Letter to the Chancellor of the Florida State University System regarding the policing and censorship of course materials relating to Israel/Palestine

Raymond Rodrigues
Chancellor, State University System of Florida
chancellor@flbog.edu

Dear Chancellor Rodrigues:

We write on behalf of the Middle East Studies Association of North America (MESA) and its Committee on Academic Freedom to express our grave concern about recent measures announced by the State University System of Florida that will police and censor teaching about Israel, Palestine, the Middle East and related topics at the state’s public universities and colleges. While the State University System has framed these measures as combatting “antisemitism” and “anti-Israeli bias,” we regard this new policy directive, along with other recent measures taken by the state and its officials, as a politically motivated attack against First Amendment-protected speech and academic freedom at Florida’s public institutions of higher education.

Arabic words have a proud and positive history in the English language. Consider a few:

Magazine is one of my favorites. It comes from the Arabic word for storehouse, makhzan. In French, it was borrowed as magasin, which just means “store.” From the mid-1600s, books in English that listed things of interest to particular groups of people started using it in their titles, so it gradually took on the meaning of a special interest periodical.

Or how about sequin, a small disk used as an ornament on clothing. It came through the French and Italian from the Arabic sikkah, a die for coining.

Then there is mattress, from matrah a cushion or rug that you lie on. In modern Arabic taraha can mean to broach (a subject) or to posit, since the root has to do with laying things out.

Or what would a nice room be without an alcove, a recessed or arched section or opening? It is from the Arabic al-qubbah, meaning a dome or vault.

And of course we could go into chemistry, algebra, alcohol and a host of other scientific terms, since medieval Muslim science was way more advanced than the European and so was borrowed with alacrity.

But then there are the recent borrowings that have been endowed with negative connotations. Our English word “agony” comes from the Greek for struggling or striving, agonizomai. The Olympic games in modern Greek are called Olympiakoí agónes, So our idea of being in excruciating pain comes originally from the idea of striving hard in a contest. Striving hard in Arabic is jihad. It can be an internal struggle to do the right thing or discipline oneself, or a public struggle to give charity to the deserving. In some contexts it can mean to struggle violently, but that is only one of its meanings. A famous soccer club is called “Nadi al-Jihad,” the “struggle club” or “competitive club.” But in the US the FBI has begun putting the word jihad in indictments for terrorist activity, which is not the connotation of the original. In fact, people give their sons the name “Jihad,” not because they are glorifying violence but because they are naming them for “virtuous struggle.” It is similar to the German girl’s name, Wylda, which means “strive.”

The most recent Arabic word to be demonized is “intifada.” The horrid Elise Stefanik (R-NY) lambasted university administrations for allowing the word to be said on campuses. Since Congress is forbidden to police our language by the First Amendment, they put pressure on private universities and corporations to do it for them.

Congresswoman Lisa McCain in Michigan’s 9th District knew she disliked the word, but didn’t seem to actually know what it was, and kept demanding that Columbia University President Minouche Shafik “denounce the infantada.”

Since it sounded like the Spanish food empanada, her malapropism provoked a good deal of mirth on the internets. I think it would be great if the infantada ended up on the menu in Michigan restaurants.

Since McCain lives in Michigan, which has one of the largest Arab and Muslim populations of any state in the country, I suggest she come to Dearborn for the truly magnificent Lebanese, Yemeni and other food, and talk to some locals about what intifada actually means to them. Alas, she won’t find infantada on the menu, though.

Then on Tuesday a spokesman for President Biden’s White House actually denounced the term “intifada” as “hate speech” and hinted that using it was a form of antisemitism. But Arabic is a Semitic language, so how can a Semitic word be “antisemitic”? I’m confused.

Al Jazeera English Video: “Arrests at Columbia University: Police enter hall where students barricaded”

Intifadah derives from the three-letter root n-f-D. The verb nafada means to remove or to clean. Thus you use it for getting dirt off clothing. “His two hands nafada from something” means he gave up on it.

Arabic verbs are based on three-letter roots, as in Hebrew, and are then put into “molds” to create further meanings and connotations. In Form 7 you slip the equivalent of an “i” before the root and insert a “t” after the first letter.

That gives you intafada, a verb which has many meanings but can denote to “rise,” or “rise up,” or “revolt.”

Intafada al-shay’ means “the thing moved or was disturbed.”

Intafada al-karm means the vineyard became succulent.

Intafada al-sha`b means “the people rose up or revolted.”

It is this last sense that seems to have infuriated the members of Congress. But uprisings aren’t all bad.

The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum has an Arabic website. On one of its pages it explains the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. The word for “uprising” in the title of the article is — you guessed it — “intifada.”

The Nazis forced Polish Jews into one section of Warsaw in 1940, isolating them from the outside world. Some 400,000 were crowded into small apartments in squalor. Then in September of 1942 the Nazis began deporting them to death camps like Treblinka. Some organized to make a stand and there was a skirmish in January of 1943. In April a full-scale rebellion of the remaining Jews broke out, the Jewish Ghetto Uprising. They engaged in an intifada against the Nazis. Doomed though the effort was, I think we’d all agree that it was a noble intifada.

Al-Ittihad [Unity] newspaper in Arabic did a retrospective on the youth demonstrations in France and elsewhere in Europe in May, 1968. You guessed it. They called it an intifada. So does the Arabic service of France 24.

The Arab Spring youth revolt against dictator Hosni Mubarak in Egypt? An intifada.

Jordan’s al-Ra’i [Opinion] newspaper, ironically enough, refers to the U.S. campus demonstrations against Israel’s Gaza campaign as, yes, an intifada, as do many other periodicals.

Of course, the object of the ire of the US Establishment is two particular moments of popular push back against oppression, the first and second Palestinian intifadas in the Palestinian West Bank against Israeli colonization, in the late 1980s and again at the turn of the century.

This PBS site explains of the first that “The First Intifada was a largely spontaneous series of Palestinian demonstrations, nonviolent actions like mass boycotts, civil disobedience, Palestinians refusing to work jobs in Israel, and attacks (using rocks, Molotov cocktails, and occasionally firearms) on Israelis.” It was largely nonviolent, though, so people denouncing it aren’t denouncing violence but the failure of the Palestinians to acquiesce in their own oppression and slow-motion ethnic cleansing.

In short, the paroxysm of anti-Palestinian bigotry that has swept the United States, no doubt deriving in some large part from a bad conscience over our complicity in their genocide, has now advanced to the point where an attempt is being made to outlaw perfectly ordinary words such as “uprising.”

I predict that it will fail, and that what the Arab world is applauding as the “intifada” of the American universities will only derive further energy from the attempt to suppress them.

On April 24, a diverse coalition of students assembled at Alumni Park to protest several things. Chief among them were:

1. The administration’s unprecedented decision to deny the valedictorian of the graduating class, this year a Muslim woman of South Asian heritage, the opportunity to make an address at commencement and

2. The ongoing genocide of Palestinians in Gaza by Israel. Students protesting accordingly made several demands of the USC administration, which included calls for divestment and steps to improve campus climate. Students’ plans for the day included yoga sessions, a series of teach-ins about Palestine, and inter-faith activities, all leading to a vigil for the dead at sunset. Protesting students were joined by faculty and other members of the university community. This included several people from our own department, including numerous undergraduate and graduate students. At least four faculty members also joined those gathered at Alumni Park both to protest USC’s complicity in genocide and to ensure the safety of our students. Students were in fact peaceful; they posed no plausible threat to any other member of the university community; their actions were confined to a small part of campus; and they were in no way, shape, or form disruptive to the university’s mission or its day-to-day activities.

Despite these facts, the university administration decided to invite the LAPD onto campus, armed with batons, shields, armor, rubber bullets, and tear gas. In so doing, the administration escalated unnecessarily and introduced violence and weapons into a situation where there had been none.

The actions of USC administration:

· Needlessly and irresponsibly subjected students, faculty, and the wider university community to violence

· Led to the unjust arrest of 93 individuals for trespassing in the place where they work and study; among those arrested were two members of the History Department faculty

· Activated tools of state coercion to suppress free speech and free assembly on campus Like any institution of higher learning, USC’s mission commits the university to developing, cultivating, and applying new knowledge through teaching and research. It is our job as faculty to produce new knowledge, transmit that knowledge to our students, and then help them apply it ethically and morally for the betterment of our communities. We have a duty of care to our students and an ethical commitment to the pursuit of free inquiry. The university administration is therefore obligated to create and maintain a safe space where students and faculty may enjoy the intellectual, social, and material conditions under which teaching and research can flourish. On April 24, learning and exchange did continue. Due to the administration, this was sadly moved from the safety of the classroom and the university commons to police wagons and jail cells. Under no circumstances is any of this acceptable.

On these points, the university administration’s failure is total. By resorting to authoritarian methods, the university has created an environment where inquiry cannot be pursued and ideas may not be freely exchanged. In subjecting our students and colleagues to arbitrary violence, the administration has forfeited its right to lead. We accordingly demand:

· The immediate resignation of President Carol Folt, Provost Andrew Guzman, Senior Vice President Errol Southers, and Chief Lauretta Hill

· That the university drop all charges against the 93 individuals it had LAPD unjustly arrest and reimburse them any and all expenses incurred due to needless detention

· That the university refrain from further intimidation of students involved in peaceful protest or other forms of campus activism, whether it be threatening expulsion, suspension, the loss of scholarships, fellowships, and employment, or other punitive actions

Signed:
*Richard Antaramian, Associate Professor of History
Alice Baumgartner, Associate Professor of History
Marjorie Becker, Professor of History and English
Philip Ethington, Professor of History, Political Science, and Spatial Sciences
*Joan Flores-Villalobos, Assistant Professor of History
Jason Glenn, Associate Professor of History
*Josh Goldstein, Professor of History and East Asian Languages & Culture
Wolf Gruner, Professor of History, Shapell-Guerin Chair in Jewish Studies, and Founding
Director of the Center for Advanced Genocide Research
Sarah Gualtieri, Professor of American Studies & Ethnicity and History and Middle East Studies
Alaina Morgan, Assistant Professor of History
Jay Rubenstein, Professor of History and Religion and Director of the Center for Premodern
World
George Sanchez, Professor of American Studies & Ethnicity and History
Laura Isabel Serna, Associate Professor of History and Cinema & Media Studies
Nayan Shah, Professor of History and American Studies & Ethnicity
Francille Rusan Wilson, Associate Professor of American Studies & Ethnicity, History, Gender &
Sexuality, and Director USC Black Studies Initiative/Emerging Center
Benjamin Uchiyama, Associate Professor of History
*Aro Velmet, Associate Professor of History
*statement co-author

Relevant video added by Informed Comment:

ABC 7: “LAPD arrests more than 90 people after pro-Palestinian protest at USC”

Interrogations of university leaders spearheaded by conservative congressional representatives. Calls from right-wing senators for troops to intervene in campus demonstrations. Hundreds of student and faculty arrests, with nonviolent dissenters thrown to the ground, tear-gassed and tased.

We’ve been here before. In my book “Resistance from the Right: Conservatives and the Campus Wars in Modern America,” I detail how, throughout the 1960s and into the 1970s, conservative activists led a counterattack against campus antiwar and civil rights demonstrators by demanding action from college presidents and police.

They made a number of familiar claims about student protesters: They were at once coddled elitists, out-of-state agitators and violent communists who sowed discord to destroy America. Conservatives claimed that the protests interfered with the course of university activities and that administrators had a duty to guarantee daily operations paid for by tuition.

Back then, college presidents routinely caved to the demands of conservative legislators, angry taxpayers and other wellsprings of anticommunist outrage against students striking for peace and civil rights.

Today, university leaders are twisting themselves in knots to appease angry donors and legislators. But when Columbia University President Minouche Shafik called in the NYPD to quell protests, she was met with a firm rebuke from the American Association of University Professors.

If the past is any indication, the road ahead won’t be any easier for college presidents like Shafik.

Lawfare from the right

Throughout the 1960s, students organized a host of anti-war and civil rights protests, and many conservatives characterized the demonstrators as communist sympathizers.

Students spoke out against American involvement in the Vietnam War, the draft and compulsory ROTC participation. They demanded civil rights protections and racially representative curricula. The intervention of police and the National Guard often escalated what were peaceful protests into violent riots and total campus shutdowns.

11Alive: “Over 20 taken into custody at Emory University after explosive protests”

From 1968 into the 1970s, conservative lawyers coordinated a national campaign to sue “indecisive and gutless” college presidents and trustees whose approach to campus demonstrations was, in conservatives’ estimation, too lenient.

The right-wing organization Young Americans for Freedom hit 32 colleges with lawsuits, including private Ivy League schools like Columbia, Harvard and Princeton, as well as public land-grant universities like Michigan State and the University of Wisconsin.

The legal claim was for breach of contract: that presidents were failing to follow through on their end of the tuition agreement by not keeping campuses open and breaking up the protests. Young Americans for Freedom sought to set legal precedent for students, parents and broadly defined “taxpayers” to be able to compel private and public institutions to remain open.

Conservative students further demanded that their supposedly communist peers be expelled indefinitely, arrested for trespassing and prosecuted.

Expulsions, of course, carried implications for the draft during these years. A running joke among right-wing activists and politicians was that protesters should be given a “McNamara Scholarship” to Hanoi, referencing Robert McNamara, the U.S. secretary of defense and an architect of the Vietnam War.

Meanwhile, right-wing activists hounded college leaders with public pressure campaigns by collecting signatures from students and alumni that called on them to put an end to campus demonstrations. Conservatives also urged donors to withhold financial support until administrators subdued protesting students.

Cops on campus

Following the massacre at Kent State in 1970, when the National Guard fired at students, killing four and wounding nine, nearly half of all colleges shut down temporarily amid a wave of nationwide youth outrage. With only a week or two left of the semester, many colleges canceled remaining classes and even some commencement ceremonies.

In response, conservatives launched a new wave of post-Kent State injunctions against those universities to force them back open.

With protests ongoing – and continued calls from the right to crack down on them – many university administrators resorted to calling on the police and the National Guard, working with them to remove student protesters from campus.

In fact, this very moment brought about the birth of the modern campus police force.

Administrators and lawmakers, afraid that local police could not handle the sheer number of student demonstrators, arranged to deputize campus police – who had historically been parking guards and residence hall curfew enforcers – with the authority to make arrests and carry firearms.

State and federal lawmakers attempted to further stifle student dissent with reams of legislation. In 1969, legislators in seven states passed laws to punish student activists who had been arrested during protests through the revocation of financial aid, expulsion and jail sentences.

President Richard Nixon, who had excoriated campus disruptions during his successful White House run in 1968, encouraged college presidents to heed the laws and applauded them for following through with expulsions.

Is ‘antisemitism’ the new ‘communism’?

As the U.S. presidential election approaches, I’ll be watching to see how the Trump and Biden campaigns respond to ongoing student protests.

For now, Trump has called the recent protests “antisemitic” and “far worse” than the 2017 white nationalist rally in Charlottesville. Biden has similarly condemned “the antisemitic protests” and “those who don’t understand what’s going on with the Palestinians.”

Both are repeating the false framework laid out by GOP Reps. Elise Stefanik and Virginia Foxx, a trap that university administrators have fallen into during House inquiries since Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel.

There indeed have been antisemitic incidents associated with pro-Palestinian demonstrations on university campuses.

But in these hearings, Stefanik and Foxx have baited four women presidents into affirming the right’s politicized framing of the protests as rife with antisemitism, leading the public to believe that isolated incidents are instead representative and rampant.

Like their association of civil rights and peace demonstrators with communism throughout the Cold War, politicians on both sides of the aisle are now broadly hurling claims of antisemitism against anyone protesting Israel’s war in Gaza, many of whom are Jewish.

The purpose then, as it is now, is to intimidate administrators into a false political choice: Will they protect students’ right to demonstrate or be seen as acquiescent to antisemitism?

Lauren Lassabe Shepherd, Instructor, School of Education, University of New Orleans

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

MESA Board Joint Statement with CAF concerning escalating repression of protest on campuses

The Board of Directors of the Middle East Studies Association and its Committee on Academic Freedom view with increasing alarm the growing number of attempts to intimidate, repress, and criminalize campus protests against the ongoing Israeli state violence against Palestinians and the US diplomatic, military, and economic support for it. Federal, state and local government officials—from the president, to congressional members, to governors and mayors—have exacerbated the threats on campuses by encouraging university administrators to violate basic commitments to freedom of expression, while casually smearing overwhelmingly peaceful protesters with unsubstantiated claims of violence or discriminatory speech. University leaders should constitute the first line of defense for students and faculty in the face of forces seeking to vilify, harass, and silence them. Instead, we regret that several university boards of trustees, presidents, and their administrations have acquiesced in the ugliest of campaigns targeting their students and faculty for engaging in what have been peaceful protests, joined by a wide cross-section of their campus community.

As Palestine solidarity and anti-war demonstrations have proliferated and intensified, sweeping characterizations of them as violent, dangerous, and antisemitic have been deployed as part of a campaign that has weaponized the language of “safety” to delegitimize, intimidate, and forcibly disperse legal, peaceful dissent. University administrations, most egregiously at Columbia, New York University, and Yale have—in some cases, in violation of their own university policies—called in the police to break up protests and arrest tens of students, some of whom have been summarily suspended and evicted from university housing. At NYU, faculty, too, were arrested. The University of Southern California cancelled the valedictorian’s commencement address after a slanderous hate campaign was launched against her for her pro-Palestinian views; the University of Pennsylvania revoked Penn Against the Occupation’s status as a registered student group; Harvard has now banned that university’s Palestine Solidarity Committee. Given the developments of the past several weeks, we are extremely concerned about what these disturbing events portend as commencement season approaches.

Attempts by universities to limit or suppress Gaza war-related speech and protest have been all too common since shortly after the 7 October attack. But the growing securitization and outright repression on campuses have reached levels not seen since the 1960s. We are witnessing a situation in which, in the name of security, it is university leaders themselves who have become the primary threat to the rights and safety of members of the campus community. The appeasement of malign forces seeking to destroy academic freedom, faculty governance, and curricular diversity, in which Columbia’s president Nemat Shafik so willingly participated during her 17 April congressional hearing, must not be allowed to metastasize. Today the goal is to suppress speech on Palestine, but the battle over free speech and academic freedom on our campuses did not begin, nor does it end, there.

We therefore call upon college and university boards of trustees, presidents, and administrations across the country immediately to clearly and forcefully recommit themselves to the freedom of inquiry, expression, and protest on campus that have been pillars of the US academy for decades. As the massive killing and destruction in Gaza continue, we also demand that you fulfill your responsibility to your profession and your campus community to defend peaceful protesters, uphold academic freedom, and reject all pressures seeking to criminalize peaceful encampments and demonstrations against this horrendous war—and our government’s complicity in it.

Charges that these peaceful on-campus rallies are antisemitic in character are bad faith propaganda by hard line ethno-nationalists who have long striven to equate criticism of Israeli government policy with bigotry toward Jews — a ridiculous proposition. If accepted, this strategy would imply that criticism of the government of Andrés Manuel López Obrador in Mexico is a form of bigotry toward Chicanos. If so, no one has more racialist prejudice toward Chicanos than Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas. The only documented antisemitic slurs have been shouted in the street in New York beyond the Columbia University campus, by outsiders rather than students and faculty. Any bigotry toward Jews is completely unacceptable and wholly contemnible.

The campus demonstrations are instead being driven by outrage at six months of war crimes committed by the fascist government now in power in Israel, which includes ministers who are the Israeli equivalent of neo-Nazis.

It is bad enough that presidents of major American universities are having their students and faculty arrested for “trespassing” on their own campus, with many of them suspended and forced out of their dorms (for which they paid and the rental terms of which they had not violated).

Those same presidents of leading institutions of higher education in the U.S. have stood completely silent as the extremist government in Israel has destroyed every last university in Gaza, leaving 88,000 students stranded and their education interrupted, for who knows how long. Many of them may forever be deprived of their degree.

The Israeli military has also murdered from the sky 5,479 students and 261 teachers .

Reliefweb notes,

“As of 30 March, the Education Cluster estimates that 87.7% of all school buildings in Gaza have been damaged or destroyed. 212 school buildings have had a direct hit and could be severely damaged and a further 282 have sustained moderate, minor or likely damage. Previously 503,500 children attended, and 18,900 teachers taught at the school buildings which have now had a direct hit or sustained major or moderate damage. Every university in Gaza has been destroyed.”

The dead include hundreds of undergraduates and over a hundred professors, as well as three presidents of universities.

Wesleyan President Michael S. Roth is the only one I know of to have publicly denounced this situation (thanks to Laila Lalami for tipping me to this piece).

Apologists for Israel’s total war on the innocent civilians of Gaza, blinded by their ethno-nationalism, may attempt to maintain that these universities were part and parcel of the Hamas government that has ruled Gaza since 2006. This allegation, however, is laughable. Hamas military cadres only come to 37,000 persons by Israel’s own reckoning. None of them were undergraduates or professors of literature.

About 19 institutions of higher education, including 12 universities, in Gaza served 88,000 students and employed 5200 staff and faculty before October 7, since which time they have all been closed and several have been demolished.

As I wrote last winter, the buildings of the al-Azhar University in south Gaza have been largely destroyed by Israeli shelling.

The following footage from TikTok shows the bombing of al-Azhar University in Gaza in November.

@pandapunk303 The sad part is they wont face any punishment. #freepalestine🇵🇸❤️ #alazhar #alazharuniversity #freepalestine #palestine #gaza #istandwithpalestine #foryou #fyp #crime #university #school #speakup #tiktoknew #wow #sad #messedup ♬ سبحان الله – Ali Dawud

The footage below says it shows the state last winter of al-Azhar University in Gaza:

“Destruction of Al-Azhar University in Gaza”

Al-Azhar University in Gaza was established in 1991 by the Palestine Liberation Organization, the secular rival of Hamas. It is not related to the al-Azhar in Cairo. It had 14,391 students and 387 faculty members, though some of these are now dead and none of them have any buildings in which to learn or teach. It had been ranked around 171 out of 200 among Arab regional universities, and it is amazing that it wasn’t at the bottom given that it functioned in an occupied territory under economic siege since 2007.

This was AUG’s medical school.

AU Gaza Kulliyat al-Tibb

That medical school is now not graduating doctors, to say the least.

This scholasticide is not an accident and it has nothing to do with a “war on Hamas” or “self-defense.” It is the typical gutting of a colonized people’s consciousness by a settler colonial state. These actions are intended to cripple Palestinian education and Palestinian culture in Gaza. Israeli leaders have made no secret of their hope to ethnically cleanse the Palestinians from the Strip entirely.