Anti-Semitism

Floor Speech

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Mr. McCONNELL. Now, on a recent matter, I have spoken recently about the existential choice facing America's most elite universities. In the wake of October 7, an alarming surge of anti-Semitic hate swirled around the loftiest campuses in our country. And, as we are all painfully aware by now, the responses of university administrators were not exactly profiles in courage--from the equivocations and weak public statements to the absurd double standard invoked in testimony before Congress.

After months of alumni uproar and pressure from the public, Harvard and Penn appeared to recognize that it was time for new management. As I have said, universities shopping for presidents would do well to focus their search on rigorous scholarly integrity, moral clarity, and a rock-solid commitment to the even enforcement of free speech.

Unfortunately, we are still waiting to see any real signs that these universities have actually taken the lessons of the past few months to heart. Harvard, for its part, rolled out a new Presidential Task Force on Combating Anti-Semitism to much fanfare. It sounds promising--that is, until you learn that the choice for the cochair of the panel has a record of calling Israel a ``regime of apartheid.''

The university has also made no plans to terminate an exchange partnership with the university in the West Bank that proclaimed ``glory for Martyrs'' in the wake of October 7 and whose students have even been arrested for planning a terrorist attack with weapons supplied by Hamas.

So you would be forgiven for assuming that cutting overt ties with terrorist-affiliated organizations would be step one in any serious effort to reform a university. These responses would be laughable if they didn't have such clear, measurable, dangerous consequences.

Just last month, a poll showed one in five Americans between the ages of 18 and 29 doubts--doubts--that the Holocaust happened. Let me say that again. Just last month, a poll showed 1 in 5 Americans between the ages of 18 and 29 doubting that the Holocaust happened. Perhaps this shouldn't surprise us when we look at young people in post-modern critical theory that subjectivizes norms and endlessly deconstructs the wisdom of the ages and problematizes and assails the very notion of objective truth.

The Holocaust is not an alternative fact. It is not simply a narrative to be questioned by a student's lived experiences; yet 20 percent of the young people in this country doubt whether the most vile and systematic genocide of Jews in the history of the world ever happened.

The most elite universities vying to shape their minds have now spent months in an embarrassing public struggle to avoid reckoning with their role in a rise in anti-Semitic hate. If these institutions ever hope to reclaim any mantle of cultural authority they once held, they might want to start with taking the world's oldest form of hate a bit more seriously.

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