Threat of repressive intolerance rises in academia
JVL Introduction
Despite some small victories for academic freedom, the threat from pro-Israel advocates worldwide to deny freedom of expression to pro-Palestinian students and faculty staff is growing.
Prof James Dickins, a distinguished specialist in Arabic and long-time advocate of Palestinian human rights, is celebrating the success of a campaign to prevent him being stripped of his Emeritus status by Leeds University on trumped-up allegations of inciting an assault on a Jewish students’ centre on campus. His statement, reproduced at the bottom of this post, lists the wide-ranging support he received from across academia. However, he also notes “a petty and vindictive attempt on the University’s part to save face” by depriving him of some of the privileges normally available to Emeritus (retired) professors.
As Palestine Solidarity Campaign director Ben Jamal pointed out in his letter to Leeds University in defence of Prof Dickins, research shows that “misuse of university disciplinary processes to target Palestinians and pro-Palestinian voices has produced a chilling effect on campuses, leading staff and students to self-censor.”
Nowhere is this alarming trend more evident than in the United States. As Natasha Lennard shows in the piece below from The Intercept, University and college administrations have started the new academic year making clear they plan to inflict evermore repressive intolerance on pro-Palestinian speech, “doubling down on anti-protest regulations and groundless claims that Palestinian solidarity makes Jewish students unsafe.”
NWI
This article was originally published by The Intercept on Tue 27 Aug 2024. Read the original here.
In Shot at Gaza Protesters, NYU Makes “Zionist” a Protected Class
College Administrators Spent Summer Break Dreaming Up Ways to Squash Gaza Protests. New York University students who speak out against Zionism will now risk violating the school’s nondiscrimination policies.
Loading article text…
Protecting and supporting the Nazis didn’t work out well did it the last time, did it…
the arrest by Counter terrosim sqaud of journalist Sarah Wilkinson has been ignored by press with the exception on the Morning Star on 2 September.
There’s a tussle going on in the world’s universities, with mixed results.
The Israeli press covered recently the new reluctance of foreign universities to “partner” with Israeli ones over research projects, student and staff exchanges, etc. The academics were in no doubt that Israel’s actions in Gaza had caused it – and the increasing isolation of their universities would harm them.
Only 21 FBAs – speaks volumes about that institution.
And it’s not only universities, many other institutions either for a quiet life or out of cowardice cave in to bullying, nor is it just about Zionism/antizionism. For just one of many instances recall what happened to Prof Kathleen Stock at Sussex University (the details are off-topic here so I wont elaborate).
For most of my life I was in awe of universities as bastions of free enquiry, free expression, the search for truth no matter where it led: no more. I think what’s happened in recent years, at least in the West, is called trahison des clercs. Universities used to uphold a view that the answer to bad speech was always good speech, and more of it. Now it’s gag and vilify.
Given that criticism of Zionism is becoming unlawful, it is just as well that George Orwell is not alive and working today. In an article that appeared in April 1945 titled ‘Antisemitism in Britain’, he wrote: ‘Antisemitism is only one manifestation of nationalism, and not everyone will have the disease in that particular form. A Jew, for example, would not be antisemitic: but then many Zionist Jews seem to me to be merely antisemites turned upside down’. The article came out, incidentally, in Contemporary Jewish Record. I wonder how many journals dedicated to Jewish matters would dare to publish an article containing such a sentence nowadays?
Protecting Nazis did not work out well last time, though I am not sure whether anyone in Britain apart from Mosley and his Black Shirts did either.
But if you want an example of how we are supporting the modern equivalent, I would quote from a Ha’aretz article of 16 January 2023 that stated: ‘In a recording published by the Kan public broadcaster on Monday, Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich can be heard airing his thoughts on LGBTQ people. ‘I won’t stone gays, and you won’t feed me shrimp’.’ The article goes on to describe himself as ‘a Fascist homophobe’.
To the extent that Western governments are continuing to protect the Israeli government from the consequences of their actions, you are absolutely right that Nazis are being protected, if you accept the equating of fascist and nazi ideology. I am perhaps just too crude the see the distinction between the two.