Successful diplomats are deceitful by profession and, often by nature: they move, furtively, under the public declarations and grand pretensions of statesmen., negotiating with foreign powers in an “endless whirlwind of lustful, murderous, satanic desires,” as the late Charles Hill, a former diplomat and speechwriter for Henry Kissinger, put it. his book “Grand Strategies”. They serve their superiors reliably, but sometimes secretly, sometimes contravening their superiors’ national interests by distorting what they tell them about agreements made with their adversaries to stem bloody tides.

Donald Trump has just proposed The American ambassador to the UN to a noisy courtiers whose cut-and-push tactics toward American citizens on college campuses have been on display since 2023, as I noted in January in a long essay for Salon on the origins of American concerns regarding Israel/Palestine. As Chairman of the House Republican Conference, Representative Elise Stefanik of New York declared herself an official alarmist about anti-Semitism by leading a December 5, 2023, committee hearing on what she called “the rot of anti-Semitism” in student protests against the war in Gaza.

She demanded that the university presidents present at the hearing answer “yes or no” hypocritically accusatory question on campus protesters: “Does calling for Jewish genocide violate (a given institution’s) rules on bullying and harassment? It is sometimes true, unfortunately, that protesters who shout “From the river to the sea” or who hold Israel “fully responsible” for the Hamas violence on October 7, 2023 are historically misinformed and politically immature. But far from “calling for the genocide of the Jews,” as Stefanik insisted, they condemn the genocide And accusing Israeli Jews of having committed it.

At that House hearing, this congressional crook flipped the script on the protesters, calling their intentions genocidal and making college presidents look like their enablers. In doing so, she dealt a political blow not only to university presidents, demanding that they resign because their responses to her inquisition did not satisfy her anti-anti-Semitic agenda, but also reinforced long conservative campaign against liberal university leaders, whom they accuse of ruining higher education. Stefanik and other Republicans have criticized university administrators for subcontracting the prestige and services of their institutions to authoritarian state capitalist regimes abroad, but have not done so in ways that strengthen the liberal education itself. as I warned in an essay and interview for the quarterly journal of the Carnegie Council.

I refuted the Republican blame games against liberal educators. somewhere else and often. But the appointment of Stefanik as ambassador forces me to note that, only two years before she demanded the resignation of university presidents, she herself had been called to resign of the Harvard Kennedy School’s Institute of Politics Advisory Board for his unqualified support of Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election. His “public claims about election fraud…have no basis in evidence” and his “public statements about election-related legal actions that are incorrect,” the school’s dean said.

With a stubbornness that Trump no doubt admired, Stefanik refused to resign. It was only when she was removed from her position by the institute’s board of directors that she left, without grace (again like Trump), claiming it was a “badge of honored to join the long line of leaders who have been boycotted, protested and canceled by colleges and universities across America…. The Harvard administration’s decision to cower and cave to the woke left will continue to erode diversity of thought, public discourse, and ultimately the student experience. »

Ironically, when Stefanik was a student at Harvard from 2002 to 2006, she lived in the university’s Winthrop House, named for John Winthrop, the first governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, who oversaw the public celebration of the genocidal assaults of the Puritans against the State. indigenous Pequot people. In 1637, colonial soldiers surrounded a large Pequot settlement as Puritan leader John Mason “set fire to the village, which, owing to the strong wind blowing, was soon on fire,” according to the book by James Truslow Adams, winner of the 1921 Pulitzer Prize “The Founding”. of New England”:

At dawn that May morning, as the men of New England stood guard over the flames, five hundred men, women and children were slowly burned to death.

The Israeli military may have done better than the Puritans in Gaza, but one cannot minimize the glee of the Harvard founders in their genocidal attacks on indigenous peoples, which they explicitly modeled on the attacks of the biblical Israelites, as I detailed it in the Salon essay mentioned above.

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Anti-Semites like Stefanik are right to insist that Hamas’s intentions towards the Jewsin Israel and beyond, are genocidal and nihilistic, and that Hamas is a despotic overlord to the Palestinians under its rule in Gaza. But Stefanik invented the alleged leniency of genocide on the part of leaders at Harvard and other major universities, and suppressed the truth about Harvard’s support for genocide — and that of institutions like it — shortly after the founding of the university.

Anyone expecting Stefanik to be a more constructive force on the UN Security Council than John Bolton or Nikki Haley were during Trump’s first term will be sorely disappointed.