On Tuesday, Benjamin Netanyahu gave a speech at the Center for American Progress (CAP), a prominent left-leaning think tank in Washington. Some of the think tank’s employees objected, as Mark Hemingway writes:
At a meeting on Friday, some staffers read aloud a statement objecting to Netanyahu’s appearance. . . . What’s notable about the statement . . . is how the rhetoric sounds awfully similar to the embarrassing hyperbolic social-justice boilerplate we’ve been hearing at Yale, the University of Missouri, and other colleges:
And at CAP we are a family. . . . It is imperative that we feel confident in this building to improve the lives of all Americans, and essentially to work on getting us all free. It becomes difficult to step outside of our building and say to our allies why this visit is happening, for some of us here we ourselves [sic] feel that we were not considered in that decision.
The statement goes on to address Netanyahu’s role in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in a way that is predictably pro-Palestinian. But the expectation that merely being in the same building as a democratically elected head of an important state is a threat to employees’ personal wellbeing, exacerbates their “individual struggles,” and is otherwise oppressing people the world over is just cringe-worthy. . . .
[I]nstead of viewing [the visit] as an opportunity to influence Netanyahu, or even expose how his leadership and policies are inferior, CAP employees were worried about how engaging in mere dialogue with someone they find disagreeable has placed them “in a place of confusion and hurt.”
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