The Weaponization of Safety
What we are witnessing in universities today is the weaponization of safety, particularly in relation to the weaponization of antisemitism. This weaponization deflects attention from the ongoing genocide in which universities actively participate and justify. University administrators falsely claim that they are concerned for the safety of the “university community.”
Nothing could be further from the truth. Take, for instance, the violent repression of the Student Encampments for Gaza. Students and faculty have been teargassed, tased, tackled on the ground, and arrested. On April 25, a police officer violently threw Emory University economics professor Caroline Fohlin on the ground. Black students, as is usually the case, are disproportionately affected. Videos have shows them being choked and tased.
Before the encampments started, USC weaponized safety to cancel the student valedictorian speech that would be delivered during commencement by Asna Tabassum. University administration then decided to cancel the entire event, perhaps to make their initial decision less explicitly racist and clearly determined due to their pro-Israel position. As Andrew T. Guzman, Provost and Senior Vice President for Academic Affairs, wrote on April 15, “we must prioritize the safety of our community. And as we do every year, we have been monitoring our commencement security needs based on all the information we have and the facts on the ground.” He goes on to write that the Department of Public Safety and “expert campus safety team are uniquely prepared to evaluate potential threats and we have consulted with them about the current situation, taking into account everything we know about our reality as well as the unprecedented risks we are seeing at other campuses and across the world. After careful consideration, we have decided that our student valedictorian will not deliver a speech at commencement. While this is disappointing, tradition must give way to safety. This decision is not only necessary to maintain the safety of our campus and students, but is consistent with the fundamental legal obligation – including the expectations of federal regulators – that universities act to protect students and keep our campus community safe. It applies the same values and criteria that we have used in the past to guide our actions.”
As one can easily observe, this has nothing to do with the safety of students and faculty. It has everything to do with the university’s unwavering support of Israel and its genocidal actions in Gaza, which indeed corresponds with the US government’s position.
The apparent concern for students and faculty, particularly Jewish students, is also not true. Jewish students and faculty have supported and participated in the encampments, yet university leaders have ignored this fact primarily because it would reveal the hypocrisy underlying their so-called concern for maintaining safety.
Hundreds of students were arrested after Columbia University President Minouche Shafik called in NYPD to arrest students refusing to leave the encampment. Mainstream media, including CNN, also portrayed the encampment as antisemitic, despite the fact that Jewish students formed part of the protests. Freedom of speech and academic freedom have a clear exception when one expresses unwavering solidarity with the Palestinian struggle. This is not new, but certainly there are more and more people being criminalized, suspended, and fired than ever before.
While antisemitism and safety are being weaponized to deflect attention from the ongoing genocide in Gaza and to downplay the very real antisemitism within white nationalist groups, it seems like one should also point to the equally real antisemitism underpinning these false accusations meted out against faculty and students. I argue that it is antisemitic for university administrators to pretend that pro-Palestinian protests don’t include Jewish people. It is antisemitic to portray Jewish people as a monolith supporting a genocidal settler colonial state. It is antisemitic to disregard anti-zionist Jewish perspectives and organizations. The “rising antisemitism” in universities is a false narrative that seeks to discredit pro-Palestinian protests. One doesn’t have to look very closely at the videos and images coming out of the encampment to see that “students who are wearing kippahs sitting alongside students with keffiyehs” are the ones being misrepresented as anti-semitic.
The false narrative of rising antisemitism ignores the prefiguration of a world and university otherwise where students from different religious backgrounds peacefully co-exist and collectively take action to radically transform their institutions and dismantle settler colonialism. The following post demonstrates this point exactly:
“The Interfaith Justice Caucus of Union Theological Seminary were presented with the opportunity to host a Passover Seder on our Quad for our neighbors, and particularly suspended Columbia and Barnard Jewish students.
Therefore, we have our quad for this Passover Seder to show solidarity and unwavering support for students that have called for justice and liberation through their sacrifice and their bodies. As we are entering the blessed week of Passover, it's important that we remember to ensure unity in the struggle for Palestinian liberation across all faiths and especially those among the Jewish tradition that push back against the notions that Judaism is Zionism and anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism. In remembrance of our ancestor Moses who urged Pharaoh: ‘Let My People Go’ we urge the Pharaohs that be around us to let all of our people go, especially the indigenous Palestinians who are resisting their occupation and ethnic cleansing.” (@cybersebb)
Unfortunately, universities simply do not care about statements such as these. They don’t care about the interfaith alliances students establish to organize and speak out against Israel’s settler colonial project of death and destruction. University administrators and imperial stenographers (academics) don’t want to face the cruel reality that they are justifying and actively participating in genocide. History will not be kind to them, nor will we.