Elon Musk offers to ‘help out’ university presidents who won’t punish campus antisemitism

‘Let me help them out here: Calling for the genocide [death] of anyone obviously constitutes harassment.’

By Vered Weiss, World Israel News

Billionaire Elon Musk took to his X platform to criticize universities for not doing more to combat antisemitism on their campuses.

He mockingly requested to “help out” university officials who wouldn’t give direct answers to the question of whether calling for genocide of Jews violates the university’s harassment code.

Musk wrote, “Let me help them out here: Calling for the genocide [death] of anyone obviously constitutes harassment.”

Let me help them out here: “Calling for the genocide [death] of anyone obviously constitutes harassment.” https://t.co/GH7lXLxxd6

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) December 6, 2023

Elon Musk later  responded to a tweet, posted by a parody account  criticizing the culture of universities.

“The top institutions in the WORLD are flooded with this woke mind virus. It’s more serious than you think. Something needs to change. Now,” the Elon Musk parody account tweeted, to which the real Musk account responded: “I’ve been saying this for a few years now. That’s why I acquired the company fka [formerly known as] Twitter. To stop the extinctionists.”

Many commenters agreed with Musk,  including presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr, who tweeted, “Watch the Ivy League collectively cross the finish line in the race for ideological extremism into a twilight zone of nihilism, intellectual confusion, and moral bankruptcy.”

Resef Shay responded, “You can’t smoke weed in Harvard, but at least calling for the genocide of Jews is now legalized!”

Musk was responding to a video he reposted of The House Committee on Education and the Workforce’s Tuesday hearing — titled “Holding Campus Leaders Accountable and Confronting Antisemitism.”

The hearing was intended to address the alarming increase in antisemitic incidents across the United States, particularly on university campuses.

In one of the most noteworthy moments in the hearing, presidents from MIT, the University of Pennsylvania, and Harvard were asked if calling for an intifada in Israel and the genocide of Jews constituted harassment according to their university’s code of conduct.

None of the three presidents–Claudine Gay of Harvard, Elizabeth Magill of Penn, and Sally Kornbluth of MIT  was able to give a definitive answer, with many saying it would depend on the context, if the statements led directly to physical action or if they were directed at an individual rather than a group.

Antisemitismantisemitism on campusElon MuskHarvard