Thread by @MouinRabbani

THREAD: Encounter with the Thought Police (Remarks delivered at the Fletcher School's Fares Center for Eastern Mediterranean Studies)

It’s a real pleasure to be speaking again at the Fares Center for Eastern Mediterranean Studies at the Fletcher School. I’m particularly grateful to its Director, Professor Nadim Rouhana, and his colleague Amaia Arregi for bringing us together.

My talk today is about the regional dimensions of the Gaza Crisis. But before turning to this subject I’d like to say a few words about something more local.

As you may know, I was yesterday supposed to speak with students at the Tisch College of Civic Life’s Institute for Global Leadership on the causes and consequences of the cataclysm that is the Gaza Strip. As an alumnus of Tufts University, who in 1986 participated in the inaugural course that would develop into the Institute for Global Leadership, I was particularly looking forward to this event.

On Tuesday morning I was informed that my speaking engagement, which had been publicly advertised for at least a month, would be cancelled due to a last-minute campaign waged by a group that goes by the name of Tufts Against Anti-Semitism. This group is apparently led by faculty members at the university’s School of Medicine.

You heard that correctly. An event organized for students, at the College of Civic Life, was cancelled in response to a campaign led by medical school faculty who, I am reliably informed, mobilized a prominent donor to help ensure the university’s compliance with their agenda.

I was unable to find a public profile for the group in question. It appears to be related to the Faculty Against Antisemitism Movement, which identifies the fourth of its seven core principles as follows:

“Open inquiry and free discussion and debate regarding Israel, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and the Middle East is crucial and should be encouraged. Divergent points of view should not be censored.”

Mobilizing donors and browbeating university leaders to cancel an event organized for the benefit of students seems a rather curious approach to promoting “open inquiry and free discussion and debate”. Rather, it bespeaks a fear of academic freedom, a hostility to open inquiry, and a determination to prevent the circulation of ideas. A rejection, in other words, of the foundational principles upon which university life is based. And, I should add, a particularly dangerous methodology when adopted by faculty of a medical school. Do they similarly suppress inconvenient results produced by clinical trials conducted under their supervision?

Having come to the realization that their views no longer resonate in the marketplace of ideas, and are in fact broadly repudiated within the academy, Israel’s apologists have responded with a campaign to shut debate down, and stifle any perspective not their own.

In my case too they have done so by resorting to preposterous accusations of anti-Semitism. In doing so they have hijacked, trivialized, and rendered meaningless an issue of the utmost gravity, in order to brandish it as a whip to mislead, bully, and intimidate their way to censorship.

Rather than opposition to racism and discrimination, their agenda is to enable it by silencing public discussion of Palestinian rights, and preventing awareness of the systematic violation of these rights by Israel, perpetrated with the active complicity of the United States.

According to leading scholars of genocide and the Holocaust, Israel’s violation of Palestinian rights has now escalated to the level of genocide. In other words, Tufts Against Anti-Semitism is functioning as the Commissariat for Genocide.

My colleague Noura Erakat refers to university leaders who readily capitulate to the intellectual terrorism of such pressure groups as those who drown in an inch of water. My alma mater, Tufts University, yesterday all too willingly drowned in a toxic puddle. In so doing its leadership failed to uphold the core function of an institution of higher learning, enabled and legitimized the smearing of an alumnus, and most importantly spurned its responsibilities toward its own students.

Yet today, thanks to the Fletcher School, the Fares Center, and particularly Professor Rouhana, this university is dry as a cork. I am here, I am – as the saying goes – speaking, and I will not be silenced. END