Widespread student protests on the US campuses against Israel's genocidal war in Gaza are being labeled antisemitic by pro-Israel politicians and donors. They have now joined forces to intimidate the leadership of top American universities. President Liz MaGill of the University of Pennsylvania has already been forced out. Leaders at Harvard and MIT are also under threat. The Pro-Israel Anti-Defamation League (ADL) and the Brandeis Center have called on 200 college presidents to investigate pro-Palestinian student groups. Faculty members and instructors at several public and private colleges have either been placed on leave or fired for comments about the conflict, according to Bloomberg columnist Noah Feldman. These actions are a direct assault on the academic freedom in America, with long term negative consequences for the world's most admired institutions of higher education.
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Academic Freedom:
Academic freedom is about free exchange of ideas on campus by students and faculty. It is considered essential for learning. Limiting this freedom hurts pursuit of excellence which has helped American colleges and universities become the envy of the world. This freedom must be defended by all Americans to maintain the excellence of institutions of higher learning in America.
US Congress:
GOP politicians see these pro-Palestine protests on US campuses as a fundraising opportunity. Harvard alumna Rep. Elise M. Stefanik ’06 (R-N.Y.) aggressively questioned presidents of Harvard, Penn and MIT to score points with the Israel lobby. “At Harvard, does calling for the genocide of Jews violate Harvard’s rules of bullying and harassment?” asked — to which Gay twice responded that “it depends on the context.”
GOP politicians like Stefanik are deliberately conflating slogans such as "From the River to the Sea, Free Palestine Free" with call for genocide of Jews. In fact, this chant is only about ending the long brutal Israeli Occupation of Gaza (along the Mediterranean Sea) and the West Bank (of the Jordan River).
Jewish Donors:
Several Jewish donors of major private sector universities have either cancelled their donations or threatened to do so over the Pro-Palestine protests. Investors Bill Ackman and Ross Stevens have been among the most vocal pro-Israel donors at Harvard and Penn. They both called for the ouster of the presidents of these universities over what they call "antisemitism" on campuses.
The aggressive behavior of Jewish donors is serving to reinforce the antisemitic stereotype of wealthy Jews. As former Labor Secretary Robert Reich put in a Guardian Op Ed: "As a Jew, I cannot help but worry, too, that the actions of these donors will fuel the very antisemitism they claim to oppose – based on the perilous stereotype of wealthy Jewish bankers controlling the world".
Diversity, Equity and Inclusion:
Some right-wing politicians and donors have attacked DEI (Diversity, Equity and Inclusion) programs as the cause of what they call "antisemitism" on campuses. These programs help bring in faculty and students from under-represented groups to colleges and universities that have traditionally been almost entirely white. They blame DEI because many new students from minority background tend to sympathize with Palestinians who they see as oppressed. Many of them see Israel as a "Western settler-colonialist oppressor par excellence", according to the Wall Street Journal.
Related Links:
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Pictorial Review of Israel's Young Gaza Victims
American College Campuses Rise Up Against Israel's Genocidal War on Gaza
Israeli Settler Colonialism
Islamophobia Driving US Policy in Middle East and South Asia?
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Total, Extended Lockdown in Indian Occupied Kashmir
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Indian JNU Professor on Illegal Indian Occupation of Kashmir, Manipur, Nagaland
Riaz Haq Youtube Channel
PakAlumni: Pakistani Alumni Social Network
11 comments:
Very well written.
I am worried that one of these days, Congress will pass a law equating anti-Israel commentary with hate speech and antisemitism.
I sent an email to all US and CA senators and congress-representatives upon their issuance of individual statements re. Gaza genocide, including Elise Stefanik. Total silence. No matter how much we shout, or how much anyone may donate to them, no one can match the Jewish donors. I donate to Trump and the Jewish congresswoman in the CA assembly; Saudi & Qatar have donated $16m to Harvard, MIT, and UPenn alone. According to Vivek Ramaswami, Washington D.C. is the most corrupt legislative body in the world.
Brother Riaz, I love you for your passion on behalf of your identity.
The University Principles did not get a subpoena and they were invited to testify. They could have rejected
to attend. Furthermore the JNU video is 7 years old. Lets live in the present and not the past bringing up old scabs.
that have healed.
The schools in the USa are doing a far better job in the USA on free speech as opposed to hate speech,coming from Muslims and Jews.
Your comments whether cut and paste or original have a pro palestinian bias or stigma as there is not mention of October 7th.
I understand and respect your right to express your views based on your community identity with the cause and feel your pain
of the extensive loss of civilian life. and destruction of infrastructure.
We are holding interfaith meetings to lessen the impact so "Hate has No Home in the USA."
That is what is needed here and globally. to advance healing.
On human rights in India , there should not be one human rights violation but there were 400 in a population of 1.2 Billion. in 2023 .
Please review the top ten countries for human rights violations and work on those.Several of them have large muslim populations.
Love You brother Riaz
We at United for Peace continue to be non partisan as it is part of our Goals and Mission.
Ahmad: "I am worried that one of these days, Congress will pass a law equating anti-Israel commentary with hate speech and antisemitism"
Unlike the European countries where there is no constitutional guarantee of free speech, such a definition of antisemitism in US law would not pass constitutional muster.
But the EU nations have already adopted the following definition, according to Masha Gessen who wrote recently for the New Yorker:
In 2016, the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (I.H.R.A.), an intergovernmental organization, adopted the following definition: “Antisemitism is a certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred toward Jews. Rhetorical and physical manifestations of antisemitism are directed toward Jewish or non-Jewish individuals and/or their property, toward Jewish community institutions and religious facilities.” This definition was accompanied by eleven examples, which began with the obvious—calling for or justifying the killing of Jews—but also included “claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavor” and “drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis.”
This definition had no legal force, but it has had extraordinary influence. Twenty-five E.U. member states and the U.S. State Department have endorsed or adopted the I.H.R.A. definition. In 2019, President Donald Trump signed an executive order providing for the withholding of federal funds from colleges where students are not protected from antisemitism as defined by the I.H.R.A. On December 5th of this year, the U.S. House of Representatives passed a nonbinding resolution condemning antisemitism as defined by the I.H.R.A.; it was proposed by two Jewish Republican representatives and opposed by several prominent Jewish Democrats, including New York’s Jerry Nadler.
https://www.newyorker.com/news/the-weekend-essay/in-the-shadow-of-the-holocaust
Porus: "Brother Riaz, I love you for your passion on behalf of your identity.
The University Principles did not get a subpoena and they were invited to testify. They could have rejected
to attend. Furthermore the JNU video is 7 years old. Lets live in the present and not the past bringing up old scabs.
that have healed"
My post’s focus is on academic freedom on American college campuses.
The JNU video is an illustration of the relative academic freedom that existed in India before Modi’s fascist Hindutva rule.
I don’t trust the Supreme Court anymore. Anything goes.
Harvard President Resigns After Plagiarism Allegations, Campus Antisemitism Backlash
Claudine Gay faced calls to step down as governing board stood by her
https://www.wsj.com/us-news/education/harvard-president-claudine-gay-resigns-e52adc44
Harvard University President Claudine Gay has resigned after facing mounting criticism over how she responded to antisemitism on campus and, most recently, allegations that she plagiarized the work of other researchers on several occasions.
Gay, a professor of government and of African and African-American studies, became president in July after serving as dean of Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences for around five years. She had been under pressure for weeks regarding her response to Hamas’s Oct. 7 attacks on Israel. Her remarks at a House committee hearing on the matter in early December drew widespread criticism after she gave an equivocal response to a question about whether calls for the genocide of Jewish people violated the campus code of conduct.
She was also accused of plagiarizing other academics in several published papers and her Ph.D. dissertation. The Harvard Corporation, the university’s top governing board, said in December that reviews of her work uncovered some instances of “inadequate citation,” but that the omissions didn’t meet the bar of outright research misconduct.
Gay has requested four corrections on two academic papers and is updating her dissertation in three spots, according to the school, whose board has released statements standing by Gay.
ZAKARIA: More now of our conversation about the crisis on American college campuses with Bruce Robbins, a professor at Columbia, and Bret Stephens, columnist for "The New York Times
https://transcripts.cnn.com/show/fzgps/date/2024-04-28/segment/01
ZAKARIA: In your "London Review of Books" essay, you talked about how one of the things going on at college campuses you believe is that people are coming to realize that there are large reservoirs of strong opposition to what Israel has been doing for the last few decades. Explain -- and that that is being misread in your view as antisemitism. ROBBINS: That is exactly what I think. I think that this is a
conjunctural moment, pardon with the academic professorial talk. It's Black Lives Matter, the COVID pandemic, and the fact that the young people these days have access and, no offense to CNN, to uncensored, no-gatekeeping visuals of the disruption in Gaza via social media. So they have access to information in a way that they have never had access before.
You put all those things together and I think what Israel is doing in Gaza is the symbol of evil for this generation. And the poll numbers suggest that there is a wave of feeling, a crystallization of feeling --
ZAKARIA: And you're saying, just to be clear, as a Jewish-American, you say that this is not antisemitism.
ROBBINS: I'm saying very, very much as a Jew. No, no, not at all. The simplest thing that we have tried, we, the Jewish faculty, there are many, many Jewish students who are involved in this. I mean, we of course feel as Jews that we're not being recognized, you know, because my president is telling me and Jewish Voice for Peace, an organization that I admire very much, that we're being antisemitic.
I'm sorry. This is a way of being Jewish. I'm a secular Jew. You know, I believe in universal principles, no double standards, no Jewish state without equal rights for everybody. So I'm really anti-double standards.
STEPHENS: I'm for a two-state solution which one-state solution would be a devastation for the Jewish people on a scale that hasn't been seen since the last devastation a century ago. And right now, this is an interesting discussion because we're talking about academia, but this has effects in the real world. And if the world gets behind the idea that Israel is this uniquely malevolent state, saying nothing about Syria, Sudan, and China, other abuses, but Israel is uniquely the state that must disappear and becomes the moral cause of this generation of students.
We will be replicating the tragedies that occurred on German universities in the 1920s and 1930s where the takeover by the left got to a takeover by the right. And one of the things that's so disturbing about these protests is there's no allowance for the idea that Israelis have suffered. There's no allowance for the idea that this -- that this clash in between the Israelis and the Palestinians is at the minimum morally complicated.
ZAKARIA: Last word.
ROBBINS: Oh gosh, what a responsibility. I don't think that people think that Israel is unique example of evil in the world. I think what's special about it is it couldn't do what it's doing without the support of the United States. So students in the United States think we have a responsibility. It's not just somebody else. I mean, the United States is not supporting North Korea, it's not supporting Syria.
[10:25:01]
There are a lot of bad places that are doing bad things that equal or worse, who knows, but they're not being supported by us. So we have a responsibility as Americans to do something about it. What's being done is being done in my name as an American and being done in my name as a Jew. And those things are unbearable to me.
Jewish Prof Bruce Robbins | At Columbia
https://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2024/april/at-columbia
When Minouche Shafik, the president of Columbia University, testified before the House of Representatives on 17 April, she didn’t fall into the traps set a few months earlier for the presidents of Penn, MIT and Harvard, two of whom are now gone. They had been asked whether they would permit genocidal talk against the Jews on their campuses – a dark discourse that lurked, according to the questioners, in such terms as ‘from the river to the sea’ and ‘intifada’. All three university presidents last December came up with legalistic answers, invoking context. But Shafik last week did not. She presented herself as a relentless scourge of antisemitism. Her head will not fall – at least not as a result of congressional displeasure.
There is some question, however, about her future at Columbia. First, because of her craven and embarrassing submission to the House Republicans. And second, because on the following day she brought the police in to demolish a student tent encampment protesting against the Israeli slaughter in Gaza. The encampment is on a campus lawn allocated by the university for demonstrations. More than a hundred student demonstrators were arrested. Shafik may have avoided viral memes of awkward moments in Congress, but videos of the NYPD in action against peaceful demonstrators on 18 April, now circulating widely, amply illustrate the violence that Shafik was willing to inflict on Columbia and Barnard students in the name of assuring student safety. It’s the first time the police have been invited onto Columbia’s campus since 1968. Like 1968, 2024 may go down as an inauspicious year for university administrations trying to defend the indefensible.
The House Republicans who pressed the point about chants allegedly ‘calling for the genocide of Jews’ on university campuses had not previously displayed much concern for the wellbeing of American Jews. In 2017, Donald Trump, who will soon again be their presidential nominee, described some of the torch carriers who chanted ‘Jews will not replace us’ in Charlottesville as ‘very fine people’. You would not have to dig very deep to uncover friendly associations with white supremacists among the present committee members. (I would love to be challenged to document this.) Still, you could hardly call them dull. One invoked the Book of Genesis to back up his conviction that Columbia had to support Israel whatever Israel did. Did Shafik want to bring down God’s curse on Columbia? Please answer yes or no. Another raised the genocidal threat contained in the word ‘infantada’, a malapropism she used twice.
The many Columbia faculty members who were less than happy with Shafik’s pragmatic testimony, myself included, were not surprised that she declared herself a zealous and proactive foe of antisemitism on campus. We were not surprised that she failed to distinguish between the real threat of antisemitism and criticism of the industrial-scale killing of Palestinians in Gaza, a criticism that does not target Jews as Jews. And we were not surprised that she didn’t distinguish between real acts of antisemitism, which have been very few, and the anxiety or discomfort of Jewish students forced, perhaps for the first time, to confront the fact that much of the world disapproves of what Israel is up to.
In response to the attacks of 7 October, Shafik founded a Taskforce on Antisemitism. The Taskforce had no definition of antisemitism, conflated it with criticism of the state of Israel, and sometimes seemed interested solely in Jewish feelings of discomfort, even if those feelings seemed to have been brought on only by reactions to the bombing of Gaza. One faculty member suggested it be renamed the Taskforce on Campus Vibes.
Jewish Prof Bruce Robbins | At Columbia
https://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2024/april/at-columbia
Meanwhile she was suspending and evicting from student accommodation Muslim and Jewish students who were protesting against the bombing of Gaza. She also suspended the campus chapters of Students for Justice in Palestine and, the icing on the cake, Jewish Voice for Peace. I can’t be the only Jew on campus whose head was spinning all winter at the idea that, like the government of Germany, Shafik felt qualified to instruct me on what was and was not antisemitic. When people objected that the taskforce heads knew very little about antisemitism, the administration explained that it was providing hundreds of thousands of dollars so they could hire the appropriate researchers. No surprises, then, at Shafik’s performance before the House committee.
All the same, faculty members were taken aback, to put it as politely as possible, that she failed to stand up for the basic principles of the university she leads, such as academic freedom, shared governance, transparency and due process. She had already told the university senate on 23 February that she was ‘dismayed’ by the ‘low level of trust at Columbia’ – something of an understatement – but lack of trust in the administration is not hard to understand. Last October, two weeks after the Hamas attack, it changed the university’s policy on demonstrations without consulting the senate, although consultation is a mandatory procedure for any such changes. Henceforth the administration would have ‘sole discretion’ to determine ‘final and not appealable’ sanctions on student groups. There was general outrage on campus. The student governing board, representing more than a hundred student organisations, voted by an overwhelming majority to declare its non-co-operation with the administration on this change. The board was set up in response to the 1968 protests at Columbia. This is the first time that non-co-operation had been invoked in fifty years.
As for academic freedom, Shafik said in her written opening statement that ‘we believe we can confront antisemitism and provide a safe campus environment for our community while simultaneously supporting rigorous academic exploration and freedom.’ But questioned about Professor Mohamed Abdou, the author of Islam and Anarchism, who is untenured, she responded, on camera, that he ‘will never teach at Columbia again.’ The Republican congresswoman Elise Stefanik said that he had posted: ‘Yes, I’m with Hamas and Hezbollah and Islamic Jihad.’ (What he actually wrote, as part of a much longer piece, was: ‘I’m with the muqawamah [the resistance] be it Hamas and Hezbollah and Islamic Jihad but up to a point – given ultimate differences over our ethical political commitments.’)
Stefanik accused Professor Joseph Massad – who has been targeted by petitions calling for his dismissal – of ‘stating that the massacre of Israeli civilians was “awesome”’. Shafik did not respond, as she might have done, by referring to what Professor Massad had actually written (‘No less awesome were the scenes witnessed by millions of jubilant Arabs who spent the day watching the news, of Palestinian fighters from Gaza breaking through Israel’s prison fence or gliding over it by air’; he also wrote of a ‘horrifying human toll on all sides’.) Instead, Shafik said she was ‘appalled by what he’s said’ and that ‘he has been spoken to.’ But even if he had said what they said he said, didn’t he have the right to say it? We don’t fire teachers who approve of dropping the atomic bomb.
Jewish Prof Bruce Robbins | At Columbia
https://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2024/april/at-columbia
A vocal pro-Israel faculty member has been accused of harassing students on social media, and there is a move among students to get him banished. But forget about student anxieties for a moment. The Israeli army has been committing atrocities on a massive scale, while the International Court of Justice deliberates the possibility of real genocide in Gaza, as distinct from speculative calls to genocide that House Republicans deduce, falsely, from pro-Palestinian chants by demonstrators. That’s what Israel’s defenders are defending. When a small group of Jewish faculty members was preparing last week to meet with the provost to make our dissatisfactions known, we asked ourselves how we felt about the pro-Israel professor and we said, unanimously, that we defended his right to his opinions, loathsome as we find them. I don’t worry about his being driven out of Columbia. But I worry that our president shamelessly sacrificed the principle of academic freedom that all of us depend on, the Zionists included, to keep the project of free thinking alive.
This is certainly how she is perceived by a large and rapidly growing portion of Columbia faculty. An emergency meeting of the local chapter of the American Association of University Professors on 19 April reached its Zoom limit of three hundred people within minutes, leaving many faculty members clamouring to get in. The indignant talk was not about Palestine, but about the administration’s blatant lack of respect for the safety of its students and the principles of higher education.
Student protest on behalf of the Palestinians is very much alive, at least for the moment. When the police cleared out the encampment and dragged students off to jail, others hopped the fence and established a second encampment across the way, this time without tents. It is these students who have the most convincing grounds for anxiety. They too risk arrest and jail. Some have already been suspended from classes and evicted from student accommodation, leaving them homeless on the streets of New York. Those who have merely been suspended risk losing their tuition for the semester. The university administration seems to have decided that an encampment without tents can be left alone. Perhaps Shafik realises she has made a series of grave errors, and that if she makes another one, her administration may not survive the public shame.
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