Our Zoom call this week will be on Thursday—not the usual Friday—at Noon EST. Our guests will be former Human Rights Watch executive director Ken Roth and Kathryn Sikkink, the Ryan Family Professor of Human Rights Policy at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government. They’ll be discussing a remarkable story by Michael Massing last week in The Nation, which detailed how the Kennedy School offered Roth a fellowship and then rescinded it, reportedly because of claims that Human Rights Watch is “anti-Israel.” Sikkink has publicly objected to the decision by her own dean. We’ll talk not only about this incident but about the pressures that inhibit American universities from defending human rights in Israel-Palestine and beyond.
As usual, paid subscribers will get the link this Wednesday and the video the following week.
Sources Cited in this Video
I wish more journalists had emphasized that many of Kevin McCarthy’s fiercest Republican foes are insurrectionists. But this New York Times story by Luke Broadwater lays out the connections in detail.
Things to Read
In Jewish Currents (subscribe!), Joshua Leifer notes that Yair Lapid and the parliamentary “resistance” to Netanyahu’s far-right government aren’t resisting its policies toward Palestinians.
In Haaretz, Knesset member Ayman Odeh makes a similar point.
Last week, I discussed Israel’s new government with Mehdi Hasan on MSNBC.
In The Washington Post, Gershom Gorenberg suggests that Netanyahu’s government could fall sooner than people think.
In Al Shabaka, Tareq Baconi, Yara Hawari, Tariq Kenney-Shawa and Alaa Tartir reflect on Mahmoud Abbas’ disastrous legacy.
A searing attack by Carleton College’s Amna Khalid on Hamline University’s decision to fire an adjunct professor for showing her students images of the Prophet Muhammad.
In his Substack, “State of Seige,” Ahmad Ibsais decries the media’s disparate coverage of Israel-Palestine and Russia-Ukraine.
If you listen to one thing about the NFL and Damar Hamlin, make it this.
See you Thursday (not Friday) at Noon EST,
Peter
VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:
Hi. Our Zoom call this week is gonna be on Thursday at noon ET, not the usual Friday, to accommodate the schedule of two guests that I’m pretty excited about. The first is Ken Roth, who was the longtime executive director of Human Rights Watch. Some of you may have noticed the excellent piece in The Nation, which came out at the end of last week, detailing the fact that Ken Roth had been offered a fellowship at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, which was then retracted. And the reporting suggests it was retracted because of Human Rights Watch’s alleged anti-Israel bias, which I think is—you know, those of us who follow these subjects are kind of quite familiar with the way that this kind of cancel culture can work when it comes to people who support Palestinian rights. But for it to happen at as prestigious an academic institution as Harvard’s Kennedy School is quite striking. And so, Ken Roth is going to be our guest Thursday at noon. And we’re also going to be joined by Kathryn Sikkink, who is a Professor of Human Rights Policy at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. She’s one of the people who is quoted as one of the people who internally expressed outrage at what happened at her own institution. So, we’re gonna talk about this particular incident. But the larger question of the struggle that universities have in standing up for human rights on the question of Israel-Palestine, and also more generally. So that’ll be on Thursday.
I wanted to say something about the kind of marathon effort, which ultimately led to Kevin McCarthy becoming the speaker of the House early on Saturday morning. It strikes me that one of the things that the press didn’t do enough was note the fact that Kevin McCarthy’s fiercest critics, the people in the Republican party who were most hostile to him and pushed him ultimately to make concession after concession—likely making his speakership very, very unwieldy—were also people who overwhelmingly supported Donald Trump’s insurrection on January 6th. As it happens, McCarthy was chosen Speaker almost exactly two years after January 6th. And I think it’s unfortunate that that connection wasn’t made more clearly. Because I think there’s a deep connection between these two events. Not only because many of McCarthy’s opponents were supporters of the insurrection, but also because it is precisely the dysfunction that they are creating in America’s legislative bodies that demagogues like Donald Trump use to whip up anti-democratic sentiment. The argument of authoritarian strongmen who want to overthrow liberal democracy has always been that liberal democracy doesn’t function. That it’s corrupt. That it’s ineffective. That it can’t solve problems. And, therefore, you need the strong man who’s not gonna be restrained by these rules of law and process, and who can go and fix problems. You know, famously with Mussolini, ‘make the trains run on time.’
And so, I think that one of the things that we are being reminded in some really disturbing ways by this new incipient Republican leadership in the House is that by making it very difficult for Congress to function, for the House to function, they will end up promoting the kind of sentiment that Donald Trump, or some would-be Donald Trump figure whether it’s Ron DeSantis or others, uses again to play this role of the kind of the authoritarian figure. And I think I worry that Democrats have not taken this fear seriously enough. One of the things that’s looking like a potential catastrophe is that the House will have to vote to keep the government open, and even more significantly will vote to have to vote to raise the debt ceiling so the United States does not forfeit on its debts, which would be an economic calamity. That’s going to be very, very difficult given the fact that Kevin McCarthy has ceded so much power to members of the Freedom Caucus and other extremists, who literally would be willing to let the US go into default in pursuit of their crusade to cut government spending. Parenthetically, you could say that they never seem nearly as eager to pursue when Republicans are in power but that they always turn to when Democrats hold the presidency.
Anyway, the prospect of an economic default by the US—I think some Democrats may think, well, this will help us because it’ll show that the Republicans simply can’t govern. They’re too dysfunctional. They’re too extreme. And that’ll help Joe Biden get reelected. But my fear is that what’ll actually happen is it will simply delegitimize all branches of government and allow a Republican strongman figure like DeSantis to basically run against Washington, period. And not just run against Washington but, in the Trump mode to some degree, to run against the procedural restraints that exist within American liberal democracy. Again, DeSantis is not Donald Trump, and yet he has done some very egregious things in Florida. For instance, particularly with felon disenfranchisement, which shows that he’s also quite hostile to American multiracial democracy.
So, I think this relationship between the way Republicans produce government dysfunction, which then fuels authoritarian sentiments and creates opportunities for authoritarians is one of the dynamics that I think we’re now starting to see in the victory of Kevin McCarthy. And it’s a reminder of the way in which you can both threaten the workings of a liberal democratic parliamentary process, and then also ideologically benefit from that dysfunction because it produces a kind of right-wing authoritarianism that we’ve seen in spades in the United States, and, of course, not just in the United States.
Again, our call on Thursday will be with long-time Human Rights Watch executive director Ken Roth and Harvard’s Kennedy School Professor of Human Rights Policy Kathryn Sikkink about the denial of Ken Roth’s fellowship at Harvard’s Kennedy School allegedly because of Human Rights Watch’s alleged anti-Israel bias, and the larger question of the relationship between human rights, universities, and Israel-Palestine. I hope to see you on Thursday at noon ET.
How Republican Dysfunction Breeds Republican Authoritarianism