A big victory at Butler University. The Student Government Association was recently pushed to vote on two Student Senate Resolutions designed to crack down on pro-Palestine activism. The resolutions condemned the BDS movement and embrace the controversial International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of antisemitism, a definition that includes some criticisms of Israel. Last night they both failed to pass, with sponsors pulling their support for the measures after hearing Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) and Jewish Voice for Peace members speak before the vote.
After the resolutions were shot down, SJP Butler emailed me this statement:
Measures which vilify the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement, as well as those which equate anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism, must be resisted however and whenever they manifest. Such resistance combats the continued disenfranchisement and silencing of Palestinians. The vicious attempt to stifle Palestinian speech at Butler University is not an isolated event; rather, it is a well-coordinated and heavily-funded disinformation strategy. It is a strategy which denies Palestinian students agency, and prevents the diffusion of critical knowledge on Palestine in order to misrepresent Students for Justice in Palestine’s purpose and goals. Students for Justice in Palestine chapters challenge the racist, popular narrative surrounding Palestinians in academia, and are therefore invaluable resources both for the student bodies of the campuses they inhabit, and also for Palestinian students as vehicles of empowerment. Despite these deliberate attempts to censor the work of Students for Justice in Palestine at Butler University, we remain steadfast in our commitment to educating our campus on the Palestinian struggle for freedom, justice, and equality.
In short, resolutions that oppose BDS and equate anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism not only harm Palestinians, but also uphold systems which have historically been used as weapons to silence marginalized voices across the Global South. We must reject and actively oppose such measures, while also reaffirming our commitment to freedom, justice, and equality for all peoples through mass action and popular education, in our communities and throughout our campuses.
The resolution push coincided with a campaign (launched by pro-Israel students and right-wing personalities) to attack an early October event that was sponsored by the Student Government Association and organized by SJP Butler. Boycott and Safe Protesting 101 was set up to inform students about their right to protest and how to safely do it during the COVID crisis. One of the speakers on the webinar was Dalit Baum, director of economic activism at the American Friends Service Committee. Baum briefly discussed the BDS movement and pointed out that it wasn’t antisemitic.
These assertions were picked up by right-wing podcaster Eric Metheny, who posted a video on Twitter condemning the event and claiming that “your tax dollars are going to effectively indoctrinate students and guide them towards antisemitism.” This narrative was then embraced by Ryan Fournier, who is the founder and “co-chairman” of something called Students for Trump. He told his many followers that their
“hard-earned taxpayer dollars are going to a university that wants to indoctrinate students to hate Israel.”
Brooke Beloso, an associate professor and faculty advisor of SJP, told The Butler Collegian that she was “deeply concerned” about the backlash as it “places the lives and well-being of our students in jeopardy.” She also dismissed the ridiculous idea that BDS is somehow antisemitic. “This is a nonsensical notion,” she said. “Somehow, we are all mostly capable of differentiating between a nation-state and a religion in every other circumstance.”
Zoom Censorship
A spokesperson for Zoom told the Jewish Journal that it wont allow its platform to be used for a University of Hawaii webinar featuring Leila Khaled. “Zoom is committed to supporting the open exchange of ideas and conversations, subject to certain limitations contained in our publicly available Terms of Service, Acceptable Use Policy, and Community Standards,” they told the paper. “We determined that this event is in violation of one or more of these policies and have let the host know that they may not use Zoom for this particular event.”
This is the second time that an event featuring the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine member has been censored by the company. Last month, they blocked a San Francisco State University (SFSU) webinar from being broadcast on their platform. That same webinar was ultimately censored by Facebook and YouTube as well. Zoom faced pressure from pro-Israel groups to block the SFSU event and it was suggested that they could be in violation of anti-terrorism laws if they allowed it to happen. The Act.IL ap (which is funded in part by Israel and typically targets the BDS movement) encouraged its users to contact California State University Board of Trustees and tell them that the school “may be violating US law by supporting a terrorist.”
Ellison Speaks at Rabin Memorial
The Americans for Peace Now virtual event honoring Yitzhak Rabin happened this week. The memorial for the late Israeli Prime Minister made mainstream headlines last month, after Palestinian activists successfully pressured Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to drop out of it. Pro-Palestine groups also called on Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison to skip it, but he ended up speaking nonetheless.
“It’s brave to fight and risk your life in defense of your country and your people. But if you want to demonstrate true great bravery, you have to be able to come to your own people and say to them, unless we make peace with the other side, this crisis will never end,” he said at the event. “In fact, he gave his life for the cause that he believed in, which was peace.”
Rabin (who was assassinated by a right-wing extremist in 1995) was a military leader during the ethnic cleansing of 1948 and signed an order to expel 50,000 Palestinians from their homes in the “Lydda Death March.” During the First Intifada, he told soldiers to break the bones of Palestinians who resisted. Earlier this month, David Samel wrote about “Operation Accountability”, which was carried out against Lebanon when he was Prime Minister of Israel:
“Under Rabin’s orders, the IDF deliberately killed over 100 innocent civilians in Lebanon, destroying thousands of homes, all with the reprehensible motivation of triggering a mass exodus of hundreds of thousands of terrified civilians,” explained Samel. “Early in the operation, Israel’s proxy militia, the South Lebanon Army, broadcasted ‘warnings urging the residents of more than 30 villages, including three Palestinian refugee camps, to leave ‘because your villages are going to be bombarded.’”
Odds & Ends
?? Rolling Stone interviewed former Secretary of State John Kerry last week. He had quite the quote on the Israel/UAE deal: “This has been in the making for a number of years now. I talked many times about reducing the sort of crazy hangover of lack of socialization between these countries..it’s not peace in the Middle East. Nobody should pretend that. It has nothing to do with the Palestinians.”
? At +972 Magazine, Dr. Maha Nassar looked at how many editorials about Palestinians are actually written by Palestinians: “In the New York Times, less than 2 percent of the nearly 2,500 opinion pieces that discussed Palestinians since 1970 were actually written by Palestinians. In the Washington Post, the average was just 1 percent.”
? The Pentagon recently announced that it’s raising the estimated cost for its new fleet of land-based nuclear missiles. It’s now expected to cost taxpayers at least $95.8 billion, which is up $10 billion from previous estimates. Two new studies show that the number of Americans living in poverty has grown by 8 million since May, as pandemic aid has dried up.
? Teen Vogue has a great interview with Quincy Institute co-founder Stephen Wertheim about his new book Tomorrow, the World: The Birth of U.S. Global Supremacy.
?? Secretary of State Mike Pompeo was asked about Maher al-Akhras, a Palestinian prisoner who has been on a hunger strike for almost 90 days and is close to death. The 49-year-old was arrested by Israeli forces in July and has been held without charges. “Israel has the right to defend itself,” was Pompeo’s reply.
?? During an online Biden campaign event, Israeli-American media producer and Democratic mega-donor Haim Saban had quite the revelation about Saudi Arabian Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. According to Saban, MBS told him that his country couldn’t make peace with Israel because he would end up “killed by Iran, Qatar and my own people.”
✝️ The infamous televangelist (and noted Christian Zionist) Pat Robertson said that Trump will be reelected, which will lead to “a war against Israel” and the beginning of End Times.
?? The Trump administration is apparently set to label a number of human rights organizations “antisemitic” for criticizing Israeli policy. The story was first reported by Politico’s Nahal Toosi. A congressional aide told Toosi that the effort is being pushed by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo because he’s contemplating a future presidential run and wants to build his support with pro-Israel evangelicals. “By smearing leading human rights organizations as ‘antisemitic,’ the corrupt and increasingly authoritarian Trump Administration is escalating its relentless war on human rights, justice, and the truth,” the BDS Movement’s North America coordinator Olivia Katbi Smith told me. “It is also entrenching its criminal partnership with Israel’s far-right regime, including in its desperate attempts to conflate opposition to its occupation and apartheid against Palestinians with antisemitism. The nonviolent BDS movement for Palestinian freedom, justice and equality, stands with all those struggling for a more dignified, just and beautiful world, including the named human rights and development organizations, against Trump’s McCarthyite attempts to intimidate and bully them into complacency and complicity in human rights abuses.”
?️ Matt Duss has a piece at Foreign Affairs about how the United States must reckon with the disastrous “War on Terror.” “Advocates of the war on terror believed that nationalist chauvinism, which sometimes travels under the name ‘American exceptionalism,’ could be stoked at a controlled burn to sustain American hegemony,” writes Duss. “Instead, and predictably, toxic ultranationalism burned out of control. Today, the greatest security threat to the United States comes not from any terrorist group, or from any great power, but from domestic political dysfunction. The election of Donald Trump as president was a product and accelerant of that dysfunction—but not its cause. The environment for his political rise was prepared over a decade and a half of xenophobic, messianic Washington warmongering, with roots going back into centuries of white supremacist politics.”
Stay safe out there,
Michael
