“We have failed,” wrote Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, a professor of medical ethics at the Univeristy of Pennsylvania in an opinion article entitled Hamas and the Moral Failure of Our Institutions of Higher Learning, published in the New York Times on Tuesday.

“When a coalition of 34 student organizations at Harvard can say that they ‘hold the Israeli regime entirely responsible for all unfolding violence’ and students at other elite universities blame Israel alone for the attack Hamas carried out on Israelis on Oct. 7 or even praise the massacre, something is deeply wrong at America’s colleges and universities,” he wrote.

It should be noted that Dr. Emanuel deeply understated what actually went on at “elite” US universities in the days following October 7th, when many pro-Palestinian students actually praised the murder and beheadings of babies and children and the murder, rape, and abduction of university students attending a music festival, as seen in the video below of a “protest” at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where they chanted “glory to the murders!” and “We will liberate our land by any means necessary!”

At Cornell University, a professor! actually called the Hamas assault “exhilarating!”

In the video below, students at New York University rip off posters with the photos of Israeli children abducted by Hamas terrorists.

The scene at Columbia University in New York City after the massacre:

“Students spouting ideological catchphrases have revealed their moral obliviousness and the deficiency of their educations,” Dr. Emanuel continued. “But the deeper problem is not them. It is what they are being taught — or, more specifically, what they are not being taught.”

“Certainly, not all students wear these moral blinders. But the fact that many students do, and that they are at some of the nation’s leading colleges and universities, should be a cause for profound concern across higher education.

“Those of us who are university leaders and faculty are at fault. We may graduate our students, confer degrees that certify their qualifications as the best and brightest. But we have clearly failed to educate them. We have failed to give them the ethical foundation and moral compass to recognize the basics of humanity.

“The Hamas massacre is the easiest of moral cases. The attackers intentionally targeted and killed over 1,000 civilians. They killed babies and children, people attending a concert, and people from Thailand, Nepal and more than a dozen countries who could hardly be responsible for the decades of Israeli-Palestinian violence, as if that could be any justification. And then these same gunmen took civilian hostages, with the explicitly articulated intention to use them as deterrence and, if that failed, to execute them.

“This case offers an unambiguous base to elucidate clear, shared moral principles. It’s what the ethicist John Rawls calls reflective equilibrium. The clarity of this easy example helps identify principles that allow us to wrestle through harder cases like how much an army is required to do to reduce and avoid collateral civilian deaths…without the ability to distinguish between right and wrong, and to recognize the fallacies of moral equivalence, students won’t be able to marshal the nuanced reasoning and a careful assessment of responsibility required in times like these.

“We in the academy need to look more deeply at how it is possible that so many undergraduates, graduate students, law students and faculty at our nation’s finest colleges and universities could have such moral blinders.

“We need to ask ourselves: What is in our curriculums? What do we think it means to be well educated? What moral stands are we taking? The timidity of many university leaders in condemning the Hamas massacre and antisemitism more generally offers the wrong example. Leaders need to lead.

“As a bioethicist, I support requiring students to take ethics classes. Some universities — mainly Catholic institutions, including Georgetown — still do. Having a two-course ethics requirement — one about general ethics and one about some specific area, such as military ethics, environmental and bioethics, ethics of technology, ethics of the market or political ethics — would be invaluable.

“But ethics classes alone are insufficient to help students develop a clear moral compass so that they can rise above ideological catchphrases and wrestle intelligently with moral dilemmas.

“Instead, colleges and universities need to be more self-critical and rethink what it means for students to be educated. For the last 50 years, with a few exceptions, higher education has been reducing requirements. At the same time, academia has become more hesitant: We often avoid challenging our students, avoid putting hard questions to them, avoid forcing them to articulate and justify their opinions. All opinions are equally valid, we argue. We are fearful of offending them.

“When you enter into Harvard Yard through the Dexter Gate, an inscription says, “Enter to grow in wisdom.” On the way out, the lettering reads, “Depart to serve better thy country and thy kind.” Princeton’s informal motto is “in the nation’s service and the service of humanity.” Unless we provide a liberal education with strong moral and ethical foundations as the center of our work, students will never grow in wisdom, to the detriment of our country and humanity.”

“We will liberate the land by any means necessary”

We saw exactly what that means – murder, rape, torture.

Shame on every person who came to this @UWMadison rally for death pic.twitter.com/yDuUmipRpe

— Aviva Klompas (@AvivaKlompas) October 11, 2023

(YWN Israel Desk – Jerusalem)