"The Fascist Assault on Academic Freedom Relies on Thinly Supported Claims of Campus Anti-Semitism," Substack, Mar. 27, 2025.
The fascists needed to be able to pretend antisemitism was a real threat to Jewish people. Their victory—if they really won the election, to the extent that they managed to depress turnout and suppress the vote in key states, probably also hacking voting machines in select districts—depended on Israeli fascist Netanyahu and his genocidal alliance of Jewish bigots pursuing a one-sided war of bombing, starvation, human rights crimes, expulsion, systematic murder of journalists, and violence against Israeli domestic opposition. Hamas offered the perfect foil for this end of civilizational battle, having so severely violated the laws of war and norms of the international order that any level of violence would be excused by the ideological allies of Israel: Christian conservatives, right-wing fascists, and conventional middle-class Jews—the closet fascists of US democracy. Ostensibly liberal adherents to all of the basic norms of the US constitutional system, ardent believers in the Bill of Rights—freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, freedom of conscience, freedom against unreasonable search and seizure, and due process—they would easily discard any and all safeguards against fascism if called to defend the purportedly threatened Jewish people.
This set the perfect stage for exploitation by right-wing movements in the US. At university campuses, the self-evident crimes of war being perpetrated by Israel, and the arms and funding being supplied by the US government—by a Democratic administration and with support from a majority of Congress in both parties, but with significant opposition only from the Democratic side—led to a militant anti-war movement, especially on college campuses. And what was the claim against these anti-genocide protesters? That some of them—or at least one of them, according to an extensive New York Times report on the Columbia University protests—sometimes said things that were anti-Semitic, or at any rate anti-Zionist, that sometimes crossed the normative discursive line and therefore were threatening to Jewish students, who had to be protected against speech. In other words, the rhetoric of the right, which became widely accepted by a mainstream press too afraid to investigate, ask questions, probe, and ultimately, tell the truth, was that the college student protesters and members of the anti-genocide, anti-war movement, were a physical threat to Jewish people themselves and therefore had to be violently repressed by the police. Indeed, it was widely claimed the protesters were sympathetic to Hamas, or at any rate said things that denied the right of Israel to exist. Was this a thought crime? Constitutional and human rights conventions were firmly on the side of the protesters. But the political class fell over themselves to prove their pro-Zionist, non-anti-Semitic bona fides. We were already far along the pathway to fascism by that point.
What came next was as outrageous and antidemocratic as anything since the Red Scare and McCarthyism in the late 1940s and 1950s. A pressure campaign led by right-wing Republicans and Jewish billionaire philanthropists, in a stunning abuse of power and influence, began to pressure university presidents to suppress free speech on college campus and to shut down anti-genocide protests. Leaders of universities were dragged in front of Congress and boards of trustees. If they had stood up for academic freedom, as their positions required of them, they had no other option other than to loudly proclaim the right to freedom of inquiry and freedom of expression that are essential to universities as institutions in Western society. Most of them utterly failed in their duty. They failed to defend their universities and abandoned the values of the university system itself. They brought in the police to violently arrest protesters and shut down campus speech. Those who complied and those who didn’t were fired. Yet those who complied behaved shamefully and left the university system itself exposed to repressive attacks that would follow the rise to power of the true fascists: the MAGA Republicans.
Meanwhile, how did the educated public respond to such a naked, unconstitutional attack on the fundamental principles of a free society? Let’s stipulate that for decades, misinformed conservative cable news viewers had been primed to believe that universities themselves were under attack from within by enemies of academic freedom. (Never mind that these same outlets were themselves opposed to the fundamentally liberal principles of free inquiry of the university system.) They had been told that freedom of speech was being systematically suppressed by so-called “woke” adherents of identity politics. These were the real fascists, viewers were told: the illiberal left no longer permitted free debate on college campuses. College campuses were too far extreme left, they were told. Those who disagreed with the “woke mafia” were being silenced and victimized, it was claimed.
So when a few ardently Zionist Jewish students claimed to have been harassed on campuses—it was never clear for what, how were they supposedly even identified as Jewish, what specifically happened, and in what context, only broad statements designed to evoke moral panic and reactionary responses—the unquestioning defenders of the “Jewish state” were quick to accept what amounted to a total victory of fascism over liberalism. They would defend the “Jewish people” at absolutely any price, completely deny the crimes of the genocidal state—playing coy linguistic games, mainly, to deflect from the overwhelming evidence and clear international conventions—and accept the total collapse of academic freedom and shocking assaults on freedom of expression. The anti-genocidal movement was largely composed of and substantially led by Jewish people. But the Jewish people had to be repressed to save the Jewish people.
The elephant in the room for those crying anti-Semitism is obviously the almost total absence of any evidence of harm to Jewish students or to Jewish people. Particularly compared to the current murder of tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of Palestinians by the so-called “Jewish state,” along with the displacement of millions from their homes—not to mention countless other perpetual human rights abuses and violations that have continued unabated for going on a century. Organizations like the Anti-Defamation League have spent more than a century claiming that anti-Semitism is everywhere, in recent years documenting supposed incidents on college campuses with a propagandistic zeal designed to uncritically corral Jewish American support for the so-called “Jewish state.” What evidence have they offered that all of this supposed anti-Semitism is not simply legitimate criticism of the self-proclaimed “Jewish state” committing crimes against humanity that should never be allowed to pass without being vigorously denounced? Very thin evidence. They report Jewish students “feeling threatened” and widely conflate anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism in their survey methodology, leaning into the confirmation bias of an organization specifically seeking to prove its own point.
Now that critics of Israel are being denied due process, arrested, and illegally deported, where are these supposedly ardent believers in rights of students to freedom of conscience, speech, and academic inquiry? If they really believed that the left had been unfairly suppressing the speech of on the part of the rightwing, they should surely be outraged that the inverse is happening, not just on the part of students—who have every right to independently organize and protest against speech they object to. Now the federal government itself has put its thumb on the scales to repress our constitutional rights. But we hear no objections from Republicans in Congress of these unconstitutional actions of the fascist Republican government. It turns out that they only wanted a monopoly on speech for themselves. One is reminded of free speech absolutists like Nat Hentoff, one-time columnist for the Village Voice, who for his entire career rejected those on the left who protested against conservative and reactionary speakers on campus, arguing that the antidote to reactionary voices was criticism—more speech, not less. Now more than ever it’s clear why he had a point.
