Israel
Floor Speech
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Mr. McCONNELL. Mr. President, now on a related matter, I spoke recently about alarming reactions to the October 7 attacks coming from America's top universities. We have seen student radicals spew outright hate and campus leaders respond with agonizing, equivocating statements. But it appears that neither thick-headed, young activists nor mealy-mouthed administrators can hold a candle to university faculty when it comes to moral obtuseness. Here are a few examples:
After a student group at Columbia published a letter describing Hamas's savage attacks as the--listen to this--``struggle for freedom'' of ``occupied peoples [who] have the right to resist occupation,'' over 100 faculty members signed a letter of their own expressing a desire to ``preserve Columbia University as a beacon for fostering critical thinking and opening minds to different points of view.''
Needless to say, I am a staunch supporter of the First Amendment. People are entitled to different points of view, but they aren't entitled to different facts, and the only group that has occupied Gaza since 2007 is Hamas.
Besides, America's higher education system has a long way to go when it comes to protecting free speech and fostering diverse viewpoints. Just ask any right-of-center academic. But, of all places to start on their journey toward freedom of expression, they choose to celebrate terrorism--terrorism?
Meanwhile, the University of Pennsylvania is facing a donor revolt over campus protests and an anti-Semitic literary festival that predated October 7, but that didn't stop the local chapter of, essentially, its professors' union from issuing a six-page letter denouncing the university administration's pro-Israel views.
The school's painfully nuanced attempts at moral equivalency are, apparently, an ``erasure'' of Palestinian voices. Donors' outrage at radical calls for a pogrom are ``coercive threats'' that demand their removal from all university boards.
Let us remember who is doing the aggressing here. There is an open FBI investigation into online threats encouraging the murder--the murder--of Jewish students at Cornell. The university has had to bring in police to help protect the kosher dining hall on campus, and many Jewish students are opting to stay in their rooms for safety.
Until recently, the tenured leftwing apparatchiks of America's elite universities might have expected donors to keep on writing checks no matter which sort of unhinged, post-modern hate they ginned up. Well, not anymore.
At Penn, one alumnus's call to boycott the school has spread like wildfire, precipitating a crisis that, by one account, could put a $1 billion hole in the university's books. At least a dozen CEOs have pledged not to hire any members of the Harvard student groups who blamed Israel for the murders of its children. And elite law firms have started rescinding job offers from law students who regurgitate terrorist talking points. Some are even competing with each other to fund relief efforts in Israel.
So activist professors are entitled to their own opinions. But money is also protected speech, and they aren't entitled to donors' pocketbooks. That is not how the real world works.
America and our allies have woken up from a ``holiday from history.'' American business and philanthropists are starting to do the very same thing. Let's hope it continues.
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