If you're expecting George Clooney and his partner to write a play about this, I would suggest holding your breath might be dangerous for your health.
I DIDN'T CLICK ON THIS video yesterday when it started showing up on the sidebar while I was listening to the news. Once I did I have to ask why the ADL and other groups aren't required to register as agents of a foreign country, Israel, which is the largest recipient of US aid. I wonder what argument could be made that groups that worked in tandum with the Israeli government are under a legal requirement to register as agents of a foreign government. In looking at that for this post, I was surprised to find you don't have to get direct money from a foreign government to be a foreign agent.
What they are doing is exactly the same thing that Red Channels did, what other private groups did in drawing up blacklists starting in the late 1940s and targeting, among others, university and other teachers. What is clearly going on now is Americans are being put on a new blacklist and we are going through the current equivalent to the 1940s-60s red scare. WITH CONGRESSIONAL HEARINGS OF THE HUAC VARIETY. If you think that term is too much, you can listen to the reading of this three year old article documenting that it is exactly what we are going through from The Nation.*
Professor Robinson is a sociology professor of global studies, with special expertise in Latin America. This interview largely focuses on his troubles in 2009 when two Jewish students took offense at critical material about Israel in his curriculum and reported him to local pro-Israel groups. Soon the full force of the national/international Israel lobby became involved and sought to get him fired, even including the head of the Anti-Defamation League (Abe Foxman) making a cross-country trip to convene with highest level university officials to get Robinson removed from its faculty.
Initially, Robinson was accused of being an antisemite until it was discovered that he was, in fact, Jewish.
In this interview, professor Robinson discusses the story of his struggle for academic freedom and how he nearly lost his faculty position because of critical material about Israel he presented to his class; widespread censorship and self-censorship about the Israel-Palestine conflict in the academic world; the declared “New Antisemitism” that is merely criticism of Israel and its policies; Israel’s activism in supporting despotic regimes in Latin America; the “dirty and underhanded” efforts by the Anti-Defamation League to control discourse about Israel; “eerie parallels” between the Nazi control of the Warsaw ghetto and Israeli control of Gaza (Robinson makes these comparisons 15 years ago); pro-Israel propaganda organizations on campus; the “tragedy” of widespread Jewish association and identification with the state of Israel; among other issues.
About seven years after this interview, in 2017, Robinson co-edited a book called “We Will Not Be Silenced: The Academic Repression of Israel's Critics.” Judging by information about this volume today on the internet, it seems – not surprisingly – to have to been largely ignored and never received much attention or media reviews.
* Here is some of what you can read at The Nation without having a subscription:
It was a scene reminiscent of the Red Scare days, of grainy black-and-white television images of political witch hunts by the old House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). But rather than hunting for disloyal communist sympathizers, committee members at early December’s hearing before the House Committee on Education and the Workforce were instead hunting for university presidents disloyal to Israel. “Are you now, or have you ever been, an anti-Zionist?” quipped New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg. “You can see the trap.”
What is missing from Congress are hearings into the decades of illegal anti-Palestinian espionage, covert action, and blacklisting of Americans within the United States by the Israeli government and its domestic collaborators—actions far more serious and damaging than campus semantics. As noted in my earlier articles for The Nation, they range from dispatching a secret agent to interfere in a presidential election on behalf of Donald Trump; to launching a covert operation within the US targeting academics and others who support a boycott of Israel; to conducting a massive operation to spy on and “crush” pro-Palestinian students throughout the country; to establishing a secret Israeli-run troll farm across the US to harass anyone critical of Israel; to hiring Americans to secretly spy on American students and report back to Israeli intelligence. And then there is Canary Mission, a massive blacklisting and doxxing operation directed from Israel that targets students and professors critical of Israeli policies, and then launches slanderous charges against them—charges designed to embarrass and humiliate them and damage their future employability. All secretly funded by wealthy Jewish Americans and Jewish American foundations.
Following the October 7 Hamas attack and the launch of Israel’s war in Gaza, members of Harvard’s Palestine Solidarity Committee (HPSC) sponsored a letter addressing the conflict. “Today’s events did not occur in a vacuum,” it said. “For the last two decades, millions of Palestinians in Gaza have been forced to live in an open-air prison. Israeli officials promise to ‘open the gates of hell,’ and the massacres in Gaza have already commenced.” The letter was cosigned by 33 other student organizations and published in The Harvard Crimson, the campus newspaper. Almost immediately, Canary Mission created online profiles for members of the Crimson’s editorial board (though a few likely already had one from when the Crimson endorsed divestment), along with profiles of the leaders of the HPSC and other campus clubs that cosigned the letter. The goal of the blacklist was to dox those named, encourage their harassment, and limit their future employment prospects.
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