U.S.-led plans to hand Gaza over to the Palestinian Authority after the current war, vowing not to “allow the entry into Gaza of those who educate for terrorism, support terrorism, and finance terrorism.” Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Mohammad Shtayyeh stated in an interview with Bloomberg last week that his “preferred outcome” for a postwar settlement would be for Hamas to join the PA as a “junior partner” in a broader Palestine Liberation Organization.
→Quote of the Day:
Even if the IDF is able to execute its plans, it will still be at risk of not meeting the public's expectations, since the political leadership has promised to eliminate Hamas, return all the hostages, rebuild all the ravaged border communities and remove the security threat from them. These are ambitious goals, and it is already clear that some of them will not be achieved in the initial window of opportunity of just a few weeks, to which Israel is apparently going to accede under American pressure.
Israel’s massive and quickly growing economic difficulties, the burden on the reservists and American expectations could all contribute to shortening the duration of the intensive operation inside Gaza. If that happens, the government and army will face a double-edged problem. A large portion of the public believes that freeing the hostages should be Israel’s top priority and view any delay in returning them as a major failure. At the same time, many Israelis are demanding the complete defeat of Hamas and will view a reduction of forces coupled with a promise to complete the mission in the future as the leadership evading the goals it so dramatically promised at the start of the campaign.
That’s from Amos Harel’s latest column in Haaretz, arguing (in greater detail) what we argued yesterday: that with Washington pressuring Israel to wrap up its ground campaign before accomplishing its stated goals, the Israeli leadership is now having to sell its limited achievements in Gaza as a decisive victory—hence the messaging campaign in the Israeli and pro-Israel American press to the effect that Hamas is already near collapse.
→Haaretz also published an article Tuesday breaking down Hamas’ finances. Here are some of the main sources of income for the terror group’s estimated $2.5 billion annual budget:
$1.1 billion from the Palestinian Authority
$375 million from taxes
$360 million from Qatar
$325 million from UNRWA
$125 million from Iran
$100 million from “charity associations”
→Stat of the Day: $105,000
That’s the difference between the value of a home that someone with a $2,000 monthly housing budget could have bought before the Federal Reserve started raising interest rates in March 2022 ($400,000) and the value of the home they could afford today ($295,000), according to a report in The Wall Street Journal on the dismal state of the housing market.
→Less than 200 Europeans died of fentanyl overdoses in 2022, compared to more than 70,000 Americans and 7,000 Canadians. Canada and the United States largely share the same illegal drug market, but why has Europe been spared? For one guess, here’s our X Post of the Day, from State Department veteran and Hudson Institute Research Fellow David Asher:
TODAY IN TABLET:
The Jewish Tolstoy of Berdychiv, by Edward Serotta
The third stop of my literary tour of Eastern Europe brings me to the home of Vasily Grossman, the great bard of WWII.
SCROLL TIP LINE: Have a lead on a story or something going on in your workplace, school, congregation, or social scene that you want to tell us about? Send your tips, comments, questions, and suggestions to scroll@tabletmag.com.
College Presidents Are Lying About Free Speech
I’ve been fighting for free speech at UC Berkeley. Here’s how our universities have gone wrong—and what can be done to fix them.
By Julia Schaletzky
Pushback against antisemitic mobs at U.S. universities is often countered with cries of “It’s free speech!” But the sudden converts to the cause of free speech, like the presidents of Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania, and MIT, who testified before Congress last week about not being able to define calls for genocide of Jews as actionable due to First Amendment concerns, are not engaging in good-faith debate. Having been part of several free speech-focused campus organizations at UC Berkeley, I know the law is clear: The right to free speech does not extend to threats and inciting violence. Harassment, death threats, and exclusion based on religion are not permitted in educational settings as a civil rights issue. Title IX and Title IV protect the rights of students to participate in campus activities without fear of aggression or harassment.
The discussion around free speech by campus presidents is misleading because the issue is not the law itself. Rather, college administrators have been weaponizing the First Amendment when it suits them, and blatantly disregarding it when it doesn’t. When the Proud Boys were threatening to have a presence during a protest recently, Berkeley brought the FBI to campus, just in case. For the pro-Palestine protesters too busy to do their coursework, we are being asked to use our “discretion to administer grace and flexibility” for grading so that they don’t fail their classes.
The rule of law requires that laws are enforced equally against all, so that we are not governed by the whims of the powerful but by a shared set of norms and rules that apply equally. Unfortunately, in the self-governing world of academic institutions, the rule of law is easily abandoned by like-minded ideologues working together to bring about what they call “social change,” which apparently requires that one group’s idea of the good must monopolize the entire space and mission of the university.
The technique these activists use has become a familiar one: Concepts cloaked in aspirational language such as “inclusion and belonging” are applied only to a few selected groups, while being denied to others, such as Jews, but also biological women, moderates, and conservatives. It is sobering to see that after more than $25 million has been invested in such initiatives at Berkeley annually we have created campuses that are in fact less welcoming and less inclusive than they were 10 years ago.
In positions of power, the administrators who run our new temples of conformity do not hesitate to use their positions to advance their own views and force them upon others. This sorry state of affairs reflects a short-sighted kind of moral selfishness. The selective enforcement of rules based on viewpoints is a kind of intellectual nepotism that destroys the possibilities for the very discussion and debate that were supposed to form the core of a university education. The principle of fairness has been lost. Instead, one side is clearly preferred.
What can we learn from the case of Ameer Hasan Loggins, a lecturer educated at Berkeley (B.Sc./M.Sc. in African American studies, 2007), who thought it appropriate to ask all his Jewish students at Stanford to stand in a corner to be berated as oppressors and colonizers? Who taught him this line of thinking? How did a person with this kind of abusive, totalitarian mentality come to be an educator at one of America’s leading universities?
It should be obvious that self-governance can only be even-handed when different viewpoints can be heard. During Berkeley’s famous free speech protests of the 1960s, the university’s conservative administration pushed back, leading to the arrest of more than 700 activists on campus in a single day. Now, this is unthinkable—unless the protesters came from off-campus.
Universities have become monocultures of progressive liberalism and groupthink, and are no longer able to appropriately respond to crisis or to safeguard the interests of groups that do not immediately and reflexively parrot the party line of the progressive political vertical. But why?
First, a change in values. Universities used to be institutions focused on generating knowledge and scholarship, and on educating students to become critical thinkers who could make up their own minds on issues of the day. While some still work toward this goal, a competing view has taken hold that sees the university itself as a tool that should be instrumentalized to achieve progressive political goals. This is a deeply problematic position that has not been discussed or challenged on a broader scale, in part because academia has become a political monoculture, and in part because the governance system that is supposed to prevent the rise of a self-governing, self-interested academic monoculture has broken down.
Second, the selective enforcement of policies and laws along partisan lines has transformed our universities from incubators of knowledge to factories for ideologues. Major universities do little to disguise this purpose to their students: Instead, they make a point of rewarding “correct” political beliefs and viewpoints while punishing wrong ones, often through highly selective enforcement of institutional rules. For left, progressive causes, such as the opposition to Israeli “apartheid” or support for Black Lives Matter, the limits of permitted conduct have been aggressively extended and a blind eye has been turned toward hate crime, physical violence, and the destruction of property. Protests are seen as virtuous; dissenters are cast as bigots.
For moderate or conservative causes, or even for those who are just questioning campus orthodoxy, as scholars used to delight in doing, the gavel of enforcement is brought down swiftly and aggressively, often in violation of institutional traditions and constitutional rights. As a result, more faculty are feeling compelled to self-censor than during McCarthyism.
American campuses have become hotbeds of left political authoritarianism, withholding resources, selectively enforcing policies, and extending the protection of free speech to only those whom they agree with. While many faculty might lament such practices in private, they see no way to publicly voice their concerns without the fear of retaliation from the administrative bureaucracy as well as from their peers. After all, the academic system is built on peer evaluation—for promotions, publications and funding, which drives faculty to “go along to get along,” particularly when viewpoints are clearly prescribed.
Third, ideological hiring practices have transformed American universities from homes for those who are intellectually curious to those who toe the party line, leaving students with a dearth of viewpoints. When conservative scholars retire out of the system, they tend to be replaced with ideologically vetted candidates committed to the right kind of social change. Entire departments have been transformed into something unrecognizable.
For students, “holistic” admissions without SAT metrics enable selection of freshmen according to views and commitments expressed in personal statements; there are tutors who will tell students exactly what issues to focus on in order to succeed. For staff, every job description includes mandated language stating that candidates that do not align with Berkeley “values” should not apply. For faculty, political litmus tests have been administered under the guise of DEI statements, although pushback against that is increasing. In addition, there is a rewriting of policies that redefine excellence for faculty hiring, giving search commissions more latitude to hire candidates with “lived experience” instead of academic qualifications.
Fourth, universities have become homes to activist gaslighting performed by specific administrative units and departments who see their job as generating and enforcing party-line thought. Under the guise of a forward-thinking investment in “diversity, equity and inclusion” and “critical social theory,” we have generated units that actively promote anti-Zionism, “anti-colonialism” and cast entire groups of university students and faculty as oppressors. Those units operate with little faculty involvement; instead, they perform their self-appointed functions in direct interaction with top campus leadership and release public statements on behalf of the university. Despite Berkeley students coming from all over the world, Palestine is the only territory with a dedicated chancellor’s advisory committee to make sure that the chancellor is always apprised of pro-Palestine viewpoints and demands. Critical thinkers are labeled bigots, and the questioning of orthodoxies—a key element of scientific inquiry—is suddenly no longer welcomed at institutions founded on allegiance to the scientific method.
It is particularly concerning to see that even views that Americans broadly agree with, such as the binary of biological sex in humans, the need for meritocratic admissions, and the need for individual agency in education, are not acceptable to a significant portion of campus administrators. It’s highly concerning that the academic monoculture has led to a shift of the Overton window so far left that mainstream views in America are now considered “fringe” in higher education and sideswiped as bigoted views of the uneducated masses. This divides higher education more and more from the Americans it is supposed to serve. Not surprisingly, trust in educational institutions is at an all-time low—which should broadly be of concern to institutions that are largely dependent on public funding to cover their spiraling costs.
Like a parent with a favorite child, it is not surprising that the favoritism that universities show to approved-of political viewpoints and the administrators, faculty, and students who hold them leads to a loss of trust and breeds resentment in the student body. A large number of students “mask” and are careful to not express their views, in order to not upset others, according to a recent poll conducted by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression. In turn, students on the “right side” of the political line are empowered to act like bullies. Seventy percent of Berkeley students stated that it is appropriate to “shout down” and heckle a campus speaker they don’t agree with. I would not be surprised if the constant need to self-censor is connected to the growing mental health crisis among students.
At the same time, improvement is possible. Antisemitism on campuses has woken up many to the fact that we have tolerated the erosion of free speech for far too long. The silent majority on campuses is beginning to wake up.
So what needs to happen to restore the institutional integrity of America’s universities?
First, universities need firm governance that will break the noxious spell of ideologues and restore open-minded teaching and research to its proper place at the top of our institutional priorities. Administrators must be directed to reverse policies and guidelines that enable ideology-based hiring at the expense of merit-based hiring. If 7 out of 10 new art professors have to sprinkle critical social theory terms across their application materials in order to get hired, that needs to raise an eyebrow, not be celebrated. Clear merit-based criteria have to be formulated and upheld.
Second, we need to audit campus processes determining resource allocation and policy enforcement to ensure that it is even-handed and nondiscriminatory. Campus leadership and administrators should be taught how to resist ideological capture. They must understand why it is not appropriate to force one's viewpoint on others through the selective allocation of resources and enforcement of policies. An effort should be made to define the vision for a university for the 21st century: Are we supposed to be social activists, leveraging our power for the change we personally want to see, including the power to indoctrinate? Or are we educators who should educate students to be able to have productive discussions, be critical thinkers, and make up their own minds? Put differently, the question is which do we value more, conformity or autonomy?
Lastly, universities must ensure—like a fair parent—that when siblings fight, we can come to an even-handed solution instead of playing favorites. For now, the minimum we can do is rigorously apply Title IX and Title IV, as well as the code of student conduct to all students who generate a hostile learning environment for others, whether by calling for the genocide of Jews, making antisemitic statements, shutting down lectures, attacking classrooms and fellow students, or trying to silence viewpoints that they disagree with. If universities aren’t homes for free inquiry, or places where good citizenship and intellectually healthy habits of thought and behavior are cultivated and instilled in young minds, we risk losing the integrity of one of our greatest institutions and undermining the bedrock of democracy. It might then be worth considering whether we should continue asking parents and taxpayers to support them.
Imagine FDR suggesting that Churchill be replaced during wartime This is what Biden is suggesting
How anyone can even contemplate paying thousands upon thousands of dollars for their child to go to any of these colleges or universities today just to become brainwashed into social warrior automatons boggles my mind.