The Silencers Complain About Being Silenced

by Gary Fouse (August 2017)
 

 

I just came across the below link via the blog site, Campus Watch. They have seen fit to respond to accusations of engaging in censorship against people in academia who support the Palestinian cause against Israel. The referenced article is from the blog site Mondoweiss, a rabidly anti-Israel site that I give no credibility to whatsoever.

 

As a former teacher at the University of California at Irvine and one who has been involved in the campus strife between Israel and Palestinian supporters, as well as seen and heard some of the people mentioned, I feel compelled to respond.

 

What can one say about the former congresswoman from Georgia, Cynthia McKinney? She has blamed Jews for her re-election defeat and joined with George Galloway in his Viva Palestina cruises to Gaza. When she spoke at UCI (2009) and I asked her if Jews cost her her congressional seat, she quoted the words of another anti-Semitic former congressman, Gus Savage of Chicago.

 

Then there is Richard Falk, professor emeritus from Princeton and former UN special rapporteur for human rights in the Palestinian territories who has blamed all the ills of the Middle East on Israel. Even the Obama administration disowned his findings for the UN on the last Gaza conflict in December 2008-January 2009.

 

There are many ways to try to silence people whose ideas you don’t like. You can bully, blackmail, violate, isolate, punish, and smear them until they shut up, back down, and/or lose the platform upon which they were speaking.

 

It’s not just autocratic despots or crooked attorneys who wield such strategies with tyrannical efficacy. The forces of the pro-Israel lobby have long carried out systematic campaigns of vilification and repression with a pugnacious energy that rivals even the mob’s. Anyone in the public eye who dares to level a critique of the State of Israel could find themselves targeted. And if you are a prominent and vocal Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) activist: fuggedaboutit.

 

This climate of censorship is especially hard felt on college and university campuses where a historic upsurge in successful pro-Palestine activism has led to a corollary increase in McCarthyist pressure by the dozens of Zionist organizations who have formed into a network called the Israel on Campus Coalition. Characterized by their shameless meddling in internal university proceedings, well-organized groups like the AMCHA Initiative, Stand With Us, Campus Watch, Canary Mission, and ADL are the most visible tip of a slander-industrial complex whose mission is to purge professors and students who challenge their own narrative.

 

The AMCHA Initiative is dedicated to fighting campus anti-Semitism. When students like those of the General Union of Palestinian Students (GUPS) at San Francisco State University display posters lauding the killing of Israelis or videos fantasizing about slitting the throats of Israeli soldiers, AMCHA writes letters to the university to complain and ask for a safe environment for Jewish students.

 

Continuing with Mondoweiss:

With more than a dozen essays by some of the luminaries in the movement such as Richard Falk, Saree Makdisi, Rabab Ibrahim Abdulhadi, Nadia Abu El-Haj, Steven Salaita, Joseph Massad, members of the Irvine 11, and many others—”We Will Not Be Silenced” serves as an instructive compendium of the pro-Israel lobby’s bag of underhanded tricks and an invaluable playbook for how to preempt and defeat them.

Saree Makdisi of UCLA is one of a team of Israel-hating professors within the UC system. I heard him speak twice at UC-Irvine. On the last occasion, in 2016, he mischaracterized the US State Department definition of anti-Semitism as defining any criticism of Israel as being anti-Semitic (not true).

appear with her GUPS crew at UC-I in May of 2015. However, when I showed up with my video camera and the university backed my refusal to turn it off, Abdulhadi and her supporters never materialized. The table and chairs on the stage sat empty as a hurried Skype telephone conversation was arranged with some Palestinian guy in Washington DC. I didn’t bother to film because it was such a nothingburger. The highlight was when he blew cigarette smoke into the screen while answering a question.

Then there is the Irvine 11. These were the UC-I and UC-Riverside Muslim Student Union members who disrupted and attempted to shut down the speech of the Israeli ambassador to the US, Michael Oren, at UC-I in 2010. I was there and witnessed the whole sordid event.

 

Much to their surprise and amazement, these so-called martyrs were arrested, prosecuted and convicted. Of course, they and their supporters, like Mondoweiss, argued that they were merely expressing their free speech. Nonsense.

 

Returning to Mondoweiss . . .
 

In their helpful opening essay, David Theo Goldberg and Saree Makdisi discuss the alarming implications of the Hasbara Handbook that is distributed by organizations like StandWithUs to help train pro-Israel campus activists to be effective propagandists. The handbook explicitly encourages its acolytes to avoid legitimate argument and debate with pro-Palestinian activists in favor of deceitful strategies like point scoring, emotional manipulation, and name calling—to create negative connotations “without allowing a real examination of that person or idea.

 

David Delgado Shorter, whose only “crime” was to offer his students the option of researching the BDS movement as a case study in his “Tribal Worldviews” course, survived a demoralizing ordeal at UCLA at the hands of AMCHA that included death threats and false accusations of anti-Semitism that damaged his professional and personal life.

In 2012, UCLA reprimanded Shorter for using his official class website to call for a boycott of Israel. Mondoweiss makes no mention of that.

Similarly, Mondoweiss makes no mention of why complaints were made against Cal. State Northridge professor David Klein, who was using his university server to voice his personal views about Israel.

David Klein, a math professor at Cal State, Northridge and prominent BDS activist, was subjected to a similar coordinated campaign of censorship that stretched out for years and may not even be over yet. Unlike most of the scholars in this collection, Klein was fortunate that Harry Hellenbrand, the president of CSUN at the time, was an outspoken supporter of Klein’s academic freedom.

What is especially disturbing is the alacrity with which many upper administrators quickly cave and often collude with pressure groups who have no interest in research and knowledge production, but rather have a vested interest in censorship and knowledge suppression.

Classic. The reality is that university administrators are terrified of the pro-Palestinian forces on campus. Thus, MSA and SJP get away with all sorts of disruptions, bullying and intimidation of pro-Israel students. Look no further than UC-Irvine, where I taught for 18 years. They are still trying to figure out how to deal with the latest SJP disruption on May 10-after they gave a warning letter to them for their May 18, 2016 disruption of an Israeli event. In addition, we have documented countless incidents of disruption and intimidation of Jewish students at universities across the country-especially within the University of California system, in which little to no punitive action was taken. The simple fact is that this type of disruption and thuggery is rarely practiced by Jewish and pro-Israel students or faculty. Yet when our side complains about anti-Semitism, bullying, and abuse of university resources to advance personal political agendas, these crybabies claim they are being silenced or repressed. Nonsense.

The Israel on Campus Coalition has shown few scruples about smearing its opponents as supporters of terror, self-hating Jews, or anti-Semites. Groups like AMCHA, Hillel, StandWithUs have worked with political allies around the clock to cement the erroneous notion that opposition to Zionism is tantamount to anti-Semitism, and that a hatred of Israel’s policies of racism, ethnic cleansing and dispossession is the same as hatred of Jews qua Jews.

I do not question the right of faculty and students to express their views about Israel under the First Amendment. However, when they cross the line from mere criticism of Israel into anti-Semitism, we have the right to object. When professors misuse their position as faculty and utilize university resources, such as school servers, to spread their personal political views, we have the right to object. When groups like SJP use tactics of disruption, bullying and intimidation against supporters of Israel, we have the right to object.

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Gary Fouse is a retired investigator from the US Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA). During his career (1970-1995), he served in Los Angeles, Bangkok, Milan, Pittsburgh, and the FBI Academy in Quantico. For 18 years, he worked as an adjunct teacher of ESL at the University of California at Irvine. He is also the editor of the blog, Fousesquawk.

 

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