On Sourcing Criticism

Nipuna Ginige ’26 presents an excellent, well-sourced catalogue of some of the more intemperate-sounding rhetoric former Israeli Prime Minister Bennett used earlier in his career. This is a refreshing departure from, for example, those quoted in the article blithely calling Bennett a “genocidaire” without providing any such dates or details — admittedly a difficult thing to do because, in fact, Bennett has been retired from politics for the past three years. We could argue about the contexts for those quotes (the most seemingly offensive quote, on “swinging from trees,” is clearly a riff on British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli’s famous witticism in Parliament, that “when the ancestors of the right honourable gentlemen were brutal savages in an unknown land, mine were priests in the Temple of Solomon,” for instance). But the precision and sourcing of these fact-based criticisms are exactly what is needed to elevate the level of discourse on campus, and in academia generally.