{"id":1442863,"date":"2024-01-13T11:00:00","date_gmt":"2024-01-13T11:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/theintercept.com\/?p=457257"},"modified":"2024-01-13T11:00:00","modified_gmt":"2024-01-13T11:00:00","slug":"pro-israel-effort-to-smear-penn-president-started-well-before-oct-7","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/2024\/01\/13\/pro-israel-effort-to-smear-penn-president-started-well-before-oct-7\/","title":{"rendered":"Pro-Israel Effort to Smear Penn President Started Well Before Oct. 7"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Few U.S. colleges<\/u> have generated more controversy for their response to Israel\u2019s war on Gaza than the University of Pennsylvania. Penn\u2019s president Liz Magill faced criticism for her answers about hypothetical scenarios<\/a> of antisemitism posed during a congressional hearing by Rep. Elise Stefanik, R-N.Y., who has herself faced criticism<\/a> for embracing<\/a> antisemitic conspiracy theories.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Stefanik\u2019s line of questioning last month was part of a wider campaign in the wake of the October 7 Hamas attack on Israel: demonizing pro-Palestine activism. Stefanik conflated calls for \u201cintifada\u201d \u2014 an Arabic word for “uprising” \u2014 with antisemitic attacks and asked Magill, along with other university presidents, if these purported calls for the genocide of Jews constituted harassment. Magill, by all accounts, stumbled through a non-answer.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Under pressure from billionaire donors and pro-Israel lobby groups, Magill and Penn board chair Scott Bok resigned four days after the hearing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

News of the resignations was framed as part of the university\u2019s failure to handle antisemitism on campus in the wake of October 7. But the effort to oust Magill began months before the Hamas attack, according to public letters<\/a> and people familiar with the fight over Israel and Palestine at Penn. As early as August<\/a>, Magill had drawn the ire<\/a> of pro-Israel lobbying groups, nonprofits, and university donors<\/a> after rebuffing their efforts to cancel a literary festival on campus called Palestine Writes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The story of what happened at Penn was distorted to obscure the earlier round of anti-Palestinian attacks against the literary festival, said Radhika Sainath, a senior staff attorney at Palestine Legal who works on speech and academic freedom. Palestine Legal advised the festival and urged<\/a> Magill to resist censoring the event.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Sainath, who attended the festival to conduct research for a novel, said that media reports ran with unverified claims that Palestine Writes had stoked antisemitism, even suggesting<\/a> that the festival<\/a> was linked<\/a> to the Hamas attack.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cYou could really see how pretty much every newspaper was just adopting the framework of these Israel lobby groups as a given, as if the festival was antisemitic,\u201d she said. \u201cPeople were just really upset in part about a large number of Palestinians potentially coming to campus to talk about Palestinian literature.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That coverage amplified the attacks that led to the congressional hearings, eventually precipitating Magill\u2019s resignation. University officials squandered an opportunity to correct false claims that students had called for the genocide of Jewish people, Sainath said: \u201cThey kind of went along with it and fell into this trap.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n

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A banner for the University of Pennsylvania on campus in Philadelphia on Dec. 8, 2023.Photo: Michelle Gustafson\/Bloomberg via Getty Images<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n

Over the summer<\/u>, wealthy donors, along with local and national Jewish groups, lined up to take issue with the university\u2019s plans to host a festival in September celebrating Palestinian authors.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

One of the leaders of the informal network of critics was Marc Rowan, CEO of the investment firm Apollo Global Management. Rowan serves as advisory board chair<\/a> of the university\u2019s Wharton School, which he attended, and was previously a member of Penn\u2019s board of trustees. He also chairs the board of the UJA-Federation of New York<\/a>, an influential Jewish group involved in pro-Israel advocacy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Another major force against the festival was billionaire Republican donor Ronald Lauder, also a Wharton alum, who pushed Magill to cancel Palestine Writes in a meeting in Philadelphia<\/a> and two subsequent phone calls.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

The Jewish Federation of Greater Philadelphia and the Anti-Defamation League of Philadelphia sent two letters to Magill in August complaining of \u201ca high likelihood\u201d that the festival would \u201cpromote inflammatory and antisemitic narratives about Israel.\u201d They alleged that some of the speakers, including Marc Lamont Hill; Noura Erakat; Maysoon Zayid; Huwaida Arraf; Roger Waters; and the festival\u2019s executive director, Susan Abulhawa, had a \u201chistory of antisemitism,\u201d citing criticisms of Zionism and Israel\u2019s human rights abuses. The groups said the university should issue a statement \u201cquestioning the judgment\u201d of the departments working with the festival, which included Penn\u2019s English, near Eastern languages and civilizations, and cinema and media studies departments.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Festival organizers pushed back. In a September 2 letter<\/a> to Magill and other university leaders, Abulhawa described the complaints as part of \u201ca campaign to discredit and denigrate\u201d the literature festival. \u201cWe categorically reject this cynical, sinister, and ahistorical conflation of bigotry with the moral repudiation of a foreign state\u2019s criminality, particularly as most of us are victims of that state,\u201d she wrote. \u201cEvery instance of the examples listed in the original letter refers to Zionism, Zionists, or Israel. Situating those individual Palestinians and our allies in league with actual antisemites is wholly irresponsible and dangerous.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ten days later, Magill and other university leaders issued a statement<\/a> distancing Penn from the festival, citing concerns raised about certain speakers \u201cwho have a documented and troubling history of engaging in antisemitism by speaking and acting in ways that denigrate Jewish people.\u201d The university condemned antisemitism, the officials wrote, but supported the free exchange of ideas. \u201cThis includes the expression of views that are controversial and even those that are incompatible with our institutional values.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When it became clear that Palestine Writes would go forward as planned, Rowan, Lauder, and other trustees organized an open letter<\/a> to Magill reiterating concerns about the festival. The letter eventually gained more than 4,000 signatories, including prominent alumni.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The festival began on September 22 and went off mostly without a hitch, despite threats against organizers and at least two high-profile attendees who were kept from attending in person. Gary Younge, a sociology professor at the University of Manchester; Waters of Pink Floyd; and author Viet Thanh Nguyen were scheduled as plenary speakers. Nguyen was the only one of the three who could attend in person. Younge said<\/a> his visa was inexplicably revoked prior to his trip to the U.S., and Waters said the university prohibited him from stepping on campus; he spoke to the festival online from the Philadelphia Airport. The university countered<\/a> that Waters was originally set to attend virtually and a last-minute change would have required additional security. Festival organizers disputed the university\u2019s account.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Attendees and festival board members who spoke to The Intercept described Palestine Writes<\/a> as a multigenerational, multicultural event that welcomed everyone and fostered an important cultural space on campus, particularly for Palestinian students.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But in the weeks following October 7, media outlets and critics linked the festival to the Hamas attack and said it had fomented an unsafe campus environment for Jewish students. In a letter to the university newspaper published October 12, Rowan and other donors called on Magill and Bok to resign and urged alumni to \u201cclose the checkbooks\u201d and halt donations. \u201cIt took less than two weeks to go from the Palestine Writes Literary Festival on UPenn\u2019s campus to the barbaric slaughter and kidnapping of Israelis,\u201d Rowan wrote<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n