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The Inhumanity of Academic Freedom

A transcript of the 2019 TB Davie Memorial Lecture at the University of Cape Town, delivered August 7, 2019.

I begin with a straightforward proposition: academic freedom is inhumane. Its inhumanity isn’t of the physical, legal, or intellectual variety. Even at its best, academic freedom is capable of transforming human beings into instruments of bureaucracy. It is inhumane as an ontological category. It cannot provide the very artifact it promises: freedom. To become practicable, academic freedom requires textual boundaries. Under this sort of regime, freedom is merely academic.

A Simple Question

A civil inquest into the incompatibility of electoralism and decolonization.

After a conversation with my wife in which she encouraged me to deploy language that won’t disaffect leftists enamored of US political spectacles, but instead invite them into conversation about why I consider it troublesome to mythologize presidential candidates by whitewashing their Zionism and thus diverting hard-won energy from Palestine’s national movement into electoralism (innately anathema to decolonization), I’ve been considering how to act on the advice, for I’ve tried the soft approach many times, always with the same result—a snide and often belligerent defense of pragmatism—and I can’t imagine that result changing because ultimately the objection to recalcitrance isn’t about tone so much as outlook, ethics, ambition, and ideology, and yet I want to honor the appeal to decorum, so with an open heart I ask, “What words might I use to illustrate that Palestinian well-being is more important than networking opportunities and podcast appearances, that investment in electoral politics is both dull and provincial, that instinctively defending parties in position to proffer social capital betrays the wretched and dispossessed, that nothing in this vanishing world matters more than keeping alive the idea of freedom (real freedom, untethered to the numbing conventions of US exceptionalism), that beautiful possibilities arise when we attempt to inhabit alien sensibilities—is there anything, in other words, I can say that would convince you to stop colonizing the left on behalf of liberalism and calling it a revolution?”

Tulsi Gabbard and the Art of the Half-Sentence

Gabbard’s views on Palestine appear to have evolved, but that doesn’t mean they’re good.

People in the Palestine solidarity community have been debating the merits of Tulsi Gabbard’s presidential campaign. Gabbard has earned the sympathy, or at least the interest, of some activists, while others (including myself) dismiss her as a Zionist.

Gabbard’s supporters point to occasional tweets and comments critical of Israel (most of them actually critical of Netanyahu). The best of them came during the Great March of Return in 2018: “Israel needs to stop using live ammunition in its response to unarmed protesters in Gaza. It has resulted in over 50 dead and thousands seriously wounded.”

It Ain’t Merit

Reactionary pundits are infuriating, but we should reserve much of our anger for the media that generate their fame.

A recent Intercept article about Mohamad Tawhidi, the so-called “imam of peace,” a rightwing, Zionist, Islamophobic Shia cleric (no, seriously), sheds light on his rapid emergence as a media darling:

Tawhidi’s public career began, as he recently told “intellectual dark web” star Dave Rubin, when he “was discovered” by a producer for a tabloid news show on Australia’s Channel 7. “I got a call from Channel 7,” Tawhidi told Rubin, “and apparently they Googled ‘imam,’ ‘Adelaide,’ ‘Muslim,’ just to get a comment.”

He speaks with pride where shame is appropriate:

“So they came in wanting a three-minute comment on a certain issue and I gave them a 30-minute talk about the Muslim community,” Tawhidi continued, “and the director gets in touch with me and [said], ‘We can do a lot with what you’re saying.’”

The Influence of Anxiety

What happens when you no longer feel like eating?

It began in 2007. I had been in Jordan with my father; our spouses remained stateside. He got on fine, with dozens of doting nieces and nephews keeping him flush with arak, but I decided to cut the trip short. Booze was never my thing.

I missed my wife and our small condo in Blacksburg, Virginia, but mostly I’d seen enough of Madaba, my father’s hometown, despite the charm of its stone alleys and shabby storefronts, ambiance for a carnivalesque sense of tenor and motion. It was the time of year when many residents spend the night on verandas and rooftops.

College Administrators Care About Your Speech Rights–If You’re a Nazi

They disapprove of speech favorable to Palestinians, however.

Discussing free speech in the United States is a losing proposition. Every political demographic screams about hypocrisy, but doing so misses the larger point: it’s impossible to lionize speech as understood in this country without also being hypocritical. That’s because civil liberties are indivisible from the needs of power. In many cases, speech isn’t performed as a freedom; it’s an asset exploited by the shrewdest consumers.

Ripping the Headlines

What do corporate media headlines tell us about ruling class agendas? As always, Palestine provides an answer.

Headlines are critical and often decisive elements of any news cycle. They inhabit a specific rhetorical genre—being a kind of art, as well—one reason why most publications don’t allow contributors the honor of writing them. They can be tantalizingly vague, purposefully misleading, or notoriously sensational (looking at you, Salon). But, like any textual phenomenon, they’re never neutral. Even headlines that aim to be functional omit infinite possibilities; editors select certain words over others, limit description according to ideological need, and influence a reader’s focus. (These conventions aren’t inherently bad, but they preclude objectivity.)

James Baldwin and the Jewish State

Baldwin didn’t speak often of Israel, but he still managed to say plenty

For James Baldwin, nothing started or stopped at the borders of the United States. His comments about Black-Jewish tension in the country of his birth took on worldly dimensions, offering unusual insight into domestic race relations, international affairs, and conflict in the Middle East.

Baldwin wasn’t a policy wonk, but, befitting a person of his stature, he commented regularly on contemporary issues of global import. Public figures don’t normally escape questions about Palestine and Israel; Baldwin was no exception. The few times he spoke about the region reveal a thinker of significant prescience and a skilled rhetorician who doesn’t allow audiences the luxury of comfort.

BDS is a Picket Line

And crossing it makes you a scab

Last week, Shadi Hamid, a scholar affiliated with the Brookings Institute, announced on Twitter that he was visiting “Israel” and the “Palestinian territories” as part of a “study tour” sponsored by the Philos Project, a Christian Zionist outfit with warlike proclivities which “believe[s] that the Jewish nation is an indigenous nation of the Middle East with a right to live in its ancient homeland.” The announcement didn’t go over well with members of the Palestine solidarity movement.