[News] “Civility” is the Israel lobby’s new weapon against free speech on US campuses

[Anti-Imperialist News]

  “Civility” is the Israel lobby’s new weapon against free speech on US
  campuses

Submitted by Ali Abunimah on Sun, 09/07/2014 - 22:53
*http://electronicintifada.net/blogs/ali-abunimah/civility-israel-lobbys-new-weapon-against-free-speech-us-campuses*

As I was driving through Indiana /en route/ to Michigan this weekend, I 
saw this billboard for a local sheriff’s election campaign. There, above 
the uniformed police officer with his military-style crew cut, is the 
slogan “Return to Civility.”

It seemed the perfect metaphor for what “civility” has come to mean on 
US campuses: the forceful policing, at the behest of Israel lobby 
groups, of any discourse or activism critical of Israel.

In the wake of Israel’s latest Gaza massacre, the civility police are 
cracking down hard. Most notoriously, administrators and trustees at the 
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign 
<http://electronicintifada.net/tags/university-illinois-urbana-champaign> have 
used the excuse of “civility” 
<http://electronicintifada.net/blogs/ali-abunimah/univ-illinois-admits-pre-emptive-firing-israel-critic-steven-salaita> 
to fire Steven Salaita 
<http://electronicintifada.net/tags/steven-salaita> for his strong 
criticisms of, among other things, Israel’s slaughter of hundreds of 
children in Gaza.

But civility crackdowns are now breaking out across the country. Another 
alarming case involves a student at Ohio University.


    Pouring cold water on free speech

Last week Ohio University President Roderick J. McDavis challenged the 
newly elected student senate president Megan Marzec to take the “ice 
bucket challenge 
<http://www.dispatch.com/content/stories/local/2014/08/16/chilly-challenge.html>.” 
This is a stunt where someone pours a bucket of ice water over their 
head on video to raise awareness of the disease ALS 
<http://www.ninds.nih.gov/disorders/amyotrophiclateralsclerosis/detail_ALS.htm>.

It has become a very mainstream activity which allows the participant to 
appear philanthropic at no political risk (former President George W. 
Bush took the “challenge,” 
<http://www.wjla.com/articles/2014/08/george-w-bush-takes-ice-bucket-challenge-for-als-106282.html> 
inadvertently recalling his administration’s use of water-boarding as a 
form of torture).

But what Marzec did – as Palestinians have done with their own “rubble 
bucket challenge 
<http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/middleeast/gaza/11054873/Rubble-Bucket-Challenge-launched-in-Gaza.html>” 
– is to subvert the meme.

She made a video in which she pours a bucket of fake blood over her head 
to protest Israel’s abuse of Palestinians.

“I’m urging you and OU [Ohio University] to divest and cut all ties with 
academic and other Israeli institutions and businesses,” Marzec says in 
the 50-second video that she posted on her Facebook page Wednesday 
afternoon, /The Columbus Dispatch/ reports 
<http://www.dispatch.com/content/blogs/the-eteam/2014/09/ou-bucket.html>.

“This bucket of blood symbolizes the thousands of displaced and murdered 
Palestinians, atrocities which OU is directly complacent in through 
cultural and economic support of the Israeli state,” she adds. (The 
original instance of the video is no longer available 
<http://vimeo.com/105055017> but I am including this copy in my post 
because I believe people should see that it is, contrary to the lurid 
criticisms, rather tame, polite and indeed civil.)

Marzec was quickly and swiftly denounced. The Twitter account of the 
Student Senate tweeted: “On behalf of the student senate, we humbly 
apologize for the video President Megan Marzec posted.”


    <https://twitter.com/OUSenate/status/507233147302731776>

The campus group Bobcats for Israel and Alpha Epsilon Pi, a Jewish 
fraternity, called for her resignation 
<http://www.thepostathens.com/news/article_314ada9a-353a-11e4-9ed6-0017a43b2370.html>.

“In part of the video she promotes the BDS (boycott, divestment and 
sanctions) movement, which is anti-Semitic,” one student critic told 
/The Cleveland Jewish News/ 
<http://www.clevelandjewishnews.com/news/local/article_48dc4b22-3467-11e4-91a3-001a4bcf887a.html>.

Marzec herself has reported receiving death threats for her protest. She 
showed /The Athens Post/ newspaper 
<http://www.thepostathens.com/news/article_314ada9a-353a-11e4-9ed6-0017a43b2370.html> 
messages she’d been sent that “ridiculed her as a woman, among other 
insults,” and said that she’s been subjected to “a whole slew of very 
vile things.”

But she strongly defended her protest. “It’s clear to me that my video 
was not anti-Semitic,” she told /The Post/. “Any reframing of the video 
is caused by outrage that I am standing in solidarity with oppressed 
Palestinians.”

More than 600 people have signed an online petition 
<http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/solidarity-with-megan-marzec-no-attacks-on-free/> 
in “solidarity with Megan Marzec’s right of free speech to publicly 
state her political opinions on the liberation of Palestine.” It also 
condemns “any attempt to employ threats and/or acts of interpersonal 
violence to intimidate Ohio University students into silence.”


    “Civility”

Enter the president of Ohio University, who has come down not on the 
side of Palestinians victimized by massive Israeli violence, not on the 
side of Marzec who was trying to draw attention to that violence, and 
not against those denigrating and threatening her.

Instead, the university and President McDavis issued a campus-wide call 
for “civility” 
<http://www.ohio.edu/compass/stories/14-15/9/President-Message-ALS.cfm> 
that criticized /only/ Marzec.

“Her actions do not reflect the position of Ohio University or President 
McDavis,” the university statement says. “We recognize the rights of 
individual students to speak out on matters of public concern and we 
will continue to do so, but want to be clear that the message shared 
today by her is not an institutional position or a belief held by 
President McDavis.”

And then here is the “civility” punchline (emphasis added):

    In a university community of our size, there are many issues that
    merit our attention and dialogue. As stewards of the public trust,
    we have a responsibility to encourage the free exchange of ideas.
    For it is through dialogue on conflicting views that we will move
    toward mutual understanding.

    I take great pride in the fact that Ohio University is a community
    that tackles hard issues head-on. *The conflict in Israel and Gaza
    is no exception. But the manner in which we conduct ourselves as we
    exercise our right to free speech is of utmost importance.*

    In my First Year Student Convocation address, I emphasized the idea
    that we are a University family. As members of a University family,
    we will not always agree, *but we should respect one another.* And
    when we engage in difficult dialogue on issues such as this, *we
    must do so with civility and a deep appreciation for the diverse and
    resilient international community in which we live.*


    Who is being protected?

There is much to be said about McDavis’ invocation of the “family” – 
with all its connotations of patriarchy, hierarchy, privacy, discipline 
and infantilization as a metaphor – but I will leave that for another day.

There are important unstated assumptions in McDavis’ statement. Notably, 
he seems to be saying that by criticizing Israeli violence against 
Palestinians, and urging the institution to end its complicity, Marzec 
was somehow targeting and injuring a component of the campus community 
or “family.”

Unless there is a brigade of the Israeli army with particularly 
sensitive feelings permanently stationed on campus, this cannot be the case.

Rather, the implication seems to be that criticism of Israel and its 
actions is deemed offensive to Jewish students. This is certainly 
implied by the intervention of the Jewish fraternity.

But we must always reject the equation of Jewish students with the State 
of Israel, no matter how often pro-Israel groups and university 
administrations insist on it.

This is the Israel lobby’s new tactic, as I have argued in my recent 
book /The Battle for Justice in Palestine/ 
<http://electronicintifada.net/blogs/ali-abunimah/my-new-book-battle-justice-palestine>: 
to equate criticism of Israel or solidarity with Palestinians with “hate 
speech,” “hate crimes” or even attacks on an individual such as sexual 
or racial violence that must be ultimately subject to university or 
juridical discipline and punishment.

In the case of Salaita, this meant the loss of his job based on libelous 
and speculative claims that his statements about Israel would mean 
students in his classroom might be endangered.

In the same vein, when Palestine solidarity groups have distributed mock 
eviction notices 
<http://electronicintifada.net/tags/mock-eviction-notices> as a tactic 
to educate peers on campus about Israeli demolitions of Palestinian 
homes, they have usually faced false allegations from Zionist groups 
that the dorm rooms of Jewish students were “targeted.”

It is in this context that Students for Justice in Palestine at 
Northeastern University 
<http://electronicintifada.net/tags/northeastern-sjp> was banned last 
Spring, an unprecedented act of repression that the administration only 
rescinded 
<http://electronicintifada.net/blogs/nora-barrows-friedman/northeastern-lifts-suspension-students-justice-palestine> 
after a fierce student campaign and a national outcry. The year before 
they were banned, Northeastern SJP had been forced to sign a “civility 
statement,” 
<http://electronicintifada.net/content/students-forced-sign-civility-statements-walk-out-protest/12705> 
following an organized walk-out of a talk given by Israeli soldiers.

This is the same basic idea behind the wave of complaints against 
various universities made by Zionist individuals and organizations under 
Title VI of the US Civil Rights Act 
<http://electronicintifada.net/tags/title-vi-civil-rights-act> in recent 
years alleging that campus Palestine solidarity activism was making 
Jewish students feel “unsafe.”

While the strategy has so far failed at the legal level 
<http://electronicintifada.net/blogs/nora-barrows-friedman/victory-campus-free-speech-us-dept-education-throws-out-anti-semitism>, 
it is succeeding with university administrations, who are rushing to 
issue “civility” statements explicitly or implicitly targeting utterers 
of speech critical of Israel.

It cannot be mere coincidence that Nicholas Dirks, chancellor of the 
University of California at Berkeley, sent an email to the entire campus 
community last week also calling for “civility.”

Ostensibly marking the 50th anniversary of Berkeley’s famed Free Speech 
Movement, Dirks said, “we can only exercise our right to free speech 
insofar as we feel safe and respected in doing so, and this in turn 
requires that people treat each other with civility.”

What does “civility” mean in this context? Does it mean saying “please,” 
“thank you,” “sir” and “ma’am” to war criminals? Or does it mean 
electing a sheriff instead of a professor to run a university to make 
everyone feel “safe” and secure?

(A similar statement has also just been issued from Penn State 
University 
<http://news.psu.edu/story/325057/2014/09/05/message-leadership-penn-state?utm_source=newswire&utm_medium=email&utm_term=325031_HTML&utm_content=09-05-2014-00-07&utm_campaign=Penn%20State%20Today>. 
No particular cause is mentioned as prompting the statement and it does 
not mention Palestine, but I expect to see more of these.)

Dirks, as I recount in /The Battle for Justice in Palestine/, was the 
vice president at Columbia University who, prior to taking his new job 
at Berkeley, boasted about his role in the witch-hunt against Professor 
Joseph Massad <http://electronicintifada.net/people/joseph-massad>.


    Losing their grip

Zionism is losing its grip. It has lost the substantive debate on the 
past and future of Palestine in the academy. It no longer has a hold on 
the hearts and minds of young people the way it did in the years after 
the 1967 War.

Many of the Jewish students whose “safety” is being invoked to justify 
the campus crackdowns are joining – and in some cases leading – chapters 
of Students for Justice in Palestine and similar groups.

Key Israel lobby groups, as I explain in the book, see US campuses as 
the battleground on which the future of US support for Israel will be 
secured or lost.

Raw power – intimidation, denial of tenure, firings and other kinds of 
discipline – are being used to try to stop the growth of Palestine 
solidarity on campus.

Corporatized 
<http://electronicintifada.net/content/salaita-firing-shows-where-zionism-meets-neoliberalism-us-universities/13826> 
university administrations across the country are fully complicit in 
this repression. And this iron fist is being wrapped in the velvet glove 
of “civility.”

-- 
Freedom Archives 522 Valencia Street San Francisco, CA 94110 415 
863.9977 www.freedomarchives.org
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