In response to protests over the Israeli genocide in Gaza, university administrators at Cornell University have weaponized the idea of antisemitism to limit freedom of speech and academic freedom. Similar attacks are happening across the country.

American society does not treat enslavement with the same response as the Jewish Holocaust, Rev. Graylan Scott Hagler writes, but his method is comparative, which is not the method one wants to use when discussing crimes against humanity. Rather than unifying diverse peoples around common forms of political pain and suffering, the comparative method used in this way divides them.

After the Cornell President, Martha Pollack, issued a statement about rising antisemitism “amid ongoing tensions in the Middle East,” evidently at the urging of pro-Israel students who feel “unsafe” in the light of pro-Palestinian demonstrations, Palestinian students and others sympathetic to the Palestinian cause were angry and demoralized, as she exhibited a lack of recognition for Palestinian suffering and grief in the Gaza attack.

Cornell professor Eric Cheyfitz writes: “It is no secret that Cornell’s institutional partner in the New York City tech campus is Technion-Israel Institute of Technology. It is also no secret that Technion is substantially involved in the development of systems used in the militarization of the Occupied Territories. The question might arise, then, at least in some minds, as to Cornell’s possible complicity in Israeli state policy in the Territories, including the latest invasion of Gaza and the ongoing blockade.”