BY MITCHELL PLITNICK
MONDOWEISS
REP. ELISE STEFANIK QUESTIONING UNIVERSITY PRESIDENTS IN CONGRESSIONAL HEARING ON ANTISEMITISM, DECEMBER 5, 2023. (PHOTO: SCREENSHOT FROM C-SPAN YOUTUBE CHANNEL)
The campaign to delegitimize and even illegalize any support for Palestinian rights has reached a new level of Orwellian thought policing. Any statement of support for the basic rights of Palestinians is now being defined as antisemitism, with often devastating consequences, and if recent events are any indication, pro-Israel forces are just getting started.
While the campaign is being led by Republicans who have repeatedly demonstrated their hatred for both Muslims and Jews, it is being enthusiastically supported by Democrats, especially the White House.
On December 6, in a scene that demonstrates the absurdity of American politics, Republican Rep. Elise Stefanik mercilessly interrogated three university presidents to gauge whether they were sufficiently loyal to Israel. Stefanik employed the cynical tactic of presenting her questioning as protecting Jewish students on the campuses the three witnesses headed — Harvard, MIT, and the University of Pennsylvania — from the antisemitism that she claims has swept their campuses.
What made the scene so absurd is that it was Stefanik holding the pitchfork against the three women she was trying to burn at the stake. Stefanik has espoused perhaps the most notorious of contemporary antisemitic conspiracy theories, the so-called Great Replacement Theory, which claims that Jews are bringing immigrants of color into the U.S. to displace white people. If she were not concerned about the political effects on her career, Stefanik would have been perfectly comfortable with the tiki-torch carrying neo-Nazis at the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville six years ago.
Yet leading Democrats supported her witch hunt. That included the White House, which issued a statement after the hearing where the three university presidents were pilloried, that read, in part, “It’s unbelievable that this needs to be said: Calls for genocide are monstrous and antithetical to everything we represent as a country.” It also included Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro, who said, “I’ve said many times, leaders have a responsibility to speak and act with moral clarity, and Liz Magill failed to meet that simple test.” Under this pressure, UPenn President Magill — who had been under intense pressure since she refused to cancel the “Palestine Writes” literature festival in September — finally gave in and stepped down as the university’s president.
Stefanik, in classic McCarthy-esque style, was trying to force the university presidents to condemn what she referred to as calls for the genocide of Jews by students supporting Palestinian rights. But the rhetoric she was referring to was nothing of the kind. She focused on the phrase “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” and the term “intifada.”
The university presidents did themselves no favors by deciding not to contest the basic factual error in Stefanik’s questioning — that these phrases are not in any way genocidal, but refer to a vision of freedom in all of the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea, a condition which obviously does not exist today; and, with “intifada,” refer to a call for resistance which need not necessarily mean armed resistance (to which Palestinians have a right under international law), and, in any case, is a call for Palestinians to struggle to attain the rights Israel denies them. In no way is it a call for genocide, but for liberation.
Instead, the three presidents talked about the “context” of calls to genocide, implicitly ceding the warped definitions that Stefanik was sticking them with. Still, that is a tactical error, hardly one that should cost anyone their job.
So far, only Magill has been forced out, but the pressure on one of the other two — Claudine Gay of Harvard — has been intense, although Harvard’s administration and faculty have supported her. Thus far, Sally Kornbluth of MIT has not faced similar pressures.
Still, Stefanik celebrated Magill’s ouster, stating “one down, two to go,” and was echoed by Donald Trump. The antisemitism and anti-Palestinian hate from these people is visible now and has been since they’ve been in the public eye. Yet these are the people Democrats, including the White House, are willing to be led by on the issue of antisemitism and free speech.
Attacking CAIR
But while Stefanik’s hearings grabbed the headlines, another controversy bubbled up which might have equally important effects in the long run. It stems from a speech given by the National Executive Director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), a group that has long been a target of right-wing smear campaigns.
In that speech, CAIR’s director, Nihad Awad, expressed his satisfaction at seeing Palestinians break free of the open-air prison that is the Gaza Strip. “The people of Gaza only decided to break the siege, the walls of the concentration camp, on Oct. 7. And yes, I was happy to see people breaking the siege and throwing down the shackles of their own land and walk free into their land that they were not allowed to walk in.”
“And yes,” he also said, “the people of Gaza have the right to self-defense, have the right to defend themselves, and yes, Israel as an occupying power does not have that right to self-defense.”
These remarks were distributed without the broader context in which Awad had placed them in his actual speech. That bit of convenient distortion was done by the notorious Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI), a pro-Israel propaganda group that has a long history of misleading and decontextualized translations.
In another part of the speech, Awad said, “The hatred, the prejudice, the violence, the discrimination against Jews because of their faith or their life or their religious practices is a hateful mindset, behavior and action. We as human beings, as Muslims, as Palestinians, see it as evil the way it is, and [it] should be condemned because antisemitism is a real phenomenon, a real evil, and it has to be rejected and combated by all people regardless of their faith tradition, ideology, or those people who have no ideology. It is an attack on humanity and should be clearly condemned by all people.”
Unsurprisingly, these words were not included in the video that MEMRI circulated. And how could they be? The purpose of the video is to once again twist Palestinian yearning for the basic rights we take for granted into an irrational hatred of Jews, not because of dispossession or occupation, but because we are Jews.
Awad made two statements that cannot be tolerated by the contemporary Zionist narrative, whether from MEMRI or the White House. The first is that he expressed joy at the breaching of the Gaza barrier. It was not joy at the attack on civilians, as he made clear, stating that “Ukrainians, Palestinians and other occupied people have the right to defend themselves and escape occupation by just and legal means, but targeting civilians is never an acceptable means of doing so, which is why I have again and again condemned the violence against Israeli civilians on Oct. 7th and past Hamas attacks on Israeli civilians, including suicide bombings, all the way back to the 1990s—just as I have condemned the decades of violence against Palestinian civilians.”
But Awad did express joy at seeing Palestinians entering that part of historic Palestine on the other side of Israel’s wall. That might displease Israel’s supporters, but it is a far cry from a call to genocide or support for Hamas’ brutality against civilians on October 7.
Awad also stated that Israel does not have the right to self-defense against the people it occupies. This is a plain statement of international law. To be clear, Israel certainly does have the right to protect its citizens from violence. But “self-defense” in international law refers to defending the country from outside invaders, a principle which does not apply to people under that country’s belligerent military occupation. Israel’s responsibility to protect its citizens includes a responsibility to protect those under its occupation. It can use force to do this, such as one sees with police or a national guard, but it cannot act against those people as it would an invading enemy state. I explored this point some months ago in a piece that drew heavily from the excellent work on the subject by Prof. Noura Erakat.
At this point, expecting Joe Biden or his aides to respect, or even know the principles of international law is futile. And their reaction to MEMRI’s deceptive video is fully in step with Biden’s repeated parroting of Israeli falsehoods around Gaza, even those that Israel itself has given up on trying to convince people of. But this will have other unfortunate effects.
While CAIR hardly had the kind of access to the White House or other parts of the U.S. government as AIPAC or other pro-Israel lobby and advocacy groups, it did have more such access than most Muslim American groups. That is going to change drastically as the White House has completely cut them off, which will impede access to Congress and other parts of the government.
Worse, one of the few positive aspects of Biden’s plan, revealed earlier this year, to combat antisemitism was that CAIR was one of the groups involved to make it an interfaith effort. This represented real progress in bringing Muslim groups into this discussion. Indeed, in a recent report on how Islamophobia influences U.S. policy toward Palestine that I authored with Prof. Sahar Aziz, such inclusion was a key demand. That will not happen now, and the potential destructiveness of the Biden plan has now grown.
Taken together with the witch hunt against free speech on campus that we saw in Congress, this attempt to discredit one of the country’s most important and influential Muslim groups is a significant step toward the criminalization of any support for Palestinians, let alone any public advocacy for their rights. As long as the United States remains — as it is likely to for the foreseeable future — the most important outside player in Israel and Palestine, this is a threat that must be confronted publicly, loudly, and with all the energy and resources we can muster.
The campaign to delegitimize and even illegalize any support for Palestinian rights has reached a new level of Orwellian thought policing. Any statement of support for the basic rights of Palestinians is now being defined as antisemitism, with often devastating consequences, and if recent events are any indication, pro-Israel forces are just getting started.
While the campaign is being led by Republicans who have repeatedly demonstrated their hatred for both Muslims and Jews, it is being enthusiastically supported by Democrats, especially the White House.
On December 6, in a scene that demonstrates the absurdity of American politics, Republican Rep. Elise Stefanik mercilessly interrogated three university presidents to gauge whether they were sufficiently loyal to Israel. Stefanik employed the cynical tactic of presenting her questioning as protecting Jewish students on the campuses the three witnesses headed — Harvard, MIT, and the University of Pennsylvania — from the antisemitism that she claims has swept their campuses.
What made the scene so absurd is that it was Stefanik holding the pitchfork against the three women she was trying to burn at the stake. Stefanik has espoused perhaps the most notorious of contemporary antisemitic conspiracy theories, the so-called Great Replacement Theory, which claims that Jews are bringing immigrants of color into the U.S. to displace white people. If she were not concerned about the political effects on her career, Stefanik would have been perfectly comfortable with the tiki-torch carrying neo-Nazis at the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville six years ago.
Yet leading Democrats supported her witch hunt. That included the White House, which issued a statement after the hearing where the three university presidents were pilloried, that read, in part, “It’s unbelievable that this needs to be said: Calls for genocide are monstrous and antithetical to everything we represent as a country.” It also included Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro, who said, “I’ve said many times, leaders have a responsibility to speak and act with moral clarity, and Liz Magill failed to meet that simple test.” Under this pressure, UPenn President Magill — who had been under intense pressure since she refused to cancel the “Palestine Writes” literature festival in September — finally gave in and stepped down as the university’s president.
Stefanik, in classic McCarthy-esque style, was trying to force the university presidents to condemn what she referred to as calls for the genocide of Jews by students supporting Palestinian rights. But the rhetoric she was referring to was nothing of the kind. She focused on the phrase “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” and the term “intifada.”
The university presidents did themselves no favors by deciding not to contest the basic factual error in Stefanik’s questioning — that these phrases are not in any way genocidal, but refer to a vision of freedom in all of the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea, a condition which obviously does not exist today; and, with “intifada,” refer to a call for resistance which need not necessarily mean armed resistance (to which Palestinians have a right under international law), and, in any case, is a call for Palestinians to struggle to attain the rights Israel denies them. In no way is it a call for genocide, but for liberation.
Instead, the three presidents talked about the “context” of calls to genocide, implicitly ceding the warped definitions that Stefanik was sticking them with. Still, that is a tactical error, hardly one that should cost anyone their job.
So far, only Magill has been forced out, but the pressure on one of the other two — Claudine Gay of Harvard — has been intense, although Harvard’s administration and faculty have supported her. Thus far, Sally Kornbluth of MIT has not faced similar pressures.
Still, Stefanik celebrated Magill’s ouster, stating “one down, two to go,” and was echoed by Donald Trump. The antisemitism and anti-Palestinian hate from these people is visible now and has been since they’ve been in the public eye. Yet these are the people Democrats, including the White House, are willing to be led by on the issue of antisemitism and free speech.
Attacking CAIR
But while Stefanik’s hearings grabbed the headlines, another controversy bubbled up which might have equally important effects in the long run. It stems from a speech given by the National Executive Director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), a group that has long been a target of right-wing smear campaigns.
In that speech, CAIR’s director, Nihad Awad, expressed his satisfaction at seeing Palestinians break free of the open-air prison that is the Gaza Strip. “The people of Gaza only decided to break the siege, the walls of the concentration camp, on Oct. 7. And yes, I was happy to see people breaking the siege and throwing down the shackles of their own land and walk free into their land that they were not allowed to walk in.”
“And yes,” he also said, “the people of Gaza have the right to self-defense, have the right to defend themselves, and yes, Israel as an occupying power does not have that right to self-defense.”
These remarks were distributed without the broader context in which Awad had placed them in his actual speech. That bit of convenient distortion was done by the notorious Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI), a pro-Israel propaganda group that has a long history of misleading and decontextualized translations.
In another part of the speech, Awad said, “The hatred, the prejudice, the violence, the discrimination against Jews because of their faith or their life or their religious practices is a hateful mindset, behavior and action. We as human beings, as Muslims, as Palestinians, see it as evil the way it is, and [it] should be condemned because antisemitism is a real phenomenon, a real evil, and it has to be rejected and combated by all people regardless of their faith tradition, ideology, or those people who have no ideology. It is an attack on humanity and should be clearly condemned by all people.”
Unsurprisingly, these words were not included in the video that MEMRI circulated. And how could they be? The purpose of the video is to once again twist Palestinian yearning for the basic rights we take for granted into an irrational hatred of Jews, not because of dispossession or occupation, but because we are Jews.
Awad made two statements that cannot be tolerated by the contemporary Zionist narrative, whether from MEMRI or the White House. The first is that he expressed joy at the breaching of the Gaza barrier. It was not joy at the attack on civilians, as he made clear, stating that “Ukrainians, Palestinians and other occupied people have the right to defend themselves and escape occupation by just and legal means, but targeting civilians is never an acceptable means of doing so, which is why I have again and again condemned the violence against Israeli civilians on Oct. 7th and past Hamas attacks on Israeli civilians, including suicide bombings, all the way back to the 1990s—just as I have condemned the decades of violence against Palestinian civilians.”
But Awad did express joy at seeing Palestinians entering that part of historic Palestine on the other side of Israel’s wall. That might displease Israel’s supporters, but it is a far cry from a call to genocide or support for Hamas’ brutality against civilians on October 7.
Awad also stated that Israel does not have the right to self-defense against the people it occupies. This is a plain statement of international law. To be clear, Israel certainly does have the right to protect its citizens from violence. But “self-defense” in international law refers to defending the country from outside invaders, a principle which does not apply to people under that country’s belligerent military occupation. Israel’s responsibility to protect its citizens includes a responsibility to protect those under its occupation. It can use force to do this, such as one sees with police or a national guard, but it cannot act against those people as it would an invading enemy state. I explored this point some months ago in a piece that drew heavily from the excellent work on the subject by Prof. Noura Erakat.
At this point, expecting Joe Biden or his aides to respect, or even know the principles of international law is futile. And their reaction to MEMRI’s deceptive video is fully in step with Biden’s repeated parroting of Israeli falsehoods around Gaza, even those that Israel itself has given up on trying to convince people of. But this will have other unfortunate effects.
While CAIR hardly had the kind of access to the White House or other parts of the U.S. government as AIPAC or other pro-Israel lobby and advocacy groups, it did have more such access than most Muslim American groups. That is going to change drastically as the White House has completely cut them off, which will impede access to Congress and other parts of the government.
Worse, one of the few positive aspects of Biden’s plan, revealed earlier this year, to combat antisemitism was that CAIR was one of the groups involved to make it an interfaith effort. This represented real progress in bringing Muslim groups into this discussion. Indeed, in a recent report on how Islamophobia influences U.S. policy toward Palestine that I authored with Prof. Sahar Aziz, such inclusion was a key demand. That will not happen now, and the potential destructiveness of the Biden plan has now grown.
Taken together with the witch hunt against free speech on campus that we saw in Congress, this attempt to discredit one of the country’s most important and influential Muslim groups is a significant step toward the criminalization of any support for Palestinians, let alone any public advocacy for their rights. As long as the United States remains — as it is likely to for the foreseeable future — the most important outside player in Israel and Palestine, this is a threat that must be confronted publicly, loudly, and with all the energy and resources we can muster.
Mitchell Plitnick
Mitchell Plitnick is the president of ReThinking Foreign Policy. He is the co-author, with Marc Lamont Hill, of Except for Palestine: The Limits of Progressive Politics. Mitchell's previous positions include vice president at the Foundation for Middle East Peace, Director of the US Office of B'Tselem, and Co-Director of Jewish Voice for Peace.
You can find him on Twitter @MJPlitnick.
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