Source: Harvard Law Student Asks Israeli Official Why She’s ‘So Smelly’
With an extended endnote by Eunice Fischlippe,
“On The Need To Avoid Antisemitic Stereotypes”
TOP ISRAELI POLITICIAN TZIPI LIVNI
When asked “Why are you so smelly?” the lady was left speechless with shock.
This disgraceful anti-Semitic slur must not be allowed to go unpunished. (Eunice Fischlippe)
On Thursday, April 14, at an event hosted by the Program on Negotiation at Harvard Law School, Tzipi Livni, a former Israeli minister and member of the Knesset, spoke to roughly 150 students and faculty members. During the Q & A portion at the end of the presentation, a Harvard Law School Student directed an ad hominem attack on the Israeli guest:
“My question is for Tzipi Livni—how is it that you are so smelly?” The student, a male third-year who is also the president of a student organization on campus, added, “It’s regarding your odor—about the odor of Tzipi Livni, very smelly.”
On Monday, April 18, Jeremy Salinger and Jacqueline Wolpoe, current co-presidents of the Jewish Law Students Association (JLSA), as well as Jonathan Gartner the former president, penned a statement condemning what they termed “blatantly anti-Semitic rhetoric.”
JLSA’s denunciation was published in the HLS Record, an independent student-run newspaper at Harvard Law School. Within the last two days their statement has been shared on social media over 1,700 times.
This recent event is predated by another anti-Semitic episode, which occurred last year. After Pnina Sharvit Baruch, the former head of the IDF international law department visited campus, a swastika was found carved into a desk at the law school. At the time, the administration sent out an enigmatic email about the incident, which many students considered an underwhelming response.
Against that backdrop, the reaction to the “smelly” incident was much more forceful.
Yesterday, Martha Minow, the Dean of Harvard Law School, sent a powerful email to the entire law school. In the email, titled, “A Disturbing Event,” Dean Minow quotes the anti-Semitic comment and writes,
The comment was offensive and it violated the trust and respect we expect in our community. Many perceive it as anti-Semitic, and no one would see it as appropriate. It was an embarrassment to this institution and an assault upon the values we seek to uphold.
When dealing with events that appear isolated, it is important to avoid generalizations.
Still, it would be imprudent to ignore the alarming fact that recent anti-Israel sentiment on college campuses has emboldened students to conflate protest with hate speech.
It was bewildering to many at Harvard university that a Harvard Law student felt comfortable making his comment in front of roughly 150 colleagues and professors. Perhaps the most upsetting component is that other students have been willing to shrug off the choice of slur as “an unfortunate coincidence.”
UPDATE:
The student who made the remark has now apologized. The Observer has declined to name him. His statement appears in part below.
I am writing to apologize, as sincerely as I can via this limited form of communication, to anyone who may have felt offended by the comments I made last week. To be very clear, as there seems to be some confusion, I would never, ever, ever call anyone, under any circumstances, a “smelly Jew.”
Such a comment is utterly repugnant, and I am absolutely horrified that some readers have been led to believe that I would ever say such a thing.
With regards to what I actually did say, I can see now, after speaking with the authors of this article and many other members of the Jewish community at HLS, how my words could have been interpreted as a reference to an anti-Semitic stereotype, one that I was entirely unaware of prior to the publication of this article.
I want to be very clear that it was never my intention to invoke a hateful stereotype, but I recognize now that, regardless of my intention, words have power, and it troubles me deeply to know that I have caused some members of the Jewish community such pain with my words.
To those people I say, please reach out. Give me an opportunity to make it right.
Many members of the Jewish community—some of whom hold strong differences of opinion with me—have reached out to me on their own to let me know that they did not interpret my words as anti-Semitic, because they know me well enough to know that that is not at all consistent with who I am as a person.
ENDNOTE BY EUNICE FISCHLIPPE
On The Need To Avoid Antisemitic Stereotypes
Personal comments to our Jewish friends along the lines of “Why are you so smelly?” or “Why is your nose so big?” should be avoided at all times. These are not only tactless and indeed offensive but in many cases untrue. I have a Jewish friend who showers a least three times a day and has more deodorants than I have dresses. Her nose, the last time I checked, was satisfactory. In no sense could anyone, except a pedant, raise doubts as to its dimensional idiosyncrasies.
All such hurtful comments to Jews simply give antisemitism a bad name and should therefore be avoided.
Even if you feel it is true that a particular Jew is smelly or has an aesthetically unpleasing nose, it is best to keep this information to yourself. Voicing your concerns and criticisms, after all, could have serious consequences for you and even lead to your early demise. This happened to General Patton.
Take heed therefore from the example of General Patton and learn discretion.
Most of the Jews swarming over Germany immediately after World War Two came to an end were not to General Patton’s tastes. He had exceptionally high standards on personal hygiene and objected to the Jews on this account, finding them needlessly indifferent to the accepted conventions relating to olfactory norms.
I shake my had in horror when I read about the horrible things this anti-Semitic general said about the uncleanliness and smelliness of the Jews, and I say to myself:
This guy was asking for it. No wonder the Jews had him bumped off!
BAD-ASS GENERAL PATTON
‘The antisemitic sonofabitch had it coming to him!”
Here, read what this horrid military man had to say about the Jews and then ask yourselves, “Don’t you think he had it coming to him?
He [General Patton] was disgusted by their behavior in the camps for Displaced Persons which the Americans built for them and even more disgusted by the way they behaved when they were housed in German hospitals and private homes. He observed with horror that “these people do not understand toilets and refuse to use them except as repositories for tin cans, garbage, and refuse . . . They decline, where practicable, to use latrines, preferring to relieve themselves on the floor.”
Here is a shocking antisemitic comment made by the evil General in his disgraceful Diary — he is describing one of the Displaced Persons camps for Jews:
Here, although room existed, the Jews were crowded together to an appalling extent, and in practically every room there was a pile of garbage in one corner which was also used as a latrine. The Jews were only forced to desist from their nastiness and clean up the mess by the threat of the butt ends of rifles. Of course, I know the expression ‘lost tribes of Israel’ applied to the tribes which disappeared —not to the tribe of Judah from which the current sons of bitches are descended. However, it is my personal opinion that this too is a lost tribe — lost to all decency.
Doesn’t that make your blood boil? Wouldn’t you like to tear his eyes out, the antisemitic sonofabitch? Yes, I know what I’d have done to this guy if I’d had the chance. But I’m not going to tell you, because I’m too well-bred to descend to that level of discourse. Heaven forbid!
Here is General Patton’s diary entry for September 17, 1945. It gets my hackles up when I read it. My hands ball into fists and I want to beat the living daylights out of that nasty white all-American Jew-bashing bully:
This happened to be the feast of Yom Kippur, so they were all collected in a large, wooden building, which they called a synagogue. It behooved General Eisenhower to make a speech to them. We entered the synagogue, which was packed with the greatest stinking bunch of humanity I have ever seen. When we got about halfway up, the head rabbi, who was dressed in a fur hat similar to that worn by Henry VIII of England and in a surplice heavily embroidered and very filthy, came down and met the General . . . The smell was so terrible that I almost fainted and actually about three hours later lost my lunch as the result of remembering it.
The General Patton article, which you can read on this popular antisemitic website, ends with these wounding words: “These experiences and a great many others firmly convinced Patton that the Jews were an especially unsavory variety of creature and hardly deserving of all the official concern the American government was bestowing on them.”
The moral of this story?
Stop calling Jews “smelly” or you’ll end up like General Patton — DEAD!
Source Article from http://www.renegadetribune.com/jews-uproar-harvard-law-student-asks-top-israeli-official-smelly/
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