Princeton, New Jersey
5 months ago, 15 of us were arrested for protesting the University’s complicity in the ongoing genocide against the people of Gaza. 2 of us—both graduate students—were arrested on the 25th of April minutes after the launch of the Gaza Solidarity Encampment. 13 of us—Princeton students, researchers, and affiliates—were arrested on the 29th of April for participating in a peaceful protest in a University administrative building. At the time of our arrests, the university barred us from campus and evicted us from university housing, all without formal disciplinary charges. Weeks later, the university conducted a “disciplinary investigation” and sanctioned us with four years of disciplinary probation. One of us, postdoctoral researcher Sam Nastaste, remains barred from campus. These measures are far harsher than Princeton’s response to previous campus protests.
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Tag Archives: Israel
“Pedagogy Under Occupation”: Slides and Key Formulations
Here is the plain text version of the PowerPoint slides (or Google Slides slides) for my July 11 presentation, “Between Indoctrination and Neutralism: Pedagogy Under Occupation,” to be given at the NASSP Conference at Creighton University.
Here is an unstructured list of some of the key formulations from the paper. Continue reading
Force and Fraud on Campus
So much falsehood has been offered up in the last seven months that it seems futile to single out a discrete claim as a particularly egregious example that absolutely demands rebuttal. But one claim happens to combine egregiousness, absurdity, and in my case, proximity in space and time, in a way that really does demand a response.
I’m sure most readers are aware of the recent demonstrations on college campuses in defense of Palestinian rights. I happen to live in Princeton, New Jersey, not far from Princeton University, and have visited Princeton’s Gaza Solidarity Encampment a dozen times in the last six days. Two students were arrested on campus on Thursday, April 25th, and thirteen were arrested on Monday, April 29th, for a total of fifteen arrests. Continue reading
“First They Came for the Professors…”
“….but I was a university administrator, so I called the cops, egged them on, and assumed the role of aggrieved victim.”
Ironically, Emory University’s Caroline Fohlin specializes in the political economy of early twentieth century Germany. You can’t make shit like that up, but her arrest does starkly raise the question posed by Jason Brennan’s valuable book, When All Else Fails: The Ethics of Resistance to State Injustice (Princeton, 2018): when, exactly, does it become legitimate to fight back? And how? Those aren’t rhetorical questions, and the answers don’t involve an infinite regress. Individual human beings have a right of self-defense, after all. Believe it or not, that right isn’t just the monopoly of Jewish States.
Continue readingWar with Iran
I’m gratified to tell you that I have no interest whatsoever in blogging right now about Israel’s recent attack on Iran’s diplomatic complex in Damascus, or yesterday’s Iranian attack on Israel, or the Biden Administration’s pledge of “ironclad” support for Israel, or the years-long “shadow war” that preceded the current altercation. For now, I’ll just remind you that back in 2020, I wrote a series of twenty-four posts about Donald Trump’s contribution to US-Iranian hostilities. Biden’s recent contribution is just a continuation of Trump’s, itself a continuation of several decades’ worth of Western policies aimed at Iran.
Continue reading“The Future Is Being Bulldozed”
An email to me from a reader of the blog who asked to remain anonymous. As it happens, about a month ago, I wrote to two of the Times’s correspondents, Jeffrey Gettleman and Edward Wong, asking similar questions about their coverage of the West Bank. I have yet to hear back from either of them.
This report from a guest reporter to the NY Times is so different in so many ways from the dozens of other pieces, both news and opinion, that they publish. It reports from places where their own reporters never set foot, describes places and events in a specific and granular manner, directly quotes both Palestinians and settlers’ real words rather than quoting only official propaganda statements, and includes the relevant historical context of the places in the report. Continue reading
Nationalism and Liberalism: ‘Policy of Truth’ at the APA
Just a quick announcement that there will be something of a PoT presence at the American Philosophical Association’s Eastern Division meeting this January in New York (to be held at the opulent, hence utterly unaffordable Sheraton New York Times Square). Roderick Long has, through the Molinari Society, arranged a two-part session for Tuesday afternoon, January 16th: “Nation-States, Nationalism, and Oppression” in the 2-3:50 pm slot (Session G7C, listed at APA Draft Program, p. 33), and “Topics in Radical Liberalism” in the 4-5:50 pm slot (Session G8C, listed at APA Draft Program, p. 37). I’ll be presenting some version of my PoT blog post, “Teaching Machiavelli in Palestine” in the first of the two sessions. Continue reading
From Apartheid to Genocide: Israel in Gaza
Blood on all our hands
We cannot hope to wash them clean
History is mystery
Do you know what it means?
Motorhead, “Brotherhood of Man“
In an earlier post, I wrote:
Whether I end up keeping the resolution or not, and barring some extraordinary event that absolutely “demands” comment, my aim is to keep my counsel for the next full year, from now until the beginning of November 2024.
That “extraordinary event” is here. Israel’s open, unapologetic attacks on the medical system of both Gaza and the West Bank are a conclusive indication that we’ve reached a macabre turning point in this “war.” Continue reading
Teaching Osama bin Laden’s “Letter to the Americans”
I’m told that Osama bin Laden’s 2002 “Letter to the Americans” is currently trending on TikTok, and that some people have encountered my short pedagogical paper about it from the Winter 2017 issue of Reason Papers.
The paper began life as a presentation to the 2011 conference of the Association of Core Texts and Courses, which explains the somewhat cryptic references in it to “dialectic” and “the Core” (“dialectic” was, if I remember, part of the official theme of the conference). The presentation later became a contribution to RP‘s “Afterwords” section, where it was called “You’ve Got Mail: Teaching Osama bin Laden’s ‘Letter to the Americans,‘” Reason Papers 39:2 (9 page PDF). Continue reading
“Death, Desolation, and Tyranny”: Israel in Jenin
If the people of Jenin were Americans facing the British in 1776, we would be celebrating the revolutionary war they began. If they were Ukrainians facing the Russians, or Afghans facing the Soviets, we’d be sending them heavy arms to fight a proxy war against our common enemy. But because they’re Palestinians facing our ally, Israel, we arm the power that occupies them, anathematize their resistance, and watch with cold indifference or grim satisfaction as the refugees of yesteryear are made refugees once again, driven out of the refugee camp that until recently was their home.
The Freedom Theatre of Jenin Refugee Camp in happier times, August 2019.
Policy of Truth 