“The View” cohost Joy Behar argued Wednesday that the rise of antisemitic rhetoric and anti-Israel protests at elite American universities is straight out of “the Third Reich playbook” of attacking “a group of people just because they are Jewish.”
“Just like people attack Black people because of the color of their skin, these kids are being attacked or harassed just because they’re Jewish,” she said, adding that “these students should feel safe and not be at the mercy of these attacks.”
“I protested back in the day,” she continued, “but we were not intimidating anybody. We were not threatening anybody. That’s different between protesting and harassment.”
The comments came as the women of “The View” discussed Tuesday’s Congressional hearings with the presidents of Harvard, Penn State and MIT, who were questioned about codes of conduct and responses to hate speech on their campuses in response to the ongoing Israel-Hamas War.
Footage from Tuesday’s testimony showed Claudine Gay of Harvard, Elizabeth Magill of Penn and Sally Kornbluth of MIT stumbling through the question of whether or not calling for the genocide of Jews constitutes bullying or harassment. Each president asserted that the context of the situation would have to determine the consequences of any action stemming from such speech.
The “View” women spent almost nine minutes dissecting these responses and their relation to the nature of free and protected speech in America, as outlined in the United States Constitution, vs. colleges’ individual codes of conduct.
“Universities have an obligation to protect their students. This is not the government intervening in free speech,” cohost Sara Haines said. She continued, saying that while the “collective us” have been “quick to react” in comparable situations in the past, she’s not seeing similar support for Jewish students today.
“So this silence is deafening to me because I don’t think I realized until lately, just how insidious and accepted antisemitism is globally around the world … There is a pause when it comes to Jewish people,” Haine said. “We warn all the time about dog whistles on the show. This is a bullhorn and they are telling you exactly what they want to do. We warn of Donald Trump, ‘Take him seriously, he’s not just full of words.’ This needs to be taken as seriously with those same standards. It’s unacceptable.”
Cohost Whoopi Goldberg began and ended the segment with a call for decisive categorization of free speech and a consistent method of maintaining how the speech is labeled.
“There’s no justification — either it is or it isn’t. It’s not gray. It’s unfortunately not a gray area and it’s tough because this is part of our free speech, and we have to figure out how to work it so that everybody gets protected,” Goldberg said. I feel like they’ve been trying to figure this out for so long, that they can’t, and then they stopped thinking about it and then it goes away.
“Here’s the bottom line,” she added. “Can we all agree that either it should be protected for everyone? Because that also means you and I, when someone else decides that they don’t like what I say, let’s be consistent. Whatever we do, that’s what I want.”
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