Countering genocide

American universities pride themselves on being a melting pot of free exchange of ideas and critical thinking. The US university tenure system provides academic freedom for professors to instruct and encourage students to think outside the box, fostering the pursuit of ideas that might be considered unpopular or controversial. An environment that enables students to engage in academic learning and encourages involvement in social and political activism; to challenge and prepare tomorrow’s leaders free of outside influence.

Notwithstanding the foregoing, recent student protests throughout the US universities have exposed the limit of this academic freedom when confronting the Israeli Iron Curtain. Professors and students were brutally thrown to the ground, handcuffed and detained as if they were criminals. Police in full combat gear, flaunting guns and batons, with prisoner buses lined up to intimidate protesters are reminiscent of scenes under dictatorships the US condemns.

Bottom of Form: The protests at US campuses have revealed a sharp divide between those demanding an end to their university’s complicity with the Israeli genocide and those who weaponize antisemitism to stifle criticism of Israel. Ironically, within the latter group, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) has aligned with Democratic Israeli apologists and bona fide antisemitic Republicans to pressure US academia to shut down the peaceful protests.

ADL and its cohorts flourish on Western antisemitism. They thrive on hate, much like an ant forage on aphids, ensuring that Jews in the West live in perpetual insecurity. ADL tolerates proven antisemites, such as evangelical Zionists and Donald Trump (aphids), when it benefits Israel. This explains why someone like Trump, who in the summer of 2017 described Charlotteville white supremacist, chanting “Jews will not replace us” as “very fine people,” is by far the favored choice for Israelis and hardened American Zionists, to be the next US president. Among Israelis who support the current racist Israeli government coalition, Trump’s favorability jumps to a whopping 72 percent.

The AIPAC financed diabolical alliance, led by the ADL, and otherwise politically antagonistic politicians such as Republican representative Mike Lawler and Democrat Josh Gottheimer, were united in heeding Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s call to end student protests. They sought to inaugurate the Israeli Iron Curtain by decreeing that criticism of the Israeli government policies would violate American laws.

In his audacious sermon to Americans on April 24, Netanyahu demanded university leaders to take stiffer measures against the students and professors, while showering praise on “local, state, and federal officials” for cracking down on the peaceful protests. He also misidentified the actors when he compared American university protests to Nazi Germany. In fact, the only resemblance between the events at American universities today, and Nazi Germany in the 1930s is the suppression of free academia.

In 1930s Germany, voices that rejected Nazism were vilified, and “federal officials” ousted university presidents, banned professors from their classes, and Nazi mobs assaulted peaceful citizens. The Nazis did in German universities what Netanyahu solicited “local, state, and federal officials” to do – at US campuses.

At the same time, the ADL and the parochial pro-Israel professional victims, waged a smear campaign slandering protesting students as antisemitic and accusing them of creating “unsafe and uncomfortable” environment for other students. Undoubtedly, demanding ceasefire and protesting the use of starvation as a weapon of war would likely make those who support war and genocide uncomfortable, just as dictators would be uncomfortable when challenged. Nevertheless, the purported discomfort doesn’t give “federal officials” the right to abridge freedom of speech, or silence criticism of a foreign government and its policies.

Excerpted: ‘American Universities: From Fighting South African Apartheid to Confronting Israeli Genocide’. Courtesy: Counterpunch.org