On Balance | Trump still owns the Republican Party, but Elise Stefanik waits in the wings
- The Republican congresswoman’s sparring with the heads of Ivy League universities has gone viral, establishing her ability to rouse moderates
- She is an obvious contender for the White House whenever she decides it’s time to run
With her final line of questioning on genocide, a subject that US politicians of all stripes invoke in their allegations against Beijing, the New York representative pulled off a spectacle with more substance than the usual performative garbage masquerading as debate.
Her exchanges with the University of Pennsylvania’s then president Elizabeth Magill, MIT president Sally Kornbluth and Harvard University president Claudine Gay – who were inexplicably incapable of saying that calls for genocide against Jews are against their schools’ codes of conduct – have dominated the headlines and social media since.
In the tragic politics of the Middle East, where dislocation, dispossession and violent hatred make choosing sides treacherous, Stefanik’s question should have been easy to answer.
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Gaza residents gather around a massive crater ahead of pause in war with Israel
The rules of engagement in academic discourse are complex, but there was an obvious rhetorical path: calls for genocide have no place in civilised culture, including academia, and such speech differs fundamentally from denunciations of the Israeli government’s treatment of Palestinians, which should be acceptable within discourse about the Middle East.