An impartial third-party investigation has cleared a George Washington University (GWU) psychology professor of antisemitism charges. The right-wing pro-Israel group StandWithUs had targeted Dr. Lara Sheehi for allegedly making antisemitic remarks that upset students and inviting an anti-Zionist speaker to her class. The report noted that the accusations were “either inaccurate or taken out of context and misrepresented.”
Sheehi is a psychology professor at the school and is the co-author of Psychoanalysis Under Occupation: Practicing Resistance in Palestine (Routledge, 2022), a book on Palestinian clinicians working under Israeli apartheid.
“I am grateful to the investigators and the labor that was expended to meticulously document what I have known since day one: those of us who fight for Palestinian liberation do not do so on the backs of our Jewish siblings, nor do we discriminate, retaliate or isolate Jewish or Israeli students in our classrooms,” she said in a statement. “I am delighted that today I stand stronger, uplifted by the national and international solidarity that has been shown to me in my field and elsewhere. Importantly, I stand strong with the support of an independent report that not only proves my innocence but also asserts the dangerous ramifications of fabricated claims of antisemitism against me, an Arab woman, scholar, and clinician. I am hopeful that these findings will send a clear message to anyone who feels scared or intimidated by external political groups whose explicit aims are to harass and silence us.”
StandWithUs filed a civil rights complaint against Sheehi at the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR), an increasingly popular strategy among pro-Israel lawfare groups. StandWithUs claimed that Sheehi discriminated against students based on their “their Jewish and Israeli identities.” It also alleged that Sheehi had called students Islamophobic for expressing concerns about a talk by Hebrew University of Jerusalem Professor Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian in which she cited stone-throwing as a form of resistance.
The university looked into the situation and found the charges without merit but hired the law firm Crowell & Moring LLP to launch its own probe.
Pro-Israel campus groups like StandWithUs frequently aim to equate anti-Zionism with antisemitism. The Crowell & Moring investigation seemingly dismisses this narrative and notes that it can easily be used as a tool of censorship. “Underlying much of the discourse that arose in the class is the issue of what is appropriately defined as antisemitism – that is, whether structural critiques of the State of Israel, including actions by the Israeli government, constitute antisemitism,” reads their report. “This issue is being debated in college campuses across the country, and in many other arenas. SWU and a few of the students in the class, advocated for an expansive view of the definition of antisemitism, which, if accepted in the university environment, could infringe on free speech principles and academic freedom.”
Sheehi’s case is not an isolated incident. Palestine Legal’s annual report for 2022 identified 214 incidents of suppression of U.S.-based Palestine advocacy. 70% of those incidents targeted students or scholars.
“Dr. Sheehi is just the latest of far too many professors and clinicians to become the victim of these tactics, which dovetail with a wider, programmatic attempt by pro-Israeli lobbies to influence the activities of the Department of Education,” read a recent letter to the school from the organization Academia for Equality. “Dr. Sheehi has been singled out in this complaint as creating an environment hostile for her Jewish students precisely because she stands in solidarity with Palestinians.”
In February, Palestine Legal announced that it was launching its own federal civil rights complaint against GWU. Three students allege that the school has denied Palestinians mental health services, falsely accused them of committing crimes, and put them through disciplinary processes not faced by non-Palestinian students.
“There is simply no justification for GW’s racist, bigoted treatment of Palestinians,” said Palestine Legal senior staff attorney Radhika Sainath in a statement. “Even if pro-Israel groups don’t like it and complain, the law is clear, Palestinian students are entitled to the same education and services as other students.”
I hope StandWithUs investigates the 120 Israeli law professors who came to the conclusion that Israel practices apartheid –
https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20230330-israel-practices-apartheid-say-israeli-law-professors/
‘Israel practices apartheid,’ say Israeli law professors…The Israeli Law Professors’ Forum for Democracy has found that changes introduced by the current government led by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu “validate the claim that Israel practices apartheid.”…The group represents 120 of Israel’s most prominent law professors….It reached the conclusion in a position paper titled “Implications of the Agreement Subordinating the Civil Administration to the Additional Minister in the Ministry of Defence”….Under the power-sharing agreement signed in February between the Likud parliamentary faction and the Religious Zionism faction, Netanyahu agreed to transfer responsibility for, and management of, the occupied West Bank to civilian hands. The deal stipulated that the far-right leader of the Religious Zionism faction, Bezalel Smotrich, will be granted special authority over the occupied Palestinian territory….”The Civil Administration is the civilian arm of the military government,” explained the professors. “Under international law this is the only branch that is supposed to govern the West Bank. Subordinating the Civil Administration to a civilian authority (the Ministry of Defence) is a violation of international law, and specifically of the 1907 Hague Regulations.”…The position paper published by the forum earlier this month is an indication that even inside Israel attitudes are shifting. “The agreement is an overt and formal measure that gives validity to claims that Israel’s practices constitute apartheid, which is prohibited under international law,” the law professors concluded.
Kudos to Palestine Legal!
The “third party” investigation called for by GW in Dr. Sheehi’s case appears to be a replication of the Department of Justice/FBI’s “two tier” review process for evaluating claims of religious and racial bias. I do not know how Crowell & Moring LLP conducted their research but I’ll bet the university is glad they initiated it and I am also pretty sure Stand With Us wishes they had not. It would be helpful to know the actual process – who did Crowell & Moring LLP speak to; what kinds of questions did they ask; what kind of answers did they get; did anyone refuse to cooperate; what were the qualifications of the people doing the investigation, and the like. It may be the case that those questions, and the process they informed could be published as a model for all future accusations of anti-Jewish bias leveled against Palestinians and their supporters.
Such a resource already exists in the form of the DOJ/FBI Hate Crime Data Collection Guidelines and Training Manual, however, I can readily understand that using a government – published document may turn off certain groups so a civilian version might make more sense and be welcomed more widely. The point of publishing and promoting such a document is that not only might it serve to allow those accused of bias to record and report what happened to them immediately after the event which I imagine would be invaluable to lawyers and law enforcement. And if it became routine for these events to be cataloged and reported regularly and immediately I can imagine the number of specious and politically-driven accusations would drop, perhaps significantly. This is so because it is often the case that the mere accusation of antisemitism/anti-Jewish bias is sufficient to either silence a critic or damage them reputationally. Indeed, this, may be the entire point of the accusation. Knowing that an impartial evaluation would be conducted and the results reported publicly would aid in defeating or preventing the use of the law to intimidate or harm the those who stand with Palestine.
Question for Any Zionist: Is it antisemitic according to IHRA to suggest that accusations of antisemitism brought by avowedly anti-Arab/anti-Palestinian groups such as Stand With Us be routinely evaluated by an impartial third party for accuracy?
View here 500+ Palestine posters/events that were censored/cancelled often over specious accusations of anti-Jewish bias
StandWithUS better stand down, and focus on the hundreds of thousands of protesters who must be “anti-semitic” because they are loudly criticizing the Israeli government, its crooked leader, and their policies.
It is time the US defined the term “anti-semitic” and stopped overreacting every time someone exercised their rights to free speech, without being harassed and kicked out of their jobs.
Anyone who uses the linguistic term “Semite” as a designation for Jewish people, rather than a reference to speakers of Hebrew or Arabic is mimicking Hitler and demonstrating simple ignorance.
Zionist bloviators denounce critics of Israel as anti-Semites but ‘Semite’ is not a racial or ethnic category but a linguistic classification. A “semite” is someone who speaks a Semitic language, like Hebrew or Arabic.
The German term “antisemitisch” was coined in 1860 by the Austrian Jewish scholar Moritz Steinschneider to contest the false idea that people who speak a Semitic language are somehow inferior to “Aryan” people, i.e. Europeans who believe or are told they should believe, they are somehow affiliated with Indo-Iranian peoples. (Re “semitism” see Alex Bein, The Jewish Question, Biography Of A World Problem (1984, p. 594); Avner Falk, Anti-Semitism: a History and Psychoanalysis of Contemporary Hatred (2008, p. 21))
“Aryan” became Hitler’s absurd shorthand for racially “pure” Nordic peoples. Not to be outdone, the knesset (2018) designated Arabic as a racial marker to be effaced in Israel. By this law, the State of Israel is the leading purveyor of anti-Semitism in the world.