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‘I feel like we’ve lost our humanity’

In a Monday speech to an audience at Notre Dame, Israeli scholar Yoram Hazony said Hamas’ surprise assault against Israel is “not morally equivalent” to the subsequent civilian collateral damage inflicted by the Israeli Defense Forces.

Calling Hamas’ actions “radically evil,” Hazony (pictured) said higher education should not be defending the terror organization: “I feel like we’ve lost our humanity.”

Hazony, president of the Herzl Institute and chair of the Edmund Burke Foundation, ripped “elite universities” as being “captured by Neo-Marxist ideologues” which have been “the driving force” behind the current resurgence of antisemitism in the U.S., The Observer reports.

Of note, Hazony pointed out that many university protests against Israel began even before the country’s counter-attack against Hamas.

Hazony said the October 7 attack against Israel was a “rude awakening” for those who thought antisemitism wasn’t an issue. He brought up the testimonies of college presidents before Congress who waffled over whether calling for the eradication of Jews violated the respective schools’ codes of conduct.

Universities need to be more vigilant in “prohibiting” speech which calls for violent action, Hazony said. He added it was “naive” to call for “more free speech” to take on those calling for the extermination of an entire people.

MORE: Conservative Israeli scholar at Princeton target of cancel culture campaign

“Free speech can’t help where speech is being used in order to destroy free speech, or to eliminate the possibility of an exchange of honors and mutual respect,” Hazony said.

From the story:

Hazony accused these groups of “employing threats, aggression, deception and a wide variety of forms of abuse in order to intimidate and silence anyone who descends from their views.”

He added that these groups rely on faculty members who do not discipline their actions.

In order to remedy this problem, Hazony called on universities to punish faculty and students who threaten others or call for violence against any ethnic, religious or political groups and to hire more intellectually diverse faculty.

Hazony drew a distinction between restrictions on speech which explicitly calls for violence and restrictions on speech that can simply be interpreted as “offensive,” which he argued are often used to discriminate against conservatives.

Outside the venue at which Hazony spoke, anti-Israel protesters held a “vigil” for all the Palestinians killed since the war started, which included reading the names of dead children and “pass[ing] around flowers.”

Grad student Francesca Freeman said the vigil was a response to the “hatred promoted” at the Hazony talk. She called Israel’s counter-offensive a “genocide” and referred to the (Palestinian) victims as “martyrs.”

MORE: Penn professor accused of white supremacy at Hazony-founded conference

IMAGE: Yoram Hazony/X

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