The groves of bloodthirsty academe

Next only to the shock from the barbarity of the attacks on the day of 7 October 2023, has been the cold-blooded complicity of academics in explaining away, if not outright justifying, Hamas terrorism.

I learnt this first-hand during the fortnight after 7 October. For several years I have been a subscriber to a well-known email list, whose subject is described as network cultures, in which are discussed media, art, the digital world, and the perceptions that surround these. On it, academics from Europe and the USA often take issue with cultural theorists and artists.

On 8 October a post titled ‘Silence on Palestine’ appeared on the list and attracted comment: “The Palestinians have been pushed into a position of having very little choice” and “When a Palestinian fights for their freedom they are automatically a terrorist” and even “In a perfect world Hamas would sit in the Knesset and discuss problems”.

Nowhere was there the most elementary recognition of the demonic attack upon those attending the music festival and upon families in the kibbutzes being terrorist action, nor that Hamas is officially held to be a terrorist organisation by both the European Union and the USA.

A compilation of my posts to the ‘nettime’ academic email list on the subject of the Hamas terror attacks. My last post of 19 October was censored from the list. Click the image for the pdf file.

Sickened by this position, which was the overall line adopted by writer after writer, I registered opposition by pointing out that “Hamas is a terrorist organisation, there is no other way to see it. Hamas is a creation of the Muslim Brotherhood, which has been described as “the world’s incubator of modern Islamic terrorism” and for 35 years Hamas has brought bloody violence against Israelis and Palestinians.”

The responses that swiftly crowded in reeked of intifada propaganda. “Comparing the behaviours one can easily label the IDF as a terrorist organization”, “Israel, under the influence of its war party, has become an apartheid state”, “The threat to Israel comes from their own apartheid policies, and from the support they receive for those policies”.

Just as disconcerting, I found, were the retreats into the ivory tower – “Commercial media outlets and considerably commercial social media are means to prohibit solidarity” – and the allegations that I am commissioned to express what I did – “Your charges sound like AIPAC talking points” (the AIPAC is the American Israel Public Affairs Committee)” and “You must be quoting Israeli press releases and conveniently omit all the Israeli violations of international law”.

And so it went on for 12 days. In every correspondence I began by repeating that Hamas is a terrorist organisation, repeated the death toll, the hostages, and their rocket fire. Then the wretchedness of Gaza in stark contrast to the hundreds of millions of dollars that have flowed in as assistance and aid, the antecedents of the use of violence against Israelis and Jews in the origin of the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO), the threat by Hezbollah and its sponsors, the rising incidents of anti-Jew hatred and intimidation in Europe and North America, the nauseating ‘celebrations’ in western cities about the 7 October attack.

It made no difference. I was called an Israeli “bot” and as supplying a “blatantly misleading and a very callous reading of history”. This is what confronts us today, the unhinged leftism that has taken hold of universities in the ‘west’ (and just as important, in their partner institutions in the ‘east’, which means fast-developing Asia, and India). This is the strident activism that resorts to moral equivalence between a terror federation and professional defence forces, that howls for ‘proportionality’ but for one side only.

Not European left politicians, not American leftist professors and their ‘woke’ acolytes, nor their critical race theory and cancel culture networks – now with Asian characteristics – have condemned the Hamas atrocities. This is the nihilist cancer that needs rooting out.