The fallout of last week’s testimony by the liberal presidents of three of America’s most elite universities, who beclowned themselves in refusing to condemn anti-Semitism on their campuses, continued over the weekend.
University of Pennsylvania President Liz Magill surrendered to mounting pressure from alumni, donors and Republicans and resigned.
On Sunday, conservative journalists Christopher Rufo and Chris Brunet released a thread on X (formerly Twitter) threatening to upend the career of Harvard President Claudine Gay. Their reporting suggests Gay violated Harvard’s ethics code by plagiarizing parts of her doctoral dissertation.
But the conservative Media Research Center uncovered a nugget from that same congressional hearing last week that did not get as much attention.
A South Florida Democrat tried to deflect the anti-Semitism in her own party by blaming former President Donald Trump for the rising tide of Jew-hatred on left-wing college campuses and in Democrat-run major cities.
And for good measure, she revived the hoax that Trump in 2017 asserted that neo-Nazis at a 2017 Virginia protest were “fine people.”
As reported by the MRC on Friday, Rep. Frederica Wilson, a noted Trump hater, sought to turn attention away from the pro-Hamas sentiment on campuses by noting that she has Jewish friends.
“I’m privileged to represent a strong, united Jewish community in south Florida. My next-door neighbor is a rabbi. My Jewish constituents have experienced everything from bomb threats on Jewish centers, schools, to harassment of Jewish community centers,” she said.
But then, she turned her attention to Trump.
Wilson questioned historian Pamela Nadell, a professor of history and Jewish Studies at American University, about the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, that turned violent and left one liberal protester dead.
Nadell went along with Wilson, saying Charlottesville “signaled that the long history of anti-Semitism in the United States, that it was about to burst out again.”
As the MRC noted, Wilson “attempted to draw a connection between Trump and the ongoing anti-Semitic events on college campuses – even though the campus events are specifically connected to the ongoing war between Israel and Hamas and have no link whatsoever to the Unite the Right rally.”
Ironically, the MRC added, if Wilson sought to connect anti-Israeli or anti-Semitic sentiments to one prominent ideological and political organization, she could look at Black Lives Matter, which endorsed the Oct. 7 terrorist attacks by Hamas that killed more than 1,200 Jews.
As noted, the idea that Trump was somehow condoning neo-Nazis or anti-Semintism in the wake of the 2017 riot in Charlottesville, here is what he told reporters at the time:
“Excuse me, they didn’t put themselves down as neo-Nazis, and you had some very bad people in that group. But you also had people that were very fine people on both sides. You had people in that group – excuse me, excuse me, I saw the same pictures you did. You had people in that group that were there to protest the taking down of, to them, a very, very important statue and the renaming of a park from Robert E. Lee to another name.”
When a reporter tried to claim that either Goerge Washington or Lee were different from the Nazis, Trump correctly pointed out both were slaveholders.
He then added:
“I’m not talking about the neo-Nazis and white nationalists because they should be condemned totally. But you had many people in that group other than neo-Nazis and white nationalists, OK? And the press has treated them absolutely unfairly. Now, in the other group, you had some fine people, but you also had some troublemakers and you see them come with the black outfits and with the helmets and with the baseball bats. You had a lot of bad people in the other group, too.”
Android Users, Click To Download The Free Press App And Never Miss A Story. Follow Us On Facebook and Twitter. Sign up for our free newsletter.
We can’t do this without your help. Visit our GiveSendGo page and donate any dollar amount; every penny helps.