The Harvard Crimson reports on President Lawrence Summer’s December 22, 2004 address in
Speaking for more than an hour last month, in far more extensive remarks than his Memorial Church speech [in September 2002], Summers excoriated those academics who, he said, have demonized Israel while ignoring human rights violations elsewhere. . .
Summers rejected what he called “relativistic nihilism, in which all positions are equally legitimate, all positions must be respected and compromise must be entered into, no matter what the starting point or reasonableness of the two parties. It seems to me that Israel is right, its friends are right, moral people everywhere are right to resist that approach.” . . .
Last October, Summers delivered a keynote address on the same theme at a fundraising dinner for the United Jewish Appeal in New York, which later appeared as an op-ed in The Jewish Week.
Summers’ speeches stand as milestones in the intellectual and moral reaction to anti-Semitism, together with Melanie Phillips’ May 3, 2004 lecture to the London Society of Christians and Jews on “The New Anti-Semitism,” followed by her landmark lecture on December 27, 2004 on the role of the media.
They are all essential reading.
(The State Department’s first report to Congress on global anti-Semitism, pursuant to the Global Anti-Semitism Awareness Act enacted last year, is here. It is a long report).