(August 3, 2020 / JNS) Ending capitalism, that is the ultimate solution, preached Rabab Abdulhadi, the radical, Israel-hating San Francisco State University associate professor of ethnic studies. Throughout the U.S. Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israels (USCACBI) June 30 webinar, she and other professors pilloried Israel as an outpost of Western colonial oppression.

Pitzer College anthropology professor and Zoom host Daniel Segals introduction set the stage for the webinars repetitive droning. He began with the now ubiquitous virtue-signaling land acknowledgement that Californias Pitzer College continues the project of settler-colonialism with the occupation of indigenous land. The wider Claremont Colleges must seek to resist, disturb and work through this settler-colonial facet of racial-capitalism, as well as its devaluing of black lives, to reach a future defined by restorative social justice. Pivoting via intersectionality to the webinars topic, he asserted that Pitzer is complicit also in Israeli state apartheid, occupation and ethnic cleansing through an Israel study-abroad program. For good measure, Segal praised college chapters of JVP and its thuggish ally: Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP).

Thuggish leftist nihilism also characterized Abdulhadis comments, as when she sputtered that companies should just go out of business, or in her references to Lenins dictum on imperialism. She warned that trying to actually appear that we are conciliatory towards the Zionist project [i.e., Israel] is very problematic. She also praised Americas ongoing riots and Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement as having the makings of an intifada.

Consequently, Abdulhadi lauded the then-upcoming July 1 Day of Rage against Israels possible declaration of sovereignty in the disputed West Bank. Such events ostensibly commemorate the fallen of a racial project encompassing such disparate places as Brazil, Kashmir, Puerto Rico and the wider United States. Adhering to the ideology of intersectionality, she looped in the myth that Michael Brown was killed and martyred by a police officer in 2014 in Ferguson, Missouri.

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Abdulhadis targets included universities, which are also corporations and act like corporations, as indicated by their dismissals of lecturers and junior scholars, actions, she claimed, that threatened to silence activists like her. She ignored widespread shouting down and even violence against conservative speakers in academic cancel culture. Rather, she claimed a de-legitimization of rage, de-legitimization of anger, de-legitimization of emotions in order to kind of rescue a colonialist notion of civility of doing the proper things, Mrs. Emily Post, and the proper etiquette. By contrast, for her militancy is really important, although oftentimes in the academy, there is a construction of activism and commitments as something outside of what we do like a hobby.

Comrade Rabab had a soulmate in her fellow webinar participant, UCLA African-American studies professor Robin D.G. Kelley. We go way back, he said of Abdulhadi, whom he praised for organizing numerous African-American delegations to Israel and thereby linking Israeli apartheid to anti-black racism. Epitomizing the hyperbolic, thin-skinned academic, he claimed that Rabab has faced decades, decades, decades of repression, violent repression within institutions she works win. This astonishingly overlooks that the securely employed Abdulhadi freely speaks and writes without violent repression from any institution.

While Abdulhadi nodded in agreement, Kelley proclaimed that justice is indivisible and global. He praised Palestinian-black solidarity that since the 1960s has been resisting racialized, state-sanctioned violence, a new abolitionist generation, as if Abraham Lincoln would have hated Israel. This has started a post-1967 radical insurgency that moved beyond the nation-state as a path of decolonization that is dedicated to eradicating all forms of oppression.

This insurgencys utopian aims included replacing police, military and prisons with non-carceral paths for safety and justice. Similarly fanciful are freeing the body from the constraints of inherited and imposed normativities, protecting the earth, ending precarity, acknowledging indigenous sovereignty. Staying with this evidence-free cant, he lamented that subjugation of racialized subjects has been foundational to modern finance and industrial capital around the globe.

Kelleys liberation theology did not include Jews in Israels colonial project or in America, for whom the 1960s ghetto rebellions had signaled the demise of the old black-Jewish alliance. Concurring with Abdulhadis support of Jewish Voice for Peaces (JVP, where she is an adviser) Deadly Exchange campaign, he promoted the blood libel of devastating consequences of U.S. and Israeli joint police trainings for American minorities. The knee-to-neck choke hold that [Minneapolis police officer Derek] Chauvin used to murder George Floyd has been used and perfected to torture Palestinians by Israeli occupation forces through seventy-two years of ethnic cleansing and dispassion.

The terrorism-supporting, former SJP member Nerdeen Kiswani, chair of New York Citys unapologetically anti-Zionist organization Within Our Lifetime/United for Palestine, spouted Marxism while sporting a hijab. She maligned Israels ongoing genocide and current nefarious agenda that dates from the initial annexation of Israels very 1948 independence. For her, militancy is principles and not trying to make yourself palatable for white, Western consumption in an America built on white supremacy, and imperialism, and capitalism are laudable traits.

The webinars tiresome, jargon-laden discussion contained not a single original thought; anyone exposed to academia over the past few decades has heard it all before. The COVID-19 pandemic has forced these webinar participants to abandon live events for now. But their universities are already begging Congress, state legislatures and donors for massive bailouts in order to continue indoctrinating students with hate-filled, anti-American, anti-Israel propaganda. To the contrary, taxpayers, alumni and anyone concerned about the growing nihilistic, violent, Marxist far-left should demand the defunding of academe absent serious reform. It is past time for Abdulhadi and her ilk, who use their constitutional liberties to undermine the civilization that makes their lives possible, to lose their publicly supported sinecures.

Andrew E. Harrod is aCampus Watch Fellow, freelance researcher and writer who holds a Ph.D. from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University, and a J.D. from George Washington University Law School. He is a fellow with the Lawfare Project. Follow him on Twitter at:@AEHarrod.

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Privileged profs don mantle of victimhood to rage against Israel and America - JNS.org