Law Offices of Bruce Fein
300 New Jersey Avenue, N.W., Suite 900
Washington, D.C. 20001
Phone: 202-465-8728; 703-963-4968 (M)
Email: bruce@feinpoints.com
December 10, 2023
Representative Elsie Stefanik
United States House of Representatives
318 Cannon House Office Building
Washington, D.C. 20515
Dear Congresswoman:
I urge you to resign immediately for your aiding and abetting genocide of Palestinians in Gaza by voting to send arms to the IDF to perpetrate the crime in violation of the Genocide Convention. It is altogether fitting and proper that you do this.
At a recent congressional hearing held on December 5, 2023, you voiced outrage at the resistance of the Presidents of Harvard, Penn, and M.I.T to declare categorically that any student who hypothetically called for genocide of Jews would be expelled. No evidence was adduced suggesting such a student is more than a figment of your fevered imagination.
At the same time, you were aiding and abetting an actual not a hypothetical genocide: namely, the Israeli government's siege of 2.3 million Palestinians in Gaza to create conditions of life calculated to destroy them physically in whole or in part. “No food, no water, no power, no medicine, no shelter, no hope.” The siege fits the definition of genocide in section 2 of the Convention like a glove. It is open and notorious and aggressively executed by the Netanyahu administration.
The siege has been accompanied by industrial scale bombings of homes, places of worship, marketplaces, journalists, refugee camps, hospitals, ambulances, United Nations marked schools, roads, everything in sight. Babies clinging to life in incubators have foreseeably died because of the siege. Reported Palestinian deaths approach 20,000, with the true number probably a multiple of that number. More than 80 percent of the entire civilian population in Gaza have been displaced and confront death by disease, starvation, or bombing.
These facts establishing genocide are inarguable. Yet you have eagerly implicated yourself by voting unconditional military assistance to the Israeli government to facilitate the crime of crimes.
According to your standards, a university president who neglects categorically to pledge to expel a hypothetical student who calls for genocide of Jews should resign, as the President of Penn has done.
A fortiori, you should resign without tarry for aiding and abetting genocide of real people, 2.3 million Palestinians in Gaza (whom the Israeli Defense Minister has sub-humanized as "animals") with the use of weapons you voted to supply.
To borrow from Joseph Welch at the Army-McCarthy hearings, have you no sense of decency.
Resign and let us be done with you!
Finally, why did your hypothetical reference only Jews as targets of genocide? Why not a hypothetical student calling for genocide of Palestinians or Uighurs or Biafrans? To take a page from Animal Farm, are all targets of genocide equal, but Jews are more equal than others in your gospel?
Sincerely,
/s/Bruce Fein
Bruce Fein