Tag Archives: Gaza

Robert Massie at Princeton

Posted on by under activism, ethics, General announcements, Memorials and Obituaries, Neutrality and Complicity, Notes on the Anti-War Movement, Palestine

“Divestment and the Boundaries of Conscience”
As regular readers of this blog know, I’ve been involved since 2024 in the campaign to induce Princeton University to divest its holdings, not just from Israel, but from arms manufacture and military affairs as such. 

It was about a year ago that I got it into my head to get Robert K. Massie IV involved in our efforts. Massie is one of the architects and chroniclers of the decades-long campaign to divest from apartheid South Africa; I’d first encountered his book Loosing the Bonds twenty years ago, and been impressed by the rigor of his argument, as well as by the wealth of detail and moral passion he brought to the subject. Continue reading →

Morituri Te Salutant

Posted on by under cancel culture, Memorials and Obituaries, Neutrality and Complicity, Notes on the Anti-War Movement, Palestine

I woke up this morning to find an email from one of my best friends in Palestine, someone who lives in a small village in the South Hebron Hills. I’ve excerpted it below, deleting personal names, and omitting place names and other particulars, and corrected the grammar of one sentence for clarity. It’s in English, but I’ve provided a tl; dr translation just after the block quote. The word “football” refers throughout to soccer. Continue reading →

Is It Time to Bomb Columbia University?

Posted on by under activism, anarchism, cancel culture, moralism, Neutrality and Complicity, Notes on the Anti-War Movement, Palestine

I had a conversation the other day with a friend who just started law school at Columbia. This person told me that on the first day of orientation, the first-year law students were visited by officials from Columbia’s so-called Office of Institutional Equity (OIE). According to OIE, the chant “From the River to the Sea, Palestine Will be Free,” is presumptively to be understood as advocacy of genocide, as discrimination against Jews, and therefore as a violation of Title VI. Anyone who chants it thereby becomes a candidate for reprimand, suspension, and/or expulsion. So they were instructed not to chant it. A couple of things can be said about this, I think. Continue reading →

Dreams of Death

Posted on by under Memorials and Obituaries, Neutrality and Complicity, Notes on the Anti-War Movement, Palestine, slices of life

I dreamt last night of my late wife, Alison. I didn’t see or hear her, and I was in a mostly unfamiliar place, but her presence was unmistakable. I knew that we were somewhere in Washington Heights near the George Washington Bridge, where we used to live. We were dating in the dream, not yet married, and it was late, so I’d decided to go back home. For some reason, I had to go across the street to a pay phone to call an Uber. It was midnight, but paradoxically enough both bright as noon and dark enough to obscure the way. I called the Uber guy, who was hard to hear, but he said he was coming, and there the dream ended. Continue reading →

The Final Solution Is Here

Posted on by under activism, Memorials and Obituaries, Neutrality and Complicity, Notes on the Anti-War Movement, Palestine

I am, as I write this, sitting in a quiet air-conditioned room in a comfortable, modern library. The window to my right looks out on a bright, sunlit plaza. The plaza hosts a series of high end restaurants, each of which is set up for outdoor dining, with umbrellas to ward off the sun and heaters to keep out the chill. There are maybe a couple of dozen people out there enjoying the warmth of the evening. In observing this scene, a non sequitur of a thought occurs to me. Five thousand seven hundred miles away, a genocide is taking place. People are being starved, shot, and bombed to death with obscene abandon. The contrast is so stark as to be surreal. And yet it’s real. Continue reading →

Loyalty and Academic Freedom

Posted on by under activism, anarchism, Fatwas, Neutrality and Complicity, Notes on the Anti-War Movement, Palestine

The case of Jonathan A. C. Brown
A friend is circulating an Open Letter to Interim President Robert Groves of Georgetown University in defense of Professor Jonathan A.C. Brown, the Alwaleed bin Talal chair of Islamic Civilisation in the School of Foreign Service. Apparently, during the recent US-Israel-Iran war, Brown made this comment on X:

“I’m not an expert, but I assume Iran could still get a bomb easily. I hope Iran does some symbolic strike on a base, then everyone stops,” Brown wrote on X.

Brown has tenure and a chaired professorship at Georgetown, but apparently the comment was regarded as frightening enough to call for his suspension. The President forced Brown to delete the tweet, and he’s now been suspended. He’s also been removed as chair of his department, which I believe was intended as punishment. Continue reading →

Stirring the POT (3)

Posted on by under activism, Neutrality and Complicity, Notes on the Anti-War Movement, Palestine

Genocide and the Academic Chairs of Virtue

I had meant “Stirring the POT” to be a monthly series, but my last one was back in March and it’s now July, so I guess the “monthly” promise was destined to be broken.

I wrote my last installment just after the talk I gave on institutional neutrality at APPE, and a couple of months before the one I was then scheduled to give at the Heterodox Academy conference in June. The Heterodox Academy talk ended up being significantly different from the APPE version or the version I put on the blog back in March. At any rate, the third version was the charm. The talk was well attended and went very well. There were a few skeptical or critical questions during the Q&A which I expected, but there was also some significant agreement, which came as a surprise. I’ll save all the squabbling for a separate post. Continue reading →

Against War with Iran

Posted on by under Fatwas, Neutrality and Complicity, Notes on the Anti-War Movement, Palestine, Trump 2, War with Iran

People like to say that Near East politics is complex, but the war on Iran is blindingly simple. Aggression is immoral, as is participation in it. Israel’s war on Iran is a blatantly obvious, incontestable act of aggression, as is US participation in the war so far, along with any further participation. No one has bothered to provide even a semi-plausible justification for this war, no one can, and no one will. The whole thing is insane.

Continue reading →

Israel’s War with Iran

Posted on by under War with Iran

Between January and March of 2020, I wrote a 24-part series condemning the idea of war with Iran. I then reluctantly added a 25th part last April. I’m not going to repeat any part of that performance now. If you want to read it, click the “War with Iran” tag. Suffice it to say that I knew this day was coming, did my inept share of tilting at windmills about it, and now it’s here.

Continue reading →