Shadi Hamid: ‘We on the left bear some responsibility for creating the conditions for these political attacks’
Well before the Israel-Gaza war broke out, a new McCarthyism was already widespread on American college campuses. During the Red Scare of the late 1940s and 50s, about 100 professors were fired for supposed communist sympathies; according to Greg Lukianoff, co-author of The Canceling of the American Mind, the number fired for their political beliefs – primarily for conservative or “anti-woke” positions on race and gender – over the past 10 years is almost double that.
It’s only going to get worse, and it is time to sound the alarm. Today, conservatives are using their political power to punish pro-Palestinian speech, including through chilling legislation that conflates support for Palestinian rights with antisemitism and terrorism.
We on the left bear some responsibility for creating the conditions for the political attacks now being waged against our “side”. Cancel culture sets dangerous precedents. Once the idea of punishing “offensive” speech gains acceptance, both on and off campus, anyone with political power can get in the game.
To return to a place of sanity in public debate, we must take the principles of free speech both seriously and literally. I hope that the Gaza war ends as soon as possible, ideally through a durable ceasefire. When that happens, campuses will probably, for better or worse, reoccupy themselves with language policing and culture wars over race, identity, and who ends up where on the hierarchy of oppression.
After being punished themselves, members of the left will be tempted to punish others. Like victims who become victimizers, those who experience cancel culture are often the ones who most fiercely desire retribution. It is a cliche because it is true: an eye for an eye leaves the whole world blind. In our anger, justified or not, too many of us prefer a world where we are all equal in our blindness, each and every one of us suffering for the sins of the other. This is what must be fought.
Brett Max Kaufman: ‘Don’t ban political speech because college administrators or donors disagree with it’
The McCarthy era taught us that when campuses engage in ideologically motivated efforts to police student and faculty speech, those efforts not only backfire but severely damage the foundation on which academic communities are built.
The first amendment and the principles of academic freedom require institutions of higher education to safeguard all protected speech – even when that speech is contentious or offensive. As the framers of the constitution intended, and as the US supreme court has reminded us again and again, it is the most controversial, most disfavored speech that makes the first amendment necessary in the first place. Whatever phrases like “from the river to the sea” mean – and whichever side of the current conflict is deploying them – they are constitutionally protected.
That does not mean that colleges and universities are helpless to protect students who are truly under threat. Neither the first amendment nor principles of academic freedom protect speech that contains a serious and imminent threat of violence, an incitement to violence, or speech that pervasively harasses someone based on their race, gender, ethnicity, religion, national origin, or other protected characteristics. Educational institutions have an obligation to confront such speech when they see it committed by, or directed at, members of their communities. But banning broad swaths of political speech because administrators, corporate donors, or other powerful people disagree with its message is a recipe for further division, and, in time, further scars and regret.
It’s worth recalling that many of the “subversive” views that were the targets of McCarthy-era censorship on campuses around the country are not even mildly controversial today. In navigating today’s challenges, university administrators must hold fast to the values of learning and free expression that have made our academic institutions flourish, and avoid deploying the easy cudgel of censorship as an ill-fated shortcut to persuasion and mutual respect.
The US Congress, Ivy League universities and other centers of power have been gripped by a ginned-up hysteria aimed at silencing, intimidating and interrogating people and institutions for not being sufficiently pro-Israel. The absurd nature of the allegations being thrown around – including the performative outrage and cynical grandstanding of Congresswoman Elise Stefanik, who recently berated the heads of several Ivy League schools for ostensibly tolerating antisemitism on their campuses – will surely generate analogies to McCarthyism and the Second Red Scare.
But there are important differences about this moment. Unlike the Second Red Scare, which was a particularly American phenomenon, the intensifying repression against Palestine advocacy isn’t limited to the US but is happening in Canada and across Europe as well. That’s because this hysteria is not a reaction to the debate on American college campuses but rather the product of a calculated and global transnational strategy backed by the Israeli government since 2015.
The Israeli government, having realized that it was failing to deal with growing dissent in global civil society over Israel’s oppression of Palestinians, opted for a securitized policy response that would “go on the offensive”. This included a strategy of working with like-minded partners to exact repressive outcomes in countries in Europe and North America that included the passage of anti-BDS laws, lawsuits aimed at NGOs, smear campaigns and the proliferation of speech codes in the guise of combating antisemitism. Israel realized that its vision of apartheid wasn’t going to win the debate so instead sought to shut the debate down entirely.
Natasha Roth-Rowland: ‘Chilling of Palestinian activism is enabled by a Republican party hostile to higher ed’
A range of so-called watchdog groups have long countered pro-Palestine activity on US college campuses with tactics including aggressive monitoring, blacklisting, and intimidation. These groups are often funded by philanthropic foundations that also support Islamophobic and rightwing groups that share broad goals of smearing Palestinian and Muslim students and professors as antisemites and terrorist sympathizers.
Since 7 October, this dynamic has reached disturbing new heights. The escalation has been compounded by the concurrent rise in antisemitic and anti-Palestinian rhetoric and violence on campuses and beyond, creating an atmosphere of fear and distrust that is fertile soil for an existing campaign of surveillance and harassment targeting Palestinians, Palestinian solidarity groups, and Jews critical of Zionism.
This fraught standoff has been long in the making. As early as the 1980s, prominent pro-Israel organizations such as the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (Aipac) were compiling “dossiers” on “anti-Israel” US college campuses and professors. The Israeli government and its supporters have, over the decades, pushed to label almost all criticism of Israel antisemitic. That project has been greatly accelerated by the flawed IHRA definition of antisemitism, which has impoverished our understanding of anti-Jewish prejudice by weighting it toward speech and action about Israel, and heightened the legal and professional risks of pro-Palestinian activism – especially on campuses.
But this chilling effect on higher education, and on free speech more broadly, is not just about Israel-Palestine and pro-Israel groups. It has also been enabled and expanded by a Republican party that is increasingly brazen in its assaults on higher ed. This, too, has been decades in the making, driven by Republicans’ assessment of college campuses as the frontline in the country’s culture wars. Their distrust has spurred outright censorship – banning certain topics in the classroom, for example – and attempts to defund certain programs and departments.
These efforts to use higher ed as a cudgel with which to impose a far-right worldview – or, rather, to excise whatever does not fit into that worldview – is a strategy long favored by authoritarians around the globe. That it should interface so seamlessly with a campaign to vilify critics of Israel – and that anti-Palestinian repression often serves as a model – should come as no surprise.
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