Fajr Scientific Banned from Gaza

Two weeks ago, I posted here on Fajr Scientific’s Gaza Medical Evacuation Initiative. I’ve just learned that the initiative has been canceled, as the Israeli government has now banned Fajr from operating in Gaza. This decision comes a few weeks after the release, by 99 physicians associated with Fajr and similar medical organizations, of an Open Letter to President Biden and Vice President Harris, providing medical testimony and forensic evidence that the Israeli military had, among other things, been executing Gazan children by shooting them directly in the head and chest.

From the letter (bold type in original): 

Children are universally considered innocents in armed conflict. However, every single signatory to this letter saw children in Gaza who suffered violence that must have been deliberately directed at them. Specifically, every one of us who worked in an emergency, intensive care, or surgical setting treated pre-teen children who were shot in the head or chest on a regular or even a daily basis. It is impossible that such widespread shooting of young children throughout Gaza, sustained over the course of an entire year is accidental or unknown to the highest Israeli civilian and military authorities.

Here is the appendix to the letter. This article contains images of X-rays showing bullets lodged in children’s heads and throat (the trajectory in the latter case being through the forehead). Here’s a link to The New York Times essay discussing the evidence (may be paywalled). Continue reading

Mishra and Rhodes on the Anti-War Movement

I attended a webinar the other night with the journalists Pankaj Mishra and Ben Rhodes on “Gaza, Israel, and the American Left,” organized by The New York Review of Books. Since the anti-war movement came up during the talk, I asked Mishra and Rhodes if they had any advice to offer the movement. To my surprise, both claimed not to, on the grounds that it would be “presumptuous” of them to do so. It struck me as a pretty odd thing to say. Here were two world-class journalists who’d just spent the previous hour offering up advice to the world’s most powerful governments. Rhodes, in fact, isn’t just a journalist, but was Deputy National Security Adviser during the Obama Administration. And here they were, for all that worldly wisdom, expressing timidity about the prospect of giving advice to a bunch of college students and faculty. Continue reading

No One is to Advocate Anything Until I Blow This Whistle

The New York Times has a click-baitish headline about Hamas on the front page, except that unlike most click-bait headlines, this one happens both to be click-bait and true.

“Pro-Palestinian Group at Columbia Now Backs ‘Armed Resistance’ by Hamas”

It’s true. They do. Of course, at this point, a headline like that is a bit like one ca. 1943 that said:

“Pro-Jewish Group at Columbia Now Backs ‘Armed Resistance’ by Stalin’s Red Army”

Or, how about, ca. 1944: Continue reading

Arrested Princeton Students’ Statement on Court Appearance

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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“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.

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War 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.

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“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