Part 1
(Guest post by Andrew Pessin, professor of philosophy at Connecticut College.)
The One Simple Question That Determines Everything
Andrew Pessin
apessin@conncoll.edu
1. Yes or No
It’s a simple yes or no question. Much follows from how one answers the question, but we’ll start with just the question.
(Q) “Is it acceptable to slit babies’ throats, rape little girls, chop off of the hands and feet of teenagers, gouge out eyes, murder children in front of their parents, murder parents in front of their children then kidnap the children, bind entire families together then burn them alive, and livestream all the above including posting videos of their murders to the victims’ own social media accounts—
and worse—on a mass scale—in the pursuit of some political aim?”
I’ve been asking question (Q) of various faculty members at my institution and elsewhere, people whom I previously thought to be quite decent with serious commitments to ideals such as diversity, inclusion, toleration, and anti-racism, in the form of asking them to publicly name the perpetrators of the October 7 massacre and condemn the atrocities, full stop.
They have overwhelmingly refused to respond.
Based on what I have seen, out of some 200+ faculty members at my institution only four are willing to publicly condemn the brutal, sadistic, barbaric slaughter by Hamas of some 1200 mostly Jewish civilians, including many babies, children, teenagers, disabled people, and grandmothers, full stop.
If any other identity group had experienced a mass slaughter like this, or even a far smaller one, or even an abstract harm of some sort, does anyone doubt these faculty members would erupt, loudly and for days? Not a hypothetical, at least here: not only was there much outraged chatter after (for example) the Pulse nightclub massacre in 2016 or the George Floyd matter in 2020, but this past spring our now former President scheduled an event at a venue that had had discriminatory policies
fifty years ago, and the faculty here exploded in weeks of outrage, departmental statements of solidarity with harmed students, with cancelled classes and then a cancelled President.
But when it’s Jewish babies and children, raped, tortured, dismembered,
decapitated, there is silence.
And these are the
decent people.
Many others across many campuses clearly think the answer to (Q) is “yes.” Cornell professor Russell Rickford found the October 7 bloodshed positively “
exhilarating”; Columbia professor Joseph Massad was
filled with “jubilation and awe,” finding the massacre “astounding.” And Marc Lamont Hill of CUNY answered (Q) more or less explicitly when he
wrote, “So many university academics who insist upon doing performative, virtue signaling ‘land acknowledgements’ at every public event are eerily silent as real liberation struggles are happening. Guess decolonization really is a metaphor for some folk…” He clearly derides those who are all talk and no action, so for him, at least, the answer appears to be “yes,” at least in the pursuit of “decolonization.”
Nor are these professors alone in their sentiments. Lamont Hill’s remark also came after ten days of massive campus rallies openly
celebrating the “resistance,” the sanitized word for the mass torture and slaughter of Jewish civilians. Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), the leading campus group with some 200 chapters, immediately endorsed and defended the massacre by openly
proclaiming that “decolonization is a call to … actions that go beyond … rhetoric,” including “resistance … in all forms,” including “armed struggle,” and illustrated their social media with images of homicidal hang gliders in case we missed the point. Most tellingly, they declared that they “are PART of this movement, not [merely] in solidarity”—the movement, that is, that guns down unarmed dancing teenagers.
So Rickford, Massad, and Lamont Hill have a
lot of fellow travelers in the affirmative camp, faculty and students, people for whom all that gore
is apparently fine if it’s for “decolonization,” at least when the victims are Jews.
Blogging about Israel and the Arab world since, oh, forever.
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