 back to ThinkTech. This is Our Changing World. I'm Jay Fidel. Today we're gonna talk about the Israeli Hamas War. We're gonna talk about the media. We're gonna talk about the college campuses. And we're gonna try to figure out why all these protests have been happening in American college campuses and elsewhere too. With our old friends Seymour Kazimurski and Daphne Desser, who's a professor at UH. Seymour, why don't you give the scope of our discussion and give the scope of Daphne? Welcome and thank you very much for inviting me, Jay. I get very perturbed because antisemitism is rising its ugly head again. And I wanna make it on a personal level so people don't just look at it as a word. When I was growing up at eight years old, I lived in a small town called Senegal. And the signs on the hotels or two hotels that had no dogs and no Jews allowed. And I had to live with that. When I would come out from school and the kids were waiting for us who wanted to fight with us, they said, and that means that goddamn Jews. And I lived with that. I know exactly what antisemitism is all about. All these people who use the word antisemitism and think that it's all about Israel, that's not true. It's about all of the Jewish people around the world who face antisemitism. Sometimes it's direct in their face, sometimes it's behind their back. And that's one thing that we have to realize has been going on for centuries. This is not new with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. This is not new since World War II. It's been going on for years and years, hundreds and thousands of years. So when people say, is Israel submitted or are they Nazis or are they doing pogroms or are they doing... I mean, how could they say that with knowledge? And that's why I wanted to bring Daphne into the picture. Daphne is a professor at UH. She has spoken with me when I talk about the Holocaust to students all over Hawaii. And I can tell you that she can give us a direct answer what is wrong on college campuses today. So if I may, I'd like to introduce Daphne. Well, thank you so much, Seymour. And thank you, Jay, for having me. And I'm sorry to be here on this kind of occasion. I think that every Jewish person has somewhere in their history a story like Seymour's where an ancestor or a relative, a friend even has faced antisemitism, whether that's working back from history to the pogroms, the Holocaust or other incidences that they've had experienced within their own lives. But what I will say about university campuses in general is that although we have lots of important research done on antisemitism from histories of, let's say the departments of history, polysci, some of sociology, the study of antisemitism hasn't made its way into certain departments. So we have a pretty extensive study now in English departments, in American studies, in ethnic studies, in women and gender and sexuality studies, those sorts of departments on every sort of ism you can imagine, racism of all sorts, sexism, et cetera. But what we will find on very few syllabi are any readings about antisemitism. So one of the things that I think we can do to bring about change on university campuses is simply curricular to bring the study of antisemitism, the research on antisemitism that already exists to the students and to the faculty, to encourage faculty to include a unit on antisemitism when they're addressing other forms of oppression, which they often do in the classrooms. And the other point I will just make in terms of how we can improve the campus climate is we need to hire experts in Jewish studies. We need faculty for whom this is their primary area of research so that when these moments happen, we have enough faculty on board that can give the real and true definitions of things like genocide, apartheid, ethnic cleansing, as opposed to what we are seeing on social media that are completely irresponsible misuses of those terms, essentially forms of anti-Jewish propaganda. But we do not have, I think, on the university campuses today, enough of a voice to speak back to what we are seeing on social media, but also unfortunately also not enough in terms of what we need to speak back to faculty on campuses, including this kind of messaging on their social media and even in the classrooms and in the research. Daphne, I have to add to what you're saying. And one thing that has been very prevalent in my Holocaust studies, talking to hundreds of schools over the last 20, 30 years, we are not educating even high schools, nevermind colleges and universities, about what the Holocaust was about. And the Holocaust itself as a standalone genocide, it is not, some people lump them in with many other genocides and they've all been horrible, but the Holocaust by itself was this single event where they wanted to eradicate a complete Jewish people. And I think that's something that we have to educate at a lower level than college and get the teachers to understand what that's about. Right now in Canada, two provinces, British Columbia and Ontario, now have mandated Holocaust education in high school, grade 10, 11 and 12. We have 13 states in the US right now that have mandated Holocaust education. Here in Hawaii, which is of course, to our audience is the most important, we don't have it as mandated, but as you know, we're putting together the Hawaii Mobile Museum of Tolerance in connection with the Simon Wiesenthal Center where we will have a bus going to every school to educate 4,000 to 5,000 children a year about the Holocaust, not just the Holocaust, but about tolerance, about bigotry, about any of the other issues that we have. I just want to be sure that we understand that education is the true key to make sure that people understand what's going on today. I think that's correct. And I think what you'll find is that these disputed terms like genocide that's being used, people are accusing Israel now of genocide, if you look carefully at what that entails, it means killing people of your own citizenry because of an ethnic or racial difference, right? So if you were to apply genocide to what Israel was doing, they would have to be going after their own, Arab-Israeli citizens and trying to kill them, right? So you can't claim what's happening in Gaza to be a genocide when that is not the case. You can't claim that for it to be a genocide in Israel when at this point Israel's not going after the West Bank. So, and yet you will find this term that Israel, what Israel's doing currently in Gaza is a genocide repeated over and over and over again. It's almost become an acceptable term. And part of... It's wrong, Daphne. It's 100%, I get so vehemently angry about that. It is so wrong to label what Israel is doing today. They have been bombarded, they have been attacked for 50, 60 years, and the straw broke the camel's back. And when it did, now they're going after Hamas. And they may go after Hezbollah. They may have to fix what has happened in Gaza. The biggest issue we have and what people need to recognize, social media, news, radio, television, they all sensationalize everything. They use words like genocide. They use words like ethnic cleansing. They use words to make people try to open up their eyes to something sensational. And that is what is wrong. What we need to understand that Israel has a right, an absolute right to defend themselves. They have a right to attack somebody who has attacked them. They have a right to eradicate Hamas. And their second right and their most important mission is to salvage and to try to get all of the people back that have been taken by Hamas. And part of the... You talk of the choir, you guys. I think we need to address the fact that this is happening all over the country by thousands of students and hundreds of universities. And some of them are less noxious, less toxic than others. But you have the phenomenon when they're out there protesting in favor of Hamas and thus in favor of doing massacres. However you label that. So what troubles me is that we can have this conversation but it seems to me that when you send your kid, and I'll talk about a middle-class family to college, just as in grade school, you are entrusting your kid and your kid's education and his sensibilities and his morality to the school and the faculty. And in UH and in many other schools in the country, that's not a good entrustment. You send your kid to UH and your kid winds up in a class where the faculty member is anti-Semitic and spewing anti-Semitic tropes all over the classroom and now the kid's picking it up. And the kid's classmates are picking it up. Before you know it, he's out there with a crowd and he's picking it up like for life. Kids are very impressionable. Ain't all of Hitler knew that, Hitler youth, right? You impressed him early on, the same thing with the Palestinian people, you impressed them early on, you give them a little hate and they keep it, they stay with it. So I don't think there's time to have a rational philosophical conversation. I think that steps should be taken, whether it by the president of the university, whether it by the legislature, whether it by the courts, somebody has got to say, you can't do that with our kids and our society. You're out of here. We're firing you, we're terminating you. We don't care if you have, you know, special, what do they call it when you have special sex and party. We don't care if you have tenure or not. You know, a lot of people say, well, you know, once you have your PhD and you can convince a few guys for, you know, get a job, you'll get on a college campus. And if you couldn't get on a campus here in Hawaii, you'll find another place and you can be on the campus. And maybe if you spew a little, you know, negative stuff like anti-Semitism that people who hire you will hire you that much quicker. And now you're on the campus and you can do your thing. I don't think we should permit that. I think there's got to be some regulation. Well, we have title six, the Civil Rights Act and universities are federally funded institutions. So if there are demonstrable in cases of anti-Semitism, so discrimination based on region or nationality, so Israel, religion, Judaism, ethnicity, all those sorts of things, that's not legal. And students, concerned students can file suit. But so there is a mechanism for demonstrated cases of anti-Semitism to be addressed within already within the title six of the Civil Rights Act for federally funded organizations of which UH is one. And so when we have demonstrable cases of situations where we're students and this every single complaint that I have received has come from a student about something a faculty member has done in the classroom or is posted on social media. We begin the process of first engaging the professor and trying to talk with the professor and then moving on up through a process where we try to figure out what is happening. And of course, initially we want to engage in dialogue and we want to educate. And we certainly want the student to be heard. But at some point, there may be an opening for a few lawsuits if the student feels that there is a pattern or history of anti-Semitism. So we do have those mechanisms. Daphne, have you ever advised a student to go file a lawsuit and we'll put them in touch with a lawyer, maybe a Jewish lawyer who would go after this guy and do you think that BDS would just stand by and it's an anti-Semitic organization would stand by and let that happen? Or would they find counsel somewhere here on the mainland to oppose that suit and put that kid through the ringer? Not so easy. Would you advise him to file a suit? I mean, I'm not a lawyer and but I think that suits have been filed already back East, suits will be filed. Suits get filed against UH all the time. I hate to say this, but you can look this up. That's filing suit. It's not something that is unheard of and people do it for much lesser reasons. What are the stakes? If I file a lawsuit, okay, and I really want to leave an impression on the university and on this faculty member who is going to be intractably anti-Semitic anyway. You can't change the leopard on the spots. So how much money can I recover? Can I get him fired? Can I send him on his way? Probably not. I don't think you can send anyone on his or her their way, but I think that we have freedom of speech and that is the other component. So that where freedom of speech will break down is when it moves into not just offensive speech, but as again, it has to show a pattern in a history of discrimination based on an identity. So that is the defining move that we, that you need in order to even begin to consider a lawsuit. I think it's not a terrible thing to attempt just to show the seriousness. Jewish students and people who care about Israel, some of them are feeling extremely isolated. They do feel under personal attack when faculty posts these kinds of things on their social media or engage in this kind of propaganda in their classrooms. They're frightened, they're confused and they come to us, some faculty for support and for a mechanism for talking back. And that's what I'm engaged in, I'd say on a daily basis, I deal with at least one student complaint. So it is a concern, right? And this is from my point of view. I'm one of the people who gets these complaints who talks to the students, who hears how scared and isolated and lonely they feel. So maybe not everyone is aware of this and maybe it's not having any happening everywhere on campus but that is my day-to-day life right now. Daphne, I have to ask you a question and we have to broaden the subject because we're talking about anti-Semitism on campus. What about Islamophobia on campus? That's right. And I think we want to always say we are against discriminatory actions and speech against all people. I think the Jewish people have traditionally stood by all kinds of minorities and all kinds of oppressive situations because we have that history within our own, his families and lived experience that we can almost immediately identify with someone feeling like a minority, someone feeling frightened, someone feeling scared, all of those things are feeling unheard. We're all different kinds of ways of talking about this now intergenerational trauma, et cetera. And so this cuts across the board and what we want is for that message to be heard by all students. No student should feel intimidated by a faculty member. No student should feel scared to go to class. So across the board, whenever this happens, we need to be vocal. And I think in general, the Jewish community has often stood by other minorities and also by against examples of Islamophobia. We do not at all approve of that. We condemn it, okay? To be very clear, we condemn all acts and speeches that have anything that might remotely be considered against the Palestinian people or Islamophobic. That's not what we're trying to do. A diagonal off that is, has UH had any protests to the massacre on October 7th? I mean, we know there have been protests against the Jews, against the Israelis, but what about against Hamas? Have there been any protests at all? So we had protests occur that were seemingly to celebrate the attacks or at least to support the reasons for the attack. They coincided with faculty posting on the social media that this was a celebratory moment, a moment of liberation. And then they appear- Liberation from Hamas? Yes. In favor of Hamas, we're talking about Hamas, exactly. And so at those protests, we would have a few counter protests. Sometimes some students and other people from the community would stand on the other side of the street and try to articulate why they do not support Hamas. Why do they not see, they do not see Hamas as a liberatory organization and why they distrust Hamas because of its past history and because of its charter. And they're trying to educate people about the complicatedness of claiming that Hamas is a liberatory movement. And one of the things that really troubles me is what you were talking about in terms of kids not only feeling isolated and dwelling on that for a moment. Isolated means you look around in the classroom, you look around on the campus and you say, I don't know whether these people around me who are not part of my Jewish community, whether they're anti-Semitic or not, I don't know. I can't talk to them because I don't know. And I mean, I'm only drawing off my own experience on this. So I get really wired and troubled by not being able to discuss my feelings about it with the average person. I think that's part of being isolated. But the other part is where you have threats where people make threats against Jews about violence or implicitly about violence, like Donald Trump. You can make a threat that's kind of stochastic, but it's a threat nevertheless. And in this case, think of Cooper Union. Think of those kids who had to be barricaded in a library or something. And elsewhere in the country who are afraid of violence. We haven't seen that before. Seymour, we haven't seen that in our whole lifetimes in this country, never even imagined it. And it's happening right now. Daphne, you've got to do something. It's come to a new level, Jay. Yes, anti-Semitism has been here. Yes, anti-Holocaust has been here. I've had the schools that have called me that had swastikas on their walls and I've had to go and talk to the kids. But where it is now, it's coming to the surface. A lot of it has been behind our backs. And now it's coming to the surface. And it doesn't have to be Arab people that are doing it. A lot of other people who have anti-Semitic feelings and tendencies, and they're starting to feel empowered. And they're coming out with it. This young man at Cornell University. Look, I mean, who would think that he, of all people, would come out and be anti-Semitic and say that he's going to cause violence? Absolutely incredible that we've gotten to this level. A 300% increase, according to the ADL, a 300% increase just in the last few weeks. The FBI office here has said they've never had as many anti-Semitic and anti-Jewish issues that have popped up. So we are, we're facing a new reality. Anti-Semitism is on the table now. Not acceptable. We have to go. Not acceptable. You know, you talk about these kids who may go into court and file into the federal law. What about faculty? What about you? What about, you know, Jewish faculty on the campus or Jewish administrators? David Lassner, why can't he go to court? Why can't he do something? I'm waiting to see a real pushback on this where there are sanctions and there's accountability. If your co-faculty member is doing things to ruin our young people in college, to distract them and misdirect them and demoralize them, then somebody in the university should do something. We would like to see a condemnation of the attacks by Hamas on the citizens of Israel on October 7th. The fact that there was no condemnation, I think does de-center our sense of a moral compass. I think for Jewish faculty and students and staff who have some connection to Israel, whether Jewish, being Jewish or not, to have not had a public condemnation was disheartening and demoralizing and frightening that these horrific things could take place and that there would be silence. And then on top of that, that it could be celebrated. I think that was emotionally very destabilizing for a lot of people because one would think you see babies being killed, you see seniors being kidnapped, you see young people at a musical festival, trying to celebrate peace. You see people who live near the border of Gaza committed to peace with the Palestinians, sending their children to schools where they learn Hebrew and Arabic and they teach the history of the Palestinian people, and people who are peacemakers killed brutally, brutally in front of their own children. How? How do you see that? And how is not your first reaction to condemn? How is your first reaction not moral shock? How do you stay silent? And how do you celebrate that? I think that was the beginning of this sense of disconnect from the community because we need leaders, moral leaders, who did people who have institutionalized leadership positions to say clearly under no circumstances do we ever condone or stay silent when a baby is killed, when a grandmother is kidnapped, when young people are brutally murdered. Okay, but you say how, how can we tolerate that? I say why? Why do the kids, you know, here we live in a diverse community, aloha, land of aloha, yet the Native Hawaiian crowd at UH is anti, is pro-hamas, it's really interesting how they run a tarot with that. Why doesn't somebody do anything about it? I mean, my problem is why? It's a perversion of liberalism, right? As you identify as a liberal person and somehow on college campuses, liberal now includes the Palestinians. And if you want to support the Palestinians well, it's plus and minus, it's digital. Now you have to oppose the Jews and the Israelis. But I read you a list of all the possible causes and I can read it again if you want. But query, why? Why is this happening? I don't think we can fully appreciate how to deal with it unless we understand the factors or the combination of factors that have made it happen. Jay, I think you just answered your own question. It is a combination of factors, hatred, intolerance. Those are things that are inbred in a lot of people and you're not gonna change them with the whys. You're only gonna change them with action, education. That is the only thing that is going to make us able to live in a better world today. I don't think there's an answer to the why. It's just not gonna happen. We have to educate, we have to make sure that the children of today understand how to make a better world. Goddamn social media, I love it in some ways, but man, it is the worst thing that has happened to people who can be biased or can learn how to be biased. It is terrible and our news also is not great. So on that point Seymour, let's talk about the Israelis versus the Hamas public relations campaign. Part of the war here is not a kinetic war. It's a propaganda war. And I mean, you gotta give credit to the Hamas for understanding that. The Israelis sometimes expect people to read up on it and they don't really give you enough information to work with. Well, the answer is quite simple, Jay. Hamas has an excellent PR program. Today from Lebanon, we had somebody that talked about, we didn't really mean to kill those children or kids. It was a mistake that had happened. And then the question was asked by the interviewer, well, you went into a stadium where there were kids listening to music and you mowed them down. He took off his microphone and walked away. We know they're liars. We know that what Hamas says is truly 99% not true, but they can relate to the people who want to believe them and they will believe them and they'll just pile on Israel all the time. So we can't stop the PR program. Israel's PR is getting better. We can counter it. Daphne, what do you think? I mean, of course we know that Hamas wanted to make a PR campaign against the Jews. They always do and use human shields to enhance that. But what about the Israeli IDF? What about the Israeli government? What about Netanyahu? Have they done a good job? Could they do better? And furthermore, the Jewish community in the United States, would they do better in confronting the propaganda that's coming out of, you know, BDS and Hamas and the Palestinian organizations? Can't we do better? I find a large user reluctant to express themselves. They were reluctant to go on these protests. They were reluctant to write pieces and force the media to print them. What can we do? Well, we have a bit of a distancing that happens between the Israeli Jews and American Jews. And so part of what happened is a division along political posturing and identification that we haven't seen before. So historically, American Jewish people tend to be Democrats. And with Netanyahu and Barack Obama was the beginning of sort of a breakdown of a relationship between the US and Israel personally. I heard they did not get along. But we begin to see Netanyahu sort of giving up on American Jews, giving up on American Jews who were progressive and on the left and making an appeal instead to the evangelical Christians to the right wing. And so as soon as you make that move, as soon as you have the alliance and allegiance between the policies and the politicians associated with Netanyahu along with the evangelical Christian right, the Jewish Americans are confused and liberals in general are confused. What they see is Netanyahu. What they see is Netanyahu and a cabinet that included the very far right that otherwise would have never had any kind of political power in a very similar way that we saw Trump make allegiances with the evangelical right in the US and risk his own country in terms of providing a kind of propaganda tool that he hadn't lost the election and we saw an insurrection. So when people, American liberals, Jews see this happening in the US and they look and see what's happening with Netanyahu and the cabinet there, there is a much easier alliance with the Palestinian cause, right? Because what we've done is we've created a fracture between Israeli Jews and American Jews along political identification. So it becomes for the American Jews who tend to lean left traditionally, the American Jews on the right may or not having this kind of problem, but those on the left have had a very difficult time. And so part of what they need to do, which is a very difficult move is to still explain how and why the Jewish people have a right to self-determination, the Jewish people have a right to defend themselves, Israel has a right to exist even as the progressive Jews are arguing the opposite and are arguing for other things depending on how radical they are. So I think what's happening is it is a very complex nuance argument that needs to be made and that kind of messaging does not work well on social media. That kind of messaging does not find itself well on a placard and does not show up in chance at protests. And so those of us, I included, who tend to lean towards the left on many issues and I'm still believe that Israel has a right to exist and to defend itself. We find ourselves in a very difficult rhetorical position that really universities should be fostering and encouraging nuance, complexity, dialogue, conversation, study across a variety of different perspectives bringing in history, political science, sociology, all the experts, multiple points of view to begin to understand how we got at this place. That should be the work of the university, not professors knowingly misleading by using inflammatory rhetoric, not professors using social media to inflame. Rather the university has a role, it has a role in that it should take its knowledge to bear, its expertise in history, social science, sociology, rhetoric, et cetera and lay this for the students out for them to decide, for them to study but they should always be clear that these issues are complex, that we need to listen to the other side and the university needs to be a place of debate and respectful discussion. So that- I'm about to survival of the state of Israel. Excuse me, it sounds very academic, Daphne. And we're seeing our both of you. I'm an academic. So I'll seem or ask, you know, answer the question about the survival of Israel because I'm talking- I have, listen Daphne, everything you said is 100% correct. And obviously as an academic and somebody who could teach Jay and I a lot more about what's going on in the university world. In the real world outside, I believe Israel will survive. I think Israel is very, very strong. I think at this stage, all the lefts and all the rights have come together to help Israel to the point where money is flowing, millions and millions of dollars are flowing. I just received a request from one of my friends in Israel to get them 2,000 special vets that they need and 2,000 many, many things. And I'm getting my people in China building it for them. Everybody is helping Israel today. So I don't see a problem with Israel right now. And I don't want to make sure or I want to make sure that the audience understands what is happening in Gaza is horrible. I mean, it's awful to see all these people killed and, you know, displaced, et cetera. And the biggest question I'm asked all the time, what happens after? We can't worry about after. Right now we must worry about eradicating Hamas. We must get rid of Hamas because they have made their charter to destroy Israel. They have to be gone. We have to get the hostages back. Those two things are the number one, the number two. We can discuss at a later date what we're gonna do to help Gaza if we're gonna get the other Arab countries to pitch in and do what they have to do. I think that is possible right now. I really do. Maybe on myopic, but in my opinion, the world is going to be a much better place in a month or two or three because the Middle East will be a much more secure place in the world. And don't forget Israel is the only democratic society in that area. Of course, you're speaking to the choir, Seymour. And we're convinced. Both Daphne and me are convinced. Daphne, have you ever heard of Stand with Us? Yes. This is an organization that's sort of on the other side of BDS and they work across the country to deal with the kind of poison that BDS puts out. But I've always felt that Stand with Us needs to be bigger, stronger, more ubiquitous around college campuses. Do you agree? What I would say, and I said this to my colleague, he said something like, well, we don't hear enough of the other side. He said, I'd really like to know your perspective. We don't hear enough of it. And I said to my colleague, well, that's because there's a boycott. So how do you hear the other side? You can't have it both ways. You cannot boycott Israel and not allow scholars from Israel, artists from Israel, musicians from Israel, topics about Israel, and then claim that we're open for discussion and debate. What that does, it sets up a climate in which there is this lack of information, in which there is a lack of dialogue, and in which we can't have meaningful conversations across differences because one group has been just taken off the table, has been told you're not allowed on campus. You're not allowed to speak. I mean, when you take that kind of stance in an academic environment, you're really doing damage to the academic principle at the heart of what the academy is about. And I will also say that no other country is under this kind of boycott, not Russia, not North Korea. So you begin to wonder what exactly is going on here. But I think what we have attempted to do again and again is try to make the argument that BDS is not helping the situation, right? And is contributing probably to this lack of education, this lack of information because we simply cannot get our experts, our scholars, on campus. So that is a big problem from my perspective. The other thing to know about BDS is that its ultimate goal, if you look at what Omar Barghouti, I think is his name, I'm sorry, but it looks like it's just about boycotting and divesting and sanctioning, but the ultimate goal of BDS is the eradication of Israel. It's about the end of Israel. So if you look close enough, if you look very closely at what they're actually attempting to do, it's not about we oppose the settlements in the West Bank and therefore we want to sanction Israel for a while. This is an existential threat to Israel. They do not believe Israel should exist. They're framing Israel as a settler colonial state that should not be there. So that's something else that people don't know, well-meaning people might say, well, the settlers really shouldn't be there and I feel terrible for the people in Gaza. Yes, I signed on for BDS, but you must know that the ultimate goal is the eradication of the Jewish state to be clear. So if, but if we cannot even have this discussion, that's not a productive academic environment. We need to be able to say these things. We need to be able to discuss them and we need to be able to be clear about their motives. If what they really are saying is they do not believe the Jewish state should exist. They do not believe Israel should exist. Do not hide that. Do not pretend you're about something else. So tell the truth. And then those of us who would argue that it should have, that does have a right to exist, let us make our arguments. Yeah, don't forget the funding. My recollection is that BDS is funded in substantial part by Hezbollah and Hezbollah is funded in substantial part by Iran, whose mission it is to destroy the state of Israel. So it's part of this global war we have found ourselves in. It didn't start in October 7th. It's been, as Seymour has said, it's been going on. And the problem is in part, at least in this country, it's happening on college campuses and it's having a really destructive effect on academic freedom and on the student body, I'm afraid to say. And I think steps have to be taken and it's a very difficult question when I, when you ask how and I ask why, the problem is, what do we do now? Anyway, I think we have to have another conversation to explore these things in light of other events which will take place here at UH and elsewhere across the country. Let me offer you each to take a minute and give your final comments, your message, your takeaway to our viewers to leave an impression on them. Daphne, why don't you go first? I would like to say that the way I see the role of the university is one of the few places in which people who profoundly disagree can meet together and discuss and hear one another's point of view and hopefully learn from a variety of different disciplines and perspectives. That's the role of the university. And if we return to that mission and we remember that mission, at least the climate on campus could significantly improve. So that is my vision and that's what I'm continuously trying to put forth as what I'm attempting to accomplish. It's not so much for me about using my platform to argue for a particular point of view. At this point, what I'm trying to use my platform for is a recognition of what the university's mission is, a recognition of its potential toward better understanding, towards educated decision making, towards educating a citizenry that is capable of making responsible decisions. We have that resting on our shoulders. So before we start posting things on social media that we know do not do the complexity of the issues justice, before we enlist our students in some kind of propaganda war, we should remind ourselves of the responsibility we have to educate citizenry for a democracy in which they are used to contending with multiple views on multiple perspectives and have the critical thinking skills to root out propaganda, to root out unethical argumentation. That is the role of humanities within the universities. And that's what I ultimately wanna argue for. Now the stakes are really high because the people who come through UH and every university, every college in the country, those people are the future citizens and leaders of the country. And they need to have a moral compass. And if they don't, you know, the, oh my gosh, I wouldn't wanna be around for that. That's the end, as you say, that's the end of our democracy. Seymour, okay, take a minute. Give us your final thoughts. I wanna speak, Jack. I want to emphasize peaceful confrontation. I know what Daphne is talking about is absolutely true. And we need to be able to have open discourse between both sides. There is a case for a Palestinian two-state. There is a case for Israel to do exactly what it's doing. But what has happened is we have become such a violent society. We are killing each other all over the United States. We seek violence all over the world. And it seems that life doesn't have the value that it used to have. We've gotta bring that back. We have to make sure that what we want for our world to be is a world of peaceful confrontation, being able to talk to each other, being able to understand that we have differences, whether it's Republican or Democrats, conservatives or liberals, we need to be able to talk and give our point of view without getting violent. Thank you, Daphne. Daphne, that's it. And thank you, Seymour, it has been great to have you. We will circle back because this conversation is not finished. Hello. Thank you. Hello. Thank you, Daphne. Thank you, Seymour.