The One Freedom Kamala Harris Doesn’t Mention

Plus, more terrible tweets by Ivy League professors; a U.S. general reports from Gaza; Hamas’s Haniyeh was no moderate

Harris: missing some freedoms?

Vice President Harris has now been out on the campaign trail enough to have a standard stump speech. Shrewdly, it frames the campaign as a fight for freedom. I noticed this theme back in May 2023, when President Biden launched his re-election campaign, and wrote about it at the time for the Wall Street Journal (“The Bright Side of Biden vs. Trump”).

Here’s an example of what Harris has been saying. This particular rendition is from her remarks July 31 at a political event at the Four Seasons Hotel in Houston, Texas, but she’s given a version of it about half a dozen times over the past couple of weeks:

I will tell you, across our nation, we are witnessing a full-on assault against hard-fought, hard-won freedoms and rights -- (applause): the freedom to vote -- and we can look at this region of the country to have all those examples; the freedom to be safe from gun violence; the freedom to live -- (applause) -- without fear of bigotry and hate; the freedom to love who you love openly and with pride -- (applause); the freedom to learn and acknowledge America's full history -- (applause); and the freedom of a woman to make decisions about her own body -- (applause) -- and not have her government tell her what to do….

Generations of Americans before us led in the fight for freedom.  And now the baton is in our hands -- each and every one of us. 

And so, we who believe in the sacred freedom to vote will finally pass the John Lewis Voting Rights Act and the Freedom to Vote Act.  (Applause.) 

We who believe in the freedom to live safe from gun violence will finally pass universal background checks -- (applause) -- and red flag laws and an assault weapons ban. 

We who believe in reproductive freedom will fight for a woman's right to choose.  (Applause.)...

when I am president and when Congress passes a law to restore reproductive freedoms, I will sign it into law.  (Applause.)

In this moment, our fundamental freedoms are on the ballot…

Typically a presidential candidate from either political party would add in, somewhere in this series of freedoms, a reference to freedom abroad, and America’s role in protecting and defending it. Bill Clinton used to talk about America standing strong in defense of peace and freedom around the world. It’d be natural, and easy, for Harris to add in a line about America standing in support of freedom around the world, whether it is freedom from terrorist violence, freedom from invasion by neighboring tyrannies, the freedom to vote, freedom of the seas, even reproductive rights and women’s freedom and the freedom of independent labor unions or opposition political parties to organize in countries where they are now forbidden. It’d be philosophically consistent to run on freedom at home and abroad. Such an approach might help reassure undecided independent voters who are worried that a San Francisco progressive Democrat president will take a surrender-Afghanistan and cut-off bomb-shipments to Israel-type approach to foreign policy.

Yet Harris doesn’t talk about freedom abroad, or foreign policy at all, really, on the campaign trail. Maybe there’s no consensus among the Democrats between the progressive isolationist wing and the more internationalist factions. Or maybe she’s trying to woo the isolationist-leaning Trump-Vance “working class” voters, not the Nikki Haley types. Barack Obama used to talk about investing in America’s infrastructure rather than Iraq’s; maybe she’s getting advice from him. Or maybe she’s so left-wing she doesn’t believe America plays a constructive role in the world.

Anyway, Harris may figure she can get elected while avoiding talking about foreign policy. If she winds up as president, though, she’s going to have a lot of decisions to make that bear on these freedoms overseas. She’ll be on stronger ground to make them if she talks about these issues, and builds a mandate for a freedom-promoting agenda, not only in America, but around the world.

Terrible tweets by Ivy League professors: In the latest installment of our new regular feature, “terrible tweets by Ivy League professors,” we feature Yale University’s Richard C. Levin Professor of History, Timothy Snyder.

Yale University, in New Haven Connecticut.

Snyder is such a prolific tweeter that we’ll cover three of his tweets in a single item. On July 31, Snyder tweeted, “The only things these Trump guys have to share is sexual anxiety.” On July 27, he tweeted, “If you ever want to vote again, if you want to live in a country where one day your children and grandchildren can vote, you need to vote for Harris this November.” On July 17, he tweeted, “Got all the way through the Constitution and did not find the provision whereby the South African oligarchs select the vice-presidential nominees on behalf of the Russian dictator.” 

That last one was an apparent reference to support for J.D. Vance by David Sacks and Elon Musk, who were both born in South Africa. This is another example of the Trump-haters coming to resemble Trump. Sacks and Musk are both Americans. For Snyder to describe them as “South African” because they are immigrants to America is xenophobic,. For Snyder to suggest that Sacks and Musk, rather than Trump himself, made the selection is not supported by the evidence. Plenty of other rich people were reportedly lobbying against Vance’s selection.

If there are other Yale professors out there who are publicly expressing concern that Snyder is damaging the institution’s reputation by behaving in public like a partisan rather than like a scholar, I’d love to know about them.

Is Snyder representative or an outlier? The website OpenSecrets crunches the Federal Election Commission data and reports that for the 2024 political cycle, of the roughly half million dollars that Yale employees have made in political contributions to federal candidates, Democrats have reaped 96.61 percent of the money, while Republicans received 3.39 percent. That’s pretty lopsided. Harvard, by comparison, is at roughly a 92 percent Democrat, 8 percent Republican split for federal contributions in the 2024 cycle, by the OpenSecrets reckoning.

As I’ve said before, the “free speech” crowd will accuse me of wanting to restrict the free expression rights of faculty. Not so. It’s actually probably useful for the public to see these tweets as insight into the mindset of faculty at these institutions. 

Report from Gaza: Lt. Gen. Dave Deptula, who is dean of the Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies and also a senior military scholar at the U.S. Air Force Academy, has a new piece out in Forbes in which he describes himself as “the first U.S. general officer (active or retired) to travel across Gaza during this war.”

It’s a highly illuminating piece. I appreciated especially the detailed description of Hamas tactics in Gaza:

Hamas counts on media coverage and attention to civilian deaths to shift blame to Israel. The tactic they use to do this is to stash weapons, explosives, or rockets into every structure where, or near where, they will be operating—mosques, hospitals, schools, shops, apartment buildings, and personal residences. They walk the streets in civilian clothes with no weapons, then duck into a building knowing where weapons are stored and use them against the IDF. They depart the building without any weapons, resuming their civilian appearance.

Deptula’s overview: “the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) are doing remarkable work in defending their nation while protecting Palestinian civilian lives. Their integration of effects from all domains to achieve their objectives while at the same time minimizing risk to civilians is exemplary. Unfortunately, negative perceptions on social media and elsewhere, based on a combination of disinformation, ignorance, and anti-Semitism, indicates there is a wide gap between the reality I witnessed and the perceptions promulgated in the media. Israel was brutally attacked and is obligated to respond in a manner to prevent that from ever happening again. War free of civilian casualties is not possible, but Israel is doing all in its power to keep military effects focused on the Hamas terrorist army.”

He concludes: “the IDF has executed caution and discipline in operational employment to have achieved the lowest ratio of enemy to civilian deaths in history. No one knows the horrors of war more than those who must fight it. But to stop before eliminating Hamas’ ability to repeat the atrocities of 7 Oct would be foolish and self-defeating.”

Ismail Haniyeh was no moderate: To read the newspaper coverage, the Hamas leader, Ismail Haniyeh, was a moderate.

Here’s the New York Times account: 

Tahani Mustafa, a senior Palestine analyst at the International Crisis Group, called Mr. Haniyeh one of Hamas’s most astute diplomats. His assassination would likely extend the war in Gaza, she said.

“It’s not to say he renounced armed resistance, but at the same time, he was of the centrist moderates who thought conciliation, diplomacy were better routes to take,” Ms. Mustafa said. “In that sense, it’s a huge blow.”

Here’s the Wall Street Journal:

Haniyeh was open to demilitarizing, espousing more moderate views and pressuring Sinwar and Hamas’s military wing to acquiesce to a cease-fire deal in Gaza…“There is a risk that the removal of Haniyeh tips Hamas into more hard-line positions and makes striking a cease-fire deal even more difficult, as the movement has lost an important moderating voice,” said Hugh Lovatt, a senior policy fellow with the Middle East and North Africa Program at the European Council on Foreign Relations, a think tank.

Palestinian Media Watch offers a useful corrective to this “centrist moderates,” “moderating voice” narrative, which is fundamentally false.

Among the “representative statements” by Haniyeh: “We love death like our enemies love life! We love Martyrdom…”

And, “The blood [spilled] in the Gaza Strip, alongside the resistance and the [Izz A-Din] Al-Qassam [Brigades] (i.e., Hamas’ military wing), will defeat this occupier (i.e., Israel), will defeat this enemy... As I said, and I repeat every time, the blood of the children, women, and elderly – I do not say that it shouts out to you, but rather we need this blood so that it will ignite within us the spirit of revolution, so that it will arouse within us persistence, so that it will arouse within us defiance and [a forward] advance.” 

And, “we [Hamas] will not recognize Israel, we will not relinquish one inch of the land of Palestine.”

And, “‘the [Palestinian] struggle will continue up until the liberation of all Palestinian land and Jerusalem, and until the return of all the Palestinian refugees’ to their homes... Haniyeh added, ‘They want us to recognize the Israeli occupation and to abandon resistance, but as the representative of the Palestinian people and in the name of all who long for freedom in the world, I once again emphasize that we will never recognize the State of Israel.”

With centrist moderates like this, who needs extremists?

As Anti-Defamation League CEO Jonathan Greenblatt put it, “Give me a break. Let's be clear: Haniyeh was a mass murderer who authorized and celebrated the unspeakable savagery of 10/7. For decades, Haniyeh specialized in barbaric violence and sinister propaganda that dehumanized Jews, demonized Israelis, disparaged America, and justified genocide. His hands were stained with the blood of thousands of Israelis. All the while, he embezzled hundreds of millions of dollars to enrich himself even as he impoverished his own people.”

And to those who would argue that this is just rhetorical bluster, that one needs to judge Haniyeh by his deeds, not his words—consider, did Haniyeh resign from Hamas after October 7? Did he donate what Israel says are his $4 billion in assets toward relief for families of Hamas violence? No, he was celebrating in Iran with the leadership of the foremost state sponsor of terrorism. 

Jokes are already circulating about the Hamas Gaza leader, Yahya Sinwar: “Print journalists pre-writing obits of Sinwar, cancer survivor community organizer who kept a low profile.”

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