During Chanukah, two students defaced a Menorah at
Northeastern University, and Northeastern’s Students for Justice in
Palestine (SJP) led an ugly anti-Israel/pro-Hamas rally in Copley Square. One
observer noted “the virulence of the chants and messages on the placards… suggest
that more sinister hatreds and feelings… were simmering slightly below the
surface.” Such sentiments suggest that our campus has imported some of the ugliest and most belligerent aspects of the
Middle East conflict, including the murderous desire of those who want to
eliminate Israel and rule over “Palestine, Palestine, from the river to the
sea!”
University officials, of course, called the defacing of the
Menorah unacceptable, but Northeastern president Joseph Aoun did so in generic remarks that
failed to mention Jews or anti-Semitism, a signal that neither he, nor any
other administrator, is likely to deplore the SJP’s hate-fest in Copley Square,
even though it is both more disturbing, and constitutes a more direct
indictment of the university itself.
The Popular Nazi Meme
Northeastern
has had a checkered career in dealing with anti-Semitism, Israel and the Middle
East. In 1991, Bernard Stotsky, a World War II veteran, endowed a chair in
Jewish historical and cultural studies, with particular emphasis on the
Holocaust. But holders of the chair have tended to veer in other directions. By
the middle of the last decade, the chair was occupied by a professor who
supports the anti-Israel BDS movement (Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions). A series of revelatory documentaries by a watchdog group called Americans for Peace and Tolerance (APT), drew attention to Northeastern’s abuse of the Stotsky chair.
Northeastern’s treatment of the Holocaust was also disgraceful. To commemorate Holocaust Awareness Day, the university hosted a screening of Defamation, a
film that compares Israeli solidiers to Nazis. Worse, it insinuates that many Holocaust survivors have attempted to profit from their horrifying stories.
A Hostile Academic Takeover
The meme that Israelis are the new Nazis,
though popular with anti-Semites everywhere, including some allegedly serious academics,
defies reason. Morally, this rhetoric is verbal sadism (when Jews embrace it, masochism),
that seeks to degrade and humiliate Jews. In academic terms it deserves
attention, not as a serious representation of reality, but rather as a weapon,
a “lethal
narrative” in a cognitive war developed by racist Palestinians to mark Jews
as a legitimate target of violent revenge. Hence the chant of the SJP in Copley
square: “When people are occupied, resistance is justified.” Of course, we all
know, the primary Palestinian form of “resistance” (especially from Gaza) is targeting
Israeli civilians.
APT’s work
documents not only the hijacking of Holocaust, but places it within a larger
framework that should concern all who cares about the resilience of American
civil society and the democracy it makes possible. They reveal the presence
within the Spiritual Life Center at
NEU of a Muslim Chaplain, Imam Abdullah Faruuq, a Jihadi agitator whose actions
at NEU were financed in large part by the Roxbury Mosque. His campus activities
made a mockery of the “Center,” dismaying both Jewish and moderate Muslims with
his hate speech.
More
broadly and more seriously, however, they reveal a hostile takeover of the
academic discussion of the Middle East on campus. Instead of presenting the
“Palestinian narrative of suffering” (in which the Israelis are the new Nazis),
as the story told by the (most radical and irredentist) Palestinians,
professors like Shahid Alam and Dennis Sullivan, presented it as the correct
way to interpret the Middle East conflict. Under their authority, this lethal
narrative, became a new, hegemonic academic orthodoxy at Northeastern
University. Without the slightest trace of awareness of how his attitude
violates the very principles of good scholarship and pedagogy Alam bragged:
…Over the last few years, that situation [where harsh
criticism of Israel was difficult] has been entirely reversed… so that most of
my students… understand, know the truth…[P]eople
listen with great appreciation and attention. And no one disagrees. If there are one or two people who want to say
something, they don’t because they
can sense that they will get no support from the class.
And, if any
students inclined to defend Israel from this onslaught of lethal rhetoric and
class-room intimidation should take a course with Dennis Sullivan, they will run
into the same kind of intellectual bullying: one-sided syllabi, penalty in
grades for disagreeing with the professor.
Weaponizing the Campuses
Now Alam’s
“truth” is not in any way an academic work but rather a
polemic, a work of unabashed fantasy (Palestinians are descended from the
ancient Canaanites). It deploys a stream of accusations about murderous
Zionists that, especially considering its extensive inaccuracies, could
reasonably be described as weaponized “hate-literature,” aimed at destroying
Israel. That same strategy of destruction explains why the Holocaust Memorial
Committee got hijacked: in
the words of Nadim Rouhana, an academic activist from Tufts, featured at an
NEU Holocaust event: Israel “has made every political [use] of the Jewish
Holocaust to gain support for the Jewish State.” So what better way to attack
her than to destroy that shield against hatred. Is this anti-Semitic? Shahid Alam
embraces the accusation:
“If you are an academic or an activist, if they call you [Anti-Semite] wear
that as a sign of distinction. This proves that I’m working for the right side,
for the just cause.”
If Alam is
a poster
boy for weaponizing academia with the “Palestinian narrative of suffering”
to conduct a ruthless cognitive war, Dennis Sullivan is a poster boy for the stupefaction
this process involves. His comments in a lecture on the place
in the negotiating process of Hamas, the most explicitly genocidal of all the
Palestinian organizations, reveals an almost willful disregard for both
relevance and accuracy. “Hamas is a terrorist organization, sure. They also do
great health care and kindergartens.” Now aside from the deterioration of
health care conditions in Hamas-run Gaza, the idea that somehow kindergartens
where children are brainwashed
in genocidal hatred and trained to desire martyrdom above all, serves as a counter-argument to their terrorism,
defies both sound reasoning and judgment.
All told,
APT’s work reveals a stunning degradation of both the academic integrity and
the collegial sociability of campus life at NEU where matters concerning the
Middle East, Jews, and Muslims are concerned. Perhaps the most disturbing
aspect is the abysmal level of
intellectual discourse, a willful ignorance that systematically avoids
discussing anything that challenges this belligerent orthodoxy, and excludes
any voices that might offer students an opposing view. Is this where
Northeastern wants to be?
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Richard Landes is a professor of history at Boston University.
I’d be curious to know NU’s speech codes and, assuming they’re like most of those on non-public campuses, what would happen if someone complained about the overt anti-Semitism.
My guess is, “nothing much.”
Not to turn this into a general “anti-Northeastern” discussion, but Bob Sykes’ comments are correct. I also feel the author’s assessment of President Aoun’s email is spot-on. I personally had a bad experience at the university and feel the author and Mr. Sykes’ comments touch on a lot of my complaints about the school.
One particular area not mentioned, that also lead me to the conclusion that Northeastern’s conduct is at least disgraceful, (although perhaps not criminal), is its treatment of many international students. They are accepted into an English language college preparatory program (called Global Pathways) with the expectation of receiving admission to the University thereafter. Although the school markets the program that way (even actively advertising), it admits students who it knows are not qualified to enter the university, and makes it very difficult for those who could (versus staying in their home country and taking a TOEFL preparatory class during the same timeframe). Keep in mind this is a full-tuition-price program.
The majority of the students from this program either go home empty-handed, or get placed into the “College of Professional Studies,” which I could best describe as a for-profit college subsidiary of NEU, comparable in quality and reputation to those “universities” which advertise on late-night television in the hopes of attracting students. Most return home with a near-worthless degree and no employment.
Although I wasn’t an international student myself, this situation always bothered me while there. I felt many of those students were the victims of false-advertising and “bait and switch” tactics as the University sought to increase its endowment at students’ expense. Between this, the above-described antisemitism, and the fact that University building projects often displace African-Americans in the nearby working-class neighborhood, I do not see how Northeastern officials could talk about so-called “diversity” with a straight face.
I hope that my experience was unique and that I simply misunderstood the international programs from my outside perspective, and that my alma mater was a better school than I have come to believe. As I see it now, I will never, ever donate even one penny to this university, and would strongly discourage any perspective student from considering matriculation.
I graduated from Northeastern in 1966 when it was a very large commuter school dedicated to educating working class students like me who had aspirations to a middle class life style. A number of years ago, NU turned its back on the working class and became just another run-of-the mill university with a second-rate, pretentious faculty.
In recent years, it has become clear that NU is actually exploiting its students, allowing them to run up huge debts (ca $200,000) while pursuing lame, dead-end degrees. The only beneficiaries of this debt are the administrators and faculty. The students’ lives are destroyed.
NU has always had an anti-intellectual air, which was fine when it was a trade school. But, in the 60s there were plenty of Jews on campus and there was no anti-Semitism, at least that I can remember. No doubt, the virulent anti-Semitism of NU administrators, faculty and students is imitative and the product of mere envy. They think they see it in the Ivies, and they want to go them one better. They see anti-Semitism as the hallmark of a modern liberal institution.
I have not given NU any money for many years. Nowadays, it is just a criminal organization, stealing from its students and indoctrinating them in hate. It should be closed down.