[Stefanik has campaigned on Great Replacement Theory tropes and
indulged genuine anti-Semites. University presidents should stop
playing into her hand and uphold the right to criticize any
government.]
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ELISE STEFANIK, GREAT REPLACEMENT THEORY AND BIGOTRY AGAINST JEWS  
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Juan Cole
December 12, 2023
Informed Comment
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_ Stefanik has campaigned on Great Replacement Theory tropes and
indulged genuine anti-Semites. University presidents should stop
playing into her hand and uphold the right to criticize any
government. _

,

 

Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-NY) does not
care about antisemitism. In the notorious congressional hearing
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which she participated last week, she weaponized anti-Palestinian,
anti-Arab and anti-Muslim hatred in order to embarrass three
university presidents with dishonest “have you stopped beating your
spouse?” questions — pretending to do so in order to fight bigotry
against Jews.

Stefanik implicitly characterized campus protests against the Israeli
total war on Gaza and its reckless disregard for civilian life as a
form of antisemitism, indeed as a call for genocide. Apparently the
logic is that if Palestinians get their basic civil rights, then an
Israeli ethnostate becomes difficult to maintain, and if Israel has to
be a pluralist state rather than retaining solely sovereignty for
Jews, that outbreak of equal rights equates to a genocide.

It is the same logic white nationalists use to argue that rights for
African Americans equates to genocide against white people. That
Stefanik is deploying Klan logic is no accident — see below.

Stefanik is supposedly a Roman Catholic. Here is what the head of her
church said
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brutalizing Israeli tactics in Gaza: “This is what wars do. But
here, we have gone beyond wars. This is not war. This is terrorism.”

The Pope accused the Israeli army of terrorism against Palestinians.
Would Stefanik let him come to the University of Pennsylvania and say
that on campus? Or is she a cafeteria Catholic who likes the pro-life
stance of the church regarding abortion but isn’t pro-life when it
comes to war on Palestinians?

We can further tell that Stefanik is a hypocrite because she did not
bother to criticize Donald J. Trump for saying that the Nazis who
chanted “Jews will not replace us” at Charlottesville in 2017 were
“very fine people.” (She did, in her earlier incarnation as a
somewhat normal person, herself condemn the white nationalists at
Charlottesville. But she never protested Trump’s characterization.)

When challenged on Trump’s association with Kanye West and other
genuine antisemites, Stefanik lamely excused him on the grounds that
he had recognized Israel’s illegal occupation of Syria’s Golan
Heights. No wonder she can’t understand, like, college. She thinks
breaking international law is a sign someone isn’t an antisemite.

It gets worse. In 2021, Stefanik began taking up the talking points of
the Great Replacement Theory. It holds that wealthy Jewish businessmen
are bringing in immigrants from the Global South to replace white
workers, since the immigrants will work more cheaply. Stefanik perhaps
did not utter the phrase, but she appealed to all the dog whistles of
this odious theory.

Marianna Sotomayor
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last year at the _Washington Post _that Stefanik put out campaign
ads saying, “Radical Democrats are planning their most aggressive
move yet: a PERMANENT ELECTION INSURRECTION . . . Their plan to grant
amnesty to 11 MILLION illegal immigrants will overthrow our current
electorate and create a permanent liberal majority in Washington.”
Guess who the “radical Democrats” might be, to which she refers?
Could they possibly be people such as, oh, I don’t know, Rep. Jamie
Raskin (D-MD), Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-NY), Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA) and
other Jewish American legislators who have worked for immigration
reform
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Anti-immigrant hatred wrapped up with bigotry toward Jewish Americans
has been responsible for mass shootings at Buffalo, NY and at the Tree
of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh. It is perhaps the single most
dangerous ideology in the United States.

Stefanik is up to her ears in it.

_Democracy Now! “Peter Beinart on ‘Who is Elise Stefanik?’_
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I wrote earlier about the origins of the Great Replacement Theory:

“The phrase, and the most extensive elaboration of the theory,
originated with the French Nazi René Binet
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who served during WW II in The Waffen Grenadier Brigade of the SS
Charlemagne
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which consisted of French collaborators. You don’t get more fascist
than that– the Charlemagne Brigade were the last troops to defend
Hitler’s bunker before his suicide, and staged a failed, desperate
fight against the Soviet army’s advance into Berlin.

Binet fulminated
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the war against “the invasion of Europe by Negroes and Mongols,”
by which he meant Americans and Soviets. He saw Americans as an impure
mestizo “race” (he was a biological racist). He also launched
diatribes against unbridled capitalism and the ways in which Jews were
using it to abet the replacement of civilized white Europeans.

So this supposedly far right American nationalist idea actually
originated in hatred for Americans and a denigration of their supposed
“whiteness” by the European Right, which did not see Russians as
“white” either . . .

As defenders of illiberalism and implicitly of hatred of Jews, these
useful idiots of the far right are symbolically still deployed around
Hitler’s bunker, defending it from the approaching Allies.”

The fact is that Stefanik was not defending Jewish American students
on US campuses but attempting to silence non-white and progressive
students and ensure that their speech is criminalized.

During the intense Israeli bombardment of densely populated Gaza,
which has killed over 17,000 people
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70% of them women and children, many American students have felt
traumatized. The gory images coming out of Gaza and the grim
determination on the part of Israeli and Biden administration
officials to continue the carnage have shaken many in the younger
generation. Some 46% of young people aged 18-29
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or strongly disapprove of the Biden administration’s handling of the
Israeli-Hamas conflict, whereas only 19% strongly approve.

In addition, Palestinian American, Arab American and Muslim American
students, along will many other students of color and progressives,
including members of Jewish Voices for Peace, have demanded not only
an immediate ceasefire but an end to Israel’s occupation of the
Palestinian territories and freedom for the stateless, oppressed
Palestinians. They have chanted, “From the river to the sea,
Palestine will be free” and called for a new uprising (in
Arabic, _intifadah_.

Students (and professors) invested in chauvinist Israeli nationalism
have charged that protesting against the Israeli assault on Gaza, or
in favor of basic human rights for Palestinians, are forms of
anti-Jewish bigotry. That charge is patently ridiculous. The issue is
not discrimination against a minority but critique of the 18th most
powerful
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in the world and its shameful, blatant disregard for International
Humanitarian Law.

Stefanik’s Democratic rival, Steven Holden, a veteran, replied 
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Facebook, pointing out that she is implicitly assaulting the first
amendment:

University Presidents should stop playing into the hands of wily
sociopaths such as Stefanik, who is plotting to impose Trumpism and
his promised dictatorship on all Americans, to take away a woman’s
right to choose nationally, to ban Muslims, and to put the nail in the
coffin of the Voting Rights Act. They should simply say that in this
country we have a first amendment and we can criticize any government
we like– Argentina’s, China’s, Hungary’s, or Israel’s. That
isn’t racism, that is responsible world citizenship, and the right
of free citizens of a democracy.

_Juan Cole [[link removed]] is the founder
and chief editor of Informed Comment. He is Richard P. Mitchell
Professor of History at the University of Michigan He is author of,
among many other books, Muhammad: Prophet of Peace amid the Clash of
Empires
[[link removed]] and The
Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam
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Follow him on Twitter at @jricole
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the Informed Comment Facebook Page
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* Rep. Elise Stefanik
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* anti-Semitism
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* First Amendment
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