Politics & Palestine: 11 Statements Fact-Checked
[I've read and fact-checkled as much as I could. The […] include my editing or comments. Some material has been reduced, but not to alter the original writer's intent.]
Pro-Palestine demonstrations are antisemitism.
The pro-Israel lobby is very strong with the Canada Israel Jewish Affairs (CIJA), B’nai Brith, and the Friends of the Simon Wiesenthal Centre being the most ardent financial supporters.
Judy Haiven's newsletter had this to say about student protest encampments:
The students and their friends set up encampments to expose what Israel has done and continues to do. The students and their allies demand an end to universities’ connections to Israeli research centres, cultural exhibits, and sports exchanges, and an end to the special treatment Israeli academics receive from almost all research universities in Canada. The students are demanding their universities divest from Israeli-linked investments. For this the students are tear-gassed, pepper-sprayed, attacked by police, roughed up and arrested.
The students and their friends set up encampments which are peaceful. They denounce the murders and destruction of Gaza. Many of those at encampments across the US, and in Toronto and Montreal are Jews themselves fed up with being lied to by Jewish authorities –Jews of a generation who want to vanquish the Palestinians.
Friday and Saturday, we watched as the cops in Edmonton and Calgary utterly destroyed peaceful encampments, beat up protesters, smashed tents and equipment and sent at least one young person to hospital. For what?
We have to listen to the elites and those in authority characterise the students as antisemitic. There is zero evidence of that. At least one law professor has noted about the police in Calgary and Edmonton, ‘It looks to me like they’ve engaged in kind of a mass violation of protesters’ constitutional rights’
And the Canadian media plays right along. Blithely they go along “stenographers to power” as Amy Goodman (host of broadcast Democracy Now!) famously said — despite the fact that more than 97 Palestinian journalists have lost their lives thanks to Israeli snipers. … Why are the students willing to give up their studies, their apartments, their jobs – and be in the line of fire of the police for a cause that others call intractable and “too complicated.”
Jews are forever telling me (also a Jew) “the situation is too complicated.” They are consumed with worrying about antisemitism in Canada: I would like to meet one Jew who in the last 20 years has been deprived of a career, a job, an opportunity, a law practice, a medical practice, or being a politician in this country because of being a Jew. Yet just mention the word antisemitism and that spills over to accepting genocide in Gaza — as a way to fight antisemitism here!
That’s absolute nonsense. As US former secretary of labor, Robert Reich, who is Jewish, recently wrote, “Once we start conflating antisemitism with protests against mass brutality, such as the slaughter in Gaza, we invite blindness to injustices in which America is complicit.”
I’d say Canada is complicit as well.
The Guardian Arielle Angel Sat 11 May 2024 11.00 BST
Campus protest crackdowns claim to be about antisemitism – but they’re part of a rightwing plan
Accusations of antisemitism are the tip of the spear in a frightening illiberal project serving an autocratic agenda
Since 7 October, commentators have been ringing the alarm that a growing protest movement in solidarity with Palestine signals not just the end of a “golden age” for American Jews – as Franklin Foer recently put it in the Atlantic – but for American liberal democracy itself.
There is no doubt that many Jewish students – especially those raised to believe that their Jewish identity is indivisible from the political ideology of Zionism – feel uncomfortable, or that many of them feel ostracized by their peers. But their discomfort has justified a powerful attack on academic freedom and first amendment rights that long predates the student encampments – part of a longstanding rightwing project to curb speech and reshape the public sphere.
The months since 7 October have seen shocking attacks on freedom of expression and assembly on campus. Even before the stunning display of police brutality in recent weeks, campuses have been home to canceled speakers and events, arbitrary disciplinary hearings, and outright censorship. The University of Southern California has canceled its entire commencement ceremony rather than let its valedictorian, Asna Tabassum, deliver a message of Palestine solidarity in her speech. Universities have suspended chapters of Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) and Jewish Voice for Peace, in decisions that PEN America has said are “united by a degree of opacity, in that university leaders have not been fully forthcoming in delineating how these student groups broke campus rules, or how the decision to suspend them was reached”.
These curtailments of civil liberties, enacted in the service of “protecting Jewish students”, are not now and will not be confined to Palestine-related speech.
2. Israel has a right to defend itself
I think so and so do most authorities in the United Nations. However, Israel is a modern nuclear power with an efficient military wing and is quite capable of defending its borders against aggressors. It does not need the billions in foreign aid dollars that it currently receives from the US. Also, "defending itself" does not and should not entail crimes against humanity directed at civilian populations. You can't pick and choose which UN codes of conduct you want to accept. And pointing to UN states that do, such as Russia and North Korea, does not exempt Israel that positions itself as an outpost of democracy in the mideast.
3. Don't hold Israel to a higher standard than other nations
OK, but these are countries that were recently held to account for their actions, and had their UN membership in danger of being revoked.
1969 South Africa for apartheid and occupation of Namibia. South Africa was sanctioned by having its representatives refused recognition and thereby eliminating it from participation in the General Assembly. Malaysia is currently seeking similar action against Israel.
Russia for its invasion of Ukraine
Serbia for genocidal actions in Albania and crimes against humanity, and Slobodan Milošević was arrested and imprisoned after trial at The Hague.
And, there is this transcript from Mehti of the media company Zeto: I left in the highlighted text so that you can read the source material.
Israel is a rogue nation. It should be removed from the United Nations
Tue 15 Oct 2024 15.53 BST Mehdi Hasan Zeto
Last modified on Wed 16 Oct 2024 14.28 BST
Over the past year, Israel has launched attacks on multiple countries and occupied territories: the Gaza Strip, the West Bank, Lebanon, Syria, Yemen and Iran.
Yet countries and territories aside, Israel has also targeted one specific organization with a series of unprecedented rhetorical and violent attacks. Yes, the United Nations. We have all witnessed Israel, effectively, declare war on the UN.
Consider the record of recent weeks and months:
Israel’s prime minister, while standing on stage at the UN general assembly, denounced the body as “contemptible”, a “house of darkness” and a “swamp of antisemitic bile”.
Israel’s outgoing ambassador to the UN shredded a copy of the UN charter with a miniature paper shredder while also standing at the podium of the general assembly, and later said the UN headquarters in New York “should be closed and wiped off the face of the Earth”.
Israel’s foreign minister falsely accused the UN secretary general of not having condemned Iran’s attacks on Israel, declared him “persona non grata in Israel” and announced that he had “banned him from entering the country”.
The Israeli government actively obstructed a UN-mandated commission of inquiry trying to collect evidence on the 7 October attacks.
Israel’s parliament is in the process of designating a longstanding UN agency, Unrwa, as a “terrorist organization”.
The Israeli military has bombed UN schools, warehouses and refugee camps in Gaza for 12 consecutive months, and killed a record 228 UN employees in the process. “By far the highest number of our personnel killed in a single conflict or natural disaster since the creation of the United Nations,” to quote the UN secretary general.
The Israeli military is now also attacking UN peacekeepers in southern Lebanon. According to the UN, “five UN ‘Blue Helmets’ serving with UNIFIL in Lebanon have been injured as Israeli forces inflicted damage on UN positions close to the ‘Blue Line’.”
How is any of this OK? Acceptable? Legal?
Perhaps the biggest question of all: how is Israel still allowed to remain a member of the UN? Why has it not yet been expelled from an organization that it is relentlessly and shamelessly attacking and undermining? Sure, there are other human rights abusers that remain card-carrying members of the UN – Syria, Russia and North Korea, to name but a few – but none of them have killed UN employees en masse; none of them have sent tanks to invade a UN base; none of them have “refused to comply with more than two dozen UNSC resolutions”. It has been more than 60 years since any country in the world dared make the UN secretary general himself “persona non grata”.
4. ICC has no jurisdiction over Israel
Neither Israel nor the United States have given formal recognition to the International Criminal Court (ICC), making them two among few dissenters from a global consensus on the need for such a body. Here's a helpful distinction between two judicial bodies.
Court of Justice (ICJ) and the International Criminal Court (ICC) are often confused with each other, and while both courts sit in The Hague, Netherlands, that is about where the similarities end.
Adjudicating international disputes
The ICJ has been around since 1945 and its primary duty is to resolve disputes between States. ICJ proceedings can only be brought where both States have consented to the ICJ’s jurisdiction. This consent can happen in a few different ways. One in the Genocide Convention. There are 153 State parties to the Genocide Convention, meaning that many States have the option of bringing a case against another State under the compromissory clause. Russia, Myanmar, and Israel are all parties to the Genocide Convention.
The ICC is a much more recent institution that has only been operating for about 20 years. Rather like a domestic criminal court, it prosecutes individual people for committing crimes. Once States have ratified the Rome Statute, which sets out the list of crimes that the ICC can prosecute, they have almost no other role.
Usually, the Prosecutor will investigate a situation in which crimes have likely been committed such as in Darfur, Ukraine, Palestine, or Venezuela to name a few presently on the books. If the Prosecutor’s team can gather enough evidence of crimes, link those crimes to individuals, and (this is the hardest part) have those people arrested, those individuals can be tried and convicted of a crime, and then imprisoned.
One of these crimes is genocide. The catch is that the Prosecutor is only permitted to open investigations into situations arising in countries that have ratified the Rome Statute. While the Rome Statute has 123 State parties, there are notable absentees including Russia, Israel, Myanmar and even the United States.
So, what we have is two Courts that are equipped to address the matter of genocide, but in two different ways. The ICJ can consider whether a State has committed genocide under the Genocide Convention. Under that Convention, genocide is defined as any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group:
Killing members of the group;
Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.
The most difficult aspect of this definition is intent. It must be established that the respondent State intended to destroy the group. The ICJ has applied quite a strict test, it’s not simply a matter of killing enormous numbers of people. There must be an intent to destroy the group entirely in a particular place. And, if a case is brought under the Genocide Convention, the ICJ cannot consider other questions like the legality of an invasion or whether war crimes and crimes against humanity have been committed.
The ICC, on the other hand, prosecutes genocide as a crime committed by individuals, and it also has jurisdiction over other crimes that the ICJ cannot consider, such as war crimes and crimes against humanity.
While the definition of genocide is the same at both the ICC and ICJ, the difference is that at the ICC an atrocity does not need to meet the threshold of ‘genocide’ to be prosecuted.
The ICC can therefore investigate a much wider array of crimes than the ICJ. However, it can only do so in situations arising in States that are party to the Rome Statute.
The ICJ has jurisdiction over many more States, but it can only address the very limited question of whether a particular State has committed genocide.
So remember, the ICJ resolves disputes between States, while the ICC prosecutes individuals for crimes
International Court of Justice vs Israel
Selma Dabbagh for London Review of Books
Finally, something shifts. The ruling by the International Court of Justice is said by public international lawyers to be a game changer.* For starters, the vocabulary has been reset. Out with the references to ‘self-defence’, bandied around as an excuse for the inexcusable; in with the cogently argued case that the US and UK’s greatest ally in the Middle East is committing genocide.
The judges first dismissed Israel’s claims that the South African legal team lacked the jurisdiction or standing to bring the case, and then by a vast majority (in each instance, either fifteen to two or sixteen to one) ordered a series of six provisional measures.
The state of Israel is now required, according to the ICJ, to take all measures within its power to prevent genocide. The judges threw out the Israeli legal team’s claims that the Palestinian people do not constitute a ‘protected group’, and that there is no specific intent to destroy the Palestinians ‘in whole or in part’. As evidence of that intent, the judges quoted the statements of Israeli politicians: ‘we are fighting human animals ... we will eliminate everything’; ‘we will fight until we’ll break their backbone’; ‘they will not receive a drop of water’.
The provisional measures call for Israel to stop killing Palestinians in Gaza and to ‘submit a report to the court on all measures taken to give effect to this order within one month’. One fairly rare requirement was for the evidence of genocide to not be destroyed. The panel of judges stopped short of calling for an immediate ceasefire, to the disappointment of many Palestinians, but the measures are arguably impossible to achieve without one.
[No action has been taken by Israel in obedience to ICJ orders and now we have this from the International Criminal Court]
This is huge: Arrest warrant issued for Netanyahu.
Last week, the International Criminal Court (ICC) issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant, on allegations that they committed war crimes and crimes against humanity.
This is huge. In this Wire, we’ll break down each allegation in the ICC’s historic decision, why this is a landmark moment, and why it matters for our movements.
Netanyahu and Gallant stand accused of the war crime of starvation as a method of warfare, and the crimes against humanity of murder, persecution, and other inhumane acts.
The ICC also “found reasonable grounds to believe” the two Israeli officials “bear criminal responsibility as civilian superiors for the war crime of intentionally directing an attack against the civilian population.”
Unsurprisingly, Netanyahu has responded to the warrant by accusing the ICC of antisemitism. And, like clockwork, Biden sprang to his defense, calling the warrants “outrageous.”
5. Pro-Gaza is pro-terrorism
The military organizations known as Hamas, Houthi and Hezbollah have been designated "terrorist entities" by the Canadian government. Currently they operate with support from Iran, and all have the destruction of the state of Israel as a central statement of purpose. Hamas won a majority and became the de facto government of Gaza and a Palestine nation, but there are many Palestinians who do not support their violent ideology. It would be a gross and indefensible mistake to label all Palestinian males as "terrorists" and yet this is a designation that the Israeli Defense Force operates with and uses to justify killings by their snipers and general military personnel.
Closely associated with this notion is one that criticizes Moslem-dominated nations for their treatment of women. It seems that if one (Bill Maher most promiently) can point out the "apartheid of sexuality" forced upon Muslim women, then there need be no discussion of the apartheid that Israel imposes on Palestinians. Yes, women are treated badly in many Arab nations and I have seen them and spoken to some and read many. I find it repugnant that in some countries 50% of my human species should be treated as a possession by the other 50%. And we should fix that. But not by killing them all.
Now, to get back to the issue of Palestine and Israel.
from Wikipedia:
In February 2012, Hamas' Khaled Meshal and Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas signed the Hamas–Fatah Doha agreement. A unity government was sworn on 2 June 2014. The government was supposed to exercise its functions in Gaza and the West Bank, and prepare for national elections, though that did not happen, with disagreements between the two parties. With the failure of the national unity government, the Palestinian National Authority continued to exercise power only in the West Bank, while Hamas remained in power in the Gaza Strip.
Canada recognizes the Palestine National Authority as the political voice of Palestinians.
6. The land claimed by Palestinians was useless desert before Israeli settlements made it productive.
THE CONVERSATION Canada Published: November 16, 2023
How colonialist depictions of Palestinians feed western ideas of eastern ‘barbarism’
Author: Elizabeth Vibert Professor of Colonial History, University of Victoria
The dismissal of Palestinians as “barbaric” or somehow less human is rooted in a long history of colonizing narratives, including views of Indigenous lands and peoples as “uncivilized.” [North American colonizers viewed indigenous wilderness agriculture as "subsistence" and Indigenous linguistic works as "pre-literate"]
In his classic 1978 book Orientalism, Palestinian-American literary scholar Edward Said explained how British colonizers wielded the “power to narrate” and showed how … the relationship was cemented in the West as “superior” versus “inferior,” “civilized” versus “uncivilized,” “rational” versus “depraved” in all arenas of life: politics, culture, religion.
The “four stages” theories … [would] classify human societies according to imagined “stages of civilization”, where hunting-gathering was placed at the bottom (“savage”) stage, followed by pastoralism (shepherding etc., often labeled “barbarism”), agriculture (emerging “civilization”), and at the apex, European commercial society.
People inhabiting lands sought for colonization were often described as “wasting” land, having “backward” food production practices and being in need of “civilization” — all according to western definitions.
Beginning in the late 19th century, Zionists who initiated the nationalist project for Israel, in a land both peoples considered their ancestral home, gave little thought to the Palestinians. Zionists were deeply informed by scornful views of small-scale farming and sheep-herding societies. And British administrators during the Mandate period (1920-1948) took a similarly dim view of much Arab agriculture.
Palestinians were resisting colonial designs on their lands even before the British issued the infamous Balfour Declaration of 1917 — a document that in a short paragraph promised Jewish people a “national home” in Palestine, so long as they did nothing to “prejudice the civil and religious rights of the existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine.”
Zionist leaders’ claims about “a land without a people for a people without a land”, then, fit within a larger narrative that erased Palestinians and dismissed traditional Palestinian stewardship of the land.
The Zionist project to “make the desert bloom” was based, in part, on damaging misunderstandings of Arab dryland wheat and baʿlī farming systems. Baʿlī planting, tillage and plant protection methods, as demonstrated by Palestinian geographer Omar Tesdell, facilitate growing crops without irrigation. These agro-ecological practices are at once resilient and dynamic, and have much to teach farmers in increasingly drought-prone regions.
As we have seen throughout history, dehumanization can have tragic and devastating impacts on people and land. Nearly half a century ago Edward Said asked a poignant question: Can we continue to divide humans into stark categories of “us” versus “them” and survive the consequences humanely?
7. Koran tells Muslims to eradicate Israel
Ask different "scholars" and you get different answers. Even if I think those holy books are fairy tales, that won't stop true believers who think they are the divinely-authored word of god from carrying out their particular interpretation of whatever instructions they think they've been given.
There are no lines from the Quran (Koran, Q'ran etc.) that direct the followers of Mohammed to kill Jews and destroy Israel. Some radical, alt-right (crazy) ISIS militiamen radicalized by imans with their own political agenda (are there any super-Christians like that?) might believe they should exterminate Jews and Israel but Moslem doctrine does not support it. Israel does have a right to defend itself against organizations that want to destroy it no matter what authority those groups (falsely) believe tells them to do so.
Islamic tradition regards Jews as a legitimate community of believers in God (called "people of the Book") legally entitled to sufferance. The standard Quranic reference to Jews is the verse 2:61–62.
"As for those who have not fought against you for your religion, nor expelled you from your homes, God does not prohibit you from dealing with them kindly and equitably. God loves the equitable." (Quran 60:8)
So just the opposite. If they haven't tried to hurt you, God loves that you are kind to them. And specifically referring to Jews, the Quran says:
Surely those who believe, and those who are Jews, and the Christians, and the Sabians, whoever believes in Allah and the Last day and does good, they shall have their reward from their Lord, and there is no fear for them, nor shall they grieve. (Quran 2:62)
8. God promised this land to Jews
The Bible in both its old and new testaments has some beautiful writing, with Paul's 11th letter to the Corinthians, the sermon on the mount by Jesus and many of the psalms of David being first-to-mind examples. And it is a fairy tale. Even the parts that have come down to us from original sources were written in support of that fairy tale. I'm sorry that you need to grow up and face the fact that there's no Big Daddy who will look after you and the planet. This is it; you did it; live with it. And live well. Do not use fairy tales as justification for taking stuff like other peoples' land or lives.
There were some Jewish diasporas: Babalonian servitude, Egyptian bondage (although archaeology doesn't support this latter). According to the Jewish fairy tale book, Joshua "fought the battle of Jericho" and kicked the livin' bejesus outta them and annihilated a lot of people such as Caananites, Amelekites and others in order to take back the land that "the Lord, their God had given unto them" or something like that.
Today, Benjamin Netanyahu under sentence of arrest and detention by the International Criminal Court still advises his troops to treat Palestinians (Hamas fighters or civilians) in the words of Samuel to King Saul:
"Now go, attack the Amalekites and totally destroy all that belongs to them. Do not spare them; put to death men and women, children and infants, cattle and sheep, camels and donkeys.’”
Rabbi Jill Jacobs—the head of T’ruah, a rabbinical human rights organziation—said that rabbis generally agree that Amalek no longer exists, and that references to it do not provide a morally acceptable justification for attacking anyone. “The overwhelming history of Jewish interpretation is to interpret it metaphorically,” Jacobs said, explaining that one common approach is to see it as a call to stamp out evil inclinations within ourselves.
9. Pro-Palestine movement is heavily funded by anti-Jewish lobby
I couldn't find any particular group identified as an "anti-Jewish lobby". There are weird online groups that promote hatred as their badge of membership, but Q-anon and Ku Klux Klan and Proud Boys don't have a history that I could find of raising money for campus student protestors. I did find this:
NY TIMES The Backlash to Anti-Israel Protests Threatens Free Speech
Dec. 4, 2023 By Michelle Goldberg Opinion Columnist
When it comes to free speech, “Israelism” should be an easy case. Others are trickier. As I write this, the internet is ablaze with outrage over a teach-in planned for this week by Columbia Social Workers 4 Palestine about the “counteroffensive on Oct. 7 and the centrality of revolutionary violence to anti-imperialism.” This rhetoric, with its grotesque mixture of euphemism and dogma, was disgusting, but it was still a mistake for the school to cancel the event on Monday; better allow the organizers to disgrace themselves in public than pose as silenced heroes. Given the growing pressure on school leaders from Israel’s partisans, administrators are going to feel a growing temptation to err on the side of censorship. If we don’t want escalating bigotry to enable escalating repression, we need to err on the side of speech.
“Obviously the rise of antisemitism is very real,” said Axelman. But at the same time, “there has been this phenomenon of people, especially on the pro-Israel right, using the word ‘antisemitism’ very nonchalantly and throwing it around at anybody who is willing to criticize Israel, be they Palestinian, Jewish or otherwise. We’ve seen that phenomenon accelerate quite dramatically since Oct. 7.”
And that "better ... to disgrace themselves in public than pose as silenced heroes" is significant. It's why there's a Speakers Corner in London where anyone can mount a soapbox and talk. It's why 30 years ago Jonathan Rauch wrote Kindly Inquisitors and concluded:
At the beginning of this essay I mentioned two striking cases, one in France and the other in Michigan. As a codicil, there is something else I want to say about them.
I mentioned that the French passed laws banning Holocaust “revisionism,” which questions and often denies that Hitler’s genocide ever happened.
It so happens that I am a Jew. The idea of erasing the memory of 6 million dead horrifies me. The memory is all that stands in the way of Hitler’s attaining his dream, which was not only to kill the Jews but to kill the very idea of them, to extinguish all traces, so that history would close up seamlessly around the gouge left by their extraction. It would be as though they had never existed.
Nonetheless—how hard this is to say—if some people want to erase the memory, they should go ahead and try. Stopping them from trying won’t make anything any better. The only way is to let them have at it—while insisting that the only way they can succeed is through an exhaustive public process of checking, a process which I believe will come as close as is humanly possible to sorting truth from falsehood.
How can a Jew say that? In the Museum of the Diaspora in Tel Aviv, written in large letters on the wall, I saw the answer: “A rabbi whose community does not disagree with him is not really a rabbi, and a rabbi who fears his community is not really a man.” The quotation is from Rabbi Israel Salanter, who died six years before Hitler was born; he flourished in Lithuania and Russia, so almost certainly some of his descendants died in the Nazis’ hell fires. I don’t know what he would say about Holocaust “revisionism” if he were alive today, but I do know that those words of his are displayed in the Museum of the Diaspora because the critical spirit they embody is the only spirit that can save the Jews, and the rest of us, from political meddling with history.
At the beginning I also mentioned a case at the University of Michigan in which a student was disciplined for saying that he considered homosexuality a disease treatable with therapy.
Because of that wrongheaded idea, many gay people grow up hating themselves or living in fear. I know, because I am one of them. The no-offense humanitarians say of such opinions that they cause “real harm to real people.” Yes. I have to agree.
Nonetheless, I am preaching that this student ought to be allowed to have his say, and that nothing at all should be done to stop him. If he wants to be rude about it, if he wants to post a sign on his door saying that “fags are sick,” he should not be stopped. In fact, I am preaching that if he believes that gay people are curably ill, he should say so and try to prove his point.
How can I say that?
First, because punishing him won’t work. No hypothesis has been laid to rest by suppressing it. The only way to kill a bad idea is by exposing it and supplanting it with better ones.
Second, because homosexuals, like all minorities, stand to lose far more than they win from measures regulating knowledge or debate. Today, true, the regulators may take gay people’s side. But the wheel will turn, and the majority will reassert itself, and, when the inquisitorial machinery is turned against them, homosexuals will rue the day they helped set it up.
Third, because the liberal system is working. It has been bringing forth the truth about human sexuality from the murk of superstition and taboo. If homosexual political activists short-circuit the process by using intimidation and inquisition, the general public will soon see that universities are enforcing knowledge rather than searching for it. The researchers’ credibility—science’s credibility—will be shot. Prejudice then really will have the field to itself.
Fourth, because inquisitions are wrong, and because the advancement of human knowledge through the open-ended public search for error is much more important than my feelings. Though I have been told that I am “sick,” though my feelings have suffered, I live a far fuller and happier life than I could in a society where powerful people’s feelings were protected by an inquisition.
To the homosexuals—and blacks and feminists and Christians and so on—who want to silence the wrongheaded, I want to say: Yes, misinformation about homosexuality’s being a “disease,” or blacks’ being inferior or whatever, does hurt people. But all misinformation hurts people. It used to be believed that human sacrifices helped the crops, that witches hexed villages and had to be destroyed, that bleeding the body was a good way to treat a fever. What hurts us is not wrong-thinking people but propaganda and ignorance; and unfettered criticism—liberal science—is the cure, not the disease
10. Jewish students feel/are unsafe on campuses with protest encampments
My first reaction to this sort of statement is an unqualified "Grow up". I have read of no instances where students were harmed by protesters, and having their feelings hurt does not qualify. This seems to lie within the same parameters as calls for trigger warnings by academics regarding any material that some student may find upsettig. Too bad. Stay in pre-school if that's how sensitive you are. History is full of nasty stuff. Books and other media that present literary and critical views on history will contain examples of nasty stuff. The feelings that arise from studying that material should arise. Deal with it as a grownup person. Don't ban the material or ask/demand that your university "disinvite" a speaker whose views you don't want to hear. Stay away from the presentation. Make a sign and march up and down outside the venue hosting the speaker. Attend the presentation and ask questions if given the opportunity. Let the speaker - even the one who has hateful, unsupported things to say - stand up in front of whatever crowd they can attract and publicly disgrace themselves. The alternative will be the underground uncriticized promulgation of those views. Here's another perspective exerpted from an essay.
London Review of Books Vol. 46 No. 10 · 23 May 2024
If We Say Yes
— from an article by Amia Srinivasan on open letters and campus protests
On 15 April students at Columbia University and Barnard College set up a Gaza solidarity encampment on a university lawn, just hours before Columbia’s president, Minouche Shafik, was hauled in front of Congress to answer questions about the way her administration was dealing with the ‘rising antisemitism on campus’. The next day, Shafik authorised the NYPD’s Strategic Response Group to enter Columbia’s campus. They did so, in full riot gear, and arrested more than a hundred student protesters.
The police reported that the students they arrested ‘were peaceful, offered no resistance whatsoever’. Visiting the Columbia campus the following week, the speaker of the House of Representatives, Mike Johnson, suggested the National Guard be brought in to deal with the students, whom he called ‘lawless agitators and radicals’. With their encampment dismantled, the students built another on a different lawn, and occupied a university building; mass arrests again followed. One Columbia professor commented: ‘When I saw that police “tank” coming up the street, something in my heart broke. I stood and sobbed. The trustees had broken their compact with the university and I do not know it will come back.’ On 22 April, more than a hundred Columbia faculty members held a rally to protest against the arrests and suspensions of their students. The day before, I had signed an open letter – along with three thousand other academics from around the world – that pledges us to uphold ‘an academic and cultural boycott of Columbia University’.
While Columbia was not the first university to call the cops on its students during the current wave of protests, its heavy-handed intervention galvanised students across the US and abroad, and set the template for their protests: the solidarity encampment. More than two thousand students in the US have been arrested, from Yale and NYU to the University of Northern Carolina, Emory (Georgia), Vanderbilt (Tennessee) and Pomona (California).
At SUNY Purchase, a public liberal arts college in upstate New York, students gathered, without tents, on campus to protest; when the college’s ‘quiet hours’ began at 10 p.m., the students sat down and fell silent. The cops came in anyway and arrested seventy people, including faculty observers and students who had tried to flee the protest after the police ordered them to disperse.
At Dartmouth College in New Hampshire, police body-slammed a Jewish labour historian in her mid-sixties. At Emory an economics professor was wrestled to the ground by the police for objecting to their manhandling of a student; she was charged with battery for ‘resisting’ arrest.
At the Universities of Ohio and Indiana snipers were stationed on rooftops. At UCLA, pro-Israel counter-protesters attacked the Gaza encampment for hours with sticks, traffic cones, bear spray and fireworks as police and campus security stood by; the following night, riot police attacked the encampment with rubber bullets and bean bag rounds.
Such actions are not confined to the US. Early in May, at the University of Amsterdam, masked far-right activists attacked the Gaza solidarity encampment with flares just a few hours after it was set up, while the police looked on. That night, riot police dismantled the camp with bulldozers, knocking one protester unconscious and injuring several others.
11. Palestinians/Israelis aren't a real nationality
from Myth #5: (Max Fishermax@vox.com)
"You hear variations of this argument from partisans to the conflict who argue that the other side has an insufficient claim to the land because their nationality is made up.
"The pro-Palestinian argument is that Israelis are European Jews who made up the idea of an Israeli identity in order to steal land, but who actually belong in Europe. The pro-Israeli argument is that Palestinians are just Arabs who made up the idea of a Palestinian identity to claim land they weren't fully using and should go to Jordan and Egypt.
"There is a real degree of racism in both of these arguments, and both fundamentally ignore the actual experiences of Israelis and Palestinians. Israelis are in Israel, and not in Europe because Europe spent centuries violently rejecting them as not European. They had little choice but to adopt a distinct national identity, which they began doing in the 1800s. This movement became Zionism.
"Likewise, Palestinians began developing a distinct national identity in the early 1800s, also as a reaction to oppression, in their case the centuries of Ottoman domination. As with Israelis, that sense of a common Palestinian national identity grew into the desire, as is their right, for a state of their own. While it's true that Palestinians are ethnically Arab, as are many other Middle Easterners, this is not the same as a nationality.
"Both sides argue that they have claims to the land going back centuries. And they both have a plausible case. But the argument over whose family tree goes back further obscures this conversation as much more about modern national identities than about ancient religious roots. This also misses a fundamental but uncomfortable truth that neither side is eager to admit.
"Here is that truth: All national identities are, to some extent, artificial. And strong national identities as we know them today are largely a modern phenomenon. The American [Canadian] national identities obviously did not exist 300 years ago. Both are relatively modern inventions, stitched together from prior identities and groupings and land claims. And yet we all agree that the American identity is real and valid and that the [Canadian identity is real and valid].
"Similarly, while Israelis and Palestinians do have ancient heritages, there is also some truth to the idea that these identities are in many ways modern inventions. But so are many other national identities. And here's the thing: the world is organized on an idea called national self-determination, which says people are allowed to determine their own national identity and then organize politically around it. Israelis and Palestinians clearly each see themselves as holding a strong national identity, so the world should respect that."
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So, that wasn't so bad, was it? I, we, or just you, could probably compile a list of articles on the horrors and misinformation about the war in Sudan or about Putin's attempt to annex Ukraine. Go for it. I'd read it.