The latest Congressional hearings resulting in a massacre of college presidents brings again recollections from my teen-age years within the Nineteen Fifties when everybody’s eyes had been glued to the TV broadcast of the McCarthy hearings. And the coed revolts incited by vicious faculty presidents attempting to stifle tutorial freedom when it opposes international unjust wars awakens recollections of the Sixties protests in opposition to the Vietnam Conflict and the campus clampdowns confronting police violence. I used to be the junior member of the “Columbia three” alongside Seymour Melman and my mentor Terence McCarthy (each of whom taught at Columbia’s Seeley Mudd College of Industrial Engineering; my job was primarily to deal with publicity and publication). On the finish of that decade, college students occupied my workplace and all others on the New College’s graduate school in New York Metropolis – very peacefully, with out disturbing any of my books and papers.
Solely the epithets have modified. The invective “Communist” has been changed by “anti-Semite,” and the renewal of police violence on campus has not but led to a Kent State-style rifle barrage in opposition to protesters. However the widespread denominators are all right here as soon as once more. A concerted effort has been organized to sentence and even to punish in the present day’s nationwide scholar uprisings in opposition to the genocide occurring in Gaza and the West Financial institution. Simply because the Home Unamerican Actions Committee (HUAC) aimed to finish the careers of progressive actors, administrators, professors and State Division officers unsympathetic to Chiang Kai-Shek or sympathetic to the Soviet Union from 1947 to 1975, in the present day’s model goals at ending what stays of educational freedom in the US.
The epithet of “communism” from 75 years in the past has been up to date to “anti-Semitism.” Senator Joe McCarthy of Wisconsin has been changed by Elise Stefanik, Home Republican from upstate New York, and Senator “Scoop” Jackson upgraded to President Joe Biden. Harvard College President Claudine Homosexual (now pressured to resign), former College of Pennsylvania President Elizabeth Magill (additionally given the boot), and Massachusetts Institute of Know-how President Sally Kornbluth had been known as upon to abase themselves by promising to accuse peace advocates vital of U.S. international coverage of anti-Semitism.
The newest sufferer was Columbia’s president Nemat “Minouche” Shafik, a cosmopolitan opportunist with trilateral citizenship who enforced neoliberal financial coverage as a high-ranking official on the IMF (the place she was no stranger to the violence of “IMF riots) and the World Financial institution, and who introduced her legal professionals alongside to assist her acquiesce within the Congressional Committee’s calls for. She did that and extra, all on her personal. Regardless of being advised to not by the school and scholar affairs committees, she known as within the police to arrest peaceable demonstrators. This radical trespass of police violence in opposition to peaceable demonstrators (the police themselves attested to their peacefulness) triggered sympathetic revolts all through the US, met with much more violent police responses at Emory School in Atlanta and California State Polytechnic, the place cellphone movies had been rapidly posted on varied media platforms.
Simply as mental freedom and free speech had been attacked by HUAC 75 years in the past, tutorial freedom is now below assault at these universities. The police have trespassed onto faculty grounds to accuse college students themselves of trespassing, with violence harking back to the demonstrations that peaked in Might 1970 when the Ohio Nationwide Guard shot Kent State college students singing and talking out in opposition to America’s conflict in Vietnam.
Right this moment’s demonstrations are in opposition to the Biden-Netanyahu genocide in Gaza and the West Financial institution. The extra underlying disaster might be boiled right down to the insistence by Benjamin Netanyahu that to criticize Israel is anti-Semitic. That’s the “enabling slur” of in the present day’s assault on tutorial freedom.
By “Israel,” Biden and Netanyahu imply particularly the right-wing Likud Social gathering and its theocratic supporters aiming to create “a land with out a [non-Jewish] folks.” They assert that Jews owe their loyalty to not their present nationality (or humanity) however to Israel and its coverage of driving the Gaza Strip’s thousands and thousands of Palestinians into the ocean by bombing them out of their houses, hospitals and refugee camps.
. The implication is that to help the Worldwide Courtroom of Justice’s accusations that Israel is plausibly committing genocide is an anti-Semitic act. Supporting the UN resolutions vetoed by the US is anti-Semitic.
The declare is that Israel is defending itself and that protesting the genocide of the Palestinians in Gaza and the West Financial institution frightens Jewish college students. However analysis by college students at Columbia’s College of Journalism discovered that the complaints cited by the New York Instances and different pro-Israeli media had been made by non-students attempting to unfold the story that Israel’s violence was in self-defense.
The scholar violence has been by Israeli nationals. Columbia has a student-exchange program with Israel for college students who end their obligatory coaching with the Israeli Protection Forces. It was a few of these change college students who attacked pro-Gaza demonstrators, spraying them with Skunk, a foul-smelling indelible Israeli military chemical weapon that marks demonstrators for subsequent arrest, torture or assassination. The one college students endangered had been the victims of this assault. Columbia below Shafik did nothing to guard or assist the victims.
The hearings to which she submitted communicate for themselves. Columbia’s president Shafik was capable of keep away from the primary assault on universities not sufficiently pro-Likud by having conferences exterior of the nation. But she confirmed herself keen to undergo the identical brow-beating that had led her two fellow presidents to be fired, hoping that her legal professionals had prompted her to submit in a approach that may be acceptable to the committee.
I discovered probably the most demagogic assault to be that of Republican Congressman Rick Allen from Georgia, asking Dr. Shafik whether or not she was accustomed to the passage in Genesis 12.3. As he defined” “It was a covenant that God made with Abraham. And that covenant was actual clear. … ‘Should you bless Israel, I’ll bless you. Should you curse Israel, I’ll curse you.’ … Do you contemplate that to be a severe concern? I imply, would you like Columbia College to be cursed by God of the Bible?”
Shafik smiled and was pleasant during this bible thumping, and replied meekly, “Positively not.”
She might need warded off this browbeating query by saying, “Your query is weird. That is 2024, and America will not be a theocracy. And the Israel of the early 1st century BC was not Netanyahu’s Israel of in the present day.” She accepted all of the accusations that Allen and his fellow Congressional inquisitors threw at her.
Her major nemesis was Elise Stefanik, Chair of the Home Republican Convention, who’s on the Home Armed Providers Committee, and the Committee on Training and the Workforce.
Congresswoman Stefanik: You had been requested had been there any anti-Jewish protests and also you stated ‘No’.President Shafik: So the protest was not labeled as an anti-Jewish protest. It was labeled as an anti-Israeli authorities. However antisemitic incidents occurred or antisemitic issues had been stated. So I simply needed to complete.
Congresswoman Stefanik: And you’re conscious that in that invoice, that bought 377 Members out of 435 Members of Congress, condemns ‘from the river to the ocean’ as antisemitic?
Dr. Shafik: Sure, I’m conscious of that.
Congresswoman Stefanik: However you don’t imagine ‘from the river to the ocean’ is antisemitic?
Dr. Shafik: We now have already issued a press release to our neighborhood saying that language is hurtful and we might choose to not hear it on our campus.
What an applicable response to Stefanik’s browbeating might need been?
Shafik might have stated, “The explanation why college students are protesting is in opposition to the Israeli genocide in opposition to the Palestinians, because the Worldwide Courtroom of Justice has dominated, and many of the United Nations agree. I’m pleased with them for taking an ethical stand that many of the world helps however is below assault right here on this room.”
As a substitute, Shafik appeared extra keen than the leaders of Harvard or Penn to sentence and probably self-discipline college students and college for utilizing the time period “from the river to the ocean, Palestine might be free.” She might have stated that it’s absurd to say that this can be a name to eradicate Israel’s Jewish inhabitants, however is a name to provide Palestinians freedom as an alternative of being handled as Untermenschen.
Requested explicitly whether or not requires genocide violate Columbia’s code of conduct, Dr. Shafik answered within the affirmative — “Sure, it does.” So did the opposite Columbia leaders who accompanied her on the listening to. They didn’t say that this isn’t in any respect what the protests are about. Neither Shafik nor every other of the college officers say, “Our college is pleased with our college students taking an energetic political and social position in protesting the thought of ethnic cleaning and outright homicide of households merely to seize the land that they stay on. Standing up for that ethical precept is what schooling is all about, and what civilization’s all about.”
The one spotlight that I bear in mind from the McCarthy hearings was the reply by Joseph Welch, the U.S. Military’s Particular Council, on June 9, 1954 to Republican Senator Joe McCarthy’s cost that considered one of Welch’s attorneys had ties to a Communist entrance group. “Till this second, senator,” Welsh replied, “I believe I by no means gauged your cruelty or your recklessness. … Have you ever no sense of decency, sir? In the end, have you ever left no sense of decency?”
The viewers broke into wild applause. Welch’s put-down has echoed for the previous 70 years within the minds of those that had been watching tv then (as I used to be, at age 15). An analogous reply by any of the three different faculty presidents would have proven Stefanik to be the vulgarian that she is. However none ventured to face up in opposition to the abasement.
The Congressional assault accusing opponents of genocide in Gaza as anti-Semites supporting genocide in opposition to the Jews is bipartisan. Already in December, Rep. Suzanne Bonamici (D-Ore.) helped trigger Harvard and Penn’s presidents to be fired for his or her stumbling over her red-baiting. She repeated her query to Shafik on April 17: “Does calling for the genocide of Jews violate Columbia’s code of conduct?” Bonamici requested the 4 new Columbia witnesses. All responded: “Sure.”
That was the second when they need to have stated that the scholars weren’t calling for genocide of the Jews, however searching for to mobilize opposition to genocide being dedicated by the Likud authorities in opposition to the Palestinians with President Biden’s full help.
Throughout a break within the proceedings Rep. Stefanik advised the press that “the witnesses had been overheard discussing how properly they thought their testimony was going for Columbia.” This conceitedness is eerily reminiscent to the earlier three college presidents who believed when strolling out of the listening to that their testimony was acceptable. “Columbia is in for a reckoning of accountability. If it takes a member of Congress to power a college president to fireside a pro-terrorist, antisemitic school chair, then Columbia College management is failing Jewish college students and its tutorial mission,” added Stefanik. “No quantity of overlawyered, overprepped, and over-consulted testimony goes to cowl up for failure to behave.”
Shafik might have pointedly corrected the implications by the Home inquisitors that it was Jewish college students who wanted safety. The truth was simply the alternative: The hazard was from the Israeli IDF college students who attacked the demonstrators with army Skunk, with no punishment by Columbia.
Regardless of being advised to not by the school and scholar teams (which Shafik was formally sure to seek the advice of), she known as within the police, who arrested 107 college students, tied their arms behind their backs and stored them that approach for a lot of hours as punishment whereas charging them for trespassing on Columbia’s property. Shafik then suspended them from lessons.
The conflict between two sorts of Judaism: Zionist vs. assimilationist
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variety of these protestors being criticized had been Jewish. Netanyahu and AIPAC have claimed – accurately, it appears – that the best hazard to their present genocidal insurance policies comes from the historically liberal Jewish middle-class inhabitants. Progressive Jewish teams have joined the uprisings at Columbia and different universities.
Early Zionism arose in late 19th-century Europe as a response to the violent pogroms killing Jews in Ukrainian cities akin to Odessa and different Central European cities that had been the middle of anti-Semitism. Zionism promised to create a protected refuge. It made sense at a time when Jews had been fleeing their nations to save lots of their lives in nations that accepted them. They had been the “Gazans” of their day.
After World Conflict II and the horrors of the Holocaust anti-Semitism turned passé. Most Jews in the US and different nations had been being assimilated and turning into affluent, most efficiently in the US. The previous century has seen this success allow them to assimilate, whereas retaining the ethical customary that ethnic and non secular discrimination akin to that which their forbears had suffered is improper in precept. Jewish activists had been within the forefront of preventing for civil liberties, most visibly in opposition to anti-Black prejudice and violence within the Sixties and ‘70s, and in opposition to the Vietnam Conflict. A lot of my Jewish faculty mates within the Nineteen Fifties purchased Israel bonds, however considered Israel as a socialist nation and considered volunteering to work on a kibbutz in the summertime. There was no considered antagonism, and I heard no point out of the Palestinian inhabitants when the phrase “a folks with out a land in a land with out a folks” was spoken.
However Zionism’s leaders have remained obsessive about the previous antagonisms within the wake of Nazism’s murders of so many Jews. In some ways they’ve turned Nazism inside out, fearing a renewed assault from non-Jews. Driving the Arabs out of Israel and making it an apartheid state was simply the alternative of what assimilationist Jews geared toward.
The ethical stance of progressive Jews, and the best that Jews, blacks and members of all different religions and races needs to be handled equally, is the alternative of Israeli Zionism. Within the arms of Netanyahu’s Likud Social gathering and the inflow of right-wing supporters, Zionism asserts a declare to set Jewish folks other than the remainder of their nationwide inhabitants, and even from the remainder of the world, as we’re seeing in the present day.
Claiming to talk for all Jews, residing and lifeless, Netanyahu asserts that to criticize his genocide and the Palestinian holocaust, the nakba, is anti-Semitic. That is the place of Stefanik and her fellow committee members. It’s an assertion that Jews owe their first allegiance to Israel, and therefore to its ethnic cleaning and mass homicide since final October. President Biden additionally has labeled the coed demonstrations “antisemitic protests.”
This declare within the circumstances of Israel’s ongoing genocide is inflicting extra anti-Semitism than anybody since Hitler. If folks all through the world come to undertake Netanyahu’s and his cupboard’s definition of anti-Semitism, what number of, being repulsed by Israel’s actions, will say, “If that’s the case, then certainly I assume I’m anti-Semitic.”
Netanyahu’s slander in opposition to Judaism and what civilization ought to stand for
Netanyahu characterised the U.S. protests in an extremist speech on April 24 attacking American tutorial freedom.
What’s occurring in America’s faculty campuses is horrific. Antisemitic mobs have taken over main universities. They name for the annihilation of Israel, they assault Jewish college students, they assault Jewish school. That is harking back to what occurred in German universities within the Thirties. We see this exponential rise of antisemitism all through America and all through Western societies as Israel tries to defend itself in opposition to genocidal terrorists, genocidal terrorists who conceal behind civilians.It’s unconscionable, it must be stopped, it must be condemned and condemned unequivocally. However that’s not what occurred. The response of a number of college presidents was shameful. Now, fortuitously, state, native, federal officers, a lot of them have responded in another way however there must be extra. Extra must be finished.
It is a name to make American universities into arms of a police state, imposing insurance policies dictated by Israel’s settler state. That decision is being funded by a round circulation: Congress provides huge subsidies to Israel, which recycles a few of this a reimbursement into the election campaigns of politicians keen to serve their donors. It’s the similar coverage that Ukraine makes use of when it employs U.S. “assist” by organising well-funded lobbying organizations to again shopper politicians.
What sort of scholar and tutorial protest expressions might oppose the Gaza and West Financial institution genocide with out explicitly threatening Jewish college students? How about “Palestinians are human being too!” That’s not aggressive. To make it extra ecumenical, one might add “And so are the Russians, regardless of what Ukrainian neo-Nazis say.”
I can perceive why Israelis really feel threatened by Palestinians. They know what number of they’ve killed and brutalized to seize their land, killing simply to “free” the land for themselves. They have to assume “If the Palestinians are like us, they need to wish to kill us, due to what we’ve finished to them and there can by no means be a two-state answer and we are able to by no means stay collectively, as a result of this land was given to us by God.”
Netanyahu fanned the flames after his April 24 speech by elevating in the present day’s battle to the extent of a struggle for civilization: “What’s essential now could be for all of us, all of us who’re and cherish our values and our civilization, to face up collectively and to say sufficient is sufficient.”
Is what Israel is doing, and what the United Nations, the Worldwide Courtroom of Justice and many of the International Majority oppose, actually “our civilization”? Ethnic cleaning, genocide and treating the Palestinian inhabitants as conquered and to be expelled as subhumans is an assault on probably the most fundamental ideas of civilization.
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Peaceable college students defending that common idea of civilization are known as terrorists and anti-Semites – by the terrorist Israeli Prime Minister. He’s following the ways of Joseph Goebbels: The way in which to mobilize a inhabitants to struggle the enemy is to depict your self as below assault. That was the Nazi public relations technique, and it’s the PR technique of Israel in the present day – and of many within the American Congress, in AIPAC and plenty of associated establishments that proclaim a morally offensive concept of civilization because the ethnic supremacy of a bunch sanctioned by God.
The actual focus of the protests is the U.S. coverage that’s backing Israel’s ethnic cleaning and genocide supported by final week’s international “assist.” It’s also a protest in opposition to the corruption of Congressional politicians elevating cash from lobbyists representing international pursuits over these of the US. Final week’s “assist” invoice additionally backed Ukraine, that different nation presently engaged in ethnic cleaning, with Home members waved Ukrainian flags, not these of the US. Shortly earlier than that, one Congressman wore his Israeli military uniform into Congress to promote his priorities.
Zionism has gone far past Judaism. I’ve learn that there are 9 Christian Zionists for each Jewish Zionists. It’s as if each teams are calling for the Finish Time to reach, whereas insisting that help for the United Nations and the Worldwide Courtroom of Justice condemning Israel for genocide is anti-Semitic.
What CAN the scholars at Columbia ask for
College students at Columbia and different universities have known as for universities to disinvest in Israeli shares, and likewise these of U.S. arms makers exporting to Israel. Given the truth that universities have turn into enterprise organizations, I don’t assume that that is probably the most sensible demand at current. Most essential, it doesn’t go to the center of the ideas at work.
What actually is the large public relations concern is the unconditional U.S. backing for Israel come what could, with “anti-Semitism” the present propaganda epithet to characterize those that oppose genocide and brutal land grabbing.
They need to insist on a public announcement by Columbia (and likewise Harvard and the College of Pennsylvania, who had been equally obsequious to Rep. Stefanik) that they acknowledge that it’s not anti-Semitic to sentence genocide, help the United Nations and denounce the U.S. veto.
They need to insist that Columbia and the opposite universities making a sacrosanct promise to not name police onto tutorial grounds over problems with free speech.
They need to insist that the president be fired for her one-sided help of Israeli violence in opposition to her college students. In that demand they’re in settlement with Rep. Stefanik’s precept of defending college students, and that Dr. Shafik should go.
However there may be one class of main offenders that needs to be held up for contempt: the donors who attempt to assault tutorial freedom through the use of their cash to affect college coverage and switch universities away from the position in supporting tutorial freedom and free speech. The scholars ought to insist that college directors – the disagreeable opportunists standing above the school and college students – should not solely refuse such stress however ought to take part publicly expressing shock over such covert political affect.
The issue is that American universities have turn into like Congress in basing their coverage on attracting contributions from their donors. That’s the tutorial equal of the Supreme Courtroom’s Residents United ruling. Quite a few Zionist funders have threatened to withdraw their contributions to Harvard, Columbia and different faculties not following Netanyahu’s calls for to clamp down on opponents of genocide and defenders of the United Nations. These funders are the enemies of the scholars at such universities, and each college students and college ought to insist on their elimination. Simply as Dr. Shafik’s Worldwide Financial Fund fell topic to its economists’ protest that there have to be “No extra Argentinas,” maybe the Columbia college students might chant “No Extra Shafiks.”
Notes
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=syPELLKpABI
Nicholas Fandos, Stephanie Saul and Sharon Otterman, “Columbia’s President Tells Congress That Motion Is Wanted Towards Antisemitism,” The New York Instances, April 17, 2024., and “Columbia President Grilled Throughout Congressional Listening to on Campus Antisemitism,” Jewish Journal, April 18, 2024. https://jewishjournal.com/information/united-states/370521/columbia-president-grilled-during-congressional-hearing-on-campus-antisemitism/#:~:textual content=Columbiapercent20Presidentpercent20Grilledpercent20Duringpercent20Congressionalpercent20Hearingpercent20onpercent20Campuspercent20Antisemitism
Miranda Nazzaro. “Netanyahu condemns ‘antisemitic mobs’ on US faculty campuses,” The Hill, April 24, 2024.
