By Randy Alonso Falcon on April 21, 2024 from Havana
When a real and final catastrophe befalls us in Palestine, the first responsible would be the British and the second responsible would be the terrorist organizations formed from our own ranks. I am not willing to see anyone associated with such criminal and deceived people.- Albert Einstein in a letter of April 1948 after learning that Zionist paramilitary groups had murdered more than a hundred Palestinian Arab civilians in a Jerusalem village, Deir Yassin.
The tentacles of international Zionism are powerful and manifold. They sprout everywhere like ivy. And they suffocate whoever gets in their way.
The brutal war unleashed by Israel against the Palestinian people since October 7 has also had collateral victims in academia, media, culture and business. Anyone who dares to criticize the Israeli genocide or show solidarity with the Palestinian people may fall victim to the deadly embrace of Zionism.
Elite universities in the United States have witnessed the powerful Zionist arm and its imperial elite accomplices. On those campuses where university authorities have not been openly pro-Israel or allowed pro-Palestinian student demonstrations, they have ended up paying with resignation or demotion.
The presidents of Harvard University, the University of Pennsylvania and MIT were forced to resign or apologize after being questioned in the U.S. Congress in a McCarthyite-style session for allegedly tolerating anti-Semitic acts at their institutions.
During the appearance in front of Republican and Democratic lawmakers, House Republican Conference Chairwoman and Donald Trump supporter Elise Stefanik charged that several students supported intifada, which is an Arabic word meaning uprising and interpreted by many Jews as a call for violence against them. Stefanik asked Penn’s president whether calling for the genocide of Jews constituted bullying or harassment, to which Liz Magill replied that “if it is targeted, severe or pervasive, it is harassment.”
On January 2, Harvard’s first African-American president resigned for her “lukewarm” response to the impeachment trial in the U.S. Congress on whether she would take action against students who sing “Intifada” or “From the River to the Sea”.
Since her appearance in Congress, Dr.Claudine Gay, suffered all kinds of attacks and invective. “Those who relentlessly campaigned for my impeachment often trafficked in lies and ad hominem insults, not arguments,” Gay wrote in The New York Times in announcing her resignation.
“They recycled old racial stereotypes about black talent and temperament. They pushed a false narrative of indifference and incompetence,” she said.
On Dec. 10, another of the chancellors questioned at the congressional public hearing, Elizabeth Magill of the University of Pennsylvania, had already resigned. Her defense of academic freedom and freedom of speech and her refusal to answer “yes or no” questions made her position as chancellor untenable, in the face of pressure from the institution, and another trophy of the extreme Trumpist right.
The root cause, no doubt, was the university’s major benefactor, businessman Ross Stevens, rescinding a $100 million donation to the business school in protest said of the university’s handling of anti-Semitism on campus by the university and its leadership.
Support for Magill had previously taken a hit over her refusal to cancel a Palestinian writers’ conference
Scott Bok, chairman of the board of trustees of the “Ivy League” – as a group of eight prestigious U.S. universities is known – also resigned that day during a meeting of board members, just hours after Bok announced Liz Magill’s resignation from her position as president, a post she had held for just two years.
Even after repression from the school admin. and NYPD, students at Columbia hold the encampment on the Butler Lawn. Photo: Wyatt Souers, Peoples Forum
The lesson was well learned by the chancellor of Columbia University in New York. Dr. Minouche Sahfick lashed out on April 18 against a pro-Palestinian student sit-in on the Columbia campus.
The Chancellor said that the demonstration “represents a threat” to the functioning of the university and said that she had requested “help from the NYPD to expel these people”.
More than 100 students were arrested by police forces. Several students who participated in the protest said they were also suspended from Columbia University and Barnard College, including Isra Hirsi, daughter of Congresswoman Ilhan Omar.
“It is terrible that our own university throws students out of their homes – residences – and, on top of that, gives them only 15 minutes to leave,” denounced a student – who preferred to keep her name confidential – and who was one of those detained by the authorities. The students were not just thrown out of their residences but also, were dropped from the university health insurance and cafeteria plans.
The university indicated that it was still identifying students who participated in Thursday’s protest and that there would be more suspensions.
The student protest opposed Israeli military action in the Gaza Strip and called for greater transparency from the university regarding the institutions it funds and a rejection of its investment in companies that “profit from Israeli apartheid.” The students’ criticism of the University’s transparency and its investments emerged with force after a hearing of Columbia’s president before the U.S. Congress, where she had to defend herself against accusations of anti-Semitism by Republican congressmen.
Her answers, in which she tried to get out of a similar controversy that led her Harvard counterpart to resign, disappointed students and sparked the sit-in, although since the war in Gaza began on October 7, this is not the first pro-Palestinian protest on campus, but the largest.
As in previous Congressional hearings targeting elite universities, the onslaught was led by far-right Republicans like Elise Stefanik, a supporter of the anti-Semitic, white supremacist “Great Replacement Theory,” and Jim Banks, an outspoken defender of the Jan. 6 fascist coup attempt and ally of Zionist stalwart Marjorie Taylor Greene. Most of the participants began their remarks by reaffirming the lie that opposition to Zionism constitutes anti-Semitism.
Columbia University Chancellor testifying before Congress.
A report of the session on World Socialist Web describes, “Congressman Tim Walberg, who has called on Israel to annihilate Gaza with nuclear weapons, insisted that the university “discipline” Joseph Massad, a tenured professor of Arab Politics at Columbia University. Columbia President Nemat Shafik, a former senior official at the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the Bank of England, responded that Massad was being “vetted,” a fact of which the professor had never been informed until the hearing. When confronted about the hiring of Mohamed Abdou as a visiting professor, Shafik responded chillingly, “He’ll never work at Columbia again.
“Stefanik and other congressmen named several professors, calling for them to be fired and for Columbia to review its hiring procedures. One congressman described a faculty member who opposed genocide as “a wretch.” Congressman Joe Wilson (R-S.C.) called for censure of faculty and students who argue that capitalism is “a system of economic oppression.”
Shafik stated that the university was “in regular contact with the NYPD and the FBI” and that further “disciplinary action” would be taken against dissident students and faculty.”
Despite the repression driven by Zionist forces and their allies, other student communities have risen up these days in solidarity with the Columbia students, including those enrolled at Harvard University itself.
Google defends its links to Israeli genocide
A few hours before the Columbia arrests, 28 Google workers were fired for their participation in protests in New York and California to demand an end to the tech giant’s complicity in the Israeli genocide in Gaza and its occupation of Palestinian territory. Charges against the nine workers arrested Tuesday night after peacefully occupying Google’s offices should also be dropped.
Google workers fired for standing for Palestine.
The Google employees were demanding that the company abandon its work on Project Nimbus, a $1 billion cloud computing contract that provides the Israeli government, including the Israeli Defense Ministry, with cloud computing services, including artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning. A leaked contract shows that Google billed the Israeli Defense Ministry $1 million for consulting services.
Protesting employees carried placards demanding, “No more genocide for profit” and “No cloud for apartheid.” Their brave stand was met with swift repression: the company called the police to remove them from the offices for trespassing and the employees were fired.
Chris Rackow, Google’s head of global security, sent a memo to all employees threatening anyone who even considered protesting Google’s involvement in the genocide. “Following an investigation, today we terminated twenty-eight employees involved. We will continue to investigate and take whatever action is necessary,” Rackow stated, adding, “If you are among the few who are tempted to think that we will overlook conduct that violates our policies, think again.”
A statement from Google workers with the No Tech for Apartheid campaign in response to the summary firings noted that those who took action were within their rights: “Google workers have the right to peacefully protest under the terms and conditions of our employment. These firings were clearly retaliatory.” The statement denounced parent company Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai and Google Cloud chief Thomas Kurian as “people who profit from genocide.”
Kate Sim, a child safety policy advisor and one of the workers who were ousted, said of them, “Listen when employers tell you exactly who they are. McCarthyism is still alive and well. And just look at how terrified of the power of the workers they are.”
The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) has been shown to have been using other artificial intelligence tools, in particular a program known as Lavender developed by the IDF’s espionage Unit 8200, for its ethnic cleansing operations in Gaza. In six months, the IDF has damaged or destroyed more than half of the homes in the narrow territory and have killed at least 40,000 Palestinians, half of them children. At least 99 veterans of Unit 8200 were working for Google in 2022.
In March of this year, Google fired computer engineer Eddie Hatfield for protesting Project Nimrod during Mind the Tech, an annual Israeli conference held in New York. A letter signed by more than 600 employees denounced the company’s sponsorship of the conference under the headline, “Stop profiting from Israeli apartheid and violence against Palestinians.”
As of this writing the courageous sit in at Columbia’s main quadrant continues despite the arrests and hysterical threats from the administration. (to be continued)
Source: Cubadebate translation Resumen Latinoamericano – English