https://truthout.org/articles/harvard-presidents-ouster-makes-visible-the-rising-power-of-the-far-right/
Harvard President’s Ouster Makes Visible the Rising Power of the Far Right
The same forces targeting Palestine solidarity work are trying to end all campus discussions of anticolonial politics.
A truck calling the president of Harvard a "national disgrace" drives around Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on December 12, 2023. JOSEPH PREZIOSO / AFP via Getty Images
The recent resignation of Harvard’s first African American president, Claudine Gay, which was brought on by an orchestrated campaign mobilized by the far right, made visible the threat of organized fascism on university campuses. Claiming victory, the far right propagandist
Christopher Rufo posted on social media: “SCAPLED: Harvard President
Claudine Gay Resigns” (and quickly clarified that he meant to write
“SCALPED”).
Antisemitism across the U.S., including at universities, is a
critical concern. But attempts to identify and counter actual
antisemitism are now being muddied by a disingenuous Zionist campaign to
suppress all who express solidarity with Palestine by falsely labelling
any criticism of the settler-colonial state of Israel and its policies
as antisemitism. The organizing logic of this far right project is to
surveil, silence and discipline those on university campuses across the
U.S. who are speaking up against Zionist settler colonialism and
witnessing the violence carried out by Israel. This is done by
threatening students and faculty and by targeting their current or
prospective employment. Students and faculty who express solidarity with
Palestinians have been consistently doxxed and harassed, turned into
objects of far right and Zionist hate campaigns.
On October 7, 2023, fighters from Gaza took control of Beit Hanoun crossing and breached the wall
Israel had erected alongside the Gaza Strip to keep its 2.3 million
residents under permanent imprisonment. Israel responded by bombarding
Gaza, and protests emerged across the globe in solidarity with
Palestine. Across university campuses,
student protests sought to draw attention to the apartheid conditions
imposed by Israel’s colonial occupation, outlined the role of
colonization as the foundational driver of violence, and called for a
ceasefire. In a statement authored by the Harvard University Palestine
Solidarity Committee and signed by 33 other student organizations,
Israeli settler colonialism has been described as the root cause of the
violence. This analysis is aligned with the analysis of the violence
offered by Amnesty International:
“The root causes of these repeated cycles of violence must be addressed
as a matter of urgency. This requires upholding international law and
ending Israel’s 16-year-long illegal blockade on Gaza, and all other
aspects of Israel’s system of apartheid imposed on all Palestinians.”
An organized campaign by Zionists, working alongside far right
propagandists, has targeted protests that stood in solidarity with
Palestine and critiqued Israeli settler colonialism, manufacturing a campus crisis. At the City University of New York (CUNY), the chancellor deployed additional security
on campus in spaces where Arab, Muslim and Jewish students gather, and
several events expressing solidarity with Palestine were cancelled. The
chancellor’s letter to the campus community noted, “University property
and platforms, including CUNY computers and email addresses, cannot be
used to promote political activities or agendas.”
Frank Wu, the president of Queens College at CUNY flagged a social media post by the school’s Muslim Student Association to the New York City Police Department. At Columbia, the student chapter of Jewish Voice for Peace and local Students for Justice in Palestine group were both suspended.
Related Story:
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- by Daniel Falcone
- Truthout
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It is critical to note here that a range of students, organizations
and activists speaking in solidarity with Palestine have issued statements challenging the disinformation crafted around them.
For instance, they have debunked the lies that have circulated falsely
alleging that Palestine protest groups have called for genocide of Jews.
Devoid of facts, however, the disinformation campaign waged by Zionists
has continued to amplify affect to create a moral panic, mobilizing the
organizing forces of Zionists alongside the repressive tactics of the
far right to target academic freedom, police organizing and crush
dissent.
Responding to the protests, the hedge fund billionaire Bill Ackman wrote a post on X calling on Harvard to release the names of the student members of the organizations that had signed onto the statement, building a campaign of fear by threatening their career prospects.
Zionist donors are driving efforts to target students and faculty who
express support for Palestine, exerting pressure on universities by
pulling funding or threating to pull their funding for allowing
pro-Palestine protests. Consider the role of the Wexner Foundation in pulling funding from Harvard. The foundation produced the “Wexner Analysis: Israeli Communication Priorities 2003” as a strategic blueprint for pro-Israel activists seeking to covertly influence U.S. public opinion around Israel, working in conjunction with the public relations firm the Luntz Research Companies and The Israel Project.
The Zionist billionaire donor Seth Klarman, owner of the investment
company The Bauman Group, with a building on Harvard’s campus named
after him, wrote an open letter
with Mitt Romney criticizing the Harvard leadership. The letter noted:
“The expressions of hate and vitriol against Jews have continued and
strengthened over the last week on Harvard’s campuses. The threatening,
violent protests by pro-Palestinian groups on Harvard campuses become
more heinous with each passing day.”
Klarman runs the Klarman Family Foundation, and is the co-founder and chair of the right-wing Israeli newspaper, The Times of Israel. The Klarman Foundation donates to a range of pro-Israel and Zionist advocacy organizations
including The Israel Project, The David Project, Anti-Defamation
League, Friends of the Israel Defense Forces, the Jewish National Fund,
the Simon Wiesenthal Center, Stand With Us, the United Israel Appeal and
the Zionist Organization of America. He was one of the largest donors to the 2020 Biden campaign.
For the far right, a crisis is an opportunity. Over the last three
years, the GOP has been organizing a repressive campaign across
university campuses targeting the teaching of critical race theory,
starting with Donald Trump’s memo ordering the Office of Management and
Budget to stop funding training for federal employees. According to CRT
Forward (an initiative launched by the UCLA School of Law Critical Race
Studies Program), since September 2020, across 44 states in the United States,
far right extremist politicians have been running campaigns seeking to
censor the teaching of critical race theory, having introduced 783 “anti-Critical Race Theory bills, resolutions, executive orders, opinion letters, statements, and other measures.”
Far right propagandists are trying to broaden the current repression
of Palestine solidarity activists to escalate the repression of all
scholars and activists who discuss postcolonial and anti-colonial
politics, arguing that calls for Palestinian sovereignty on Western
university campuses emerge from the pedagogy of postcolonial and
decolonization studies. Here’s Christopher Rufo, tweeting on October 14:
Conservatives need to create a strong association between Hamas, BLM,
DSA, and academic “decolonization” in the public mind. Connect the
dots, then attack, delegitimize, and discredit. Make the center-left
disavow them. Make them political untouchables.
The narrative is reiterated by Bari Weiss. In a speech to the Federalist Society titled “The last line of defense,” Weiss pins the crisis of protests demonstrating solidarity with Palestine to decolonization. She states:
In other words, everyone can now see how very deep these ideas run,
and we see clearly that there are not just metaphors. Decolonization
isn’t just a clever turn of phrase, or a new way to read novels. It is
the sincerely held political view that serves as a predicate to
violence.
Claudine Gay’s resignation comes as a result of an orchestrated
racist campaign that started with a hearing before the House Committee
on Education and the Workforce on December 5, 2023, when the presidents
of Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania and the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology were pressed on the policies of the universities
in addressing antisemitism on their campuses. This had earlier led to
the resignation of the University of Pennsylvania President Liz Magill. The hearing, one of the most watched hearings
of all time, sends out a warning to other higher education institutions
about the consequences for not repressing campus support for Palestine.
The architecture of the hearing was based on the false premise that
since October 7, there have been widespread calls for Jewish genocide
across U.S. university campuses. There is no empirical evidence to back
this up, and the politicians participating in the December 5 hearing
couldn’t provide evidence to substantiate the claim.
Critical to the manufactured frenzy around the hearing was the questioning and subsequent social media posts produced by the far right MAGA politician, Elise Stefanik, who has platformed the extremist antisemitic Great Replacement theory (the same ideology that resulted in the Buffalo mass shooting), peddled in antisemitic narratives, circulated QAnon conspiracy theories and actively disseminated the Trump lie about a stolen election.
The structure of Stefanik’s questioning sets up a discursive trap,
repeating “Does the call for the genocide of Jews on your campus
constitute harassment, yes or no?”
Implicitly referring to Palestinian solidarity protests, and
mislabelling slogans voiced in the protests — “From the river to the
sea, Palestine will be free,” and “Intifada” (some version of it) — as
calls to genocide, the five-hour questioning was built to censor campus
speech in solidarity with Palestine. The communicative act of
mislabelling Palestinian slogans for freedom as antisemitic, terrorist,
and as calls to genocide forms the racist discursive infrastructure of
white settler colonialism that works actively to erase the voices of the
colonized claiming sovereignty while carrying out genocidal violence.
At the core of the questioning was the demonization of Palestinians and
solidarity with the Palestinian struggle.
For large cross-sections of Palestinian and Global South voices, the
call “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” expresses the
human right to justice and liberty, challenging the apartheid condition
and Israeli occupation of Palestine. Similarly, the reference to
Intifada is a call for resistance, mobilized to challenge a colonial
occupation and protected by international law.
Once the campaign saw its first trophy with the resignation of the
University of Pennsylvania President Liz Magill, a victorious Stefanik
posted on social media: “One down. Two to go.”
Stefanik claimed
that this is the first of more congressional hearings on “all facets of
their institutions’ negligent perpetration of antisemitism including
administrative, faculty, and overall leadership and governance.” In a
piece published in the right-wing British tabloid The Daily Mail, she states, “We must DEFUND the rot in America’s higher education.”
Claiming credit for the resignation of President Gay,
Stefanik tweeted: “TWO DOWN,” accompanied by three red siren emojis.
She further tweeted “I will always deliver results…” By falsely framing
pro-Palestinian protests as antisemitic, by falsely identifying the
cause of antisemitism as diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programs,
and by stoking manufactured frenzy around DEI diversity, equity and
inclusion programs, Stefanik seized the opportunity to consolidate her
position within the Republican Party.
The manufactured crisis over false rumors about “calls to Jewish
genocide” is synergized with the broader far right campaign attacking
the teaching of critical race theory on university campuses, turning to
DEI programs.
Rufo claimed that, “Powerful forces — including Elon Musk, Bill
Ackman, and many others behind the scenes — are boosting our story about
the Claudine Gay plagiarism scandal. They do not want to let this one
go. They realize that DEI is death to merit, accomplishment, and the
American spirit.” Weiss chimes in, arguing that, “Lots of organizations
claim to be defending young Jews on campus. Simple litmus test: do they
oppose DEI? If not, do not take them seriously.”
Yet what continues to be ignored is the actual threats against
antisemitism across the U.S. — which arise not from support for
Palestine but from white supremacy. In 2014, the white supremacist Frazier Glenn Miller Jr. shot and killed three people outside a Jewish community center and retirement home in suburban Kansas City. In 2019, the white supremacist John Earnest
opened fire, attempting a mass killing of Jews attending services
inside a synagogue in Poway, California, killing one person and injuring
several. The white nationalist Robert Bowers
shot and killed 11 worshippers at the Tree of Life synagogue in 2018,
the deadliest antisemitic attack in U.S. history. Each of these attacks
was driven by white supremacy, with Bowers specifically drawing on Great Replacement theory,
blaming Jews in the U.S. for catalyzing “an invasion of nonwhite
immigrants who would slaughter the white race.” Note the mainstreaming
of the Great Replacement theory, an extremist ideology that has resulted
in a growing wave of white extremist terrorism in the U.S. and abroad, including in Norway and Christchurch.
The study and discussion of anti-colonial theory at universities
exists in continuity with anti-colonial struggles in communities and on
the streets. In spite of the far right extremism seeking to terrorize
universities, the actual work of decolonization will continue. As long
as conditions of oppression, exploitation, apartheid and occupation
continue, the voices of the global majority will stand in resistance.
- ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
-
- Mohan J. Dutta is dean’s chair professor of communication at Massey
University of New Zealand. He is the director of the Center for
Culture-Centered Approach to Research and Evaluation (CARE), developing
culturally centered, community-based projects of social change, advocacy
and activism that articulate health as a human right. Mohan Dutta’s
research examines the role of advocacy and activism in challenging
marginalizing structures, the relationship between poverty and health,
political economy of global health policies, the mobilization of
cultural tropes for the justification of neocolonial health development
projects, and the ways in which participatory culture-centered processes
and strategies of radical democracy serve as axes of global social
change.
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