The real purpose of this nasty political farce is to pressure US universities to crack down on criticism of Israel
Fri 24 May 2024
THE GUARDIAN
If you didn’t know what was really going on at US college campuses, the congressional hearing on Thursday – in which the presidents of Northwestern and Rutger’s and the chancellor of UCLA were called to testify before a Republican-controlled House committee – would do little to inform you.
The House committee on education and the workforce has held six – yes, six – public events to draw attention to the supposed crisis on campus in the months since the 7 October attack on Israel. They’ve hauled university presidents to Washington to harangue them, allegedly for not being sufficiently punitive toward pro-Palestinian students and faculty. These hearings have been used to belittle and antagonize university faculty and students and have fed racist and anti-intellectual moral panics that have led to the resignations of several of the university presidents who have been called to testify, notably including Liz Magill of the University of Pennsylvania and Claudine Gay of Harvard
The hearings have aimed to pressure colleges and universities to crack down on a wide variety of politically disfavored speech, particularly pro-Palestinian and anti-war speech, and particularly that of students and faculty of color. In many cases, this pressure seems to have yielded the desired results: at Columbia, Minouche Shafik, the university president, twice ordered the NYPD onto campus to conduct violent mass arrests of anti-genocide student protesters; the first of these raids came the day after Shafik testified before the House committee and disparaged her own students in degrading terms.
But on Thursday, at least, the university administrators seemed less nervous, a bit more subdued – even if they were not willing to defend the rights of their anti-war students or correct the Republicans’ lies about them.
Michael Schill, president of Northwestern, Jonathan Holloway, president of Rutgers and Gene Block, chancellor of UCLA, were calm, if occasionally annoyed, as the Republicans on the committee told them they should be “ashamed” for using insufficient violence against protesters, called for the defunding of specific programs and the firing of individual faculty members, demanded that undergraduate students be expelled and compared pro-Palestinian demonstrators with Nazis and the segregationist George Wallace. At one point, a Republican congressman also digressed into a prolonged grievance over the firing of a Northwestern football coach.
The Republican outrage at the college administrators is nominally due to what they say is a “scourge of antisemitism” on these campuses. That pretext is supported by the false conflation of anti-Zionism or simple concern for Palestinian life with antisemitic animus – a dangerous and insulting conflation that was made repeatedly and without contradiction throughout the hearing. In reality, the false equivalence of anti-Zionism with antisemitism is belied by the reality on the ground, in the campus anti-war encampments that have sprung up across the country and in the burgeoning young Jewish anti-Zionist movement. In the real world, Jewish students are not only safe and welcome in the encampments and in the broader anti-war movement; they are frequently emerging as intellectual and organizing leaders.
But this reality was not convenient for the Republicans, who hope to cynically use a fear of antisemitism to provide a shield of moral righteousness to their anti-education, anti-diversity, anti-intellectual and fundamentally racist project. The flimsy pretext of fighting antisemitism was required to provide a thin pretext for an effort that is at its core about rooting out and punishing disfavored ideologies and attempting to eliminate them from the public sphere. To say that this is an insult to the history of antisemitism would be an understatement.
The attempt to paint the anti-war movement as violent and malicious veered, at times, into the absurd. In one prolonged exchange, the hearing was shown a viral video, produced by a young Zionist influencer at UCLA. In the video, the man is standing in a path on campus, facing a small group of silent pro-Palestinian protesters wearing keffiyehs. The young man declares that he wants to pass them to go into an academic building. The students are mostly silent; one seems to ask him to use a different entrance. “I want to use THAT door,” the man says, pointing, and looking back at the camera. The protesters are quiet; they do not move. No one is violent, or even particularly agitated. The Republican committee members referred to this video repeatedly and in dramatic terms throughout the hearing, claiming it represented an epidemic of Jewish students being violently refused access to campus facilities.
Meanwhile, other events on UCLA’s campus went largely unremarked. For while a pro-Palestinian encampment was present on UCLA’s campus for some days, so were pro-Israel demonstrators, whose much better-funded demonstration featured large groups of Zionist protestors bussed in from off campus, along with a jumbotron that played pro-Israel propaganda at all hours. When they were there, the Zionist group jeered and taunted the anti-genocide protesters, allegedly yelling racial slurs and rape threats and even allegedly releasing rats into the encampment.
On the night of 30 April, a large group from the pro-Israel camp, many of them wearing Halloween masks, violently attacked the pro-Palestinian encampment. They brought “knives, bats, wooden planks, pepper spray and bear mace”, according to one witness, and proceeded to beat the anti-genocide protesters, pushing many into the ground using barricades. The police, whom UCLA had summoned to campus to help maintain order, stood by and allowed the attack to continue for hours. They seem to have assessed, correctly, what they were there to protect, and who they weren’t.
At the hearing on Thursday, the Republicans went to extensive lengths to criticize universities that have engaged in negotiations with their student protest encampments, calling these talks “capitulation” to “pro-terror” and “pro-Hamas” forces. Since the encampments sprung up at many campuses this spring, not all universities have chosen to disperse their students by having them beaten and arrested; some have engaged in dialogue – with varying degrees of good faith – and attempted to persuade the students to pack up the tents in exchange for material concessions.
At Northwestern, the successful negotiations resulted in a pledge from the administration to include funding for five undergraduate students and two faculty members from Palestine to come to campus, as part of the university’s broader international programming. This promise to include Palestinian scholars in campus life seemed to particularly offend the Republicans, who demanded to know why Jewish affinity groups had not been consulted before the commitment was made.
This is not typical of such university funding decisions: Why would a Russian-speakers’ club, say, be consulted before a scholarship was offered to a Ukrainian student? But the message from the outraged Republicans was clear: the inclusion of Palestinians in university life, they feel, should be subject to a Jewish person’s veto.
Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist
Northwestern president becomes lightning rod in Republican-led committee hearing also featuring chiefs of Rutgers and UCLA
Robert Tait in Washington
Members of a Republican-led congressional committee confronted another set of university heads on Thursday over their approach to pro-Palestinian protests in the latest hearings on Capitol Hill on a reported increase of campus antisemitism.
Republicans on the House of Representatives’ education and workforce committee repeatedly clashed fiercely with Michael Schill, president of Northwestern University in Illinois, over his decision to negotiate an end to a tented protest community rather than call in police, as has happened on other campuses.
In a sometimes fiery three-hour session, Schill – who opened his testimony by declaring that he was the Jewish descendant of Holocaust survivors – became the lightning rod in a hearing also featuring the chiefs of Rutgers University and the University of California, Los Angeles.
All three institutions witnessed the appearance of encampments in April similar to one set up on the grounds of Columbia University in New York by students protesting Israel’s military offensive in Gaza and related financial ties with their universities.
Schill and Jonathan Holloway, president of Rutgers in New Jersey, drew Republican ire for adopting a softly-softly approach by persuading protesters to dismantle their sites through agreements that some members depicted as appeasement.
The UCLA encampment was dismantled by police after it was violently attacked by pro-Israeli counter-protesters on 30 April. Gene Block, that university’s chancellor – although criticised for deploying police too late and failing to act when pro-Palestinian protesters blocked the movement of students they accused of being Zionist, as detailed by the Los Angeles Times – attracted less rough treatment from GOP members.
A new pro-Palestinian encampment appeared on the UCLA campus as Bock testified on Thursday. Over two dozens officers descended on the campus, but it was unclear if any arrests were made.
But Block was strongly denounced by Ilhan Omar, the leftwing Democratic congresswoman from Minnesota, who told him that he “should be ashamed” for failing to protect protesters from violent attack.
“You should be ashamed for letting a peaceful protest gathering get hijacked by an angry mob,” she said.
Thursday’s session was the full committee’s third hearing on a trend of campus protests that have been subject to accusations of antisemitism and intimidation alleged to have arisen after October’s attack by Hamas on Israel, which produced a devastating Israeli military retaliation.
An initial hearing last December led to the resignation of two university presidents, Elizabeth Magill of the University of Pennsylvania and Claudine Gay of Harvard, for giving answers deemed too legalistic.
A second hearing last month on developments at Columbia University brought assurances of action from its president, Minouche Shafik, who immediately afterwards called in police to remove an encampment on the main campus lawn. But her actions triggered an upsurge of similar tented protests at campuses across the US that became the partial focus of Thursday’s hearing.
The committee’s Republican chair, Virginia Foxx of North Carolina, set a confrontational tone by quoting from Ernest Hemingway’s novel The Sun Also Rises, where a character describes going bankrupt – gradually, then suddenly.
“These three little words paved the road that led to today’s hearing,” she said. “Over the course of years – decades, even – universities gradually nurtured a campus culture of radicalism in which antisemitism grew and became tolerated by administrators.
“Each of you should be ashamed of your decisions that allowed antisemitic encampments to endanger Jewish students.”
Schill, saying that antisemitism and supporting Israel were not “abstract” or “theoretical” for him, admitted that his university’s rules and policies had fallen short and the university had not been ready for the students’ response to the 7 October attack and its aftermath.
But he was targeted by Republican members who questioned his compromise with protesters and suggested he had tolerated antisemitism.
He showed visible irritation with Elise Stefanik, the representative from New York, after she told him “I’m asking the questions here” and held up a placard emblazoned with an “F” to signify that the Anti-Defamation League had pronounced Northwestern’s policy on antisemitism a failure.
Answering Burgess Owens, a Republican representative from Utah, who used another placard designed as a cheque for $600m to depict funding the university receives from Qatar – a Gulf kingdom that also finances Hamas – Schill said: “I’m really offended by you telling me what my views are.”
Jim Banks, a GOP representative from Indiana, told Schill that “your performance here has been an embarrassment to your school”, adding that Northwestern University had become “a joke”.
Responding to Brandon Williams of New York, all three heads said they had been taken by surprise by the encampments’ appearance and did not know who was behind them. Williams called this an “astonishing admission”.
Several Democratic members questioned the hearing’s premise and the sincerity of Republicans in tackling antisemitism, accusing them of silence when it came from their own side.
“The first amendment protects both popular and agreeable speech, and speech that people can reasonably disagree with, including sometimes hateful words but again and painting with a broad brush,” said the committee’s ranking Democrat, Bobby Scott of Virginia. “The [Republican] majority has attempted to remove any distinction between hate speech and genuine political protest.”
Suzanne Bonamici of Oregon highlighted what she depicted as Republican hypocrisy. She said: “Just a few days ago, the true social account of Donald Trump included an outrageous video with Nazi-like language about a unified reich. Did any of my colleagues on this committee call that out?”
US: Why Protesting Genocide is Dubbed as ‘Anti-Semitism’
The current protests in US university campuses demanding “divestment” from firms linked to Israel’s military machine, are reminiscent of the protests that had swept these campuses in the late sixties and early seventies demanding an end to the Vietnam war. There is, however, a major difference: the US had then been directly involved in the war, while today it is not. This had meant a draft then in the US while today there is none, which makes the current student protests completely free of even a shadow of self-interest.
By the same token, direct US involvement in that war and hence the daily loss of lives of US personnel had invested the calls within the US establishment for ending the Vietnam war with a seriousness that is sorely missing in all such calls today. The fact of the US not being a direct combatant, therefore, makes the protests of the students much more principled and serious, while it makes the pronouncements on peace of the establishment much less principled and serious.
The students, in short, are moved by a pure sense of humanity. Their protests are motivated by an abhorrence for genocide, for settler colonialism, and for imperialist complicity in an apartheid Zionist regime; they are an expression of humanity’s quest for peace and fraternity.
The US establishment, on the other hand, indulges in double talk: while paying lip service to peace it does everything to prolong the conflict, and while professing opposition to the inflicting of cruelty on innocent civilians, continues supplying arms for inflicting such cruelty.
The humanity on one side, the side of the students, is in stark contrast to the chicanery on the other side. If the first is the harbinger of hope for the future, the second represents the frantic dishonesty of a tottering imperialism.
This dishonesty is manifest at every level. For years now, the metropolitan countries have been committed to a “two-state” solution to the Palestinian issue, that is, to having a Palestinian State alongside the State of Israel. The point is not whether a “one-State” solution, that is a single State with its central executive elected through universal adult franchise, and within whose boundaries the Palestinians and the Israelis live together, is better than a two-State one; the point is that a two-State solution has been accepted for long by international opinion and also by the imperialist countries.
A corollary of the two-State solution is that a Palestinian State should come into being immediately and be recognised as a full-fledged member of the United Nations. And yet whenever the issue of admitting Palestine as a full member of the UN has come up, the United States, despite being apparently committed to the idea, has exercised its veto at the Security Council which has the final authority in the matter.
This is what happened on April 19. The Zionist State of Israel does not want an independent Palestinian State for that would put an end to its settler colonial project; and the United States, despite its public posturing, goes along with this Zionist project whenever matters come to a head.
On May 10 again the UN General Assembly voted overwhelmingly (with 143 in favour, nine against and 25 abstentions) for full membership of Palestine, and requested the Security Council to reconsider the matter. While the US, along with some of the arch right-wing regimes of the world like Argentina and Hungary voted against, other metropolitan countries (with the exception of France alone which voted in favour) abstained. The US, when the matter comes again before the Security Council, will no doubt exercise its veto once more to thwart not only any prospect of peace, but also the will of the overwhelming mass of the people of the world to resolve the problem.
The same dishonesty is visible in the manner in which the US establishment treats the student movement. Police have been sent to several campuses to break up the encampments set up by the students and hundreds of student protesters have been arrested, despite the fact that the protests have been peaceful.
The use of strong-arm methods to deal with peaceful protests constitutes an assault on the freedom of expression; but it has been justified by the entire American establishment, from Donald Trump to Joe Biden to Hilary Clinton. Donald Trump has talked of “Radical mobs taking over our college campuses” and accused Biden of being complicit with such “mobs”.
Biden in turn who has openly supported police action against students, as at Columbia University, in conformity with “liberal” opinion in general, has charged protesting students with “anti-semitism”, a bizarre charge given the fact that student protesters have included a large number of Jewish students!
Hilary Clinton has accused the students of being ignorant of the history of the middle east, as if awareness of such history could condone the perpetration of a genocide!
The anti-Vietnam war movement had at some point acquired the support of important American public figures like Eugene McCarthy and Robert Kennedy, but that again was because of America’s direct involvement in the war. In the present case the entire phalanx of establishment politicians has lined up in favour of the war and against the students.
Similar student protests have broken out elsewhere in the metropolitan world and similar strong-arm tactics have been used in many campuses. But there have also been instances of opposition to strong-arm methods. In Britain, for instance, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s advice to vice chancellors of universities that have seen such protests, to use the State machinery to break them up has not gone down well with all vice-chancellors; some have even refused to attend a meeting called by him. But in America there has been no such opposition; university heads who have sought to assert their own judgement on how to deal with the protests, have been forced to resign.
It is this suppression of thought on campuses that has brought the charge of a new McCarthyism being unleashed in the US. Then, as now, it is a group of Right-wing lawmakers that are in the forefront of the attempt to suppress independent thinking on campuses. But the question arises: in the 1950s the context for McCarthyism was provided by the Cold War and the fear of communism; what is it in the present context that is driving this new McCarthyism?
There can be little doubt that the new McCarthyism is linked to the rise of the Right and to the ascendancy of neo-fascism in the capitalist world in the context of the crisis of neo-liberal capitalism. What the rise of neo-fascism has done is not just to thrust fascist elements that had hitherto occupied the political fringe to the centre-stage, but also to let such elements hegemonise the so-called “liberal” political forces, to create a more or less unified Right-wing consensus that beats down all efforts at a revival of the Left.
It is noteworthy that when Jeremy Corbyn had been elected the leader of the Labour Party in Britain and had mounted a challenge against the establishment that had threatened to “get out of hand”, a conspiracy had been mounted against him by dubbing him “anti-semitic” (because of his sympathy for the Palestinian cause) and even removing him from the Labour Party itself.
Students and teachers in universities still constitute in the metropolis an independent source of thought, and hence a moral force that poses a threat to this Right-wing consolidation. Control over universities, therefore, becomes an important item on the agenda of this Right-wing consolidation. Independence of thought must be destroyed, every trace of humanity must be destroyed, if this Right-wing consolidation is to have its way. What we are seeing in the United States today is this brazen attempt to destroy independence of thought.
Protesting genocide is dubbed ‘anti-semitism’. Neither the students nor Jeremy Corbyn was anti-semitic; in fact, it is among their detractors that one can find elements that have had links with anti-semitic movements at home and abroad (like the movement started by Stepan Bandera of Ukraine who had collaborated with the Nazi invaders). But “weaponising anti-semitism” comes in handy for Right-wing consolidation in metropolitan countries.
What is happening on US campuses, therefore, is of great significance. The struggle between humanity and chicanery that is being played out on campuses today presages decisive class struggles in the days to come.
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