Haverford College President Wendy Raymond played defense for more than three hours on 7 May during an anti-Semitism on US college campuses hearing of the House Committee on Education and Workforce.

Raymond made clear Haverford condemns anti-Semitism, but at no point did she remind committee members that there are Israeli war crimes and a genocide taking place with American weapons in Gaza and that Haverford students and faculty retain a First Amendment right to name this and speak out against the horrors occurring there. She overlooked the Palestinian-Jewish solidarity – alongside other allies – at both Haverford and other colleges around the country in the face of Israeli human rights abuses and heavy-handed responses from elected officials (as well as university administrators).

The Haverford president missed a tremendous opportunity to emphasize the legitimacy of student and faculty advocacy for Palestinian rights before a committee that Georgetown University Professor David Cole, a hearing witness who was previously the national legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union, compared to the House Un-American Activities Committee and its vicious search for Communist spies during the McCarthy era.

Based in Pennsylvania, Haverford states that its Quaker origins “inform many aspects of the life” of the non-sectarian institution.

Quakers believe in speaking truth to power, though that was absent in Raymond’s testimony. She did, however, refuse to give into demands for details about how Haverford has disciplined students and faculty over the last 19 months.

Presidents Robert Manuel of DePaul University and Jeffrey Armstrong of California Polytechnic State University also failed to speak out against Israeli war crimes and genocide in Gaza. Historians in some future time period will presumably note the lopsided nature of these hearings and the paucity of concern about the severe and ongoing Israeli human rights abuses in Gaza that have caused the on-campus protests.

Anti-Palestinian representatives

In fact, at one point, Manuel gave the impression that DePaul is allowing a study group to Israel to go forward even though it knows that Israel could discriminate against some students in the process of admitting travelers to the apartheid state. Congresswoman Virginia Foxx stumbled on the issue because Republicans now despise the word “inclusivity” – exclusivity apparently being preferable in the same way that the US Naval Academy now prefers racist books to books about racism.

No member of Congress bothered to follow up on possible discrimination against study group participants, most likely Palestinian and/or Muslim students. And the committee is not at all seized with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s promotion of racist and anti-Semitic books at the Naval Academy while discarding books that tackle such hatred.

Congressman Randy Fine, a new member of the committee and the US Congress, wants to be able to say any anti-Arab or anti-Muslim slur that occurs to him while legislatively limiting pro-Palestinian speech in the midst of Israel’s Gaza genocide. He recently referred to “Muslim Terror Raggies” at Columbia University and just days before the hearing accused Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib of being a Muslim terrorist while asserting that Palestinians should starve.

When a student protester was reportedly abused by security officers at Columbia University, Fine’s tweeted retort was “Boo hoo.”

The video of the assault on the student suggests how easily other countries, and now the US, have slid into abuses against marginalized groups. All of this is intended to flip the script on the horror of the genocide taking place in Gaza, and is eagerly misrepresented by anchors such as CNN’s Jake Tapper who has absurdly blamed students for why he lacks time to cover Gaza.

With Fine’s racist rhetoric, documented by The Electronic Intifada and by Alex Kane at Jewish Currents, he can’t be expected to address campus or regional tensions in a helpful manner. He is a bomb thrower, intentionally fomenting hatred.

In a gerrymandered state like Florida, and a safe Republican congressional district, Fine likely figures he can express his anti-Arab views without political consequence.

Ironically, Fine has proposed legislation that he says would “restrict people’s ability to say whatever they want.” That’s other people’s speech, apparently including speech critical of Israel’s policies.

Stephen Miller, Trump’s deputy chief of staff, who once palled around the occupied West Bank with Ben Packer, a supporter of the racist Meir Kahane, has recently stated that the US might suspend habeas corpus, the constitutional right to challenge one’s detention in court. Miller is casting about for a way to throw Palestinian and allied non-citizens out of the country – not to mention undocumented migrants – for protesting Israel’s war crimes.

As reported by The Electronic Intifada and others, Miller’s anti-immigrant stance was already clear during his college days at Duke University, where he worked alongside white supremacist Richard Spencer, who has gone on to advocate for what he calls “white Zionism.”

Miller and allied members of Congress are misusing claims of anti-Semitism to defund and wreck American universities as they pose a challenge to the authoritarian instincts of Trump.

Stefanik stands in for McCarthy

Congresswoman Elise Stefanik, during her few minutes with the microphone, attempted to intimidate the president of Haverford, the Quaker-founded college.

The focused targeting of a Quaker-associated institution by Stefanik and other representatives suggests that the religious minority may now be in the crosshairs of Republicans looking to undermine groups and institutions that have shown solidarity with Palestinians and their efforts to secure freedom and equal rights – or have not, in their view, sufficiently reined in the First Amendment rights of students and faculty.

Angry at the cautious defense from Wendy Raymond – “respectfully, representative, I will not be talking about individual cases” – Stefanik sought to intimidate her. “Respectfully, president of Haverford, many people have sat in this position who are no longer in the positions as president of universities for their failure to answer straightforward questions.”

Stefanik is herself on record earlier this year refusing to extend the right of self-determination to Palestinians and asserting, like extremist Israeli ministers Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich, that Israel has a “biblical right” to the occupied West Bank. The anti-Palestinian racism she has displayed and can act on should be a matter of public discussion alongside Congressman Fine’s bigotry.

Raymond, however, did not broach these matters. The genocide wings of the Republican and Democratic parties are keen to keep protesters of the Gaza genocide on the defensive 24/7 while not having to answer for their own complicity with Israeli war crimes.

Stefanik also asked Raymond about a student group that called for “the complete dismantling of the apartheid, settler colonial state of Israel by all means necessary.” Raymond, when asked what “all means necessary” means to her, replied that such terminology is “repugnant because of what it can mean and I will not defend that statement.”

It’s not surprising that the leader of a Quaker institution – with the Society of Friends’ longstanding commitment to nonviolence – would reject language that suggests the possible use of violence and puts no limit on it. The distinction, however, between heated rhetoric that was not acted upon and members of Congress funding a genocide never was broached at the hearing.

It would have been interesting to hear Raymond discuss her thoughts on the first part of the sentence regarding “dismantling of the apartheid, settler colonial state of Israel” and how she understands that phrase in relation to the dismantling of apartheid South Africa and the Jim Crow American South. She might have also commented on President Donald Trump’s support earlier this year for ethnic cleansing of Palestinians and both parties’ backing of Israeli war crimes that have far graver real-life consequences than the language chosen by a student group that is protected by the First Amendment – as Republicans insisted should be the case in past years for right-wing ideologues visiting college campuses.

If there’s evidence that any of those Haverford students initiated violence against fellow students, members of Congress didn’t cite it. Nor did Raymond mention that nonviolent options, including boycott, divestment and sanctions for Palestinian freedom and equal rights, are being closed off to Palestinians and their allies through legislation in both the US and Israel – and extending to its occupied territories.

According to a 17 April article in The Clerk, the Haverford student newspaper, Raymond has already been wrestling with the possibility of elected national officials stripping the college of federal funding.

She was quoted as saying then: “We meet 100 percent demonstrated need for every student who comes to Haverford. That is an absolute sacred promise.”

She noted the college would attempt to fundraise $5 million to replace lost federal funding. Alternatively, “Liberal arts colleges, like ours, which are relatively wealthy, can afford to break this partnership with the federal government if we must.”

If that were to happen, or the federal government were to take actions antagonistic to core values at the college, “we can do this on our own.”

That proposition may soon be put to the test. Quakers would be more likely to rally in support of Haverford against an overbearing and genocide-supporting government, however, were the president of the college more inclined to make a robust defense of students and faculty nonviolently, vigorously and thoughtfully protesting anti-Palestinian hate and the war crimes and genocide being carried out by Israel with American weaponry.

Quakers have a long history of opposing both anti-Semitism and anti-Palestinian racism. Raymond missed an opportunity to show that college presidents – like students and faculty – can do both as well.

Committee chair Tim Walberg did more than miss an opportunity. He displayed his ignorance and anti-Palestinian racism in an op-ed following the hearing when he wrote that at Northwestern University “vandals called for intifada, a global execution of Jews.”

Intifada, of course, is not a call for “a global execution of Jews,” but rather for a shaking off or revolution, in this case against occupation, dispossession, apartheid and now genocide.

But most committee members have no interest in hearing anything about the oppression Palestinians face. Instead, they are not just plugging their ears to the appeals of protesters desperate to stop this genocide, but targeting them while providing the arms that Israel is using to murder Palestinian men, women and children in Gaza.

And yet still the students speak out, including at New York University’s graduation, putting to shame administrators and politicians alike who lack their courage and threaten to punish them for speech against a genocide.

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