Most Bigoted, Genocidal Representative in Congress smears Juan Cole as a Racist

Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – The House Committee on Education and the Workplace, headed by the increasingly unhinged Rep. Virginia Palmieri Foxx (R-NC), held another Stalin-style show trial on Thursday, grilling the presidents of Northwestern University, Rutgers University, and the University of California Los Angeles about how they dealt with campus student protests against the Gaza atrocity. The clown car on Capitol Hill even tried to pick up yours truly. (Yes.)

Foxx and her MAGA colleagues are much more concerned about cracking the heads of principled undergraduates than about the 15,000 dead children in Gaza.

One of the presidents on the hot seat was Northwestern’s Michael Schill, who had dealt with the protests about as well as a person in his position could have, negotiating an agreement with the demonstrating students that included providing for two-year visiting fellowships for two Palestinian faculty and full scholarships for five Palestinian undergraduates. When I was an undergraduate, I had a full scholarship to Northwestern, so I don’t see what is wrong with that.

Schill, a descendant of Holocaust survivors, had to put up with angry Christian neo-fascists telling him how to run the university and keep Jewish students safe. Many of the university protesters have been idealistic young Jews from movements like Jewish Voice for Peace. Schill underlined that he had set up a commission on antisemitism on campus.

I can say, since the crackpot Rep. Tim Walberg spilled the beans, that the committee at Northwestern, which was concerned to include perspectives on Islamophobia and anti-Arab bigotry, asked me to give a presentation.

Walberg confronted Schill on my testimony, accusing me of being an antisemite. Since I am the director of the Arab and Muslim American Studies Program at the University of Michigan and have spent 52 years studying Arab and Islamic Culture (I started first year Arabic in 1972), I have the credentials, if I do say so myself, to speak about anti-Arab and anti-Muslim hate. Walberg does not, of course. In fact, he is a notorious racist against those very groups.

But let’s get this straight. A commission on fighting antisemitism and other forms of bigotry at Northwestern asked me to make a presentation to them, and I did. And my testimony against antisemitism and other forms of bigotry is being used by Walberg to prove that I’m an antisemite?

I actually have written about Walberg, possibly the most bigoted member of Congress, which is saying a lot. I pointed out a couple of months ago,

“US Representative Tim Walberg (R-MI), a former pastor, called this week for a genocide, the Final Solution of the Palestinian Problem . . .

At a meeting in Dundee with constituents on March 25, Walberg said that President Biden had spoken of our need to get aid into Gaza. He said, “I don’t think we should. I don’t think any of our aid that goes to Israel, to support our greatest ally, arguably maybe in the world, to the feet of Hamas, and Iran, and Russia. Probably North Korea is in there and China, too — with them, helping Hamas. We shouldn’t be spending a dime on humanitarian aid. It should be like Nagasaki and Hiroshima. Get it over quick.”

“Nuking Gaza,” by Juan Cole, Digital, Dream / Dreamland v. 3 / IbisPaint, 2024.

Unfortunately for Walberg, who likely talks like this all the time with his inner circle of fellow sociopaths, his remarks were recorded.

Michigan Congressman Tim Walberg, pastor and "good" Christian, talks about his solution for #Gaza: Give it the Hiroshima treatment. "Get it over quick."

A sitting US Rep in a secret town hall feels comfortable musing positively about genocide. Listen. Share.#DemCastMI #DemCast pic.twitter.com/6BQGfWMVjZ

— JMS 🫱🏻✋🏻 #DemCastMI (@WhitchMI) March 30, 2024

Walberg has also visited Uganda, which made being gay a capital crime, urging its government to continue to kill gay people. And he is part of the movement to take reproductive choice away from women so as to keep them barefoot, pregnant and firmly under the control of men like himself.

Everybody should send money to the Democratic Party challenger to Walberg in Michigan’s fifth district, former steel worker and union stalwart Libbi Urban . I know I will.

Also if you want to help out Informed Comment, which appears to have upset the MAGA snowflakes in Congress, here’s how:

So why did Walberg say I am an antisemite? He quoted me as “claiming that Israel quote, was founded on a formal racial supremacist principle that Jews must rule the state, and that, quote, ‘The only thing that Palestinians and their sympathizers can do to make Zionists happy is to bend over and allow themselves to be royally screwed.'”

Of course, Walberg wasn’t actually alleging that I had said anything antisemitic, only that I criticized Israel, and MAGA is trying to equate the two, as though criticizing Mexican president Andrés Manuel López Obrador is equivalent to bigotry toward Chicanos.

In 2018 I wrote a column on the Israeli Parliament’s passage of a law that vested “sovereignty” solely in the Jewish citizens of Israel, excluding the 21% who are of Palestinian heritage. I pointed out that this would be like the US Congress passing a law that sovereignty in the United States is vested solely in white Christians. (At the time I thought it far fetched,, but maybe Elise Stefanik, Virginia Foxx and Tim Walberg have such plans).

So I wrote, “2018 was in many ways a turning point for the position of Israel in the system of Western, liberal, capitalist democracies. It had long sat uneasily among France, Britain, and the United States, inasmuch as it was founded on a formal racial supremacist principle that Jews must rule the state. Racism is important in the other democracies, as well, but it is not typically enshrined in the constitution. The French Rights of Man mentioned nothing about race.” Anyone who knows anything about the thinking of founders of Israel such as David Ben Gurion, whom I am sure that Walberg has not read, knows that he precisely held that Israel would be a state for Jews where Jews must rule.

As for the second quote, it was in a 2015 column in which I complained about CNN firing Mark Lamont Hill. I pointed to the success of letter-writing and smear campaigns by pro-Israel groups in disallowing a compassionate consideration of the plight of Palestinians. In that column, I wrote:

This success is not because “Jews” are “powerful.” First of all, only a minority of Jewish Americans sympathize with the far right politics of the Likud Party. Jon Stewart used to complain tongue in cheek that if Jews were so powerful he ought to have been able to get off basic cable and have a network show.

The success is because right wing white people are so powerful, and many of them still have a latent belief in the goodness of colonialism and in the White Man’s Burden. Melanie McAlister argued brilliantly that for right wing Christian whites in the United States, the Israeli domination of the Palestinians is a symbolic reenactment of the Vietnam War, in which this time the “white people” (as they characterize themselves) win instead of losing. I.e., Israel functions as did those old Rambo movies.

I think my point is borne out by the spectacle of Elise Stefanik, a proponent of the antisemitic and fascist Great Replacement Theory, strafing poor Michael Schill and weaponizing antisemitism for MAGA white Christian nationalist purposes.

I then went on to write,

One of the standard Israeli propaganda techniques is to equate any resistance to their frankly fascist techniques of social control imposed on the colonized Palestinians with “terrorism.” There is nothing new or strange about this. The British in India considered Gandhi a terrorist. Of course the colonial state views opposition as terrorism.

That same dishonest columnist at The Forward managed to reconfigure Hill’s activism as violence. The fact is that international law recognizes the right of occupied peoples to mount even violent resistance to occupation militaries. But that isn’t what Hill was calling for. And then, any violence is then twisted around as violence toward civilians. And there you have it. Terrorism.

The golden magic circle of Hasbara (Zionist propaganda) gives us: resistance= violence= terrorism.

The only thing the Palestinians and their sympathizers can do to make Zionists happy is to bend over and allow themselves to be royally screwed– or better yet, allow themselves to be deported from their homeland of millennia at the hands of the Russian and Polish immigrants.

As we speak, the Polish prime minister of Israel is trying to deport 2.2 million indigenous Palestinians from Gaza by making the Strip uninhabitable.

I think if you read the whole column it is pretty obvious it isn’t about Jews at all. It is about virulent right wing Zionism, which now rules Israel in an increasingly fascist manner.

The American right wing is now trying to equate criticism of the Israeli government with antisemitism, and if you let them do that, you may as well kiss the First Amendment goodbye.