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mccarthyism
By Rescinding Its Offer to Raz Segal, the University of Minnesota Has Scaled Mt. Irony
To protect a state conducting mass murder and starvation, pro-Israeli extremists essentially discriminated against an Israeli for his views.
Jun 25, 2024
The resurrection of McCarthyism in the U.S. has returned in full force since October 7. Careers have been truncated, protests have been muffled, and employment opportunities curtailed.
MSNBCcanceled “The Mehdi Hasan Show” in November. In June, Briahna Joy Gray was canned by The Hill, where she co-hosted the Rising web series. Almost 30% of students who demonstrated against the Israeli genocide and famine as a weapon of war had their jobs rescinded. University presidents have responded to pro-Palestinian encampments on campuses in true anti-First Amendment fashion (and hence anti-American) by calling in the police to clear them. While the police have used heavy-handed tactics against pro-Palestinian activists, when the same protesters were attacked by a pro-Israeli mob, the police stood idly by.
While these are just some instances of McCarthyism related to Palestinian rights not seen since the 1950s Red Scare, this month has shown us layer upon layer of irony, yielding Mt. Irony.
As Americans have been constitutionally granted the right to free speech, it would make sense that they not be punished with police crackdowns, university and corporate firings, and refusals to hire when they choose to exercise this fundamental right.
The University of Minnesota rescinded its offer to Israeli historian and leading genocide scholar Dr. Raz Segal to become director of its Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies (CHGS). Dr. Segal had been prescient in describing Israel’s onslaught on Gaza as a “textbook case of genocide” during the first week of the conflict, when Israel had already killed almost 1,900 and displaced more than 400,000 Palestinians.
The canceling of Dr. Segal’s directorship was fueled by two CHGS board members resigning in protest of his hiring and pressure from a local Jewish advocacy group. Interestingly, the advocacy group did not just have a problem with Segal’s genocide article. The group also voiced concern over Dr. Segal describing Israel as a “settler-colonial” state and his alleged dismissing of campus antisemitism. If the latter claim is true, it was likely dismissed by Dr. Segal as he surely understands that almost all the “antisemitism” on campus related to pro-Palestinian protests is not antisemitism at all. It is just discomfort with students decrying Israel’s genocide, constructed famine, and apartheid.
Here’s where the layers of irony come in.
One layer is that an Israeli scholar was barred from a university position by those who are pro-Israeli, in an extreme, fundamentalist sense. To protect a state conducting mass murder and starvation, pro-Israeli extremists essentially discriminated against an Israeli for his views. They sacrificed one person’s career for the greater good of genocide and starvation.
The ironies mount.
Second layer: Dr. Segal had the foresight and, frankly, courage to call out Israel on October 13, 2023, for perpetrating “another chapter in the Nakba,” in which a genocide was unfolding. In his article for Jewish Currents, Dr. Segal noted his status as a scholar of genocide. For his experience and expertise, he was selected to become the director of University of Minnesota’s CHGS—to guide the center’s role in studying genocide and the Holocaust. For utilizing his knowledge in calling out the ongoing genocide in Gaza, he was prevented from leading an organization that focuses on genocide. The university would apparently prefer to hire someone who cherry picks which genocides to actually consider genocide. If I were to guess, these would be genocides that the U.S. did not perpetrate (such as those committed against Native Americans or the Vietnamese) or act as an accomplice to (such as Bangladesh in 1971).
The last layer of Mt. Irony is the revival of full-fledged McCarthyism in the U of M’s trampling on the First Amendment. Because Dr. Segal exercised First Amendment rights within an American magazine, he was prevented from assuming CHGS directorship. Universities are supposed to be bastions of open discussion and debate, yet University of Minnesota and innumerable other U.S. higher learning institutions have embraced the antithesis.
Mt. Irony is deeply interwoven with troubling contradictions in the American public sphere. As Americans have been constitutionally granted the right to free speech, it would make sense that they not be punished with police crackdowns, university and corporate firings, and refusals to hire when they choose to exercise this fundamental right. If one speaks up against injustice, one’s career should not be curtailed. At least, so says the First Amendment.
The Clash’s “Know Your Rights” lyrics ring true, now more than ever:
You have the right to free speech
As long as you’re not
Dumb enough to try it
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'Truly Horrifying': Trump Allies Already Making List of Federal Employees to Target
"This is an intimidation tactic to try to menace federal workers and sow fear," said the American Federation of Government Employees.
Jun 24, 2024
A right-wing organization allied with presumptive Republican nominee Donald Trump and funded by the group behind Project 2025 has reportedly begun assembling a list of federal employees deemed potentially disloyal to the former president, an effort that is drawing comparisons to the McCarthyite crusades of the 1950s.
The American Accountability Foundation (AAF), headed by former Republican Senate staffer Tom Jones, is "digging into the backgrounds, social media posts, and commentary of key high-ranking government employees, starting with the Department of Homeland Security," The Associated Pressreported Monday.
The group, according to AP, is "relying in part on tips from his network of conservative contacts, including workers." AAF, which received a $100,000 grant from the Heritage Foundation—the right-wing group spearheading Project 2025—intends to publish its list online once it's completed.
In its
announcement of the $100,000 "innovation prize," the Heritage Foundation said the award would support AAF researchers as they work to "alert Congress, a conservative administration, and the American people to the presence of anti-American bad actors burrowed into the administrative state and ensure appropriate action is taken." Heritage proudly noted that AAF contributed to the smear campaign that derailed Gigi Sohn, President Joe Biden's erstwhile nominee to serve on the Federal Communications Commission.
This is a truly horrifying story about MAGA hunting federal workers. ⤵️ One complaint: the piece falls for the ruse that Heritage is doing this separate from trump but the two are joined at the hip on project 2025. News coverage should clearly say that. https://t.co/4XqkLxd6QX pic.twitter.com/H5dOHpIm3g
— Jennifer Schulze (@NewsJennifer) June 24, 2024
The American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE), the nation's largest federal workers union, condemned AAF's initiative as "an intimidation tactic to try to menace federal workers and sow fear."
"Civil servants are required take an oath to the Constitution—not a loyalty test to a president," the union wrote on social media.
During his final weeks in office, Trump signed an executive order establishing an entirely new category of federal employees known as "Schedule F." Before Biden rescinded the order shortly after taking office in 2021, tens of thousands of federal workers were to be reassigned to the new category, under which they would lose employment protections typically afforded to career civil servants—making them far easier to fire.
Trump has made clear that, if he beats Biden in November, he intends to revive the Schedule F order as part of a broader effort to bend the federal government to his will and target his political enemies.
"We will pass critical reforms making every executive branch employee fireable by the president of the United States," Trump said during a rally in South Carolina in March 2022, before he formally launched his 2024 campaign. "The deep state must and will be brought to heel."
Axios has reported that Trump's "top allies are preparing to radically reshape the federal government if he is reelected, purging potentially thousands of civil servants and filling career posts with loyalists to him and his 'America First' ideology."
"The public list-making conjures for some the era of Joseph McCarthy, the senator who conducted grueling hearings into suspected communist sympathizers during the Cold War," AP reported. "The hearings were orchestrated by a top staffer, Roy Cohn, who became a confidant of a younger Trump."
AP noted that while AAF "won't necessarily be recommending whether to fire or reassign the federal workers it lists," the group's work "aligns with Heritage's far-reaching Project 2025 blueprint for a conservative administration." The blueprint states that Trump's Schedule F order "must be reinstituted."
Skye Perryman, CEO of the watchdog group Democracy Forward, told the outlet that AAF's plans recall some of "the darker parts of American history."
Echoing AFGE, Perryman said Trump's allies are trying to "chill the work of these civil servants" as part of a "retribution agenda."
"They're seeking to undermine our democracy," she added.
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These New Attacks on Academic Freedom May Be Just the Beginning
While U.S. faculty have long been outspoken on controversial issues, these attacks on academic freedom are the worst in nearly 60 years.
May 19, 2024
During the wave of campus protests opposing the U.S.-backed war on Gaza and calling for divestment from Israel, students weren’t the only demonstrators to face arrest—supportive faculty members were also caught up in the crackdown.
At Columbia University, where president Minouche Shafik was pressed to resign by members of Congress for being too lenient toward the protesters, the university’s School of Public Health censured a South African faculty member from teaching about the health impacts of settler-colonialism. Shafik has also placed professors who have used terms like “settler colonialism” or “apartheid” in the context of Israel under investigation for alleged anti-Jewish discrimination, and removed professors from teaching assignments in response to complaints by rightwing students.
When Shafik testified before Congress in mid-April, she announced that Middle Eastern Studies professor Joseph Massad had been removed as chair of the university’s Academic Review Committee following claims by Republicans that he had said Hamas’s murder of Jews was “awesome, astonishing, astounding, and incredible”—even though he never said anything of the sort. She also failed to correct false claims by Republican committee members regarding Columbia Law Professor Katherine Franke, stating that she and Massad were under investigation for discriminatory remarks.
As Irene Mulvey, national president of the American Association of University Professors, toldThe New York Times, “We are witnessing a new era of McCarthyism where a House committee is using college presidents and professors for political theater. President Shafik’s public naming of professors under investigation to placate a hostile committee sets a dangerous precedent for academic freedom and has echoes of the cowardice often displayed during the McCarthy era.”
And Columbia isn’t the only university where faculty feel as though their academic freedoms are being steadily revoked.
Indiana University faculty have overwhelmingly endorsed a vote of no confidence in their president, provost, and vice-provost for suspending a tenured political science professor for a full year from teaching or advising—without the normal review process—after he hosted a talk by an Israeli-American peace activist that the university tried to ban.
Columbia isn’t the only university where faculty feel as though their academic freedoms are being steadily revoked.
Jodi Dean, a tenured professor at Hobart & William Smith College and a noted political theorist, has been suspended from teaching duties as a result of writing a blog post supportive of the Hamas attack. Although there had been no complaints from students about their interactions with Dean, the college’s president claimed that she had led students to feel “threatened in or outside of the classroom.” While her essay was widely condemned, even by pro-Palestinian faculty, there has been no such disciplinary action against professors who have defended the far greater violence against civilians by U.S.-backed Israeli forces.
At Texas Tech University, Jairo Fúnez-Flores, an assistant professor of curriculum studies and teacher education, had criticized U.S. policy towards Israel-Palestine on social media and was suspended after unsubstantiated claims of antisemitism appeared on a rightwing website. Similarly, at New York University, a popular adjunct who is critical of Israel was suspended due to complaints that were not revealed to him or the public. At University of Arizona College of Education, an assistant professor and community liaison were placed on leave for leading a discussion about civilian casualties in Gaza. An adjunct professor in American cultural studies at Washington University was “relieved of all job duties” and “prohibited from being on any part of the University campus” after taking part in a pro-Palestinian demonstration campus in which he and other peaceful protesters were arrested.
Graduate student instructors and teaching assistants have been particularly vulnerable and, in several instances, have been removed for simply noting the humanitarian consequences of Israel’s war on Gaza.
Administrations have been interfering with curriculum as well. At Albany Law School, a professor was ordered to unpublish a law review article by a prominent U.S. legal scholar and a legal briefing issued by a respected U.S. civil rights organization related to Israel-Palestine.
Unfortunately, the Biden Administration, rather than fighting this crackdown on academic freedom, has been supporting it. The Department of Education has opened a Title VI investigation into the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill because a Black professor in the Department of Communication said in a class that “Israel and the United States do not give a shit about international law or war crimes.” Such criticism of U.S. policy, according to the Biden Administration, may constitute discrimination against Jews.
Biden also launched an investigation against a George Washington University psychology professor for alleged antisemitism for critical comments about Israel just days after an independent investigation found no evidence to support the charges.
Faculty, however, are fighting back, particularly in defense of their students. At Columbia, Barnard, the University of Texas, and elsewhere, there have been walkouts and work stoppages. Faculty senates have condemned administrations for their violations of academic freedom, issued no confidence resolutions against their administrations, and have provided support—such as food deliveries—for students in their encampments.
Scores of faculty members have also been arrested, risking their careers and even physical safety.
At Indiana University, four professors were detained trying to protect students engaged in peaceful protests in a recognized free speech zone on campus, and have since been banned from campus for one year. At Washington University, historian Steve Tamari was brutally beaten by police while supporting peaceful demonstrators and was hospitalized with multiple broken ribs and a broken hand. Even faculty observers who were not participating in the protests themselves have become targets, such as at Emory University, where Economics professor Caroline Frohlin was body slammed during her arrest and Noelle McAfee, chair of Emory’s philosophy department chair, was also arrested. At Dartmouth, Annelise Orlick, the sixty-five-year-old head of the Jewish Studies program, was twice pushed to the ground while being arrested and initially banned from campus for six months, although that was later rescinded.
While U.S. faculty have long been outspoken on controversial issues, these attacks on academic freedom are the worst in nearly sixty years. While they are in part related to pressure from rightwing Zionist groups and donors, these actions can best be understood in light of the broader attack by the right against higher education as a whole.
Rep. Elise Stefanik, Republican of New York, for example, has refused to condemn Donald Trump’s antisemitic comments and associations, and touted the Great Replacement Theory and other antisemitic tropes; she is now leading the charge against antiwar and pro-Palestinian faculty for alleged antisemitism. The attacks that led to the forced resignation of Harvard University president Claudine Gay were orchestrated not by Zionist groups, but by figures like conservative activist Christopher Rufo, who was also behind the assault on critical race theory.
The crackdown is having an impact. A survey of Middle East Studies faculty revealed that “82 percent of all U.S.-based respondents, including almost all assistant professors (98 percent), said that they self-censor when they speak professionally about the Israeli-Palestinian issue.”
While the right may be taking advantage of concerns of antisemitism, this disturbing trend should not be seen in isolation. What’s happening on campuses may only be the beginning.
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