SPIA Owes More to Its Audience

Ms. Perry did a good job of providing a balanced view in her report. However, it is troubling that the Princeton SPIA Dean’s “Leadership” Series saw fit to invite a “UN rapporteur” who has never led any organization, and who has long trafficked in antisemitic and anti-Israel canards. She has rationalized — to the point of justifying — terrorism, and she has cast doubt on the rapes that Hamas inflicted on Jewish women on Oct. 7. In March 2024, on International Women’s Day, Albanese trivialized the atrocities committed by Hamas on Israeli women, and condescended to them as follows: “My thoughts also go to the Israeli women, especially the soldiers: what have you done, what have you become. Dears, when you realise [sic] it, you will be haunted forever.” She has been condemned for antisemitism by both Germany and France, and respectively by the U.S. ambassadors to the UN and to the UN Human Rights Council.

At a minimum, the SPIA owed it to its student audience to provide an informed counterpoint, in a debate format. In my freshman year, 1973, the Whig-Clio Society hosted a debate between physicist William Shockley, who espoused highly charged racial views, and anthropologist Ashley Montagu, whose field of study was race. Shockley’s presence on campus was controversial, but the debate format provided students with a balance of arguments and information that they could use to better calibrate their own views and seek further learning on their own.

Instead, SPIA provided Albanese with the legitimacy of its “leadership” designation and afforded her a platform from which to spew her antisemitic tropes and distorted renderings of history, unchecked by a debate format or even real-time fact checking by a moderator expert in the subject matter.