This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Rise of Asia.

Donald Trump has threatened to directly target Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and may be moving closer to ordering U.S. airstrikes on Iran. Meanwhile, Khamenei has rejected Trump’s calls for “unconditional surrender,” warning that Iran will meet any U.S. military action in Iran with “irreparable harm.” In Tehran, many civilians have already evacuated after multiple Israeli strikes killed hundreds. “There’s nothing sophisticated about slaughtering everyone in an apartment building to murder one or two people,” says Mohammad Marandi about the strikes. Marandi, who has remained in Tehran, was part of the U.S.-Iran nuclear negotiations in 2015. He calls Trump’s threat “an act of terror” but emphasizes that U.S. and Israeli vilification of Iran has “united the country more than ever before.”

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

Two complaints were filed against him with the Haryana police; one by the Sarpanch of Jatheri, a village in Haryana, and another by Renu Bhatia, chairperson of the Haryana State Commission for Women (HCW).

Besides an academic commentary on India’s military response against Pakistan and what it means for India-Pakistan relations, Khan had remarked on the ‘optics’ of the press briefings by the defence forces by placing a Muslim woman officer, Colonel Sophiya Qureshi as the face of India’s military operation.

“The optics of two women soldiers presenting their findings is importantly but optics must translate to reality on the ground otherwise it’s just hypocrisy… the grassroots reality that common Muslims face is different from what the government tried to show but at the same time the press conference shows that an India, united it its diversity, is not completely dead as an idea,” he wrote on Facebook on May 8, a day after India launched Operation Sindoor.

Complaints

According to a copy of one of the FIRs (first information report)  reviewed by Alt News, Khan has been arrested under sections 196(1)(b), 197(1)(c), 152 and 299 of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita (BNS). One of the lawyers working on the case confirmed the charges to Alt News.

This FIR was filed by a Yogesh, the village chief of Jatheri in the Sonepat district of Haryana. In his complaint, he said that at a time when Indians needed to stand united against a foreign power (Pakistan), Khan was trying to incite people against the country and hurting religious sentiments by saying that Colonel Sufiya Qureshi’s presence at the press briefings on Operation Sindoor were a mere show by the government, which otherwise works againt the prevention of crimes against Muslims.

Yogesh also claimed that Khan blamed ‘mad’ armymen for escalating tensions and conflicts between India and Pakistan. While he claimed that these comments were made in person by Ali Khan in front of a few others, he also mentioned Khan’s X and Facebook posts from May 8 in the FIR.

This FIR has been registered under the Rai Police Station, Sonepat, Haryana. The complaint was filed at 8:15 pm on May 17; Khan was arrested the following morning.

Alt News was unable to access the FIR filed by Renu Bhatia for specific details. However, Narender Kadian, deputy commissioner of police (crime), Haryana, told the press on May 18 that Bhatia’s FIR was against Khan’s posts on Facebook as well as him skipping the summons issued by the women’s commission. He added that the FIR invokes sections 353, 79, 152 and 169(1) of the BNS against the professor.

The Haryana State Commission for Women had issued a notice to Khan on May 12 after taking suo motu cognisance of his social media posts (a reference to one of these was also made by Yogesh in his FIR). The HCW complaint against Khan, accessed by Alt News, expresses concern over his remarks because it disparages women in uniform, misrepresents facts (by using terms like “genocide” and “dehumanisation” in the posts) and vilifies military actions and the role of women officers against cross-border terrorism. It also said that Khan’s remarks had the potential to incite communal unrest and violated women’s dignity, outraged their modesty and breached the University Grants Commission’s ethical conduct regulations for faculty. Two posts by the professor, one from May 8 and another from May 11, were attached to the complaint. Khan was asked to appear before the Commission on May 14 along with a written explanation, in the form of an affidavit, of his statements and materials or documents to justify his remarks. He was also directed to carry a copy of Ashoka University’s code of conduct for faculty and a copy of his employment contract.

But what is it that Khan exactly said in his Facebook and X posts that called for such a strong reaction from the women’s commission and the village chief?

What Did Khan Say?

On May 8, a day after the Indian defence forces launched the military strikes targeting terror sites in Pakistan, the Ashoka University professor wrote a post on Facebook summarising the India-Pakistan conflict.

It begins with, “Strategically India has actually begun a new phase in terms of collapsing distinction between military and terrorist (non-state actors) in Pakistan” and goes on to say that Operation Sindoor has made it clear that  “response to terrorist attacks will be met with a military response and removes any semantic distinction between the two.”…

Further, Khan says that those “mindlessly advocating for a war” have never lived or visited a conflict zone. “War is brutal. The poor suffer disproportionately and the only people who benefit are politicians and defence companies.”

At the end, he made a point regarding the ‘optics’ of Operation Sindoor’s press briefings:

“I am very happy to see so many right wing commentators applauding Colonel Sophia Qureishi but perhaps they could also equally loudly demand that the victims of mob lynchings, arbitrary bulldozing and others who are victims of the BJP’s hate mongering be protected as Indian. citizens. The optics of two women soldiers presenting their findings is important but optics must translate to reality on the ground otherwise it’s just hypocrisy… For me the press conference was just a fleeting glimpse- an illusion and allusion perhaps to an India that defied the logic on which Pakistan was built. As I said, the grassroots reality that common Muslims face is different from what the government tried to show but at the same time the press conference shows that an India, united it its diversity, is not completely dead as an idea”

A very basic, literal reading of this post suggests that the role of women military officers was not even the main discourse or primary concern. It simply conflates the contradiction in celebrating a person of one community in a certain situation, while not speaking up when others from the same community face hate crimes.

It also adds that the press conference where a Muslim army officer was placed at the forefront offered a glimpse “that an India, united it its diversity, is not completely dead.”

How the comment outraged the dignity and modesty of women remains unclear.

The second post annexed by the HCW in its complaint was made by Khan on May 11. It was a comment on the abuse faced by foreign secretary Vikram Misri and his family after he announced the ceasefire. Here he criticises those clamouring for war.

“… So when you clamour for war or you call for a country to be wiped out then what exactly are you asking? For the genocide of an entire people? I know Israel is getting away with doing this – and some Indians admire this- but do we really want to advocate the wholesale murder of children as potential future enemies?

Think about what it means when you say ‘wipe them out, ‘finish them,’ ‘destroy them’ etc? You are saying kill all the children, the elderly, minorities, those who are opposed to war on the other side and many other innocent people who want to do exactly what you want to do: be a father, a mother, a daughter, a son, a grandparent and a friend. You can only ask for such wholesale destruction if you have completely dehumanised them… there are madmen everywhere, but those closer to the border know what war means: it means arbitrary, unpredictable and senseless death. Those far from the border seem to think war is some kind of video game. This dehumanisation is symptomatic of deep seated insecurities within us because we somehow need to deny someone else’s humanity to affirm our own but the reality is that the minute we dehumanise someone else- even though they might represent the opposite of everything we stand for- then we have given in to our basest instincts. We have sown the seeds of our own destruction.”

A very literal reading of this post also suggests that it is an appeal advocating for peace over war. The words genocide and dehumanisation in the context in which they have been used do not vilify India’s military strength or efforts but instead urge one to think of what we really ask for when we celebrate war over ceasefire.

His comment, “The kind of war mongering we are seeing amongst civilians is actually disrespecting the seriousness of war and dishonouring the lives of soldiers whose lives are actually on the line,” clearly indicates that it is humanity that is being advocated for, because lives of soldiers and those who live on war-torn areas are often forgotten when emotions run high. At a very surface level, calling this seditious or affecting the nation’s sovereignty would be farfetched.

Misplaced Outrage?

In a press briefing, HCW’s Renu Bhatia criticised Ali Khan Mahmudabad and said that she was surprised he even became a professor. “Why did he become a professor if he can’t respect our daughters? What will he teach our daughters as a professor?” she says, adding that he demoralised women, which is a “shameful thing” and has no right to remain a professor.

While making these remarks, she also says that he used the phrase “painted face,” which Alt News did not find anywhere in Khan’s posts that the Commission had attached in its complaint.

“How and why did he become a professor if he can’t respect our daughters? What will he teach our daughters?” she said. “His posts show that he has a mentality of revolt against the nation.” She said that Mahmudabad was just living in India but had no love for the country. pic.twitter.com/RpFpK8UQU3

— Alishan Jafri (@alishan_jafri) May 15, 2025

It seems as though Khan’s words have not just been misinterpreted but perhaps misread because the charges in the HCW complaint and the FIRs do not add up even with the most conservative reading of Khan’s posts. How his posts are shameful, offensive to women officers of the armed forces or hurt women’s dignity has not been explained. The briefings by the two women seem to have been made to make a larger point about communal issues and the duality of many in the Right-wing.

How his words attack national sovereignty remains unclear as well because at no point are the actions of the government or defence forces critiqued. He actually lauds their stance, if anything. The political science professor very carefully only calls out “those who are baying for war” and “Right wing commentators” in the posts. Are these groups being conflated with the nation or attacking national sentiments? Then that’s a deeper problem.

In response to the HCW’s complaint and summons, Khan also issued a statement saying that his remarks have been completely misunderstood.

“From a bare reading of his original posts, it is clear that Prof. Khan praised the strategic restraint of the armed forces… and said that the optics of the women officers chosen for media debriefs was ‘important’ as proof that the secular vision of the founders of our Republic is still alive… It is preposterous that we have come to such a pass in India that even praising the army, albeit while criticizing those who clamour for war, can now invite such targeted harassment and attempted censorship,” a letter signed by over 1,200 people, including academics and his students, reads.

But Ashoka University has distanced itself from Khan’s remarks. “Comments made by a faculty member on his personal social media pages do not represent the opinion of the university. These statements have been made by him independently in his individual capacity… Ashoka University and all members of the Ashoka community are proud of India’s armed forces and support them unequivocally in their actions towards maintaining national security. We stand in solidarity with the nation and our forces,” it said. But the faculty association has stood by him, calling the charges “groundless and untenable”.

Khan is a historian and the head of the department at Ashoka, where he teaches political science. He has done his PhD and MPhil from the University of Cambridge and has an undergraduate degree in History and Political Science from Amherst College. He is also a member of the Samajwadi Party.

The charges against Ali Khan Mahmudabad are severe and can even attract imprisonment for life. The case against him is particularly disturbing because his writing and comments were fairly academic and calling them outraging women’s dignity seems like a stretch. On the other hand, the High Court had to intervene and ask Madhya Pradesh police to take cognisance of the remarks by BJP minister Kunwar Vijay Shah. Shah referred to Colonel Qureshi as a “sister of terrorists”. Meanwhile, the National Commission for Women has condemned his remarks, but has not summoned him.

Even the FIR filed by the police in Vijay Shah’s case became a point of controversy. The High Court slammed the Madhya Pradesh police for drafting the FIR “in such a way that it can be quashed“. The inflammatory remarks made by the minister were not even mentioned in the complaint. Justice Atul Sreedharan, part of the division bench looking into the case, explicitly said that the contents of the FIR were “vulnerable to being quashed” in the absence of a description of the speech. The HC said it would oversee the investigation thereon.

“It is shocking and unconscionable that the Indian state continues to make such targeted use of the colonial sedition law against an honest and principled academic, while protecting its own ministers who have made filthy remarks about serving officers of the Indian Army and having allowed its trolls to attack India’s Foreign Secretary and his daughter,” academic Supriya Chaudhuri wrote in support.

When one reflects on how the two cases—of Khan and Shah—have been handled so far, it leaves one wondering if their respective faiths have any role to play. The irony is this is precisely the point Khan tried to make in his Facebook posts, for which he is now in custody.

Understanding the charges

Section 79 punishes those intending to insult the modesty of any woman with imprisonment for that may extend to three years, and a fine.

Section 152 deals with endangering sovereignty, unity and integrity of India by exciting or attempting to excite, “secession or armed rebellion or subversive activities, or… feelings of separatist activities or endangers sovereignty or unity and integrity of India”. The punishment could entail imprisonment up to seven years along with a fine and, in worst-case scenarios, extend to a life term. This is similar to sedition.

Section 196 ensures punishment for those who promote enmity between groups on grounds of religion, race, place of birth, residence, language, etc to disrupt harmony. Punishment for those charged under Section 196 (1)(b) is imprisonment extending up to three years, or a fine, or both.

Section 197 deals with imputations and assertions that prejudice national integration.

Punishment under 197(c)—which looks at published statements, assertions or pleas “concerning the obligation of any class of persons, by reason of their being members of any religious, racial, language or regional group or caste or community” that is likely to cause disharmony, feelings of enmity, hatred or ill-will—entails imprisonment up to three years, or a fine, or both.

Section 299 punishes those who intend to outrage religious feelings of any class by insulting its religion or religious beliefs by deliberate and malicious acts. Penalty is imprisonment for up to three years, or fine, or both.

Section 353 deals with statements that result in public mischief and can result in imprisonment up to three years.

With inputs from Indradeep Bhattacharya

Image credit: Facebook/ @AliMahmudabad

The post Optics of disproportionate action: Posts that led to Ashoka professor Ali Khan’s arrest far from anti-women, seditious appeared first on Alt News.

This content originally appeared on Alt News and was authored by Diti Pujara.

Anyone who witnessed or was affected by Baltimore’s failed experiment with zero-tolerance policing during the aughts remembers the unrelenting chaos it created. As reporters working for a newspaper, we witnessed the onslaught of so-called quality of life arrests as a fast-moving crisis that seemed to accelerate with each illegal charge.

The policy was driven by the idea that even the most minor infraction, like drinking a beer on a stoop, was worthy of detainment in the pursuit of stopping more violent crimes. However, it soon spiraled out of control to roughly 100,000 arrests per year between 2000 and 2006. It led to bizarre examples of over-policing, like Gerard Mungo, the seven-year-old boy arrested for sitting on an electric dirt bike, or the incarceration of attendees of an entire cookout over a noise complaint. 

But aside from the individual horror stories of people who ended up in jail without committing a crime, there was something else just as shocking: all of the suffering occurred in a blue city, with little if any political opposition or pushback from the Democratic establishment.  

If you’re skeptical, don’t be. Post 9-11 Democrats wanted to look tough. And they were looking for a political superstar to replace former President Bill Clinton. 

Then-Mayor Martin O’Malley fit the bill. He was a rising political star who the local Democratic establishment believed would eventually ascend to the presidency. Throughout his tenure, he oversaw this policy of mass arrests, hoping the ensuing drop in crime would bolster his future candidacy. Predictably, his presidential aspirations fizzled under the weight of the 2015 uprisings after the death of Freddie Gray in police custody, and crime didn’t go down. 

But the results were undeniably horrific: tens of thousands of people placed in cuffs without committing a crime. An authoritarian policy embraced by a Democratic establishment that seemed to have few qualms with allowing police to create untenable conditions within predominantly African-American neighborhoods.

During the zero tolerance heyday, prosecutors were so overwhelmed by the onslaught of detentions that they invented a previously unheard-of legal terminology to address it: ‘abated by arrest.’ It was a legal classification intended to reckon with the fact that there was no legal basis for charging thousands of people police were putting into handcuffs. In other words, the arrest was illegal; prosecutors just invented a way to make it seem less so.  

The city’s Central Booking facility, constructed in the ’90s with the expectation it would process around 40,000 arrests annually, was so overwhelmed that many detainees would be given what was known as a ‘walk through,’ which entailed simply walking in and out of the facility in a long serpentine line guided by corrections personnel. This overcrowding was exacerbated by the jump-out boys, who would arrive in predominantly Black neighborhoods to lead people, whose only crime was living in an area police deemed suitable for mass illegal incarceration, into the back of vans.

The point was, and is, that zero tolerance was, in some sections of Baltimore, worse than authoritarianism—it led to a reconfiguration of the Constitution. People would be illegally detained and then disappear into the Central Booking facility for months without due process. Many victims weI interviewed were often released without charging documents, unable to describe or otherwise recount the crime that had landed them in jail. Baltimore was essentially non-constitutional—a bastion of notably unlawful law enforcement.  

All of this backstory is a prelude to the astonishing and terrifying argument made recently by prominent Johns Hopkins professor of Political Science and Africana Studies Lester Spence. 

Spence is one of a handful of innovative political scientists who examine national politics through the prism of urban governance. He is the author of Knocking the Hustle: Against the Neoliberal Turn in Black Politics. In it he argues that cities, once bastions of progressive policymaking, have become laboratories for neoliberalism.  

But Spence has taken this idea one step further by making an argument that makes the Trump administration’s current unconstitutional actions even more terrifying. 

During an interview for the TRNN documentary ‘Freddie Gray: A Decade of Struggle,’  Spence linked the wildly unconstitutional policing that precipitated the uprising to the anti-democratic impulses from the Trump administration that are infiltrating the country’s institutions. 

“To the extent that if you looked at a map of the country and you looked and you layered density and then voted on that map, what you’d see is the most Democratic places are the densest places, and all the rest is red,” Spence explained. 

“Now, if you layer onto those values about democracy, should everybody be able to get a right to vote? Should people accept the results of elections? But then, should people have a right to healthcare? Should people have a right to solid education? Should people have a right to a living wage? All those attitudes are concentrated in metropolitan areas. If you constrain the ability of those spaces to articulate those values and policy, then you constrain the ability to state on one hand… and then the nation-state on the other to actually fight for those values,” he said. 

“So the sort of authoritarianism comes out of the policing and the lack of opportunity and the dysfunction of democracy.”

There are obvious connections that Spence is making here. Illegal arrests have been proven to diminish political participation. Specious criminal charges literally erode the type of citizenship that a democracy depends on.

It estranges, isolates, and otherwise marginalizes entire swathes of a community. Affected residents subsequently cannot access public housing, student loans, or even admission to higher education. All of these factors conclusively diminish the strength and vibrancy of our citizenry, and, as Spence suggests, mute the constituency most likely to advocate for progressive policies. 

But Spence’s idea has even more profound implications if you delve deeper into the history of policing in blue cities like Baltimore. To understand its true significance, just consider a less direct force undermining democracy which is precipitated by Democrats’ commitment to aggressive law enforcement. 

It starts with the conservative narrative of the failed city. 

The so-called failed “Dem-run city” is shorthand for broader attacks on Democratic competence. It boils broader ideas of liberal excesses into simple narratives: The chaotic blue communities are beset by criminals and immigrants. The lawlessness and moral bankruptcy of cities that have run amok. All of it espoused by Republican candidates and right-leaning news media outlets as probable cause to run Democrats out of Washington.

The Rupert Murdoch-owned New York Post published daily stories on crime and dysfunction in San Francisco. Similarly, in our own hometown, right-wing Sinclair Broadcasting has touted a ‘City in Crisis’ series that again equates crime to failed Democratic policies and the mayhem they supposedly engender. All of this, manufactured or true, creates a perception that Democrats are wildly incompetent.

That perception gains traction, according to Spence’s idea, because—in some cases—it’s accurate.

That’s because cities under Democratic administrations have invested billions in the ostensibly flawed idea that policing was a key to reducing crime. Just like with zero tolerance in Baltimore, many Democratic mayors and elected officials not just allowed but touted aggressive and illegal policing as a proficient means to an end.

That commitment to a flawed policy has not only led to failure, but has given Republicans plenty of fodder to justify the Trump administration’s authoritarian rule. The easy-to-construct narrative that Democrats can’t and will not impose order and don’t know how to do so has simply made right-wing talking points more salient and appealing.

The irony is, as Spence points out, that blue cities like Baltimore invested massive sums in policing for decades with meager results. Defunding the police has hardly been the problem. Here in Baltimore, for example, public safety spending has outpaced education spending for decades. 

Nevertheless, Baltimore’s recent drop in homicides suggests that all this spending overlooked what appears to be the most effective solution: investment in community-based programs. 

Dayvon Love, public policy director for the Baltimore-based think tank Leaders of Beautiful Struggle, made this point in the same documentary. The Baltimore Police Department, he noted, has been grappling with a historic number of vacancies, fluctuating somewhere between 500 and 1,000 officers. However, even with fewer officers to patrol the streets, violent crime and homicides have dropped significantly. In 2024 homicides dropped to 201, a 20% decrease from the year prior. This year, nonfatal shootings and homicides have continued to fall another 20% to a record low. 

Some have attributed this to a broader national trend towards lower homicide rates. But, as Mayor Brandon Scott recently pointed out, Baltimore has always bucked fluctuations in homicides and violent crime.  

Instead, Scott attributes the drop to the city’s commitment to community-based programs like the Gun Violence Reduction Strategy, which uses a coordinated community-based approach to persuade high-risk residents to get a job rather than commit a crime. The city, with the help of the state of Maryland, has also made historic investments in Safe Streets, a violence interruption program in which former felons mediate disputes before they turn violent. 

All of this points to the fact that Democrats’ past use of aggressive policing has been a boon for Republicans because it was not just the wrong solution, but a prescription for electoral failure as well. Whether or not the Republican depiction of this policy has been fair, the fact remains that Democrats across the country have invested countless billions into authoritarian policing with little impact on crime, and as a result have paved the way for an authoritarian national movement.

If these two trends continue, as Spence suggested is possible, then we are in big trouble. 

Just consider the findings of the Justice Department report that was released after its 2016 investigation into the Baltimore Police Department in the wake of the death of Freddie Gray in police custody. It found that, among other abuses, police arrested one man 44 times. It also revealed that several extremely poor and mostly African-American neighborhoods were targeted with mass arrests to the point that a person could be detained for simply walking in an area where they did not live.

If that sounds scary, consider the fact that the editor of the paper I worked for was arrested after we published the overtime earnings of all the officers on the force during the zero-tolerance era. Police contrived a crime to effectuate the arrest, accusing him of pointing a shotgun at his neighbors. The case fell apart after his lawyers pointed out that all of this occurred in the privacy of his home and that the aggrieved neighbor had only witnessed the infraction through a shut window. However, that did not stop a cadre of heavily armed officers from dragging him into the same Central Booking facility as the other victims of the city’s mass arrest movement. 

Even more troubling were the sheer numbers of arrests effectuated by a relatively small number of officers. At its peak, BPD had roughly 3,000 sworn cops—and the number of people they managed to arrest was thousands of times greater. Imagine if the vast federal bureaucracy embarked on a similar program of nationwide detentions.

That program is, actually, already happening. The Trump administration has enlisted the FBI and IRS to help arrest immigrants, a task usually outtside their respective purviews. 

The point is, we have witnessed how over-policing changes the contours of government, and if this same mentality pervades the federal institutions and agencies, it will be more terrifying than it’s already been. 

Spence’s insight should be heeded as not just a cautionary tale, but a call to action. Baltimore has made positive changes to commit resources towards a community based approach to crime intervention. The question is, will it be enough?

This content originally appeared on The Real News Network and was authored by Stephen Janis and Taya Graham.

We speak with journalist, author and academic Steven Thrasher, the chair of social justice reporting at the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University. He was singled out by name during a congressional hearing about pro-Palestine protests on college campuses earlier this year, with one Republican lawmaker calling him a “goon” for protecting students in an encampment from violent arrest. Northwestern filed charges against Thrasher for obstructing police that were later dropped, but students returning to Northwestern for the fall term will not see him in their classrooms because he has been suspended as Northwestern says he is under investigation. In his first interview about the affair, Thrasher tells Democracy Now! that he stands by his actions and that he has “received no due process” from his employer. He says the university has previously celebrated him, including in “glowing” job reviews and by publicizing his work. “What they don’t like is that I am now applying the same social justice journalism principles that I’ve applied to race and that I’ve applied to LGBTQ people, to COVID and HIV, that I was now applying those to Palestine,” says Thrasher.

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

In a democracy, citizens must critically evaluate issues based on facts. However in a very polarised society, people focus more on who is speaking than what is being said.

This was highlighted by journalism Professor Cherian George of the Hong Kong Baptist University as he delivered his keynote address during the recent 2024 Pacific International Media Conference at the Holiday Inn, Suva.

According to Professor George when a media outlet is perceived as representing the “other side”, its journalism is swiftly condemned — adding “it won’t be believed, regardless of its professionalism and quality.”

• READ MORE: Other Pacific Media 2024 reports

Professor George, an author and award-winning journalism academic was among many high-profile journalists and academics gathered at the three-day conference from July 4-6 — the first of its kind in the region in almost two decades.

The gathering of academics, media professionals, policymakers and civil society organisation representatives was organised by The University of the South Pacific in partnership with the Pacific Islands News Association (PINA) and the Asia-Pacific Media Network (APMN).

Addressing an audience of 12 countries from the Asia Pacific region, Professor George said polarisation was a threat to democracy and institutions such as the media and universities.

“While democracy requires faith in the process and a willingness to compromise, polarization is associated with an uncompromising attitude, treating opponents as the enemy and attacking the system, bringing it down if you do not get in your way,” he said.

Fiji coups context
In the context of Fiji — which has experienced four coups, Professor George said the country had seen a steady decrease in political polarisation since 2000, according to data from the Varieties of Democracy Institute (VDI).

He said the decrease was due to government policies aimed at neutralising ethnic-based political organisations at the time. However, he warned against viewing Fiji’s experience as justification for autocratic approaches to social harmony.

“Some may look at this [VDI data] and argue that the Fiji case demonstrates that you sometimes need strongman rule and a temporary suspension of democracy to save it from itself, but the problem is that this is a highly risky formula,” he explained.

Professor George acknowledged that while the government had a role in countering polarisation through top-down attempts, there was also a need for a “bottom-up counter-polarising work done by media and civil society.”

Many professional journalists feel uncomfortable with the idea of intervening or taking a stand, Professor George said, labelling them as mirrors.

“However, if news outlets are really a mirror, it’s always a cracked mirror, pointing in a certain direction and not another,” he said.

“The media are always going to impact on reality, even as they report it objectively.

Trapped by conventions
“It’s better to acknowledge this so that your impact isn’t making things worse than they need to be. There’s ample research showing how even when the media are free to do their own thing, they are trapped by conventions and routines that accentuate polarisation,” he explained.

Professor George highlighted three key issues that exacerbate polarisation in media:

• Stereotypes — journalists often rely on stereotypes about different groups of people because it makes their storytelling easier and quicker;
• Elite focus — journalists treat prominent leaders as more newsworthy than ordinary people the leaders represent; and
• Media bias — journalists prefer to report on conflict or bad news as the public pay most attention to them.

As a result, this has created an imbalance in the media and influenced people how they perceive their social world, the professor said.

“In general, different communities in their society do not get along, since that’s what their media, all their media, regardless of political leaning, tell them every day,” Professor George explained, adding, “this perception can be self-fulfilling”.

To counter these tendencies, he pointed to reform movements such as peace and solutions journalism which aim to shift attention to grassroots priorities and possibilities for cooperation.

“We must at least agree on one thing,” he concluded. “We all possess a shared humanity and equal dignity, and this is something I hope all media and media educators in the Pacific region, around the world, regardless of political position, can work towards.”

Opening remarks
The conference opening day featured remarks from Associate Professor Shailendra Singh, head of the USP Journalism Programme and conference chair, and Dr Matthew Hayward, acting head of the School of Pacific Arts, Communications, and Education (SPACE).

The Deputy Prime Minister and Minister for Trade, Co-operatives, Small and Medium Enterprises and Communications, Manoa Kamikamica was the chief guest. Professor Cherian George delivered the keynote address.

Professor George is currently a professor of Media Studies and has published several books focusing on media and politics in Singapore and Southeast Asia. He also serves as director of the Centre for Media and Communication Research at the Hong Kong Baptist University.

The conference was sponsored the United States Embassy in Fiji, Kiribati, Nauru, Tonga and Tuvalu, the International Fund for Public Interest Media, the Pacific Media Assistance Scheme, Fiji Women’s Rights Movement, New Zealand Science Media Centre and the Pacific Women Lead — Pacific Community.

The event had more than 100 attendees from 12 countries — Fiji, Papua New Guinea, Tonga, Cook Islands, Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, Indonesia, Philippines, Solomon Islands, the United States and Hong Kong.

It provided a platform for the 51 presenters to discuss the theme of the conference “Navigating Challenges and Shaping Futures in Pacific Media Research and Practice” and their ideas on the way forward.

An official dinner held on July 4 included the launch of the 30th anniversary edition of the Pacific Journalism Review (PJR), founded by former USP journalism head professor David Robie in 1994, and launch of the book Waves of Change: Media, Peace, and Development in the Pacific, which is edited by associate professor Singh, Deputy Prime Minister and Minister for Finance Professor Biman Prasad, and Dr Amit Sarwal, a former senior lecturer and deputy head of school (research) at USP.

The PJR is the only academic journal in the region that publishes research specifically focused on Pacific media.

A selection of the best conference papers will be published in a special edition of the Pacific Journalism Review or its companion publication Pacific Media Monographs.

Kaneta Naimatau is a final-year student journalist at The University of the South Pacific. Republished in partnership with USP.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by Wansolwara.

In a democracy, citizens must critically evaluate issues based on facts. However in a very polarised society, people focus more on who is speaking than what is being said.

This was highlighted by journalism Professor Cherian George of the Hong Kong Baptist University as he delivered his keynote address during the recent 2024 Pacific International Media Conference at the Holiday Inn, Suva.

According to Professor George when a media outlet is perceived as representing the “other side”, its journalism is swiftly condemned — adding “it won’t be believed, regardless of its professionalism and quality.”

• READ MORE: Other Pacific Media 2024 reports

Professor George, an author and award-winning journalism academic was among many high-profile journalists and academics gathered at the three-day conference from July 4-6 — the first of its kind in the region in almost two decades.

The gathering of academics, media professionals, policymakers and civil society organisation representatives was organised by The University of the South Pacific in partnership with the Pacific Islands News Association (PINA) and the Asia-Pacific Media Network (APMN).

Addressing an audience of 12 countries from the Asia Pacific region, Professor George said polarisation was a threat to democracy and institutions such as the media and universities.

“While democracy requires faith in the process and a willingness to compromise, polarization is associated with an uncompromising attitude, treating opponents as the enemy and attacking the system, bringing it down if you do not get in your way,” he said.

Fiji coups context
In the context of Fiji — which has experienced four coups, Professor George said the country had seen a steady decrease in political polarisation since 2000, according to data from the Varieties of Democracy Institute (VDI).

He said the decrease was due to government policies aimed at neutralising ethnic-based political organisations at the time. However, he warned against viewing Fiji’s experience as justification for autocratic approaches to social harmony.

“Some may look at this [VDI data] and argue that the Fiji case demonstrates that you sometimes need strongman rule and a temporary suspension of democracy to save it from itself, but the problem is that this is a highly risky formula,” he explained.

Professor George acknowledged that while the government had a role in countering polarisation through top-down attempts, there was also a need for a “bottom-up counter-polarising work done by media and civil society.”

Many professional journalists feel uncomfortable with the idea of intervening or taking a stand, Professor George said, labelling them as mirrors.

“However, if news outlets are really a mirror, it’s always a cracked mirror, pointing in a certain direction and not another,” he said.

“The media are always going to impact on reality, even as they report it objectively.

Trapped by conventions
“It’s better to acknowledge this so that your impact isn’t making things worse than they need to be. There’s ample research showing how even when the media are free to do their own thing, they are trapped by conventions and routines that accentuate polarisation,” he explained.

Professor George highlighted three key issues that exacerbate polarisation in media:

• Stereotypes — journalists often rely on stereotypes about different groups of people because it makes their storytelling easier and quicker;
• Elite focus — journalists treat prominent leaders as more newsworthy than ordinary people the leaders represent; and
• Media bias — journalists prefer to report on conflict or bad news as the public pay most attention to them.

As a result, this has created an imbalance in the media and influenced people how they perceive their social world, the professor said.

“In general, different communities in their society do not get along, since that’s what their media, all their media, regardless of political leaning, tell them every day,” Professor George explained, adding, “this perception can be self-fulfilling”.

To counter these tendencies, he pointed to reform movements such as peace and solutions journalism which aim to shift attention to grassroots priorities and possibilities for cooperation.

“We must at least agree on one thing,” he concluded. “We all possess a shared humanity and equal dignity, and this is something I hope all media and media educators in the Pacific region, around the world, regardless of political position, can work towards.”

Opening remarks
The conference opening day featured remarks from Associate Professor Shailendra Singh, head of the USP Journalism Programme and conference chair, and Dr Matthew Hayward, acting head of the School of Pacific Arts, Communications, and Education (SPACE).

The Deputy Prime Minister and Minister for Trade, Co-operatives, Small and Medium Enterprises and Communications, Manoa Kamikamica was the chief guest. Professor Cherian George delivered the keynote address.

Professor George is currently a professor of Media Studies and has published several books focusing on media and politics in Singapore and Southeast Asia. He also serves as director of the Centre for Media and Communication Research at the Hong Kong Baptist University.

The conference was sponsored the United States Embassy in Fiji, Kiribati, Nauru, Tonga and Tuvalu, the International Fund for Public Interest Media, the Pacific Media Assistance Scheme, Fiji Women’s Rights Movement, New Zealand Science Media Centre and the Pacific Women Lead — Pacific Community.

The event had more than 100 attendees from 12 countries — Fiji, Papua New Guinea, Tonga, Cook Islands, Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, Indonesia, Philippines, Solomon Islands, the United States and Hong Kong.

It provided a platform for the 51 presenters to discuss the theme of the conference “Navigating Challenges and Shaping Futures in Pacific Media Research and Practice” and their ideas on the way forward.

An official dinner held on July 4 included the launch of the 30th anniversary edition of the Pacific Journalism Review (PJR), founded by former USP journalism head professor David Robie in 1994, and launch of the book Waves of Change: Media, Peace, and Development in the Pacific, which is edited by associate professor Singh, Deputy Prime Minister and Minister for Finance Professor Biman Prasad, and Dr Amit Sarwal, a former senior lecturer and deputy head of school (research) at USP.

The PJR is the only academic journal in the region that publishes research specifically focused on Pacific media.

A selection of the best conference papers will be published in a special edition of the Pacific Journalism Review or its companion publication Pacific Media Monographs.

Kaneta Naimatau is a final-year student journalist at The University of the South Pacific. Republished in partnership with USP.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by Wansolwara.

Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

In this essay, I will describe my activism on behalf of Palestinians’ human rights and their right to self-determination, from my graduate student days on a US campus, to the present in my position as a tenured full professor, and the ways in which I’ve experienced attempts at silencing and censorship. These attempts today are more blatant and worrisome than ever before on anyone speaking up for Palestine in the USA, in the wake of the deadly genocidal massacre and famine unleashed by Israel on Palestinians in Gaza after the Oct 7^th 2023 attack by Hamas; an attack, which whilst condemnable for loss of 1200 innocent Israeli civilians, must be seen in light of the 75+years of ongoing Israeli occupation of Palestinian lands and people with far more dead, injured and imprisoned than Israelis to date.

When I arrived at Tufts from Pakistan at the end of the 1970s, as a graduate student in English, I was hardly aware of the outsize influence Israeli Zionist ideology exercised on college campuses, an extension of its hold on the halls of Congress and US politics in general. Like many who grew up in what was then called the Third World, especially a new country like Pakistan which for the decades I was growing up was very much in the US camp and through the influence of mass media (TV and cinema in those days)—my generation really bought into the vision the US presented of itself as the bastion of free speech, equality, and a haven for immigrants of all races, colors and creeds. The history of its genocide of Native Americans and the enslavement of African peoples to fuel its capitalist paradise for the few were of course, facts that were entirely obscured in the popular narrative of America as the Land of the Free and the Brave.

Very quickly after my immersion in my graduate studies in 1979, my political education began to be shaped by cataclysmic global events such as the Iranian Islamic revolution that succeeded in ousting the West’s puppet, Reza Shah Pehlavi, the Afghanistan debacle unfolding on the borders of my home country- yet another example of Big Power rivalry ruining the lives of millions of brown-skinned peoples- and the rejection, by the Arab Summit Conference’s General Assembly, of the Camp David Accords for failing to uphold the UN’s charter, that included the right of return, national independence and sovereignty in Palestine and participation of the PLO in all decisions pertaining to the future of Palestine.

Recognizing, with some of my other fellow international students from Lebanon and Iran, that most students were either quite ignorant of events and histories beyond the borders of the USA, or unaware of the biases of their news media toward the “third world”—we decided to focus on one particularly egregious example of this lack of information: the case of Palestine. Becoming a founding member of the first-ever Student-led Committee on Information about Palestine on my campus, I learnt first-hand how dangerous it was to speak out on behalf of Palestine and advocate for their rights when our event posters were torn down and threatening messages left on our answering machines (in the era before cellphones). Consequences we are seeing today for students and faculty protesting against Israeli genocide in Gaza are much worse, when people like myself and my comrades from Tufts would have been doxxed, our student group and its activities suspended or banned. Back then, the reactions to our efforts at presenting an alternative viewpoint on the question of Palestine were limited to messages meant to intimidate, but did not actually result in a loss of future employment as they have for many unfortunate student supporters of Palestine today.

My own professional trajectory proceeded fairly smoothly from finishing my graduate studies to landing a tenure-track position in the Department of English at Montclair State university a year after I graduated with my Phd. from Tufts. Aside from a few Visiting Professor gigs at places like Harvard, NYUAD and several higher ed institutions in my home country of Pakistan over the decades, my tenure home has remained Montclair State, which has gone from being designated as a College when I joined the faculty as an assistant professor in 1987, to becoming a University. My 37-year career is, I contend, a study in surviving, at times even thriving in academia, despite the many obstacles small and large that are thrown into the paths of faculty like myself who dare to challenge the normative political narrative around Zionism, the singular issue that defies and denies all other progressive viewpoints.

First Rebellion

During my second year at MSU (then MSC)—I attended what was then an annual feature of our campus life: the annual Presidential Lecture. That year, our speaker was the famed New York intellectual, Susan Sontag, who was introduced a deferential group of administrators including the Acting President, and a leading member of our English Department faculty. The esteemed Ms Sontag spoke on the unit of the decade—what it is, what it signifies, how it came to be a temporal marker and so on—the usual arcane stuff intellectuals like to ponder. She honed in on a specific decade to provide some concrete examples to buttress her larger philosophical argument: the decade that the world witnessed the holocaust of the Jewish peoples in Nazi Germany, which was horrific in every sense. What got my goat, however, was the fact that this was the same decade—the 1940s—that also witnessed the creation of the state of Israel on Palestinian lands and concomitant Nakba—catastrophe—visited on the Palestinian natives of those lands, thousands of them forced to flee the onslaught of Israeli forces, many who became victims of massacres and destruction of their homes, their olive and lemon groves, their villages, their past. When I raised this point as a question for Ms Sontag to comment on, as to why she had not alluded to this other group of people affected so badly during the decade under scrutiny—she started to tremble visibly on the stage, and ultimately responded with anger at the audacity of my question.

I remember how several junior faculty approached me as we streamed out of the auditorium asking what I was thinking, and wasn’t I afraid of jeopardizing my tenure and promotion at the institution? The following day I received a summons to the Chair’s office, who proceeded to school me in the true meaning of Jews being the Chosen People of God, and why I had in a way, disobeyed God’s laws by questioning his favorite humans! It was an extraordinary meeting, and I was tempted to laugh at the absurdity of it all, except that I knew it was a serious matter, that I had to proceed with caution if I was going to get through the next few years and past the tenure decision with success. Luckily for me, I had a wonderful defender in the person of a senior member of the department, a very well-respected colleague who had brought some major grant monies into the department and college. She wrote a very strong op-ed for the campus student newspaper, The Montclarion, defending my right to free speech and expressing disdain for a globally renowned author who could not respond to a fair question except by berating me for simply asking the question. In the weeks that followed, I was amazed to discover daily messages left in my voicemail by colleagues—both staff and faculty—whom I did not know, acknowledging my courage in speaking out on a topic that most are trained to fear touching.

Since these were the days before social media, I was protected by the fact that such comments like mine could not go “viral” and hence avoid what today would surely be some sort of “cancellation.” Several years later I did get my tenure—but no promotion. For that, I had to fight hard, to the point of threatening a lawsuit, but again, luck prevailed and I got promoted to Associate Professor level the following year.

Post-tenure Obstacles and Resistances

The politics of fear that I observed amongst non-tenured faculty especially and also amongst those aspiring to leadership positions in the department and institution, operated on the unspoken assumption that criticism of Israel was unthinkable, a sure way to end a career, and hence resulted in a self-imposed censorship on the part of the majority of faculty at the university. Only one other senior tenured faculty member of my department and I, were vocal in our support for the right of Palestinians to self-determination and we were the only two who would speak out against the increasingly obvious Israeli apartheid state policies and its massive and brutal military response to stone-throwing Palestinian kids during the 1^st and 2^nd intifadas.

After Hamas’ electoral win in Gaza in 2005—and it bears noting that Israel helped create it as an alternative to the secular PLO in 1987 after the First Intifada—Israel, despite agreeing to a truce that held for a number of years, staged a raid by the IDF on members of Hamas, killing six of them on Nov 4^th, 2008. This led to retaliatory firing of rockets by Hamas, and on Dec 27, 2008, Israel attacked the Gaza strip by land and air in what it dubbed Operation Cast Lead, killing, over a 3 week period, a total of 1419 Palestinians of whom 1167 were civilians, according to the Gaza-based Palestinian Center for Human Rights, whilst Israeli Human Rights group B’Tselem reported 1385 Palestinians killed. The use of white phosphorus bombs on civilian targets including two hospitals (Al Quds and Al Wafa), as well as on the UN compound in Gaza City, was declared a war crime by several human rights organizations such as Amnesty International as well as the Goldstone Report, as were family massacres conducted by IDF forces, and killing of Palestinian civilians fleeing homes holding aloft white flags. During Operation Cast Lead, total number of Israelis killed was 4: 3 civilians and 1 soldier, and 518 wounded.

When I tried to organize a day long teach-in with scholars and artists at my university to educate our student body as well as the larger community on the scale of atrocities being committed by Israel during Operation Cast Lead, allowing for debate and discussion on Zionism as a political ideology, the creation and role of Hamas in Palestinian resistance struggles as part of a rise in Islamist or political Islam which many countries in the grip of US imperialist policies, rightly or wrongly saw as a strategy of resistance–I was taken aside by certain department members who later held leadership roles, in an attempt to discourage me from inviting some of the speakers I had lined up—specifically, the anti-Zionist academic activist, Norman Finkelstein. When I asked why, I was told that “he is not a scholar.” This, despite the fact that even before being declined tenure at DePaul university, Prof Finkelstein had already published 3 books with major academic presses which most “scholars” would be honored to have their books published by: University of California Press, University of Minnesota Press, and Verso, plus a fourth book by Henry Holt and Company, an imprint of Macmillan Books—also very prestigious, being one of the oldest publishing companies in the US.

Obviously, the issue had little to do with whether he was or wasn’t a scholar; rather, as a son of holocaust survivors, the fact that he was writing exposes of Israel as a fascist, apartheid state, with a book entitled the Holocaust Industrystriking a blow to the sacrosanct status of the Holocaust as sui generic and untouchable by any sort of critique, followed by another on the “mis-use of antisemitism and abuse of history”—well, the Zionist industry had to silence him and unfortunately that was the effect my colleagues’ persuasive tactics resulted in; in the end, I invited Joseph Massad, a scholar of Palestinian history at Columbia, who at that point in time, hadn’t yet become the target of Zionist student attacks demanding his ouster for teaching, in their opinion a “one-sided” perspective on Israel-Palestine, effectively smearing him as an anti-semite in the process.

I want to be clear here that the colleagues in question are themselves respectable scholars in their respective fields, and have been kind and gracious in their dealings with me through the decades.  I’m sure they wouldn’t recognize or even agree that what they were doing was a form of censorship by invoking the dreaded spectre of antisemitism. Their approach to censoring opinions like mine are far more sophisticated than the more outrightly course and obvious intimidation of some other colleagues, like, for instance, a self-proclaimed Christian Zionist who was Chairperson of our College’s department of Religion and Philosophy for many years, and had affixed to his office wall, a large Confederate flag. For displaying an obviously racist emblem extolling the virtues of a slaveholding past in the South, this colleague was never sanctioned or told he couldn’t fly the flag in full view of students (and faculty) walking past his office, many of whom were surely intimidated or felt harassed or unsafe by in the presence of such a symbol. Yet in recent days after the Oct 7^th 2023 Hamas attack on southern Israel that immediately resulted in Israel’s massive deadly assault on Gazan civilians and which was clearly genocidal in intent—the little Palestinian flag I affixed to my office door (courtesy the Students for Justice in Palestine on our campus)—drew notice and condemnation from several faculty members, including my current dept chair(one of the two colleagues who in 2008 had argued against issuing an invitation to Norman Finkelstein) who told me during a private exchange that he was hurt to see this display of support for Palestinians so soon after Hamas attacked Israel; never mind that as I pointed out in our friendly exchange of views, and without endorsing Hamas actions, that there really was no comparison in terms of number of lives lost—27,000 vs 1200 to date—nor had the attack resulted in damage to civilian infrastructure on the Israeli side anywhere close to what Israeli counterattacks on Gaza’s schools, hospitals, homes delivered in retaliation. The sign on his door, announcing his office as a safe space for all students experiencing “anti semitism, anti Zionism, Islamophobia,” has, by equating anti-semitism with anti-zionism, opened up a dangerous space that encourages attacks from students on those of us who proffer critiques of Zionism as a racist nationalist ideology that is unacceptable to many people of the Jewish faith too. Sure enough, a student in one of my classes this past semester brought a charge of anti-Semitism against me, which I managed to effectively debunk because of meticulous record-keeping I have learnt to do precisely to ward off such attacks. Whilst within a week of my putting up the little Palestinian flag in a display of solidarity, it was gone, vandalized, my Chair’s sign remains on his door. Despite our cordial relationship,  I cannot get him to see how the fallacious conflation it endorses, poses a grave threat to freedom of speech in our classes. The passage of HR 3016 into law recently will have a similar chilling effect.

To return to my Christian Zionist colleague, who is now long-since retired—back then he was a very powerful faculty member, who headed up for over a decade, our college’s committee that decided annually who would be awarded the prestigious University Distinguished Scholar award. It would be an important recognition legitimizing the kind of schol-activist work I had been doing, combining literary with cultural critique to avowedly advance a social justice agenda. And I believe that was precisely why it was important for the neoconservative cohort to deny me such recognition, which could open the door to many other scholars (and students)—to follow this path.

I had to apply 10 years in a row before I got it—and that was only once I brought a complaint against my self-proclaimed Christian Zionist colleague, insisting he be relieved of his chair’s position on this committee as no one is supposed to serve continuously for that length of time. To demonstrate how egregiously biased this individual was and yet managed to control the actions of a diverse body of faculty in his attempts to prevent an award/recognition I had clearly earned through my numerous publications when I started applying for this award, I will share the following point of information. One year, the committee under his leadership, decided to vote for another faculty member who had applied for this award so as to prevent me from being in the running, which proved to be such a ridiculously partisan decision that even the university President (no supporter of mine)—that year was forced to deny their decision, with the humiliating result that NO ONE was awarded this honor that year. How do you vote for someone to be given a Distinguished Scholar recognition when they haven’t published anything of note—except a few newsletter entries and an article in a non-peer-reviewed journal? Thanks to someone with a sense of justice on that committee, I managed to have a look at this other faculty’s application dossier (all of 2 pages long!)—and used the information I gleaned to later write to the President as well as the Dean of my College to let them know I wasn’t going to abide the current Chair of the Award Committee being allowed to serve another term. In that letter, I detailed the decisions taken over the past 10 years which according to what I knew about research and publication records of applicants including myself, had wronged me by refusing to acknowledge both the breadth and depth of my scholarship.

The next year, sure enough, with the threat of legal action by me as well as perhaps, a few awakened consciences—I got what by rights I should have received a decade earlier. Perhaps because my scholarly publications have nothing to do with the Israel-Palestine issue, I was helped with a strong case made on my behalf by my department representative to the Awards committee, the same colleague who is in disagreement with my anti-Zionist views.

This is where things get trickier and murkier.

People obviously have/should have, a right to their views, but when holding a particular set of views puts someone’s career in danger, and brings them into the line of censure and censorship, then dangerous precedents curbing free speech are being set.

In the cases I experienced involving the two colleagues described above, one has been very subtle in this area of curbing my right to free expression through a soft “guidance”, at times even by helping me advance certain career goals, whereas the other made blatant attempts to deny me a platform of visibility and scholarly prominence due to my views on a particular issue with which he was in disagreement. The real problem is that these two very different types of censoring actions, one within the bounds of friendly collegiality the other not—are united under the banner of a shared Zionist ideology that has huge clout in academia and politics and works to isolate people like me in an effort to curb our ability to grow in numbers and strength. As an illustration of the latter claim I’m making, despite pleading for the past two decades to my department colleagues to back a request to the upper administration for a tenure-track line in Arab and Arab American literature and culture, or hire even another postcolonialist like myself who could teach within my areas of interest such as the course I created called Images of Muslim Women and which currently gets offered only when I am available to teach it—my requests have been effectively sidelined. Hiring another brown South Asianist like me or an Arabist has proved impossible over the past 37 years, and we remain a white-dominated dept.

In the case of the more blatant approach, it led my Christian Zionist colleague in the aftermath of 9/11, to posting outrageously racist and xenophobic comments about me on a 3-4,ooo strong faculty and staff listserv, such as “Go back to the caves you crawled out from”—when I insisted on historicizing the 9/11 tragedy, bringing to the fore arguments being made by activist writers like Arundhati Roy about the many 9/11s that preceded what happened on US soil, in so many countries of the global south thanks to unrelenting military and economic interference by the US’s military-industrial imperialist complex. Part of my own historicizing argument was to link unqualified US backing of the Zionist colonial-settler Israeli apartheid nation to the state of general distrust and dislike of the US by the majority of the world’s brown and black peoples. I also published an anthology of writings by Muslim women called Shattering the Stereotypes in which I made these links between US’s destructive imperialist policies around the globe, including its egregious support for land theft and killing of native Palestinians by Israel, to the rise of Islamist extremism as a form of opposition to what its sympathizers and followers perceive as the unchecked hegemony of the western bloc of nations led by the US of A.

Making such links obviously did not go down well with people like the former Chair of Religion and Philosophy at Montclair. Accordingly, he made vocal and visible attempts to silence me, but in effect, this just exposed his bias ever so clearly, to the chagrin of more sophisticated minds, some of whom may have shared similar reservations about my politics and point of view.

Without going down the path of assuming I know what lay in the hearts and minds of colleagues as well as administrative leaders, I can attest to the fact that a strange confluence of pressure built up around me in the decades after 9/11, wherein I became the “Muslim Woman” made to emblematize both the exception to the rule of Muslim fundamentalism in western academic locations, as well as to be looked at with suspicion for harboring sentiments which, because they were at odds with the US-Zionist machine of Empire, rendered me unpatriotic (hence a traitor) in the eyes of many. Several students especially in classes where I taught Palestinian writers like Ghassan Kanafani or Arab feminists like Nawal el Saadawi who also exposed the links between Zionism, US imperialism, patriarchy and racial capitalism, as well as so-called Islamic fundamentalism —called me anti-USA, complaining about me in student evaluations. At times some Jewish students expressed anger at my views, although in more recent years, the number of Jewish anti-Zionist students has grown exponentially on campus, as a result, perhaps, of exposure to oppositional views of Zionist discourse taught by people like me. In any case, the net result of the confluence of both admiration as well as distrust for what I stood for, for the views I espoused unambiguously in my teaching and my writings, exposing the links between all manner of pieties, combined to result in a number of eventualities.

The first of these was the discovery that my name was on the AMCHA list of professors “inimical to Israel” and hence to be avoided and denounced. Here is what the Amcha Initiative’s website announcement of their stated objectives:

IMPORTANT: Share this list with your family, friends, and associates via email, Facebook, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn, or word-of-mouth.

As the fall semester begins, many students will consider taking courses offered by Middle East scholars on their respective campuses, in order to better understand the current turmoil raging in the Middle East, especially the Israel-Gaza conflict. AMCHA Initiative has posted a list of 218 professors identifying themselves as Middle East scholars, who recently called for the academic boycott of Israel in a petition signed. Students who wish to become better educated on the Middle East without subjecting themselves to anti-Israel bias, or possibly even antisemitic rhetoric, may want to check which faculty members from their university are signatories before registering. (my emphasis)

From MSU, apparently, I’m the only such signatory listed:

Montclair State University
Fawzia Afzal-Khan, Professor and Director, Women and Gender Studies

During the 2016-2017 academic year, after a semester teaching abroad at NYU in Abu Dhabi, I returned to MSU and because of a sudden departure of the woman who had succeeded me as Director of Women and Gender Studies after I’d completed two terms in the position, I was requested by colleagues teaching in the program, and at the behest of the then Provost, to take up the post once more so as to keep the program running smoothly. I agreed to do so for one year, stating that we needed to find someone else to take on these leadership responsibilities as I had done my duty and had agreed to resume my position only for a year to ensure that a program I had built up over the past 6 years and in whose success I was invested, would not fall apart. Over the summer months preceding the Fall term, I then worked pro-bono to restore some order in the program prior to moving into the AY, which included finalizing the hiring of 2 new adjunct instructors to teach several of our required courses which were already at capacity with registered students. One of these new instructors, who had already met with, and whose credentials had been vetted by, the outgoing Director, who had offered both him and the other instructor jobs for the coming year, apparently had tweeted a comment sometime over the past year, expressing his disgust at President Trump and stating, “Trump is a f—ing joke. This is all a sham. I wish someone would just shoot him outright.” I did not know of these political opinions of said instructor or about this social media posting expressing a strong wish to see the current President of the US dead, but even if I had, I would have treated it as his right to free speech particularly in off-campus fora. A few weeks prior to the start of the Fall term, I was asked to meet with the Dean of my college, who informed me that I had been relieved of my position as Director of the program.

The reason I was given for this ignominious “firing” from a leadership position that I had been invited to—nay begged—to fill, was that a letter had been sent to the President of the University, from an outside source asking how someone calling for the assassination of our country’s President, had “slipped through the cracks” in the hiring process without being properly vetted.  Since I was the Director in charge, the barb was clearly pointed at me, and as such, had its desired effect: not only the instructor in question, but I too was relieved of our positions. Here is how I saw what happened, as I outlined in an article published soon thereafter in CounterPunch.

I believe strongly that my “firing” was in response to the Islamophobic rant sent to the President, Provost and Dean of my university by right wing columnist James Merse (who writes for a rag called the Daily Caller in NJ)—and on which he also copied me. In this email he threatened the university, claiming he and his “cohort” of right-wing supporters would have marched in protest onto the campus had the admin not fired Allred! He kept asking in that email “how did Allred’s hire slip through the cracks” (he had previously stated such things publicly)-and since I was the new Director in charge of the Program at this time, the question was obviously pointed at me. Now all the administrators knew I had had nothing to do with hiring this Allred guy—so why remove me then? It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that these right-wing nuts like Merse knew of my public writings exposing their outfits and the individuals that head them and that right now in the US, these scary folks are exercising their financial and political clout to pressurize university administrators to fire or otherwise silence voices like mine who are anathema to them.

A particular article I had published a few years prior, also in Counterpunch, traces precisely this money-trail of funders of Islamophobia which I argued in the article, is quite clearly linked to Zionist and pro-Israeli sources and conservative think-tanks. My research into these links was prompted in the fall of 2012, by seeing huge billboards appear at my Hudson Valley town’s train station, touting nakedly Islamophobic ads. I wrote:

I was stunned to see an ad on a billboard staring me in the face from across the train tracks stating the following:

19,250 deadly Islamic attacks since 9/11/01. And counting. It’s not Islamophobia, it’s Islamorealism.

The ad was paid for by two organizations called “Jihad watch.org” and “Atlasshrugged”. Jihad Watch is a program of the David Horowitz Freedom Center, and its Director is a man named Robert Spencer who is the author of twelve books, including two New York Times bestsellers, The Truth About Muhammad and The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (and the Crusades). According to the Jihadwatch website:

Spencer has led seminars on Islam and jihad for the United States Central Command, United States Army Command and General Staff College, the U.S. Army’s Asymmetric Warfare Group, the FBI, the Joint Terrorism Task Force, and the U.S. intelligence community.  Stealth Jihad: How Radical Islam is Subverting America without Guns or Bombs (Regnery), is a supposed “expose” of how jihadist groups are advancing their agenda in the U.S.

Spencer was joined in weaving his web of anti-Muslim (and more specifically, anti-Arab and anti-Palestinian) conspiracy theories—which are still being taught to and ingested by the US military forces—by his colleague Pamela Geller, an acolyte of the early 20^th c. writer Ayn Rand, a libertarian conservative and uber-capitalist—hence the name of the blogsite she sponsors, Atlasshrugs.com. which today has become https://gellerreport.com/ and is spewing forth venomous stories repeating unsubstantiated Israeli hasbara claims about Hamas ‘ rapes of Israeli women (which have been proved to be utterly factitious, relying on uncorroborated accounts of two unreliable witnesses belonging to a very suspect and morally compromised militia group called ZAKA, which in Israel itself prior to Oct 7^th, had been subject to incessant criticism, investigations, and demands to dismantle it).[1]

As I was researching the links between Islamophobic content of Spencer and Geller’s work and their support for Israel, it became clear that theirs was a racist agenda that also appealed to neoconservative white supremacists in Europe. So I pointed out how

The attacks on Muslims and those thought to be Muslim which … are linked to racism in general, are hardly confined to the US. The terrible massacre of innocent children at summer camp in Norway by Anders Brevik a few years ago can be linked to the hate-speech of bloggers Geller and Spencer who are cited as important influences by Breivik in his Manifesto.

As I argued in the conclusion of that essay, there was (still is!)–a confluence of several dangerous discourses that coalesced in August 2012 in the anti-Muslim ads such as those posted on MTA train stations in NY. Jihadwatch and AtlasShrugged were also behind another series of ads posted on municipal buses in San Francisco and on municipal buses, and here is what these proclaimed:

In any war between the civilized man and the savage, support the civilized man.

Support Israel, Defeat Jihad.

The equation of “civilized man” with the State of Israel, the “savage” with that of the absent Arab, is lifted verbatim from a 1974 lecture by American author Ayn Rand, which have been echoed by Golda Meir and other past and present leaders of Israel:

The Arabs are one of the least developed cultures. They are typically nomads. Their culture is primitive, and they resent Israel because it’s the sole beachhead of modern science and civilization on their continent. When you have civilized men fighting savages, you support the civilized men, no matter who they are. Israel is a mixed economy inclined toward socialism. But when it comes to the power of the mind—the development of industry in that wasted desert continent—versus savages who don’t want to use their minds, then if one cares about the future of civilization, don’t wait for the government to do something. Give whatever you can. This is the first time I’ve contributed to a public cause: helping Israel in an emergency.

(lecture delivered in 1974)

Connecting the Dots

What I’ve tried to do throughout my academic career, is to connect the dots between phenomena the academy wishes to keep separate and de-linked via its erection of disciplinary walls, zealously guarded, even when lipservice is given to the virtues of interdisciplinarity. Most of all, drawing connections between Zionism, US militarism, racialized capitalism and exposing, as I have, how these disparate formations are threaded together in ways that permeate and inform the hallowed halls of academia, is clearly the kind of display of disobedience to the norms of our profession that must needs be punished.

It was, therefore, no surprise that the University President took the occasion of a threat toward the campus made by the reporter for the Daily Caller (a Fox News affiliate, founded by Tucker Carslon and Neil Patel), who stated in an email to the top brass that he had been prepared to “organize and lead significant peaceful-but loud—protests and campaigns” to hold the university accountable had it not terminated the adjunct instructor’s position– to not just fire that adjunct, but also “punish” me by publicly dismissing me from my position as Director of WGS.  Doing so can be read as a decision made possible by a serendipitous confluence of factors, to appease a university President wary of someone espousing my politics “leading” and setting policy and curricula goals for a small but thriving program with a reputation for disobedience, as well as to do the kind of damage control needed to prevent conservative donors allied to the individuals, media outlets and think-tanks the Daily Caller reporter had links with, to withdraw their financial support.

What I had argued several years prior to my wrongful dismissal–that a confluence of interests in the US political and cultural sphere threatened to overcome the polity with hatred, zenophobia, Islamophobia, racism—these same factors came together a few years later to ensure the following outcome in my professional life: as a brown Muslim woman who had painstakingly exposed links between Zionism and these other ills, I would not be given a public-facing position that might result in persuading others to what is clearly anathema in US discourse. Here is what I had written in 2012, following the Islamophobic and anti-Palestine poster campaign orchestrated by Geller and Spence:

What this uncritical support and valorization of the State of Israel and its Jewish citizens leads to, as the world has seen in the past 60 years or so since Israel was founded and Palestine reduced to a series of occupied settlements, is ongoing war between unequal opponents in Israel/Palestine.  Such a state of affairs based on injustice toward the Palestinians who have been refugees in their own lands since 1947, with more than 4 million of them displaced in the Palestinian diaspora, has contributed to many of the troubles we face today as the world becomes a full-scale conflict zone from East to West, North to South. The mentality of the Gellers and Spencers of this world has infected the good sense of people on all sides of this and other related debates on human rights worldwide, and exerted undue influence on the foreign policy of the USA; it has shaped presidencies and policies, and now, if unchecked,  such a mentality could bring together discourses of racism, zenophobia, class and gender politics together with Islamophobia, that may push the electorate into voting for people who would lead the country back into the Dark Ages of a second McCarthy era.

Well, as it has turned out, whether you are Trump or Biden—the Palestinians remain as fodder to be served up to the Israel lobby.

Where I Am/ We Are Today

We are obviously all under surveillance and today we are seeing the terrible consequences of speaking truth to power affecting students and faculty across our campuses who dare to condemn Israeli genocide and show empathy with Palestinian civilians being butchered in the thousands.

Once again, with a handful of other faculty on my campus, I am active on our campus discussion list in posting analysis and information beyond state-sponsored media narratives. Once again, we are the victims of name-calling and one of us on my campus has been publicly silenced due to complaints against him of “creating a hostile work environment.” I have in recent months, published an essay outlining this outrageous turn of events.

While dangerous moves to equate anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism are afoot as witnessed in a US Congressional Resolution passed last December, the temper of the masses has changed. This has been unambiguously on view as millions of people many of them of the Jewish faith, across the world continue to take to the streets in protest of the Israeli genocide–a word that following the ICJ’s ruling, will now forever be attached to the Israeli state.

On US campuses, as well, while firings and suspensions of untenured faculty who are vocal in their support of Palestine are on the rise, as is the doxxing of Palestinian and pro-Palestinian students from many of whom job offers have been rescinded, this is all being countered by many more of us than ever before, refusing to be silenced or intimidated. Helped by several colleagues, I am proud to announce that we have joined FJP National with the creation of our university’s chapter of the same, and are slowly seeing numbers of members rise, though many have requested anonymity.

While I have at times elected to, and at others been deliberately sidelined in the decision-making apparatus of university life, I believe that justice will always prevail in the end. I am proud of having remained a disobedient voice, of questioning the norms that compel us to be compliant to the norms of authority in, or outside of, academe. Indeed, I am currently the plaintiff in a case to investigate and discipline my Dean who at a public event in February of this year, refused to greet me or my husband civilly when I walked up to him to say hello, and instead launched into a hostile diatribe against what he claimed were antisemitic remarks I had made on the campus listserv.

I’d like to end by citing a passage from Steven Salaita’s latest essay, in which he pulls no punches regarding the compromises we as scholars working for remuneration and rewards make; at the same time, he exhorts us to do the right thing, to embrace disobedience and class disloyalty, in order to refuse compliance to a genocidal world order:

Maybe it’s time for scholars to disobey our own compunctions—that we’re important or even indispensable, that our education gives us special insight, that innovation would die if we suddenly went away.  Our main compunction, as with all the professions, is to obey class loyalties.  Disobedience should be introspective, then.  We have to disrupt the norms and procedures that advantage the compliant.  How can this be done?  It’s hard to say.  But that it needs doing is by now beyond doubt.

(“Customs of Obedience in Academe,” Feb 12, 2024))

Steven paid the ultimate price for disobedience—he was fired from his faculty position even before setting foot on the campus that had hired him, for a series of tweets condemning Israeli slaughter in Gaza during Operation Cast Lead. I am lucky I managed to get tenure, and within the constraints and privileges afforded by it, have tried and will continue to try to speak truth to power—including going after those, like my Dean, who think they can get away with abuse of power in their attempts to silence us.

Notes.

[1] See Nadine Sayegh, “Israel’s ‘purple-washing’ and the dehumanisation of Palestinian men and women.” The New Arab. Feb 8, 2024. https://www.newarab.com/features/purple-washing-and-abuses-against-palestinians

The post US Academia and the Censoring of an Anti-Zionist Professor appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Fawzia Afzal-Khan.

Photograph Source: عباد ديرانية – CC0

The Washington Post’s journalists recently exposed what many already suspected or knew. Donors from society’s richest 1 percent pressured university administrators and political leaders to use police and other means to crush peaceful student protests. The students wanted a change in United States and Israeli policy and action to secure an immediate ceasefire in Gaza. Growing numbers of faculty are joining the students’ protests. They too have been unjustly persecuted by the same “authorities.”

Of course, the lawful role U.S. police are supposed to play is quite different. As “peacekeepers” police should act to make it safe for any and all sides of disputes over U.S. foreign (or domestic) policies to engage in free speech. When university leaders collaborate with police to shut down free speech, both abuse their power. Students around the world have confronted those abuses as have U.S. students in the past. Our students now confront them yet again.

As a professor myself, I am embarrassed when university administrators justify calling in the police to “remove” students from university “private property” (such as lawns). They argue as if real estate concerns outweighed the education and public importance entailed by peaceful student protests on urgent, life-and-death public issues of the day. Real estate justifications also reveal university administrators’ ignorance. Huge tax exemptions subsidize private universities in the United States with public money. They get expensive public services delivered to them gratis. The rest of the U.S. public pays the taxes that fund those public services. Likewise, massive government grants support general university purposes (added on to grants for specific academic research projects) for both “private” and public institutions. To significant degrees, all colleges and universities are publicly funded institutions. They are thus perfectly appropriate locations for public expressions of opinion about important public issues. University administrators try to hide slavish pandering to rich donors when they try fake “private property” excuses for calling the police on students. Punishing students seeking peace in Gaza brings deep and lasting shame on the universities who do that.

The same applies to all those authorities who use the old “violence” ploy to cover their pandering. They pose as driven to prevent or end mostly unreal campus violence. Meanwhile, these same authorities mostly support real, infinitely worse violence in Ukraine and Gaza. In contrast, student protestors for peace in Gaza have every reason to avoid campus violence precisely because it risks dissuading some other students from joining them. Enemies of the protest try to associate it with violence precisely to constrain the protests’ growth. Years ago, university administrators, police, and politicians likewise wildly exaggerated the minimal violence they blamed on anti-Vietnam war protesters. Unlike those authorities, those protesters actually helped end that war and its horrific violence.

Protests disrupt “business as usual” to open time and space for public discussion and action around an urgent public issue. That is why workers strike, marchers crowd streets for the rights of minorities and women, and vigils for peace gather at traffic intersections. In recent years, millions of French people wearing yellow vests shut down France to ask for social changes. In the spring of 2024, general strikers similarly shut down Argentina. Protesters explain why they want change. Their protests ask others to engage with the question of change.

Protests also attest to a society’s social health: its ability to overcome the resignation, reticence, and fear that too often prevent or delay social problems from getting public attention. The absence of protest often drives urgent social problems underground. There they fester and eventually burst forth more disruptively than earlier protests would have been. Let protesters make their points. If counter-protesters wish, let them do likewise with their points. That is what “free speech” means. When the “authorities” in power fear the criticism, questions, and demands of the people they control, almost any public protests quickly become intolerably frightening to them. Their control is challenged and they react in ways that undercut their empty claims to be “democratic.” We all have a right and duty to affirm genuine free speech.

The larger world is changing. The horrors in Gaza, the forming of a new, powerful student movement critical of U.S. foreign policy, and undemocratic efforts to stop free speech all flow from global changes. Our world is now fast becoming very different from what it was for most of our parents’ lives. Just as the British empire rose, peaked, and then fell, the American empire that followed it rose, peaked, and is now declining. Americans are only beginning to grasp that reality as denying it remains the majority’s position. Each of us confronts the changes in the world based on our own histories. Therefore, before drawing conclusions about Gaza and the student protests, I need to explain where I am coming from, my family’s history, and how it contextualizes my engagement with a changed and changing world.

My mother and her sister were both incarcerated in concentration camps in the late 1930s (my aunt in a German camp, my mother in a French camp). Their parents (my grandparents) were killed in a different German concentration camp. My mother was born and raised in Berlin, Germany, and attended the University of Berlin until she fled Germany in 1936. My father, born in Metz (a disputed French/German city on the border), attended several German and Swiss universities, became a lawyer and eventually a judge in Germany before leaving for France in 1933. His sister was picked up by the Gestapo in Paris in the late 1930s and later killed in Auschwitz. Many other family members died in ways linked to fascism and/or World War II. All those who “survived” suffered severe traumas, often aggravations of other traumas they had suffered earlier in their lives.

My parents, beyond surviving, additionally underwent the refugee experience in the United States. The English language and U.S. customs were largely unknown to them. They had no money. Their European professional credentials were not honored in the United States. When I was born, my father was a steel worker in a Youngstown, Ohio, factory, and my mother was a “homemaker” in that period’s words. As the first child of refugee “survivors” of multiple traumas, I was heavily pressured to “succeed” in the new country. My unspoken task was somehow to compensate for all the losses and injuries my parents always carried with them everywhere. I also listened closely to the snippets of information about fascism, Europe, World War II, and contemporary history that emerged from countless conversations in and around my family. This is the background for how I “relate” to the events in Israel, Gaza, and the United States over recent decades, especially since last October. “Relate” here includes confronting today’s student protests, their attempted repression, and writing this article.

The uniform premise of discussions of fascism, war, and related subjects within my family was that they all represented the most recent of a long list of human tragedies across history. They could have happened anywhere and probably did. And they could happen and probably would happen again anywhere. Perhaps the best that we could reasonably hope for was that some sort of political action we might undertake now could reduce the probability, frequency, or horrors of future tragedies.

For me, that meant I should seek to understand how societies work, act to change them, and thereby contribute to achieving the best that could reasonably be hoped for. Notions that any nation or region was uniquely prone to or immune from becoming Nazis were not taken seriously. Germany was in no way uniquely prone to nazification. Likewise, “denazification laws,” “civil liberty traditions,” or slogans like “never again” gave no nation immunity from becoming partly or wholly nazified. That included Israel.

My father fought fascism as a student in Germany, then as a journalist across Europe, as a labor lawyer in Germany, and later as a naturalized U.S. citizen combatting the racism directed against African Americans and against Puerto Rican immigrants in New York City. He was respectful of Marxism as an intellectual tradition and a political movement but personally kept his distance from it. He was always a European left social democrat: comfortable in the United States of Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR) from his arrival in 1939 until FDR’s death in 1945. He became progressively more uncomfortable after 1945. He neither missed nor denied the rightward shifts of politics in the United States and Western Europe after 1945. He sensed the maturation of conditions that could again enable new nazisms to emerge. He explicitly wondered about such possibilities, especially for a fascism to emerge and take power in the United States but also in other places including Israel.

As my mother grew older, she mused often that “the Jews learned nothing from the Holocaust” and “the Jewish Zionists learned nothing from the Holocaust beyond ‘Better to perpetrate one than to suffer it again’.” My mother, 9 years younger than my father, had to leave the University of Berlin in 1936 after police identified her as a courier for the anti-Hitler underground. A frequently heard comment from one or the other of my parents: Jews have very often been the enemies and victims of nationalisms, often after long periods of living and intermarrying in neighborhoods where Jews and non-Jews comingled peacefully. What drove non-Jews to turn on Jewish neighbors were worsening economic and social problems affecting both Jewish and non-Jewish communities. In both communities, few identified the sources of their problems as capitalism, imperialism, and colonialism: the taboos against such reasoning were too strong.

There were still too few Marxists to teach and explain the effects of capitalism. The Marxists and their allies that were active then analyzed social problems in ways and using terms heavily influenced by the Russian Revolution and the specific interpretation of Marxism promoted by the USSR. That interpretation became dominant over other, alternative interpretations because the unrivaled prestige of the first and only successful Marxist revolution in 1917 Russia made its interpretation dominant. Soviet Marxism defined capitalism as an economic system that combined private property (privately owned and operated enterprises) with free markets (enterprises and workers distributing goods and services to one another via exchange). Soviet Marxists and those who followed their lead argued that the capitalist system produced the inequalities of wealth and income, the instabilities of the “business cycle,” and the corruptions of politics by money that all together could lead to fascism and Nazis. In contrast, socialists proposed to advance beyond capitalism via (1) seizure of the state by the working class (by revolution or ballot victories), (2) state takeovers of enterprises, and (3) state planning instead of markets. They called such a socialism a rational economic system working in the interests of the majority working class rather than a minority capitalist class of owners. Such a socialism was the opposite, the antidote for, and the alternative to fascism.

Meanwhile, the emerging Nazis analyzed society by focusing on altogether different concepts such as race and nation. They defined the social problem as national and racial in origin: the German nation/Aryan race was being victimized by the Jewish nation/race. My father quoted Engels to the effect that such antisemitism was the stupid person’s socialism.

How had Germans in fact suffered (or, in Nazi terms, been victimized)? In and by the loss of World War I (1918), the huge reparations bill charged to Germany afterward, the worst inflation in modern European history that devastated its middle classes’ savings (1923), and then the Great Crash (1929) and its global Depression aftermath. German capitalists and the right-wing parties they funded took political advantage of all those events by deeming them victimizations. They blamed non-Germans for them: Bolsheviks from whom German socialists and communists had imported their evil ideologies. Nazis stressed the presence of Jews in the German left as their basis to rewrite history as a conspiracy to subordinate Germans (and others) to Jewish global financial rule. That project drew much inspiration from earlier writings across Europe accompanying antisemitic upsurges there. Casting Jews as thus a threatening race/nation, Nazis could mobilize Germans for their self-defense against the Jewish threat. Self-defense could and did justify repression, property dispossession, arrest, and eventually physical extermination of Jews. Similarly now for many Israelis, the war on Gaza is justified as an exercise in defense against Palestinians and the deep threat they are seen to represent. Aggressive U.S. foreign policies likewise refer to their military arm as the Department of Defense.

Germany’s extreme problems after World War I culminating in the impact of the global Great Depression after 1929 overwhelmed its leaders. They found no traditional way forward as the mass of Germans became ever more desperate. Therefore they accepted the way offered by Hitler. His genocidal tendencies found a fertile ground that led to scapegoating especially of Jews. The Nazis filled the jails, concentration camps, and eventually the ovens and graves of Germany and many of its allies (Poland, Austria, Italy, Spain, and occupied France) with all their scapegoats.

There was always opposition to Nazism. Alongside the Jewish opposition, there were also many others, especially among socialists and communists. Those oppositions suffered countless tragic losses but also proved spectacularly productive of heroic and productive breakthroughs in thought, association, and action. Those breakthroughs shaped world history after 1945. They helped to make us the critics of received norms of racial, gender, and class discrimination. In particular, they strengthened and transformed post-war anti-imperialism and anti-capitalism. Most colonialisms were overthrown by the colonized.

My parents’ and their families’ traumas generated among the survivors a certain sympathy and empathy for the idea that Jews (and also LGBTQ+ people, the Roma, and others persecuted by Nazis) might finally and somehow find safety in the world. That extended to a romanticized early image of Israel—and especially its kibbutzim collectivities. But starting in the 1950s, as the kibbutzim declined and Israeli governments accepted ever more subordination to U.S. foreign policies, my parents’ sympathies diminished.

Qua religion, Judaism had been long abandoned not only by my mother and father but also by their parents. Those generations were proudly “free-thinkers” or what my father once called “post-religion.” Holding on to religious symbols and rituals at a time when they seemed ever more inappropriate, absurd, or worse struck them as unwanted modes of separation from the progressive tendencies of the larger society. Both my sister and I grew up and shared in that framework as have my children.

The previous paragraphs sketch some context for how I approach the Israeli-Palestine conflict and U.S. student protests. The Israelis and Palestinians are trapped in a dead-end. Different as it is in most details from Germany in the 1930s, the Palestine-Israel conflict is similarly driven toward ever more deeply irrational objectives and strategies. For safety, some Jewish Zionists undertook a 20th-century settler colonialism in Palestine similar to what the British, French, German, and other European nations had undertaken in earlier centuries. Back then it was possible to “succeed” in military, political, and ideological terms in establishing and profiting from such settler colonialisms for long periods. There were centuries of time to ethnically cleanse indigenous people, to enable invading settler colonists to herd them into areas “reserved” for their impoverishment. Israel’s is the attempt much, much later to establish and secure a settler colonialism in radically altered historical conditions. Now most of the world’s people fight for and celebrate freedom from (ending) settler and other colonialisms. Their opposition offsets and now threatens to overwhelm the immense support Israel received and receives from the US and its shrinking number of other supporters.

Colonial subjects always resisted and fought back against the colonizers. Resistance repressed went and grew underground. Periodically then it exploded into view surprising the colonizers with its ever deeper roots, persistence, and intensities. Eventually and everywhere, resistance to colonialism developed the self-consciousness, theories, organizations, and weaponry to overcome colonialism at least to the point of acquiring formal political independence. My own PhD dissertation sought to identify the roots overdetermining this process in Britain’s settler colonialism in Kenya. There, accumulated resistances and repressions peaked in the Mau Mau rebellion. It freed Kenya’s people by ending Kenya’s colonial status. Acquiring real political independence is the next step now engaging many formerly colonized territories. Real economic independence—as required by real freedom—is yet a further step now gingerly explored by China, India, and Brazil.

Colonial history thus suggests the poorest of prospects for Israeli settler colonialism prevailing over a colonized Palestine. The conditions of existence for any such prevalence are not there now nor likely to emerge. Israel’s history thus displays repeated Palestinian uprisings and repeated Israeli repressions. Both become increasingly violent and vindictive. Stuck in a dead end, resistors and repressors resort to ever more extreme actions such as Hamas’s attack last October and Israel’s destruction of Gaza ever since. Israeli officials refer to Palestinians as “animals” and speak publicly about expelling millions of them from the country. Palestinian officials insist a genocide is being imposed by Israel upon them. Netanyahu’s allies join in banning and arresting opponents of his policies. How much further along that road will they go? U.S. students in response have given birth to a new mass movement that is changing the country as you read this.

Hitler’s genocide ended when outside forces intervened to fight and win World War II. Inside forces (Jewish resistance, resistance to German occupation, and anti-fascism) helped in key ways. Will the forces already inside Israel and Palestine together with outside forces intervene and stop the Palestine-Israel catastrophe? Students and faculties at colleges and universities across the world are now in the movement for such interventions. Each of them is now making personal choices about whether and how to participate in that movement. Each person’s choice will affect the rest of that person’s life.

Many students and teachers are at work trying to understand honestly how Palestinian and Israeli societies evolved, separately and in relation, such that they came to today’s horrific situation. They use classes, readings, and libraries seriously to interrogate concepts like “settler colonialism,” “apartheid,” “self-defense,” and “antisemitism/anti-Zionism.”

Many students and teachers proceed unafraid to ask about how capitalism may have operated on both the Israeli and Palestinian sides—and among their supporters—in producing today’s dead end. The point of asking is to inquire further about an urgent issue: could basic social changes help overcome the Israeli-Palestine dead end by providing a new beginning on an economic foundation better than capitalism? Might the kibbutzim, had their numbers and importance within the Israeli economy been facilitated, have produced a different politics? Might the growth of worker cooperatives within the Palestinian territories have functioned likewise? Had such coops and kibbutzim built upon their shared economic structures to fashion political alliances, how differently might the whole Middle East have evolved?

Yes, these are big, bold, new ways of thinking about the present, horrific dead-end in Gaza. Students and universities have often led the rest of society in such new ways. Yes, universities around the world now struggle with huge free-speech vs. police issues provoked by the Gaza events. But the old, defensive, aggressive ways of thinking and acting have more than failed to solve the Israeli-Palestine problem. They made it worse. Old defensive, aggressive ways of thinking also misunderstand a changed world, one in which the U.S. dominance coming out of World War II has now peaked and is receding. A declining empire is a new experience and context for everything else happening around us. Our generation is living through that process of decline. We need to think critically about historic dead ends without past generations’ fear of using anti-capitalist traditions of thought.

The student and faculty protest movement around demands for a Gaza ceasefire is doing that. For that it deserves applause and to be joined. To the students now leading us I offer my gratitude.

The post A Professor on ‘Authorities’ Who Order Police to Crush Student Protests appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Richard D. Wolff.

The presidents of UCLA, Northwestern and Rutgers universities were questioned Thursday on Capitol Hill about pro-Palestine protests on campus Thursday, the fourth time in six months that the Republican-led House Education Committee has summoned school leaders to Washington over accusations of antisemitism. Lawmakers reserved their heaviest questioning for the presidents of Northwestern and Rutgers, where Gaza solidarity encampments were voluntarily dismantled after students negotiated deals with university administrators. Northwestern journalism professor Steven Thrasher, who has been an outspoken supporter of the Gaza solidarity encampments at his school and elsewhere, was singled out during the hearing and described as a “goon,” but he tells Democracy Now! he is undeterred in both his pro-Palestine advocacy and defense of his students. “It’s supposed to scare everybody who supports Gaza. It’s supposed to scare everybody who’s against the genocide. It’s supposed to scare students who are righteously standing up against the killing that’s happening,” says Thrasher.

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

Introduction

Professor Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, a distinguished scholar with dual American and Israeli citizenship who is a resident of California, commands global recognition for her groundbreaking contributions to Palestinian feminist theory and her unwavering commitment to grassroots activism in Jerusalem.

On April 18, 2024, Professor Shalhoub-Kevorkian was subjected to detention and interrogation by Israeli authorities. Despite a subsequent court order for her release, she continues to face the ongoing threat of further arrest and interrogation. It is evident that the line of questioning during these interrogations seeks to discredit her scholarly work by baselessly linking her to acts of violence.

The circumstances surrounding Professor Shalhoub-Kevorkian’s detention are deeply troubling. She was apprehended on meritless grounds, stemming from a gross distortion of statements made in her scholarly articles and during a podcast hosted by reputable university professors in the United States. During her detention, she endured degrading and dehumanizing treatment, including a humiliating strip search, tight restraints causing physical harm, denial of essential medication, and exposure to inhumane conditions in a cold and insect-infested prison cell.

– Lama Khouri
Co-Founder, of the Palestine-Global Mental Health Network, of which Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian is a member.

Standing with Professor Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian: Upholding Justice, Dignity and Academic Freedom

We, the Palestine-Global Mental Health Network, along with our affiliate Networks, spanning Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Ireland, the Netherlands, South Africa, Sweden, the United Kingdom, and the United States, stand in solidarity to honor the remarkable scholarship and unwavering commitment to love, justice, and dignity for all demonstrated by our esteemed colleague and dear friend, Professor Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian who was detained on April 18, and although she was released the next day, she was subjected to prolonged interrogation by the Israeli police, and her safety continues to be under threat.

Professor Shalhoub-Kevorkian’s contributions to academia and activism are unparalleled. As a world-renowned scholar, her work transcends borders and disciplines, shedding light on the hopes of humanity, life and liveability. Her scholarship, based on analysis of processes of colonization, violence and racism, draws upon and enhances Palestinian feminist theory, offering profound insights into the lived experiences of marginalized communities, particularly in the city of Jerusalem where she resides. She has enriched our understanding of the workings of colonial power, including its practices of ‘bio power’ (intrusive control of all stages of human life and death) and through its shaping of discourses. She demonstrates how this contributes to a dehumanizing of Palestinians by constructing them as dangerous ‘others’, who must be subjected to surveillance, control and state violence.

Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian’s interdisciplinary approach means that she is well placed to simultaneously analyse the ‘macro world’ of power politics and its infiltration of the ‘micro world’ of intimate human relationships and subjectivities. This has produced insights of immense value to clinicians as well as academics.

In her groundbreaking work on children, Nadera Shalhoub Kevorkian expounded and developed her concept of ‘unchilding’ which she defines as the “authorised eviction of children from childhood”. This is enacted through state violence, fear, displacement, the undermining of parental function and the denial of the right to normal physical and psychological development. Her work has influenced paediatricians and child mental health clinicians around the world. ‘Unchilding’ encompasses a range of psychological wounds inflicted on the psyche of the infant, the child and the adolescent. It describes the deliberate denial of Palestinian childrens’ fragility and vulnerability and the depiction of them as either terrorists or potential terrorists. At the same time, and most importantly, Nadera’s work depicts children as active subjects in their social worlds, who scrutinize the techniques of power used upon them and assert their own moral values and desires for hope and freedom. She listens carefully to childrens’ own narratives and uses their testimonies to frame her writing. This process of amplifying childrens’ voices has had a profound effect on the practice of many of us who work with children and families.  Nadera’s passion for the well-being of children permeates her academic work, bringing together the love and anti-violence characterizing the feminist ethos in all her writing.

What also sets Nadera apart is not only her academic prowess but also her tireless dedication to grassroots activism. She is not content to merely theorize; instead, she actively engages with communities, amplifying their voices and advocating for meaningful change. Nadera’s work embodies a steadfast commitment, within the framework of international law, to challenging systemic injustices and striving towards a more equitable world for all.

Those of us who have had the privilege to hear Nadera speaking can attest to the erudition, academic rigour and eloquence which she brings to public debate. We are also aware of what a beacon she has been for her students and fellow academics and how important her voice has been for them.

 It is hard to overstate the deep concern and dismay with which we respond to the recent events surrounding Nadera’s detainment and interrogation by Israeli authorities. Despite her peaceful advocacy and scholarly endeavors, she has faced baseless charges and undue scrutiny, highlighting the oppressive tactics employed to silence dissenting voices. It is a profound insult to her sophisticated scholarship and scrupulous use of theoretical terminology that this work is now the main subject of the police interrogation. Throughout this ordeal, Nadera has remained steadfast in her principles, standing firm in defence of academic freedom and the right to dissent.

Her message remains unwavering: one of love, justice, and dignity for all. Her resilience in the face of adversity serves as a beacon of hope, inspiring countless individuals around the world to continue the fight for a more just and compassionate society.

As we continue to advocate for Nadera’s freedom and the protection of academic freedom worldwide, we celebrate her profound impact on the socio-legal field and feminist studies. Her scholarship serves as a testament to the power of knowledge and the transformative potential of academia in addressing abuses of power.

Join us in calling upon Secretary of State Blinken to protect this renowned scholar and American citizen.

Please follow this link and add your name. 

The post Standing with Professor Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian: Upholding Justice, Dignity and Academic Freedom appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Palestine-Global Mental Health Network.

Shai Davidai.

After throwing a foot-stomping tantrum earlier this morning, Shai Davidai, an untenured Columbia University business professor, was denied access to campus.

A self-proclaimed Zionist, Davidai is an Israeli-American who served in the IDF (“proud of it”) and has continually harassed Pro-Palestine protestors at Columbia, labeling them as anti-semitic, pro-Hamas “terrorists.”

On several occasions, Davidai called for the National Guard to be brought in to brutalize pro-Palestine students. He’s even gone so far as to characterize Columbia protestors as “Hitler-youth.”

Columbia Students for Justice in Palestine have started a petition to get him fired.

There is a laundry list of complaints lodged against Davidai, most recently by the 15 Jewish students at Columbia who were arrested and suspended last week during their occupation protest, calling on the school to divest funds from Israel.

In a Jewish Voice for Peace Instagram post, the students called out Davidai directly, writing:

“Futhermore, the disgraceful Shai Davidai publically called us Judenrat Kapost, and told us we would be on ‘the last train to Auschwitz.’ We do not feel safe with this professor still teaching on campus, having access to the Jewish community spaces we cherish, much less portraying himself as a valiant protector and spokesperson of Jews on campus while insulting our ancestors’ memory. Almost every suspended Jewish student los family members in the Holocaust.”

Davidai comes from a long line of assholes. His father, Eli Davidai, is an Israeli business executive who has served as General Manager of ARC, which describes itself as a “leading global advanced manufacturing service provider.”

According to ARC’s 2018 SEC filing:

“Eli Davidai, [ARC’s] General Manager of Operations as of May 2017, has been a Managing Director at QMI [Quadrant Management Inc.] since 1992, where he is responsible for making investments and overseeing companies at the firm.  Additionally, Mr. Davidai was elected to the Company’s Board of Directors on June 5, 2018.”

Among other things, ARC manufactures weapons parts, including “polymer magazine for NATO Compatible weapons,” “triggers and hammers,” “precision guided munitions components,” and more.

In 2016, ARC won an award for an AR-15 component and, in 2010, scored a prize for an “explosive device made for a Department of Defense application.”

ARC also makes parts for MCX and MPX rifles, which are used by the Israeli military.

As you probably guessed, Shai’s parents are extremely wealthy. Eli and his wife, Zohara Davidai, have sponsored the Arrhythmia Center in Tel Hashomer, Israel, where Benjamin Netanyahu was fitted for a pacemaker last year.

Interestingly, as @cholent_lover exposed on X, Eli Davidai has had a long business relationship with Alan Quasha, CEO of Quadrant Management, who also serves on the Board of Directors of ARC. Quasha is an interesting character—an international businessman and venture capitalist who is worth billions.

Quasha has been involved in everything from Harken Energy (where George W. Bush was accused of insider trading as he sat on Harken’s Board) to his dealings with the Saudis, US intelligence, and even the Clintons.

Quasha is also the founder of Quadrant Security Strategies, which “makes equity investments in innovative and emerging private companies that support US National Security.”

To top it off, Shai Davidai’s grandfather, Benny Davidai (a founder of El Al Airlines), was a notorious strikebreaker.

The apple doesn’t fall far, as they say.

Meanwhile, as pro-Palestine protests spread across US campuses, Columbia faculty walked out this afternoon in a massive show of solidarity with student protestors.

Image by Columbia University, Associate Professor Hiba Bou Akar.

The post Columbia Professor Shai Davidai’s Family Tied to Weapons Manufacturing appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Joshua Frank.

In his State of the Union address, President Biden addressed Israel’s assault on Gaza, where the humanitarian crisis continues to worsen amid a relentless bombing campaign and siege. We’re joined by two guests: Eman Abdelhadi, a Chicago-based Palestinian Egyptian American professor, artist and activist, who on Thursday delivered an alternate State of the Union address called “The State of Genocide,” and Neta Heiman Mina, a member of the Israeli chapter of Women Wage Peace, whose 84-year-old mother, Ditza Heiman, was one of the hostages released during the temporary ceasefire and hostage exchange between Israel and Hamas in November. Abdelhadi says that by arming Israel while offering limited aid to the starving population of Gaza, the Biden administration is “effectively holding a gun to Palestinians’ heads, shooting at them with one hand and throwing crumbs at them with the other.” Meanwhile, Mina calls on the Israeli government “to do everything we can” to return the remaining hostages, including an immediate ceasefire and the release of Palestinian prisoners. “This genocide has been going on for 152 days, and it is 100% an American project,” Abdelhadi says, adding that campaigners plan to hold Biden electorally accountable for his continued support for Israel. “We are going to make sure that the DNC knows where we stand on this issue.”

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

BISHKEK -- A day after searching the offices of the news website 24.kg, law enforcement officers in the Kyrgyz capital detained for questioning eight current and former members of the Temirov Live investigative group and the Ait Ait Dese project, as the government continues to pressure independent media.

Temirov Live's founder, prominent investigative journalist Bolot Temirov, said the journalists who were detained for questioning after their homes and offices were searched on January 16 included his wife and the director of the Temirov Live group, Makhabat Tajybek-kyzy.

Temirov said on X, formerly Twitter, that the searches and detentions may be connected to two recent investigative reports by Temirov Live -- one about a private New Year's Eve flight by President Sadyr Japarov to Milan, Italy, on a government plane, the second about corruption among top officials of the Interior Ministry, including minister Ulan Niyazbekov.

The Interior Ministry issued a statement, saying that the searches and detentions for questioning were linked to a probe launched into unspecified Temirov Live publications that "carried elements of calls for mass unrest."

Temirov said that Temirov Live reporters Sapar Akunbekov, Azamat Ishenbekov, and Aike Beishekeeva, as well as former journalists of the group Aktilek Kaparov, Tynystan Asypbek, Saipidin Sultanaliev, and Joodar Buzumov, also had their homes searched.

Temirov, who was deported to Moscow in November 2022 after a court ruled that he illegally obtained Kyrgyz citizenship, which he denies, added that two other employees of the Temirov Live group, whom he identified as Maksat and Jumabek, were detained.

Kyrgyzstan's civil society and independent media have traditionally been the most vibrant in Central Asia, but that has changed amid a deepening government crackdown.

Just a day earlier, officers of the State Committee for National Security (UKMK) detained for questioning the director-general of the 24.kg news website, Asel Otorbaeva, and two editors, Makhinur Niyazova and Anton Lymar, in a case of "propagating war" in an unspecified report about Russia's invasion of Ukraine.

The three were later released but ordered not to reveal details of the case.

Lawmaker Janar Akaev called the moves against the journalists "an attack on freedom of speech."

"Such types of situations lead to self-censorship, and obstruct investigative reports on political and corruption issues," Akaev said, adding that the latest developments around independent journalists will be raised at parliament's next session.

Another lawmaker, Nurjigit Kadyrbekov, told RFE/RL that the ongoing pressure on independent journalists "could damage the president's image."

UN Human Rights Office spokeswoman Liz Throssell expressed concern over the developments around Kyrgyz journalists in the past two days.

"These latest actions by the authorities appear to be part of a larger pattern of pressure against civil society activists, journalists and other critics of the authorities," Throssel said in a statement on January 16, adding, "It is all the more concerning that the Kyrgyz Parliament is considering a draft law on mass media which would restrict the right to freedom of expression which includes media freedom."

"We call on the authorities to protect freedom of expression and ensure that media legislation in the country is in line with international human rights standards," Throssel said.

This content originally appeared on News - Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty and was authored by News - Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty.

The Guiyang Intermediate People's Court handed down the sentence to former Guizhou University professor Yang Shaozheng in a trial behind closed doors on July 29, a post on the Weiquanwang rights website said.

"Yang Shaozheng expressed dissatisfaction with the judgment in court and filed an appeal," the group said. "The reason for the appeal was that this was an illegal trial."

Yang's appeal argued that members of the Chinese Communist Party had presided over the case from start to finish, including the investigation, the prosecution and the trial itself.

"The actions he was charged with fell under freedom of speech and expression, and to criminalize a citizen for exercising those rights was a violation of the constitutional right to freedom of expression," the report paraphrased Yang's appeal as saying.

A key member of Yang's defense team, Zhang Lei, declined to comment when contacted by Radio Free Asia, indicating that he was under a lot of pressure from the authorities, while repeated calls to another member of his defense team rang unanswered on Thursday.

Cost to Chinese taxpayers

Yang, 53, lost his job at Guizhou University’s Institute of Economics in November 2017, on the orders of someone "higher up" the government hierarchy, and was subsequently investigated by police amid a purge of outspoken academics and the adoption of President Xi Jinping's personal brand of ideology across higher education.

Hunan-based dissident Chen Siming said an article in which Yang calculated that party and government personnel cost the Chinese taxpayer an estimated 20 trillion yuan (US$2.75 trillion) annually was likely the trigger for his arrest.

"These questions [he was asking] hit home," Chen said in an interview last month. "He was later expelled from Guizhou University, and then secretly arrested. During this period, lawyers and family members weren't allowed to meet with him." 

Yang spent some time on the run in 2019 after being shackled to a chair and interrogated by state security police for eight hours, around the 30th anniversary of the 1989 Tiananmen massacre.

Just before that stint in detention, Yang had criticized a new wave of ideological training being launched in China's colleges and universities.

He was arrested in secret in May 2021 and placed under incommunicado detention for six months on suspicion of "incitement to subvert state power," before being formally arrested and prosecuted. He is currently being held in the Guiyang No. 1 Detention Center.

His lawyers filed an administrative complaint with the Guizhou provincial state prosecutor on March 3, alleging that state security police were trying to force a "confession" from Yang through torture, which caused him to lose consciousness several times and lose some 25 kilograms (55 pounds) in weight.

The complaint said the abuse took place during the six months he was held under "residential surveillance at a designated location," a type of incommunicado detention frequently used to target critics of the ruling Chinese Communist Party in "national security" cases.

A Guizhou-based lecturer who gave only the surname Yu said Yang, whom she counts as a friend, is a "rare" person in today's China.

"I think Yang Shaozheng knows very well what he was bringing down on his own head when he spoke out like that, but he did it anyway," Yu told Radio Free Asia in a recent interview. "He is a politically brave person, which is a rare thing in our society."

Translated by Luisetta Mudie. Edited by Malcolm Foster.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Gu Ting for RFA Mandarin.

Photograph Source: Michael Cordedda – CC BY 2.0

What is a hard-working English professor to do when confronted with the fact that ChatGBT can write perfectly acceptable undergraduate papers interpreting literary texts?  Are we out of a job? Can our students cheat their way through college without ever learning how to read a poem or a novel?  And who really cares anyway?  Haven’t students always done this, copying large parts of their papers out of an encyclopedia or Wikipedia?  Shouldn’t students be concentrating on practical matters, preparing for jobs that don’t require a college degree, or majoring in one of the STEM disciplines, Science, Technology, Engineering, Math?

As way of putting my toe into these deep waters, I tried an experiment in my course on William Blake at the University of Chicago this spring.  I asked the students to pick out a “Proverb of Hell” from Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, and to ask ChatGPT to provide a one-page interpretation of it.  They were instructed then to write a critical commentary on the results, looking for mistakes, blind spots, and opportunities to make a better interpretation.

The first response was both reassuring and disquieting.  ChatGBT turns out to be a rather good interpreter of complex and enigmatic proverbs.  In response to “Sooner murder an infant in its cradle than nurse unacted desires,” the Bot instantly realized that the proverb was not to be taken literally, instead reading the infant as a metaphor for desire, and linking it to Blake’s other statements about the need for expression to overcome the tendency of human beings to repress their feelings.  The student who picked this proverb found that the only way to critique the Bot was to revive the literal reference to a murdered infant as a shock to the sensibility of normal readers.  After all, this is “the Voice of the Devil,” not the rational Angel, so its status as an “excessive” statement needs to be registered.  This is in line with another proverb that tells us “The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom.”  In short, the statement is not merely metaphor, but also hyperbole.

Another student asked the Bot to interpret the proverb, “Drive your cart and your plow over the bones of the dead.”  AI produced a perfectly reasonable paraphrase, advising us not to dwell on the past, but focus on the present and future.  The student pointed out that this air of reasonableness ignores the long-standing need of human beings to honor and remember the dead.  She criticized the Bot for failing to register the emotional horror of the proverb, turning it into a flaccid cliché of common sense—a perfect example of mechanical thinking. [1]

I asked the Bot to interpret my own favorite proverb, “If the fool would persist in his folly, he would become wise.”  The answer was quite reasonable, noting that human beings learn by trial and error, and even foolish actions can help us learn by experience.   I provided my own critique, pointing out that sometimes people with bold, original ideas are regarded as fools, but if they persist long enough people may come to realize that the idea was actually wise and powerful.  My example was the long-standing dismissal of Artificial Intelligence itself as a fool’s errand by many experts in computer science.  When I communicated this interpretation to the Bot, it responded that this was an interesting reading, and it would incorporate it into future requests to interpret this proverb.

In the last few months, AI has been second only to the debt crisis as a persistent obsession of the New York Times.  Since the publication of journalist Kevin Roose’s dialogue with ChatGPT back in February, in which the Bot “fell in love” with the journalist, urging him to leave his wife and “do love” together, scarcely a day has passed without a story on the threats and promises of artificial intelligence.  The spectre of killer robots and Dr. Strangelove’s automated weapon systems is haunting the world with the prospect of the human species destroying itself with its own technologies.  Dr Geoffrey HInton, the “godfather of AI,”  has been re-enacting the role of Dr. Frankenstein, warning us that he may have created a monster.  “Easy access to AI text- and image-generation tools could lead to more fake or fraudulent content.”  He has called for a six month moratorium on AI research. The average person, he warns, will “not be able to know what is true anymore.”[2]

But even above average persons like the readers of CounterPunch may have some difficulty knowing what is true. This has been the condition of the human species since we first tasted the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge.  Still, it is welcome news to humanists that scientists and engineers (and even a few capitalists) are thinking about the ethical implications of their inventions.  But a six month pause for reflection is not nearly long enough.  Better to build history, culture, and moral philosophy into the STEM disciplines as a permanent feature.  We could then develop programs in what we will call the “SCHTEM” disciplines (Science, Culture, History, Technology, Engineering and Math) and we humanists can help our machine obsessed colleagues ponder the relation of the human species to its inventions in a systematic and sustained way.  Meanwhile, we English professors could stop obsessing about the threat of plagiarized freshman themes and encourage our students to treat AI as a friend and collaborator.   This will inspire their competitive instincts and help them become smarter than the machines that are generating and interpreting all these words and images.  Remember that those images and words could be, not just fake selfies and their accompanying lies, but fraudulent satellite images and commands to launch a first strike.  If the humanities are the discipline that reflects on human nature and the fate of our species, perhaps it might help us to stop using our gadgets to render us extinct.

One thing seems certain:  the whole question of exactly what intelligence is has been opened for fresh investigation.  How does human intelligence measure up against machine, animal, and even vegetative intelligence? (See Eduardo Kohn, How Forests Think). What are the criteria that allow us to judge who or what is smarter?  One answer is clearly evolutionary success, defined as durability, longevity, adaptation, cleverness, inventiveness, skills, and cooperation with other species.  High on the list of the dubious achievements of human intelligence is our ability to destroy other species along with our own habitat.  Our much-vaunted “creativity” is all too often a form of what Joseph Schumpeter called “creative destruction,” the key feature of deregulated capitalism and its partner, environmental devastation.  Why not bring our English majors into conversation, not only with the STEM disciplines, but with economics and ecology, and the new forms of machine intelligence that command the entire archive of human and natural history?

Notes.

[1] See Stephen Eisenman’s article, “AI Chatbots Are Even Scarier Than You Think,” March 3, 2023:  https://www.counterpunch.org/2023/03/03/ai-chatbots-are-even-scarier-than-you-think/

[2] Fortune Magazine (May 1, 2023): https://fortune.com/2023/05/01/godfather-ai-geoffrey-hinton-quit-google-regrets-lifes-work-bad-actors/

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by W.J.T. Mitchell.

“There is no exaggeration in saying that I owe my career as an economist to my friend and mentor, Bill Spriggs,” said Wilson. “Not only did he convince me to finish graduate school, but when Bill hired me for my first job as a research analyst at the National Urban League, he would often tell me that I was his retirement policy. Bill gave meaning to those words by selflessly giving his time, incredible intellect, wisdom, and personal connections while advocating for me on numerous occasions. I learned so much of what I know about economics and economic policy from Bill Spriggs, but more than that, I learned to lead with principles and purpose. I am deeply saddened by his loss, and I hope to do justice to his remarkable legacy as an unapologetic advocate for racial and economic justice.”

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Newswire Editor.

New Zealand is in the grip of a fourth wave of covid but it is predicted to be smaller than previous mass outbreaks.

The most recent analysis from the Public Health Communication Centre at Otago University indicates there could be up to 12,000 hospitalisations and more than a 1000 deaths this year from covid.

Leading epidemiologist Professor Michael Baker said the fourth wave was potentially driven by a rise in the XBB subvariant, which had become dominant in the last two months — exacerbated by waning immunity and people spending more time indoors with the cooler weather.

• READ MORE: Other covid pandemic reports

“This pattern of small to moderate sized waves may indicate what we can expect to see with covid-19 in coming years. But there are still major uncertainties given the potential for this virus to continue to evolve,” he said.

A Flourish data visualization

There was growing evidence that subsequent infections tended to be less severe, which was good news — but there was no room for complacency, Professor Baker said.

“It’s a very different virus to influenza.

“With influenza, you might get it once or twice a decade. But with covid 19, it looks like you might get it once or twice a year.

“And each time you get this infection you’re running all of those risks of getting seriously ill, going to hospital or worse, and potentially developing long-term effects.”

Even those who escaped serious illness could be off work some time, which was having an impact on the workforce.

Covid-19 was still the leading cause of death from infectious disease in New Zealand, with 2419 deaths last year.

“Covid-19 is also a major cause of hospitalisation, with more than 22,000 admissions in 2022… and the virus is a source of inequalities with Māori and Pasifika markedly more likely to be admitted to hospital and die from this infection.”

A Flourish data visualization

Professor Baker and his colleagues have also been examining the multiple monitoring systems for covid-19, and suggest it could be time to transition to a “sustainable and enduring surveillance system” that covers other important respiratory infections, such as influenza and RSE.

This need had become more critical now that the Health Ministry had ditched its plans for covid-19 prevalence surveys, he said.

“A potential alternative is establishing sentinel surveillance of respiratory infections. For example, routinely testing a random sample of people attending specific health care settings such as general practices and emergency departments or community sites such as schools.”

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

As the founder and co-director of the Kathryn O. Greenberg Immigration Justice Clinic, Professor Markowitz is an expert on the intersection of criminal and immigration law, which is the clinic’s prime focus, in addition to immigration enforcement issues. The clinic provides defense representation to individuals threatened with deportation and represents community-based and national advocacy organizations on various projects. Professor Markowitz and the clinic have played a central role in many critical innovations in the field of immigration law, including: creating the New York Immigrant Family Unity Project, the nation’s first public defender system for detained immigrants; developing the concept of sanctuary laws to protect undocumented immigrants; developing the first national immigration fellowship program, otherwise known as the Immigrant Justice Corps; and initiating the nation’s first full-service in-house immigration unit located in a public defender’s office at The Bronx Defenders. 

“It is an honor to join the Innocence Project team, which has been a transformative force in the American legal system. They have not just exonerated scores of wrongly convicted people, but, in doing so, they have exposed some of the core defects and injustices that infect the criminal legal system and harm all those it ensnares. I look forward to learning from the staff and clients and supporting them in any way I can,” said Professor Markowitz.     

“Peter Markowitz is a trailblazer in immigration law, with invaluable expertise in its intersectionality with the many challenges of the criminal legal system,” said Christina Swarns, executive director of the Innocence Project. “His commitment to justice and his leadership in this field are critical to our work and reflect the shared experiences of many of our clients. We are thrilled to welcome him to the Innocence Project.”

Under Professor Markowitz’s guidance, the Greenberg Immigration Justice Clinic has been honored with numerous awards, including the Daniel Levy Award for outstanding and innovative advocacy. It has also been recognized by the New York City Council for groundbreaking work on behalf of immigrant communities.

“It is a privilege to have Peter Markowitz join the Innocence Project Board of Directors,” said Innocence Project Board Chair Jack Taylor. “Professor Markowitz has committed decades to leading innovations in immigration law, establishing a groundbreaking clinic, as well as creating integral programs in the court system to ensure equitable and just pathways for all. This is a central part of the Innocence Project’s mission, and his experience at the forefront of this field, as well as a public defender, make him a vital asset to our work.”

Professor Markowitz’s work has been published widely in leading law journals and in the press, with op-eds appearing in The New York Times, The Nation, Huffington Post, and more. Prior to his role at Cardozo, Professor Markowitz taught at both New York University and Hofstra Schools of Law. He received his J.D. from New York University School of Law in 2001. Following graduation, Professor Markowitz clerked for the Honorable Frederic Block — the U.S. District Judge for the Eastern District of New York —  and was a Soros Justice Fellow at The Bronx Defenders before entering the field of academia.

The post Peter L. Markowitz, Professor of Law at Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law, Joins the Innocence Project Board of Directors appeared first on Innocence Project.

This content originally appeared on Innocence Project and was authored by jlucivero.

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For decades, famed professor Tim White used a vast collection of human remains — bones sorted by body part and stored in wooden bins — to teach his anthropology students at the University of California, Berkeley.

White, a world-renowned expert on human evolution, said the collection was passed down through generations of anthropology professors before he started teaching with it in the late 1970s. It came with no records, he said. Most were not labeled at all or said only “lab.”

But that simple description masked a dark history, UC Berkeley administrators recently acknowledged. UC Berkeley conducted an analysis of the collection after White reported its contents in response to a university systemwide order in 2020 to search for human remains. Administrators disclosed to state officials in May that the analysis found the collection includes the remains of at least 95 people excavated from gravesites — many of them likely Native Americans from California, according to previously unreported documents obtained by ProPublica and NBC News.

The university’s disclosure was particularly painful because it involved a professor who many Indigenous people already viewed as a primary antagonist, according to interviews with tribal members.

UC Berkeley has long angered tribal nations with its handling of thousands of ancestral remains amassed during the university’s centurylong campaign of excavating Indigenous burial grounds.

View the Full Series

More than three decades ago, Congress ordered museums, universities and government agencies that receive federal funding to publicly report any human remains in their collections that they believed to be Native American and then return them to tribal nations.

UC Berkeley has been slow to do so. The university estimates that it still holds the remains of 9,000 Indigenous people in the campus’ Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology — more than any other U.S. institution bound by the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, according to a ProPublica analysis of federal data.

That tally does not include the remains that White reported and relinquished in 2020. For decades, White served as an expert adviser in the university’s repatriation decisions, sitting on committees that weighed whether to grant or deny tribes’ requests, according to a review of hundreds of pages of federal testimony and internal university documents.

White said the collection did not need to be reported under NAGPRA because there is no way to determine the origin of the bones — and therefore the law does not apply.

The collection has exposed deep rifts at UC Berkeley, pitting a prominent professor who said he’s done nothing wrong against university administrators who have apologized to tribes for not sharing information about the remains sooner.

For tribes the episode follows a familiar pattern of UC Berkeley’s delays and failures to be transparent with them.

“This is a major moral, ethical and potentially legal violation,” said Laura Miranda, a member of the Pechanga Band of Indians and chair of the California Native American Heritage Commission. She made her comments at a July hearing held by the commission, which oversees the university system’s handling of Indigenous remains.

UC Berkeley officials declined interview requests, saying “tribes have asked us not to.” In a statement, the university said White was no longer involved in repatriation decisions. There is now a moratorium on using ancestral remains for teaching or research purposes, according to the statement. The Hearst Museum is currently closed to the public so that staff can prioritize repatriation.

The university also acknowledged that, in the past, UC Berkeley had “mishandled its repatriation responsibilities.”

“The campus privileged some kinds of scientific and scholarly evidence over tribal interests and evidence provided by tribes,” the university said in the statement.

In an interview with ProPublica and NBC News, White said he’s been villainized for strictly adhering to the federal law, which he said requires balancing scientific proof with other evidence.

In the years immediately after Congress passed NAGPRA, UC Berkeley relied on White’s expertise as curator of the museum’s skeletal collection to challenge Indigenous people’s repatriation requests, according to testimony before a federal advisory committee.

Some tribal members accused him of demanding too high a burden of scientific proof for repatriations and discounting knowledge passed down through the generations. In the 1990s, he made headlines for fighting to use Native American remains as teaching tools, arguing that students should not be deprived of the opportunity to learn from them. He later sued to block the UC system from returning two sets of remains estimated to date from 9,000 years ago, saying they were too old to be linked to any living descendants.

NAGPRA does not require definitive scientific proof for repatriation, only that institutions report human remains that could potentially be Native American and consult with the affected tribal nations, said Sherry Hutt, an attorney who is a former program manager of the federal National NAGPRA Program. “It’s not a scientific standard. It’s a legal standard,” she said.

White often had the backing of university administrators in disputes over remains, but not anymore. At the July hearing before the California Native American Heritage Commission, UC Berkeley administrators cited an analysis by another anthropologist at the school, Sabrina Agarwal, that determined thousands of the bones in the collection were excavated from gravesites.

Given UC Berkeley’s legacy of raiding Native American graves, it is likely the collection White taught with contains the remains of Native Americans from what is currently California, said Linda Rugg, associate vice chancellor for research at the university.

“I want to apologize for the pain that we caused by holding on to this collection,” Rugg said at the hearing. “When we found out about it, we were dismayed ourselves.” A university spokesperson said staff and administrators are consulting with several tribes on next steps. Federal officials confirmed UC Berkeley has contacted them requesting guidance.

White, who retired last spring but is still a professor emeritus, said administrators knew about the collection, which was used to teach hundreds of students over the years. “It is very disappointing to find the Berkeley employees are making false allegations and misrepresentations,” he said.

Behind UC Berkeley’s reckoning is the centurylong saga about a powerful, progressive institution that is finally confronting its past. Isaac Bojorquez, chairman of the KaKoon Ta Ruk Band of Ohlone-Costanoan Indians of the Big Sur Rancheria, called for accountability for the newly reported remains, but also for UC Berkeley’s decadeslong delays and denials of other tribes’ repatriation requests.

“We want our ancestors,” he said. “They should have never been disturbed in the first place.”

With no documentation for the origin of his teaching collection, White surmised in a report to university officials in 2020 that it dated back to UC Berkeley’s early days and the university’s first anthropology professor, Alfred Louis Kroeber.

Kroeber, who joined the faculty in 1901, became a world-renowned scholar for his research on Native Americans in California, encouraging the excavations of Indigenous gravesites during his four-decade tenure.

His name recently was stripped from Berkeley’s anthropology building, in part for housing an Indigenous man found in the Sierra Foothills as a living exhibit at what would later become the Hearst Museum. Described as the last living member of his band of Yahi Indians, the man — whom Kroeber called “Ishi” — was studied and made to craft arrows and greet visitors for nearly five years, until his death in 1916.

The Hearst Museum continued for decades to voraciously collect Native American remains and funerary objects, trying to assemble a collection to rival the British Museum and Harvard University, said historian Tony Platt, a distinguished affiliated scholar at UC Berkeley’s Center for the Study of Law and Society. “To be a great university you’ve got to acquire stuff, you’ve got to hoard massive amounts of things,” Platt said.

The vast majority of UC Berkeley’s collection of remains came from sacred ancestral sites in California, according to ProPublica’s analysis of federal data. The collection included ancestors of the Ohlone, the tribe whose land was seized by the federal government to fund public universities, including UC Berkeley.

The university eventually amassed the remains of about 11,600 Native Americans, stored in the basement beneath its gymnasium swimming pool and in other campus buildings. But Platt said that number is likely an undercount because museum records often counted multiple remains excavated from the same gravesite as one person.

In the early 1970s, Native American activists’ long-standing resistance to the grave robbing started gaining momentum amid protests that stealing from Native Americans’ burial sites in the name of science was a human rights violation.

By then, the teaching collection that anthropology professors used had grown to thousands of bones and teeth that White said in his report to university administrators had been commingled with others donated by amateur gravediggers, dentists, anatomists, physicians, law enforcement and biological supply companies.

The remains were unceremoniously sorted by body part so students could study them. A jumble of teeth. A drawer of clavicles. Separate bins for skulls. For decades, anthropologists added to the collection, used it in their classes and then passed it along to the professors who came after them, White said.

It was this collection that White started teaching with when he joined UC Berkeley’s anthropology faculty in 1977.

UC Berkeley hired White, then 27, soon after he had obtained his Ph.D. in biological anthropology from the University of Michigan. He already was collaborating with a team to analyze “Lucy,” a 3.2-million-year-old human ancestor.

White published articles in prestigious journals and co-authored a textbook, “Human Osteology,” that boasted of UC Berkeley’s collection of human remains and called ancient skeletons “ambassadors from the past.”

Congress passed NAGPRA in 1990, recognizing that human remains of any ancestry “must at all times be treated with dignity and respect.” As UC Berkeley prepared to comply with the new law, the campus museum appointed White curator of biological anthropology, overseeing the university’s collection of human remains.

Almost as soon as tribes started making claims to ancestral remains under NAGPRA, Indigenous people accused White of undermining their efforts to rebury their ancestors, according to a review of hundreds of pages of testimony before a federal review committee tasked with mediating NAGPRA disputes.

Since NAGPRA only applied to federally recognized tribal nations, many tribes in California were not entitled to seek repatriation. (Of the 183 tribes in the state, 68 still lack federal recognition, according to the Native American Heritage Commission.) UC Berkeley’s collection of remains included those of thousands of people designated as unavailable for repatriation because they came from tribes lacking federal recognition.

Recourse under the law was limited, leaving tribal nations to file formal challenges with the federal NAGPRA Review Committee, an advisory group whose members represent tribal, scientific and museum organizations. It can only offer recommendations in response to disputes.

In the first challenge following the passage of the law, in February 1993 the Hui Mālama I Nā Kūpuna O Hawai’i Nei, a Native Hawaiian organization, took a dispute over repatriation of two ancestral remains before the federal committee. The remains had been donated to UC Berkeley in 1935, at which time a museum curator classified them as Polynesian. White disagreed.

Addressing the committee, White introduced himself as “the individual who is responsible for the skeletal collections at Berkeley.” He argued the remains might not be Native Hawaiian and could belong to victims of shipwrecks, drownings or crimes. They should be preserved for study, he added, making an analogy to UC Berkeley’s library book collection, where historians access volumes for years as their understanding evolves.

Edward Halealoha Ayau, then the Native Hawaiian organization’s executive director, pounded his fists on the table in outrage. “We do not have cultural sensitivity to books. We did not descend from books,” he said, according to a transcript of the meeting.

Ancestral remains are not research material, Ayau said, they are people with whom he shares a connection — a perspective that is central to Native Hawaiian culture.

White recently said that his analogy comparing human remains to books was taken out of context. “Both hold information,” he said. “I was obviously speaking metaphorically.”

Instead of recommending that both ancestors’ remains be repatriated directly to the Hui Mālama, the committee advised UC Berkeley to return one of them and send the other to the Bishop Museum in Honolulu for analysis, Ayau said. There, researchers finally agreed that the remains were Native Hawaiian — but only after conducting a scientific analysis over Ayau’s objections.

“I just started crying,” Ayau, who now chairs the federal NAGPRA Review Committee, recalled in a recent interview. “We failed to prevent one more form of desecration.”

The Bishop Museum declined to comment on its role in the 1993 repatriation, saying it happened too long ago for anyone to have knowledge of it.

For Ayau, the experience left him with a sense of loss over the treatment of his ancestors.

“To have someone disturb them is really bad,” he said. “But then to have them steal them and then fight you to get them back is beyond horrific.”

White’s fight to use a set of Native American remains he had borrowed from the Hearst Museum for teaching purposes made headlines in the 1990s after he clashed with then-museum director Rosemary Joyce. She said when she was hired in 1994, it was common practice for White and other museum curators with keys to borrow ancestral remains and belongings without documenting what they’d taken.

“Just leaving aside NAGPRA, as a museum anthropologist, that’s an unacceptable thing,” she told ProPublica and NBC News. “When materials are not in the physical control of the staff of the museum, you need legal documentation.”

She changed the locks on the museum’s storage space. Heeding requests from tribes, she tried to recall a museum collection of Native American remains that White kept on loan in his lab and used for teaching. White refused to return them.

The vice provost for research of the UC system sent Jay Stowsky, then the system’s director of research policy, to mediate the dispute between White and Joyce. Stowsky agreed with Joyce, calling the lack of controls at the museum “terrible.” He said human remains were “just sort of thrown into boxes” with a label on them. “Berkeley should be ashamed of itself on so many levels,” Stowsky, now a senior academic administrator at UC Berkeley, said in a recent interview.

White filed a whistleblower complaint with the university in 1997 accusing the museum, under Joyce’s leadership, of seeking an unnecessary extension to NAGPRA’s reporting deadline. (Campus investigators found no improper activity, according to White.)

Joyce said she was simply trying to account for all the remains that would need to be reported under NAGPRA. “It’s really kind of insane to have to say, I did the thing that the law said I should do,” she told ProPublica and NBC News. Joyce said the complaints were found to be “meritless.”

White then filed an internal grievance against Joyce with the school’s Academic Senate, alleging that by asking him to relinquish the human remains she had infringed on his “academic privileges.”

The university brokered a deal: White could keep ancestral remains provided museum staff and tribes could access them to conduct inventory and report them under NAGPRA.

Joyce said the arrangement was untenable and she felt unsupported by the university’s leadership. White continued to teach with the remains.

Myra Masiel-Zamora, now an archaeologist for the Pechanga Band of Indians, enrolled in White’s osteology class more than 20 years ago when she was 18 and a first-year student. But, she said, she withdrew from the course after a teaching assistant told her the human remains belonged to Native Americans.

“That was the first time I really truly learned that an institution could and can — and is — using real Native American ancestors as teaching tools,” she said. “I was really upset.”

Concern over institutions’ handling of Indigenous remains extended beyond the classroom.

Troubled by the slow pace of repatriations under NAGPRA, California lawmakers passed their own version of the law in 2001, aiming to close loopholes in the federal statute and allow tribes to claim remains regardless of whether they have federal recognition. But the state failed to fund an oversight committee established by the bill.

In 2007, without consulting tribes or offering public explanation, UC Berkeley abruptly fired museum employees who were responsible for NAGPRA compliance, and named White and others to a newly formed campus repatriation committee, according to tribal leaders.

That upset tribal members, who brought their concerns about the new committee to state senators. The firings “eliminated the only staff at the university that would stand up to Mr. Tim White and his offensive remarks regarding Native American tribes and our ancestral remains,” Reno Franklin, then a council member and now the chairman of the Kashia Band of Pomo Indians, said during a 2008 state legislative hearing.

In emails sent to ProPublica and NBC News, White sought to discredit the testimony by Franklin and others at the hearing by saying that it had been the result of a decadeslong effort by the university to use him as a scapegoat for its failures. White said he only held an advisory role and did not make final repatriation decisions.

Meanwhile, White’s career was skyrocketing after he led a team that discovered and excavated a 4.4-million-year-old hominid unearthed in Ethiopia. It was deemed the scientific breakthrough of the year in 2009 by the American Association for the Advancement of Science and cemented his reputation in the field. It also landed him, along with the likes of Barack Obama and Steve Jobs, on Time magazine’s 2010 list of the world’s 100 most influential people.

Two years later, White and two other professors sued to block the repatriation of two 9,000-year-old skeletons to the Kumeyaay, 12 tribes whose homelands straddle the U.S.-Mexico border near San Diego. White and the other professors wanted to study the remains, which had been unearthed in 1976 from the grounds of the chancellor’s house on the University of California, San Diego, campus.

They argued that there wasn’t enough evidence to support the Kumeyaay’s ancestral connection to the remains, and that the UC system had failed to prove that the remains could legally be considered “Native American.” Based on the professors’ interpretation of the law, human remains had to have a cultural or biological link to a present-day tribe to be considered Native American.

They said that not allowing them to study the remains violated their rights as researchers. An appeals court ruled against the professors, citing the Kumeyaay’s sovereign immunity, meaning they couldn’t be sued.

As tribes’ frustration with the lack of progress on repatriations grew, UC Berkeley convened a “tribal forum” in 2017. In the private gathering, tribal leaders and others expressed anger that university staff, including White, had resisted their requests to repatriate and that the university was requiring an excessive amount of proof to reclaim ancestors, according to an internal university report.

The following year, UC Berkeley Chancellor Carol Christ disbanded the campus’ NAGPRA committee that White had served on, records show. The university established a new one that did not include him.

Meanwhile, Berkeley prepared for its biggest repatriation to date: the return of more than 1,400 ancestors to the Santa Ynez Band of Chumash Indians, a small tribe whose ancestors’ remains were excavated from burial grounds along California’s coast and Channel Islands. According to the school’s NAGPRA inventory records, many of the remains had been taken by an archaeologist in 1901 whose expeditions were funded by Phoebe Apperson Hearst, wife of mining magnate George Hearst and namesake of UC Berkeley’s anthropology museum.

UC Berkeley held on to the Chumash remains and loaned some to White for research projects, before returning them to the tribe in the summer of 2018.

When the repatriation day finally came, Nakia Zavalla and other tribal members drove 300 miles to campus and entered a backroom of the anthropology building where UC Berkeley stored their ancestors.

“Going into that facility for the first time was horrifying. Literally shelves of human remains,” said Zavalla, the tribe’s cultural director. “And you pull them out, and there’s ancestors mixed all together, sometimes just all femur bones, a tray full of skulls.”

Zavalla said tribal members had to bring their own cardboard boxes to carry their ancestors home for burial — a complaint other tribal nations have made in dealing with the university. UC Berkeley officials said they were unaware of Zavalla’s “disturbing account” but have changed their policies to ensure they provide assistance “as requested by Tribes.”

Zavalla said the visit highlighted how the university had deprived the tribe of more than ancestral remains, she said. The university housed recordings and items that ethnographers and anthropologists had previously collected from Chumash elders.

For Zavalla, the information could have benefited her and other tribal members’ efforts to revitalize the Santa Ynez Chumash’s language and traditions — which government policies once sought to eradicate. But the information was not freely shared, she said: “They stole those items.”

California state lawmakers passed a bill in 2018 to expand the Native American Heritage Commission’s oversight of repatriation policies and compliance committees within the UC system. The legislation called for an audit of all UC campuses’ compliance with NAGPRA.

The following year, UC Berkeley finally barred the use of Native American remains for teaching or research, according to the university.

The state auditor’s office announced the results of its review in 2020, singling out UC Berkeley for making onerous demands of tribes claiming remains.

The auditor also noted that UC Berkeley had identified 180 missing artifacts or human remains. In a statement, UC Berkeley said staff had searched for the missing remains and artifacts, some of which had been lost for more than a century.

Soon after the audit, the UC president’s office called for all campuses to search departments that historically studied human remains for any that had not been previously reported.

In August 2020, White reported the contents of the collection he taught with to university administrators.

White told ProPublica and NBC News that given the lack of documentation, it would be impossible to determine if they were Native American, much less say which tribe they should be returned to.

“There’s nobody on this planet who can sit down and tell you what the cultural affiliation of this lower jaw is, or that lower jaw is. Nobody can do that,” he said.

The Native American Heritage Commission is continuing to press UC Berkeley for answers and accountability for its handling of the collection White reported.

Bojorquez, the tribal chairman and an NAHC commissioner, said it was “mind-blowing” that Berkeley still has not provided any documentation on the origins of the collection.

The university should have consulted tribes sooner, he said, to ensure the remains were handled respectfully and to help speed the repatriation process. “So much happened to these ancestors,” he said — they should not be in a box or on a shelf.

“They need to go home,” he said.

Separate from the teaching collection that White reported in 2020, he also notified administrators that he’d discovered remains with museum labels stashed in gray bins in a teaching laboratory. They later were identified as the partial remains of six ancestors of the Santa Ynez Chumash that were supposed to have been repatriated in 2018.

When UC Berkeley finally informed the Chumash six months later, it felt like a “blow to the chest,” said Zavalla, the tribe’s cultural director. Zavalla and other tribal staff members drove to Berkeley to retrieve the remains.

“I felt lied to,” she said. “They did not give us all of the ancestors, and they didn’t do their due diligence.”

The discovery of the missing remains outraged Sam Cohen, an attorney for the tribe, who called for probes into whether UC Berkeley or White had violated policies or laws.

“He is considered untouchable, I think, by Berkeley because he’s so famous in human evolution,” Cohen said of White. “He basically wasn’t going to voluntarily comply with anything until he was forced.”

White said he was unsure how the remains ended up in the teaching laboratory. He suggested they may have been mistakenly placed in his lab during a move years ago while he was overseas. He provided ProPublica and NBC News with a copy of an email from an investigator with UC Berkeley's Office of Risk and Compliance Services, which said the office found no violation on his part regarding the Chumash remains. UC Berkeley declined to comment on the outcome of the investigation, calling it a personnel matter.

“I have accounted for everything that happened in granular detail,” White said in an interview.

Chancellor Christ apologized to the tribe in December in a letter and acknowledged: “We do understand that, given our history, it is difficult for tribes to have confidence in our university and Professor White.”

The apology was little consolation, Cohen said, especially since it came with yet another painful acknowledgement. University records show there are still more unreturned Chumash ancestors. So far, they have yet to be found.

Christ assured the Chumash that the university was committed to returning all Native American ancestors to all tribes. UC Berkeley officials estimate it will be at least a decade before that happens.

Alex Mierjeski contributed research. Ash Ngu contributed data analysis.

This content originally appeared on Articles and Investigations - ProPublica and was authored by Mary Hudetz, ProPublica, and Graham Lee Brewer, NBC News.

An armed group has taken an Australian professor and three colleagues hostage in a remote region of Papua New Guinea, reports ABC Pacific.

The ABC’s Port Moresby correspondent Natalie Whiting reported that the professor and colleagues were in the Highlands region doing field study when they were taken hostage.

As well as the Australian academic, the group included a Papua New Guinean programme coordinator and two University of PNG graduates.

• READ MORE: Further details from ABC News
• NZ pilot held hostage in neighbouring Papua

PNG Prime Minister James Marape told reporters in Port Moresby today there were “running conversations” between PNG authorities and the kidnappers, the ABC report said.

“I just want to inform the families of those taken hostage that we have been at work and contact has been made with people in the bush,” he said, according to the ABC report.

“We’ve got police and military on stand-by to assist. But, in the first instance, we want those criminals to release those who are held in captivity.

“We have been keeping this under close wraps because of the sensitivity and the need for us to get our friends [who were] captured, get them alive and safe.”

The ABC reported that it had chosen not to name the kidnapped Australian at this stage and had asked Australia’s Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT) for comment.

NZ hostage pilot
Earlier this month, in a separate incident across the border a group of West Papuan rebels fighting for independence in the western half of Papua New Guinea island seized a New Zealand pilot as a hostage on February 7.

They also set fire to his Susi Air plane at the remote highlands airstrip of Paro near Nduga.

Indonesian authorities have sent a negotiation team to make contact with the West Papua National Liberation Army (TPNPB) group led by Egianus Kogoya group to seek the release of the 37-year-old pilot Philip Mehrtens.

The rebels were demanding negotiations with the Indonesian government for independence for the Melanesian region.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

A New Zealand-based professor in comparative politics says the Fiji constitution needs to clear up the role of the military.

Dr Jon Fraenkel of Victoria University, formerly of the University of the South Pacific, says the 2013 constitution revived the provision that existed in the 1990 constitution which gave the military responsibility for looking after the well-being of the Fiji people.

But he told Pacific Waves this needed clarifying.

• LISTEN TO RNZ PACIFIC WAVES:  Jon Fraenkel talks Fiji constitution
• Other Fiji politics reports

“Of course, when that was first introduced in 1990, it was as part of an ethno-nationalist constitution that was seeking to codify indigenous paramountcy in the states. At that point, I think the Fiji military [Republic of Fiji Military Forces] contemplated briefly assuming power in an unconstitutional way for 16 years.

“But it didn’t do that. And by the early 1990s, things had calmed down there was a desire to read for civilian government, for the military to keep out of politics. It’s only really in the wake of the [George] Speight coup that Mohammed Aziz rehabilitated this provision in the 1990 constitution, and suggested that it was still applied under the ’97 constitution, and then they put it in the 2013 constitution.

“And what does this mean? Well, it could mean just about anything. What does it mean to look after the welfare of the Fiji people? You could interpret that to mean anything at all?

“I noticed that before the final result, when [Sitiveni] Rabuka, perhaps misguidedly, complained to the military commander about the glitch about the counting of the election ballots, the military commander said that that wasn’t within his remit.

Protecting ‘well-being’
“In other words, he thought that it didn’t fall under section 131 of the Constitution that gives the military right to intervene to protect the well-being of the Fiji people.

“But after the formation of the new government in early January, the military commander, Major-General Jone Kalouniwai did make a peculiar statement where he expressed concern about the ambition of the government and about the speed at which things were moving.

“And he also suggested that the military might have some responsibility for making sure that the separation of powers is guaranteed.

“Now, that’s usually a role for the courts, not for the military. So one has to be careful about this kind of expansive understanding of the role of the military and the new Fiji. I think there needs to be further discussions about what that actually means.”

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

Fiji’s Minister of Finance and deputy Prime Minister Professor Biman Prasad says all coalition partners in the new government have agreed to a closer relationship with the Suva-based regional University of the South Pacific (USP).

He said government would restore confidence in USP and respect the governance structure of the institution.

Professor Biman Prasad said that it was a commitment made by all coalition partners in government.

• READ MORE: Professor thrilled over USP return – Fiji to pay $90m university debt
• Other USP reports

He said Fiji would now be “a real partner” with USP.

“We’re going to restore that confidence, we’re going to respect the governance structure of the university,” he said.

“This means that when the university council makes a decision, we as members in that council will respect that decision, unlike the previous government and their reps, who disregarded it because they didn’t win in the council.

“Things didn’t go in their favour; they tried to [withhold] the grant of the university through some bogus claim that there should be more investigation.

“None of that was true, none of that was reasonable.”

Vice-chancellor ban already lifted
He said the ban on vice-chancellor Professor Pal Ahluwalia, who was forced to become based at USP’s Samoa campus after being deported from Fiji in 2021, had already been lifted.

“As you know, the Prime Minister has already lifted the ban on Professor Pal Ahluwalia who was deported in the middle of the night,” he said.

“That was a sad thing for this country — it was an attack on democracy, it was an attack on academic freedom.

“So we are very pleased that our government has been able to remove that and we look forward to a very cooperative relationship with the University of the South Pacific and indeed with all other universities in the country because we believe that empowering the universities, giving them academic freedom, giving them autonomy is good for our students, good for our staff, good for the country.”

Professor Prasad said the government would work closely with tertiary institutions in the country.

“This government is going to work closely with the universities and other tertiary institutions to make sure that we empower them, we use resources at those universities to help government to work in policy areas, analyse data.

“As a government, we are going to be very, very liberal with the academic community in this country because we want them to know that this is a government which is going to be open, which is going to help them do research because we will not be afraid of critical research being done by academics, whether they are in Fiji or from outside.

“They will have access to data wherever possible. They will have access to the processes and the support to do research in critical areas.

“That will be very, very important for the government.”

Half century of innovation
Pacific Media Watch reports that the University of the South Pacific is one of only two regional multinational universities in the world — the other is in the West Indies.

USP is jointly owned and governed by 12 member countries — Cook Islands, Fiji, Kiribati, Marshall Islands, Nauru, Niue, Samoa, Solomon Islands, Tokelau, Tonga, Tuvalu and Vanuatu.

The university has campuses in all member countries with Fiji having three campuses.

For more than a half century, USP has been leading the Pacific with distinctive contributions in research, innovation, learning, teaching and community engagement.

Rakesh Kumar is a Fiji Times reporter. Republished with permission.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

Exiled University of the South Pacific vice-chancellor Professor Pal Ahluwalia says he is thrilled at the prospect of returning to Fiji.

Speaking to The Fiji Times from Los Angeles in the United States yesterday, he said Prime Minister Sitiveni Rabuka — when he was in opposition- made a commitment to pay Fiji’s outstanding debt of $90 million to USP and to allow him to return to Fiji.

“Mr Rabuka said it, National Federation Party leader Professor Biman Prasad said it, and the Social Democratic Liberal Party leader also said it,” Professor Ahluwalia said.

• READ MORE: USP unions slam Fiji’s Sayed-Khaiyum for ‘damaging’ Pacific university
• Other USP saga reports

“So it’s part of all three parties’ manifestos and part of their public statements, so we as a university are delighted that this amount that has been outstanding for so long will finally come to the university.

“It’s excellent news, not just for the Fijian students but for the entire region because the region has been carrying Fijian students for quite a while and there will now be a chance for us to do a lot of things that we have deferred and not been able to do, particularly issues around maintenance.

“It also means we can now aggressively look for quality academic staff.”

Rabuka issued a statement on Boxing Day saying the prohibition order against Professor Ahluwalia had been lifted and he was welcome to travel to Fiji at any time.

Professor Ahluwalia and his wife Sandra Price claimed that on Wednesday February 3, 2021, 15 people made up of immigration officials and police stormed into their USP home and forcefully removed them at about 11.30pm.

They claimed they were driven the same night to Nadi International Airport and deported on the morning of Thursday, February 4, to Australia.

The FijiFirst government on February 4, 2022 issued a statement that the Immigration Department had ordered Professor Aluwahlia and his partner Sandra Price to leave Fiji with immediate effect following alleged “continuous breaches” by both individuals of Section 13 of the Immigration Act.

Government said under Section 13 of the Immigration Act 2003, no foreigner was permitted to conduct themselves in a manner prejudicial to the peace, defence, public safety, public order, public morality, public health, security, or good government of Fiji.

Fiji now ‘free country’
RNZ Pacific reports that Finance Minister Professor Biman Prasad said all three parties in the coalition had promised this in their election campaigns and manifestos.

The former FijiFirst government have withheld the payments since 2019 over a protracted battle with Professor Ahluwalia, now operating in exile out of Samoa.

“They didn’t like a man who was doing the right thing who exposed corruption within the university,” Professor Prasad said.

“And it has done you know, to some extent, terrible damage not only to the university, but also the unity in the whole region.”

In July, the two unions representing staff at the university said the Fiji government owes the institution F$78.4 million and the debt has increased since then.

“Well, I can’t tell you the timetable, but all I can say is…that the university will receive the appropriate funding, as well as the government will pay what is due as a result of the previous government withholding the grant to the university,” Professor Prasad said.

His revelation comes after the government statement by Prime Minister Rabuka inviting Professor Ahluwalia to return to Fiji.

Personal apology
Rabuka said he wanted to apologise to Professor Ahluwalia in person upon his arrival for the way he had been treated by Fiji.

The prime minister has also invited the widow of exiled Fijian academic, Professor Brij Lal, who passed away on Christmas Day last year to bring home his ashes for burial at Tabia near Labasa.

Professor Prasad said they look forward to welcoming home more Fijians and expatriates exiled during Voreqe Bainimarama’s 16-year-reign.

“Fiji is now a free country. We will welcome everyone who wants to come to Fiji. No one should fear about any kind of vindictiveness or harassment,” Professor Prasad said.

“That is what we promised during our campaign, and that is what this government will deliver.”

Felix Chaudhary is a Fiji Times reporter. Republished with Fiji Times permission. This article is also republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ. 

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

The greenlight has been given to University of the South Pacific vice-chancellor, Professor Pal Ahluwalia, and Dr Padma Lal, to return to Fiji by Prime Minister Sitiveni Rabuka.

Professor Ahluwalia was deported in 2021 and Dr Lal — widow of the late leading Fiji academic Professor Brij Lal — was refused entry to Fiji along with her husband.

Exiled Professor Ahluwalia currently resides in Samoa and Dr Lal in Australia.

• READ MORE: How Fiji could help resolve the Pal Ahluwalia and USP crisis
• Professor Brij Lal: A champion of democracy and Fiji’s finest scholar

Rabuka has made it clear today that both of them are free to enter the country.

“I am ready to meet Dr Lal and Professor Ahluwalia personally,” he said.

“I will apologise on behalf of the people of Fiji for the way they were treated.”

Dr Lal had been prevented from coming to Fiji with her husband’s ashes for them to be taken to his birthplace at Tabia, near Labasa.

First anniversary
Today marks the first anniversary of Professor Lal’s death.

Rabuka said prohibition orders against Professor Brij Lal and Dr Lal, as well as Professor Ahluwalia, were “unreasonable and inhumane” and should never have been made.

He had promised his government would bring to an end the injustices suffered by Professor Ahluwalia, and Professor Lal.

“I received a clarification today from the Department of Immigration that neither Dr Padma Lal nor Professor Ahluwalia were the subject of written prohibition orders,” he said.

Josefa Babitu is a Fiji Sun reporter. Republished from the Fiji Sun.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

An award-winning professor of sport, leadership and governance has criticised her university’s handling of recent redundancies of 170 academic staff, saying a “rethink” is needed.

Professor Lesley Ferkins, director of Auckland University of Technology’s Sports Performance Research Institute and professor of sport, leadership and governance, told RNZ Nine to Noon that AUT’s senior management had lost the trust of staff.

Interviewed by Kathryn Ryan, Professor Ferkins said that if AUT continued on its current path it would “end in absolute disaster’.

• LISTEN TO RNZ NINE TO NOON: Professor Ferkins talks to RNZ
• ERA knocks back ‘flawed’ attempt by AUT to axe 100 plus academic staff
• ‘A very callous and uncaring process’ – union organiser Jill Jones
• ‘This level of disruption and instability in our lives is just crippling’
• Other AUT academic crisis reports

She said the university needed to draw on the “collective wisdom” of the academic staff.

Professor Ferkins has kept her job in the restructure, but has written an impassioned letter to vice chancellor professor Damon Salesa and the leadership team denouncing the redundancy process as lacking in transparency sound leadership values.

Last month, Professor Ferkins was named the Sport Management Association of Australia and New Zealand (SMAANZ) Distinguished Service Award winner.

Returning to ERA
AUT returned to the Employment Relations Authority today as part of its plans to make 170 academic staff redundant.

Yesterday, after a legal bid by the union representing teaching staff, the authority found the university’s process for issuing redundancy notices was flawed and breached the collective agreement.

It found that volunteers for redundancy should have been called for once specific positions were identified as surplus, but this did not happen.

In a letter to staff yesterday, AUT’s group director of people and culture Beth Bundy said AUT’s view of the findings differed from that of the Tertiary Education Union (TEU).

She said the university would return to the ERA today to seek clarification and hoped to have that by tomorrow.

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ. 

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by Pacific Media Watch.

“Defund the FBI” is the growing call by Republicans after the FBI searched former President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate. We get response from Alex Vitale, author of “The End of Policing,” who lays out reasons to defund the FBI that have nothing to do with Trump. Vitale reviews the history of the FBI, which he says has “always been a tool of repression of left-wing movements,” and calls the FBI investigation into Trump a “shortsighted” attempt to shut down some of the most extreme parts of the right wing. He uplifts efforts to “reduce the power and scope of the FBI in ways that limit their ability to demonize and criminalize those on the left.”

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

Official White House Photo by Pete Souza – Public Domain

To be clear, I was never a classroom student of Barack Obama. This is about what I learned from things Obama professed, how his actions did not match his deceiving words, and how they were a part of a class war.

In 2004, as I watched the variety of better known democrat candidates for a U.S. Senate seat in the Illinois primary and felt it was a sort of embarrassingly corrupt version of the Keystone cops, I asked a local democrat insider what the Hell were they thinking. He advised me to look into this guy named Obama. The key selling point for Obama seemed to be that he was Constitutional scholar who had entered politics after being a community organizer in Chicago. As I was still foolish enough at that time to think that it might be possible for a democrat to not be so Clintonianly insulting, I figured Obama the unknown was probably a good message to send to the party.

As I watched the democrat’s convention in Boston that year, it quickly dawned on me that I had been played. With the awareness that the democrats kept all of the real progressive activists corralled outside of earshot, I listened to Obama’s loudly touted speech. The abundance of platitudes and the slick delivery in his performance immediately raised flags. I still thought that maybe, maybe, maybe he might surprise me and I was still gullible enough to think he and the imagined progressive democrats probably would be better than the openly sadistic republicans and their conservative democrat allies.

From 2004 to 2008, I was still so earnestly unaware that I would regularly contact his office (and other democrats) to try to convince them to work toward a greener, more just, progressive world. As the years passed, it became increasingly clear that the responses I received were laced with more and more corporatized double-speak and deflection. Senator Obama’s actions increasingly aligned with the Neocon perversities while he continued to spout platitudes which were blatantly at odds with his subsequent actions. I now wish that I had saved the letters I received from his office as a form of evidence of his devious nature, but at the time, I quickly shredded them in disgust.

So, by 2008 I had completely lost the ability to believe anything Obama said. In 4 short years, he had slithered out of one skin and he was clearly, proudly, determined to the blackface version of Bush and Cheney. His embrace of and desire to protect the illegal spying by the major telecoms, his rush to embrace the corrupt banks and their egregious “bailout” (bribe), and his smugly proud pandering for corporate funding for his campaign were more than enough to show his real agenda, but there was a toxic cherry which he HAD to put on top of his putrefying pastry of a campaign for president. The choice of the corporatized warmonger Joe Biden to be a heartbeat away from the office was the clearest example of how Obama and his party of fakers were never going to be anything beyond republicans who lie about their agenda. Where a tsunami of devout supporters seemed to see Obama as the fulfillment of Martin Luther King’s “Dream,” it was unmistakably and inescapably obvious to me and a minority of others that we were being sold an illusion and that the reality of his nature was an alignment within the limited and limiting range of Clarence Thomas and Colin Powell.

Back then, I used to believe that media outlets like Common Dreams, Democracy Now!, the Nation, Mother Jones,…. were working against much of what Obama was enabling. As time went on, I watched as they and the majority of supposed “progressives” began turning a blind eye to the toxic nature of Obama and Company’s hucksterism. No matter how corporately and militaristically offensive his administration was to become, they continued to promote what they portrayed as its status as a lesser evil.

The key to understanding Obama’s (and the system which he serves) effectiveness in sabotaging the future of the majority of people for the benefit of the most ruthless and greedy is to understand that the interpretation of the Constitution of the United States of America which lies at the core of the democrats and the republicans system is desperately driven by a world view wherein variable social inequalities and agendas of private economic power are used to determine the degree of rights to which any beings on this planet are allowed access. In short, the system decides on a case by case basis and largely through private economic profitability the extent to which any being on this planet is deserving of the rights which are deceptively portrayed as being central to the Constitution of the USA. The loudly touted claims of rights, equal justice, and the supposed rule of law are little more than advertising gimmicks which are ignored and/or abandoned depending upon how economically advantageous it may be for the richest and most powerful people at any given moment.

The members of Obama’s administration made it unmistakably clear that his scholarly awareness of the Constitution was not a restraint on their ability to kill people around the planet – including several US citizens – without a trial before a jury. They and the other administrations’ devotees of the system were and apparently are fine with secret decisions to murder based upon accusations. Their court of law is above the need for evidentiary justification of their actions and the only sovereignty which matters to them is that of the Constitution-lacking state of Wall Street and its Pentagonally enforced impunity. It is a constantly-in-flux pseudo-nation of international investors whose self-serving constitutions insure a strong disregard for any boundaries which might interfere with their private profits. This is why they love to focus on “freedom.” They need to be as free as possible to undermine any and all competition for their sacred dollars. Free speech is tolerated only as long as it serves their desire for greater private profits.

Obama to Trump to Biden has been a continuity and escalation of impunity which depends upon the masquerade of oppositional parties in order to prevent the possible rise of what they need you to believe already exists. When the supposed government of the supposed USA became a blatantly unified agenda of greater private profits by whatever devious means necessary the imaginary “balance of power” became the measure of the swing of a capitalistic wrecking ball which only pivots from Washington D.C. to Wall Street in its highly manipulated and manipulating global trajectory.

Misrepresentations abound and I keep hearing the words of Black Hawk (Ma-ka-tai-me-she-kia-kiak) from his autobiography, “How smooth must be the words of the whites, when they can make right look wrong and wrong look right.” I have little doubt Black Hawk might not have limited this assessment just to “whites” if he had met Obama. But then, I also have no doubt that the same misconception of color associations was central to the rise of Obama.

Obama was the smoothest and, it seems, Trump and Biden have had almost no choice but to enable their same surreptitiousness behind their klutzy disingenuousness as a way of honoring and continuing their shared predatory legacy.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Clark T. Scott.

Compiled by Sera Tikotikoivatu-Sefeti, leila Pafrina, Sibete Ietaake and Aralai Vosyaco in Suva

From the last Strategic Plan 2019-2021, USP faced two major challenges — a fall in core funding and the impact of the global covid-19 pandemic. This hindered the university’s ability to invest in key ambitions. How has USP fared since then in terms of addressing those challenges and its impact on academia, general operations and staffing as well as USP’s financial status?

Professor Ahluwalia: It’s obvious that the impact of not receiving funding from the government is affecting us. But when we are faced with adversity, what we do is prioritise. That’s the job of a CEO, or in this case, the vice-chancellor, the president. You prioritise. You determine what is important to you. In our strategic plan, which we refreshed last year with a lot of consultation with our students and staff, our priority is to provide quality education for our students.

• READ MORE: The full e-edition of Wansolwara

That’s the first priority. With funding challenges we can’t walk away from those. But we’ve prioritised everything so that we give our students priority. It hasn’t really changed my commitment to you since the day I walked into the university. It just means that we’ve sharpened the student experience.

We’ve sharpened the realities of working in a post-covid-19 environment. We’ve tried to see how we can get our students better qualifications.

The byproduct of that is that we’ve also been able to focus on rankings because we want people to know how good this university is. It’s not like we’re chasing rankings for the sake of chasing rankings. Rankings are there as an icing on the cake, but the cake has to be the right thing. Rankings are external people telling us that we’re doing things right.

I think the impact on learning and teaching has been as minimal as you can imagine, as well as on research. We’ve deferred capital works and really important projects, which should have been done. When I came to the university, I inherited a deferred maintenance bill of $36 million. Now that’s a huge thing I tried to really solve that problem to begin with, where the idea was we would put $5 million into it every year.

We haven’t been able to do that because of the funding. So we are trying to reprioritise all the time so that students’ education is always paramount. But of course, that’s where those issues have come. In terms of staffing, since I’ve been here, we’ve never ever sacked anybody at USP. We will continue to prioritise our staff. Where there is natural attrition, in some cases, we might not fill those positions. Secondly, we’ll prioritise academic staffing over all other staffing because it’s the academic staffing that is so vital to our school.

The Strategic Plan 2022-2024 aims to strengthen five priority areas from the previous plan. How is USP progressing so far with these priorities?

The five priority areas really kind of represent our core values. In many ways, we’re doing exceptionally well. There are some areas that have been adversely affected because of covid-19. Some of those areas would be around our staff not being able to travel to regional countries. The core business of our university is reflected in Strategy Five, teaching and learning, research and innovation, our regional campuses, our work as a CROP (Council of Regional Organisations in the Pacific) agency, and all the other sections that support our core values. That is how our strategic plan is set up.

We give regular reports to our council on how we’re performing. As an example, a couple of things that have been affected because of covid-19 is that we couldn’t get enough students into laboratories. These are postgraduate students to make sure that our postgraduate number of completions remain at the same level. But it’s no different than anywhere else in the world. The whole world is experiencing that kind of disruption. For eight months our campuses in Fiji were closed, so I wasn’t surprised when we didn’t meet that KPI (key performance indicator).

We paid very close attention, and I’m really proud of our academic staff and our students because I think it’s shown our team spirit. It’s shown our human resilience. Students had to make adjustments. Probably nobody you know in the last four generations of USP students would have had to do that, so it’s a real testimony to how our students have responded to those kinds of efforts in a once in a 100-year pandemic.

Recently, USP was ranked 401-600 out of 1406 institutions, with an overall score of 70 out of 100 in the Times Higher Education (THE) Impact Ranking for 2022. Would this recognition bring about further changes at USP to increase its ranking?

Rankings are not the sole focus of our efforts. Our focus is on our strategic plan and on our mission, vision, and values. Our children must have the opportunity to study at the best university in the Pacific. We are a value-led organisation, so I’m really pleased to say that three rankings in the last 18 months have really given us confidence that we are on the right path.

We have to continue and how do we invest in this? We have funding for research, but we are also continuously making sure that the best academics are recruited and that we don’t compromise on academic quality because, at the end of the day, academic quality is what gives our students that cutting edge. It is the academic quality that helps us produce the research outputs that would then improve the ranking.

In terms of capital projects and ongoing maintenance works, what progress has been made to the upkeep of the university and its campuses?

With the crisis that we’re in right now, we continue to prioritise issues that have to be addressed. If we don’t, the problem just gets worse. So there is the normal routine maintenance and other projects. Some of the other things have been put on the backbench, but we’re still putting a lot of effort into these things. In terms of the Solomon Islands campus, there are no new plans. It’s externally funded. The campus is progressing, and we hope it will be finished next year.

This will be something that is really important because it will provide more opportunities for our Solomon Island students. The Solomon Island students are the second largest number of students of any of our campuses, so the fact that the campus will be finished soon will give a real boost to our Solomons regional campus.

In terms of financial status, is USP implementing new measures to mitigate the fall in core funding? If so, what are these measures? Are we expecting an increase in fees, will there be staff cutbacks or cutbacks to major expenditures, and is USP seeking major external funding as a backup?

By the end of June, the Fijian government would have owed us roughly $74.8 million, which is a very substantial cut in our funding from the agreed formula. What that means is that people try to understand what that funding is for. Funding from different governments is really a subsidy for students studying on campus.

The Fiji government gives that because, one, they have the largest number of students and so the amount is calculated on the number of students and it’s based on a formula which has been in place for many years. That’s the first point I want to make.

The second point I want to make is that we made it work despite the fact that we haven’t been getting that funding.

So that means that Fiji students are still being subsidised, but they need to be subsidised by the overall ways in which the university operates.

So effectively, by not paying their funding, the Fiji government is not really supporting its students, and of course, that affects our core funding, but we have reprioritised students. Our priority is teaching and learning.

Are we going to increase fees? There is no plan to, given the state of our economy at the moment. At the outset, what I’m really proud of is the resilience of our staff as well. We don’t have any staff cuts. We have not taken any. We’re not reducing our staff. We’re actually maintaining ourselves because we believe that the staff we have provide the quality education. Despite everything, we’ve maintained our staff.

We’re always looking for external funding. We’re pursuing that all the time. For us, a lot of external funding is not coming directly into consolidated revenue, which we can use the way we want. We are getting it for projects and projects are being funded. Of course, our biggest challenge remains a non-funded community.

The Kiribati campus lacks essential facilities and equipment to assist students with their programmes. This is a reason many students from Kiribati travel to Fiji to study at the main campus in Laucala. What plans, if any, are in the pipeline to upgrade USP’s teaching and learning facilities on Kiribati and other regional campuses?

One of the things that covid-19 taught us is that we can do a lot of things in more imaginative ways and still deliver quality education. People can study from home. They can do a lot of their own studies. As the vice-chancellor I spent some time in Nauru.
I had an absolutely amazing experience, which made me understand what a small Micronesian country goes through, what challenges people face on a day-to-day basis, and that has really informed a lot of my thinking about where we are.

Now that I’m at one of our larger campuses in Samoa, I’m discovering many things that need to be solved here too. But I think in terms of our programmes, we are offering more and more programmes for our regional students.

The first year experience buddy programme has been successfully running at the Laucala campus, given the importance of non-academic support in a student’s first year of university life. Will the university roll out the First Year Experience buddy programme across other regional campuses?

That’s certainly my expectation that we’ll be doing that. There are two things that we did this year that were very different, something that I am really proud of — the Semester Zero initiative. I had this idea that students should be able to come to university. Many students out there have no experience with technology, which would be normal in other countries.

So that was the first thing that we really wanted to solve, and I think we ran that programme for the first year to get that better. Now there’s a final programme to something that is actually run in different ways on different campuses.

While it is business as usual for some campuses, is USP still concerned about the possible resurgence of other deadly strains of covid-19 and its impact on education? Are appropriate measures being implemented or improved to mitigate these impacts on the USP community?

Absolutely! There’s no room for complacency. I’m really proud of the team and DISMAC — our Disaster Management Committee. We were very quick to develop plans. We’ve had to deal with a lot of different things, and we’ve learnt how to do that effectively. We’re not being complacent. We’ll monitor this.

Every week I get a report on where we are with campuses and what’s going on. I have regular meetings with all my SMTs (senior management teams).

I want to know how our staff are doing, their well-being is important to us. We’re very prepared. I think that’s why we’ve managed this crisis as well as we did. That’s what the ranking was for when we were ranked 11th for “crisis management” by the World Universities with Real Impact (WURI) 2021 global ranking.

You have many notable and remarkable achievements, and these may have been accompanied with its fair share of challenges. How has your time in Samoa been and what are some life lessons or perhaps one factor that has kept you going during those challenging times?

I’ve been very blessed. I’ve had the experience of working at a lot of institutions and I think I’ve been able to bring all that experience together to serve the Pacific. But the one biggest thing in all this, is the support of my staff and my students. Without that, nobody’s worth anything.

I’m eternally grateful and proud of the achievements of our staff and students. This is never a one-person job; it’s always teamwork. It’s always bringing the best of everybody together. I’m so proud of that.

The one thing about rankings is, not only for our students now but also for our alumni, is it shows that we are not just any ordinary university, but that we are the premier institution in the country.

As a custodian of that university, I’m very conscious of that. It’s always been on my mind. I’m not here to rule, I’m here to serve. That’s the attitude which I feel very blessed about and that’s deep in my heart. I know that the minute I stop serving, I’ll be gone.

Moving forward, what can we expect from USP in terms of programme offering, and improvements to learn, teaching and research?

We’re always looking at what the future is going to hold for our region, what is it that our staff and students need to be doing to take us to the new year ahead of everybody else because we’re training the future of the labour force, the workforce that’s going to be required for our region. We’re going to enter into health programmes and we will start looking at other programmes where we can really bring innovation to the region.

Some existing programmes will need to accommodate that change. I think the future looks fantastic, and the new streams of areas that would be available to our students and prospective students also look fantastic.

Wansolwara is the student journalist newspaper of the University of the South Pacific. It collaborates with Asia Pacific Report, which prioritises student journalism.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

What is the matter?

On January 1, 2020, Dr Brijesh Kumar Rai, then Assistant Professor of IIT Guwahati, was given Major Penalty Compulsory Retirement on charges of misconduct. On January 2, 2020, he was given a notice to vacate the quarters of the institute.

Dr Rai had been working in the Department of Electronics and Electrical Engineering at IIT Guwahati since 2011. He has filed four PILs and more than 450 RTI applications, alleging corruption at IIT Guwahati before his compulsory retirement.

A screenshot of an alleged tweet by Dr Rai was attached to a document of the 106th Board of Governors (BOG) meeting held on April 22, 2021. It is available on the website of IIT Guwahati. According to the screenshot on page number 96 of this 125-page document, Dr Rai tagged several accounts including the Ministry of Education, and the Prime Minister’s Office, and called for a protest against the forced expulsion of students. In this purported tweet, he also talked about mobilizing shopowners across faculty gates.  It also says that the demonstration will be against the BJP, PM Modi, Himanta Biswa Sharma, and IIT Guwahati and it will be led by Vikrant and Himanchal.

Vikrant and Himanchal are students of IIT Guwahati. They went on a hunger strike from January 4 to 7, 2020, in protest against the compulsory retirement of Dr Rai. According to reports, in March 2021, Vikrant faced suspension from the academic session by IIT Guwahati. Following this, he was terminated from the institute. In the case of Himanchal, he was made to sign a six-point undertaking by IIT Guwahati to continue his research. The undertaking states that he will not participate in any future protest or agitation.

In October 2021, IIT Guwahati filed a criminal defamation complaint against Dr Rai before the Court of Chief Judicial Magistrate, Kamrup (complaint number – 79/2021). Point number 8 of pages 10 and 11 of this complaint states that “with the intention of making the most out of his disinformation campaign the accused Dr Rai published a tweet on his social media account with the purpose of organising a rally on March 11, 2021”. It furthers that the tweet said that he and his associates intended to protest against public figures belonging to a particular political party on the campus of IIT Guwahati. The said tweet was made by the accused person from his Twitter handle @brijeshrai on March 11, 2021, it alleges. In the document, a copy of the screenshot purportedly taken from his social media account is attached and marked as Annexure-B. When we matched the Board of Governors (BOG) minutes report and the tweet in Annexure-B, we found that both the screenshots are the same.

According to the writ appeal filed by IIT Guwahati in the Guwahati High Court on March 14, 2022, the sequence of events is given below. Respondent means Professor Dr Brijesh Kumar Rai, and Appellant Institute means IIT Guwahati.

The index of this Writ Appeal (W.A. No. 117/2022) has a mention of the “copy of the screenshot of the Respondent’s social media accounts” in Annexure-7 (Page No. 464 to 474). When we saw page number 465 (Annexure-7) of the writ appeal, we found that a screenshot of the alleged tweet has been attached.

Fact-check

The tweet mentioned in the documents appears to be fake at first glance as it contains many errors. There are a total of 341 characters in this tweet, while the character limit of Twitter is 280. The tweet has 61 characters extra.

Furthermore, the screenshot of the alleged tweet has ‘Tweet’ written on top as well as a back button, which is visible only when we click on a tweet and open it. Tweets appearing on the feed do not have the back button. When a tweet is opened, details such as time, date, device, number of retweets and likes are visible. At the bottom, Reply, Retweet, and Like buttons are visible without their corresponding numbers. The third element to note is that when a tweet is opened, the text perfectly aligns with the profile image. This is not the case with the tweet attached in the document.

In the writ appeal filed in the Guwahati High Court, we found another alleged tweet by Professor Brijesh Rai. This tweet is still present on Twitter. It can be viewed on this archive link.

The original tweet (right) and fake tweet (left) are below and the discrepancies can be clearly observed.

Another aspect to note is that in the original tweet (right), all the accounts mentioned have a space before the ‘@’ except in the case of ‘@EduMinOfIndia’. This is exactly the same in the fake tweet which means that this portion of the tweet has been copied from the original.

Therefore, we found that the Board of Governors (BOG) minutes report of IIT Guwahati and other court documents mention a fake tweet in the name of Professor Dr Brijesh Kumar Rai.

The post IIT Guwahati cited fake tweet in court document against Professor Brijesh Rai appeared first on Alt News.

This content originally appeared on Alt News and was authored by Abhishek Kumar.

As the Supreme Court appears poised to strike down Roe v. Wade, we speak with law professor Michele Goodwin, author of “Policing the Womb: Invisible Women and the Criminalization of Motherhood.” She describes how the U.S. has historically endangered and denied essential health services to Black and Brown women, and calls new abortion restrictions “the new Jane Crow,” warning that they will further criminalize reproductive health and encourage medical professionals to breach their patients’ confidentiality and report self-administered abortions to law enforcement.

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

Dr. Eberhardt is an expert on issues of race and inequality. The author of the critically acclaimed book, Biased: Uncovering the Hidden Prejudice that Shapes What We, See, Think, Do, she uses science to expose the extent to which racial imagery and judgments shape actions and outcomes in our criminal legal system, neighborhoods, schools, and workplaces. In 2021, Dr. Eberhardt became the first Black president of the Association for Psychological Science, a global organization with more that 25,000 members world wide. In 2014, she was named a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Fellow and one of Foreign Policy’s 100 Leading Global Thinkers. Two years later, she was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, as well as the National Academy of Sciences

“It is an honor to welcome Dr Eberhardt to the Innocence Project Board of Directors. Since its inception, the Innocence Project has used science to free the innocent, expose the fallibility of the criminal legal system, and promote structural reforms that make the system more accurate, fair and equitable. Jennifer’s research and expertise aligns perfectly with our mission and will bring hugely valuable insights, perspective and leadership to our work,” said Innocence Project Board Chair, Jack Taylor. 

“Jennifer Eberhardt is a trailblazer, an innovative and influential thinker, who shares the Innocence Project’s commitment to using science to advance criminal and racial justice,” said Christina Swarns, Executive Director of the Innocence Project. “ Her deep knowledge about the ways in which race can and does influence decision making will strengthen our efforts to prevent wrongful convictions and create fair, equitable and compassionate systems of justice for everyone.”

Dr. Eberhardt joined the faculty at Yale University in Psychology and African & African American Studies after receiving her Ph.D. from Harvard University. In 1998, she joined the Stanford faculty where she is currently a Professor of Psychology, the Morris M. Doyle Centennial Professor of Public Policy, and a Faculty Director of Stanford SPARQ (a university initiative to use social psychological research to address pressing social problems). 

“It is an honor and a privilege to join the Board of the Innocence Project, one of this country’s leading criminal justice reform organizations,” said Dr. Eberhardt. “My work is deeply aligned with that of the Innocence Project – we both share a commitment to revealing the pervasive and unjust effects of racial bias in wrongful convictions and, most importantly, to finding effective and long lasting solutions to prevent it.”

Over the years, Dr. Eberhardt has been invited to speak about her work at the White House, the U.S. Department of Justice, the State of California Department of Justice, the Supreme Court of California, and the California State Capitol, among other places. 

The post Jennifer L. Eberhardt, Social Psychologist and Stanford University Professor, Joins the Innocence Project Board of Directors appeared first on Innocence Project.

This content originally appeared on Innocence Project and was authored by Justin Chan.

An Aotearoa New Zealand-based Fijian professor of Pacific studies says the increase in the frequency of natural disasters and land erosions, and rising ocean temperatures means new terminology is now needed to reflect how drastic the environmental challenges have become.

Professor Steven Ratuva, who is the co-leader for a New Zealand-government supported research project called Protect Pacific, said the term “climate change” doesn’t fully address the impacts seen throughout the Pacific and elsewhere globally.

Dr Ratuva, director of the Macmillan Brown Centre for Pacific Studies at the University of Canterbury, said it was time to shift away from saying climate change.

• READ MORE: Other climate crisis reports

“The word climate change has been around for some time, people have been using it over and over again,” he said.

“Of course climate changes, it’s naturally induced seen through weather, but the situation now shows it’s not just changing, but we’re reaching a level of a crisis — the increasing number of category five cyclones, the droughts, the erosion, heating of the ocean, the coral reefs dying in the Pacific, and the impact on people’s lives.

“All these things are happening at a very fast pace.

“So the words climate change do not address the dramatic changes taking place so we need another new way of framing it so the term climate crisis is being used now because we are right in the middle of it.”

Protect Pacific is a research project looking at climate crisis across the Pacific region and is led in partnership with the University of Canterbury, the University of the South Pacific and the New Zealand government.

At the recent Oceans Conference in Palau, New Zealand Minister Aupito William Sio announced that his government will allocate US$3 million to the project which Dr Ratuva said would mostly go towards research to be carried out across 16 Pacific islands.

The research project would be mainly led by the Pacific, for the Pacific and Dr Ratuva said it was an opportunity for the Pacific to finally participate in a study that took into account their lived experiences.

However, he added that the Pacific’s heavy dependence on aid had meant the region had had to look elsewhere for climate expertise rather than relying on their own indigenous knowlege.

Dr Ratuva said aid had not allowed the Pacific to express their independence fully.

“The pattern of economic development, the pattern of governance, the pattern of doing things, has always been reliant on aid donors — they define what has to be done with the money.

“Often the Pacific climate policies are driven by the international narratives from the United Nations, from the various aid donors so it’s important that the evidence should be generated within the Pacific using our own expertise.”

“Of course climate changes […] but we’re reaching a level of a crisis – the increasing number of category five cyclones, the droughts, the erosion, heating of the ocean, the coral reefs dying in the Pacific, and the impact on people’s lives.” https://t.co/RqeBq44RkG

— RNZ Pacific (@RNZPacific) May 6, 2022

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

Anti-abortion legislation is sweeping the U.S., including in Texas, Oklahoma and Missouri. We speak with Michele Goodwin, author of “Policing the Womb: Invisible Women and the Criminalization of Motherhood,” about the links between current conflicts between state and federal law and their historic precedents, such as Brown v. Board of Education and the Fugitive Slave Acts. “Bounty hunter” provisions in Texas’s new abortion restrictions are “plucked right out of antebellum slavery,” says Goodwin. “These are horrific times for reproductive liberty.”

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

'Unification' widely rejected

Recent opinion polls have shown that the majority of its 23 million population don't identify as Chinese, and have no wish to be governed by Beijing, which has threatened to annex Taiwan by military force to achieve its idea of "unification."

The "paternalistic and aggressive tone" of Chen's comments prompted the university investigate, the Today.it news website reported.

Taiwan's foreign affairs ministry condemned the treatment of Wang as "an abuse of power," and said it had asked its representative office in Italy to follow up on the matter.

University rector Ferruccio Resta confirmed to the office that the university's disciplinary committee has begun an investigation into the incident to determine whether Chen's actions had violated the school's code of ethics and conduct.

Lee Hsin-ying, Taiwan's representative in Italy, told Taiwanese students in the country that what had happened was "very wrong," and a bid to quash any sense of national identity among them.

Article 2 of the code requires the university to "prevent and combat all kinds of discrimination, both direct and indirect," banning words, actions and procedures that discriminates against people based on gender, ethnic or national origin, sexual orientation, religion, personal or political views, abilities, social background or age," the website said.

"The Polytechnic should consider it of primary importance not to allow the promotion of the Chinese Communist Party's world view or propaganda in an Italian university," the Today.it website said in the commentary article.

"Pending further developments, we ask ourselves: will this lecturer continue to teach at the university, and promote [CCP leader] Xi Jinping thought on socialism with Chinese characteristics in the new era?" the article said.

Chinese 'bullying' blasted

Italian politicians also hit out at the incident, saying it was "bullying."

"The Polytechnic of Milan should suspend this teacher should suspend this teacher who attacks and bullies a Taiwanese student by imposing on him a geopolitical lesson using the worst of Chinese propaganda-speak," Gianni Vernetti, a former senator and deputy minister from the center-left Democratic Party, said via his Twitter account.

And far-right Brothers of Italy senator Lucio Malan accused Chen of trying to "re-educate" the Taiwanese student, saying he would demand an explanation from the relevant government minister.

Milan's il Giornale newspaper also weighed in with an editorial on Monday noting that Taiwan still has formal diplomatic ties with the Vatican, and is for all practical purposes a sovereign state.

The row came after the 59th Bologna Children's Book Fair succumbed to pressure from the Chinese government to change the country of origin of Taiwanese artist Pei-Hsin Cho to "Taiwan, China."

Taiwan's foreign ministry spokeswoman Joanne Ou condemned the move, and accused China of trying to smear the island for political reasons.

Cho had been holding a solo exhibition at the book fair after winning an award there last year.

"The Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Taiwan reiterates that Taiwan is a sovereign state of the Republic of China and is not subordinate to the People's Republic of China," Ou said.

"The Chinese government has never ruled Taiwan for a day, and naturally has no right to claim to represent Taiwan in the international arena or to devalue the name of the country used by the people of Taiwan to participate in activities."

"Taiwan and Italy share universal values such as democracy, freedom, and human rights; Taiwan solemnly calls on relevant Italian departments to show courage and reject China’s inappropriate bullying," she said.

Translated and edited by Luisetta Mudie.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Cai Ling and He Ping.

The clamour in New Zealand to ditch vaccine passes and change the traffic light setting is poorly timed, an epidemiologist says.

The number of covid-19 deaths is on the rise, with nine reported yesterday.

Nine hundred and fifty seven people are now in hospital, including 26 in ICU, the highest number yet in intensive care.

• LISTEN TO RNZ MORNING REPORT: ‘I think this is politicking’ – Epidemiologist Dr Rod Jackson
• READ MORE: Covid-19 update: Nine deaths, 12,020 new community cases, 957 people in hospital
• Samoa covid testing reveals climb to 196 cases
• Other NZ covid outbreak reports

University of Auckland epidemiologist Professor Rod Jackson said the worst may be yet to come.

It is “too soon to relax”, although the country is nearing its peak, Professor Jackson said.

He said the push for change is “politicking” and not many businesses want to remove vaccine passes at present.

He told RNZ Morning Report that looking around the world other countries did not go straight up and down with their peaks and New Zealand would be at risk of “yo-yoing around” if vaccine passes and other public health interventions were removed too soon.

Vaccine passes should be retained until it was clear that the omicron outbreak was just about over, he said.

‘We’re at the top’
“We’re at the top at the moment. It makes absolutely no sense to remove any effective public health measures when we’re still at the top.

“It’s crazy. I think it’s political nonsense to be pushing to take them away now.”

Professor Jackson said more than 1 million New Zealanders still needed to get their booster. As well, the unvaccinated were twice as likely to catch covid-19, three times as likely to transmit it than fully boosted people and five times more likely to be in hospital.

“We’re not over it yet … those relatively small numbers of people, when you do all of those multiplications, they are sufficient to overwhelm our health system.”

He referred to what was happening in the UK and parts of Australia where there were rising case numbers.

“I know there’s huge pressure to take away the vaccine passes but I think it’s a mistake.”

Professor Jackson said it was business which forced the government to introduce vaccine mandates and he did not believe they were hugely in favour of taking them away now.

“I think this is politicking.”

Makes no sense
It did not make sense to change the traffic light setting in the next few days either.

“We’ve got more people in hospital today than we’ve ever had. We’ve got more deaths than we’ve ever had.

“It just doesn’t make any sense to be relaxing public health measures that have proven to be incredibly effective at the peak of an outbreak.”

Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern told Morning Report that the traffic light system must be “no more restrictive” than needed and mandates would not be as necessary after the first omicron wave.

Cabinet was meeting today to review vaccine mandates, vaccine passports and the traffic light system, though any decisions will not be announced until Wednesday.

Watch the PM talking to Morning Report

The changes will mark the biggest domestic shake up to covid-19 restrictions since omicron arrived on Aotearoa’s shores.

“We know that in the future we’re likely to have have additional waves of omicron… We’re already seeing that in other countries,” Ardern said.

“So let’s make sure we get the covid protection framework, that traffic light system, right for the future.

“We want it to be no more restrictive than it needs to be, so if there are areas we can pare it back, we will.”

She said that with a highly vaccinated population the government believed mandates and vaccine passes would no longer be as necessary once the omicron outbreak had peaked.

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

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I grew up kind of broke. I was taught to hustle. [Now] I make a good salary and I don’t need to do things that I don’t want to do. Still, there’s something ravenous that I notice if I don’t do that [capitalistic] thing. It feels like it comes from a feeling of deprivation, a feeling of fear that I think we’re supposed to feel. I don’t mean we’re supposed to as souls. I think we’re “supposed to” as creatures who are constantly being told that we’re not enough. We’re supposed to feel like we should do more and do more and compete and do the best and win. If you’re lucky enough to be like, “Okay, so I don’t have to do that,” then also try to be like, “What’s going to fill my heart? What’s going to really actually give me the opportunity to ask my deepest questions?” Yeah, and if you need to write for a magazine article to pay the rent and all that, that’s fine, too. For me, it’s a constant working out. It’s deep in here, that kind of anxiety.

I would imagine that it took you a long time to accept that you don’t need to chase after things that you truly don’t want. I feel like it’s always there, right? But do you know at what point in your life it became a little bit more quiet?

Yeah, yeah. I mean, it’s in the last probably five years.

Oh, wow.

I think maybe in the last five—not before the last 10 years—but the last five years where I’m more conscientious of, “Wait, that will be a task. That will be a pursuit.” You know? Now, I’m lucky. I get to choose a little bit.

Would you say the difference between a task and a pursuit is then inspiration or how something motivates you?

It’s sort of like if I’m doing something that… How can I put it… That kind of already resonates with some of the questions that I have or that in the process of doing it, I realize, “Oh, this is one of my questions” as opposed to something that is not part of my question. I’m thinking “if someone asked me to write a review [about] a book that I wasn’t that interested in and they would pay me a lot of money and this and that, that would feel like a task. But, if someone asked me to write about a photograph that I thought was amazing and was already sort of like, “Oh my god, this is my wheelhouse of questions,” then that’s something that I would’ve done anyway. That’s kind of the thing that I’m hoping for and trying to remind myself to do.

We’ve talked a little about the present moment. I’m also very interested in how you started, so can you kind of trace that for me? You were a college athlete. Did you always know that you wanted to be a writer?

Every time I’m asked this question I realize I’m not exactly sure, but one version of the story is that I was a sophomore in college and I was in a survey of American Literature class that I was not interested in at all. Actually, I went to college to play football and I was slow to the college part of it, but I had a professor who had me give a presentation on Amiri Baraka’s work. He had me read a poem called “An Agony Is Now.” I read it and it changed my life. I read that poem and then I started reading poems. I got his collection Translucency out of the library and was just deeply reading his work, but also reading all the writers around him. But then I think of other trajectories.

At that same time, I also became very good friends with some other people who were into the arts and stuff. I was deep into music. I was one of these kids who would really study the lyrics of whatever music I was listening to and listen to my folks’ records really closely, the same song over and over and over. I think of that and then I think of my sports life. I’ve always been invested or curious about performance. Whether or not I would’ve said that… My relationship to sports was also a relationship to performance, you know? By which, I mean, it thrilled me a little bit to be the bad guy or something.

And then I think of where we grew up. We grew up in an apartment complex, just outside of Philadelphia. There were so many kids. The amount of constant negotiation that took place [between] a bunch of kids trying to get onto the football field or into the game of manhunt or whatever we were playing. And the languages, the many languages that we were all sharing.

That’s so cool how different aspects of your life that on the surface may not seem related to what you’re doing all definitely informed and kind of led to you being in Bloomington and teaching and writing and performing.

Yeah, totally.

In a different kind of way, it’s really fascinating and almost freaky to look back on our past selves. It could’ve gone so many different ways and either way it’s just weird to think how we’re always in conversation with who we were and who we are. I’m fascinated by that.

Yeah, me too. To, in retrospect, be like, “Oh, I was learning that then.” I was practicing at this. God, it didn’t seem like this but I was really practicing it. If you told me when I was in eighth grade with my buddy Jay doing some stupid shit like breeding fruit flies… If you told me at the time, “Oh, you’re preparing for a life as a writer, et cetera,” [I would’ve said] “No, I’m not. I’m preparing for a life of being naughty.”

How did you decide to start writing and eventually pursue a career?

It feels like I very much stumbled into it. I really had grander designs on being a professional athlete. When I was a kid, I wanted to play football professionally and then even as I was finishing my college career, I was actually training to try to get my way into professional football in some kind of way. When I was there, that was my whole first year of grad school and maybe my second year, too. I wasn’t quite done with this other sort of imagined trajectory. I was eating like crazy, I was 260 pounds and lifting. I just had a vision, had a sort of fantasy, then it stopped eventually. It just sort of slid away, I think. I just rolled into a Ph.D. program after my MFA and I just didn’t want to get a job was really the reason I did that. I just didn’t want to get a job.

Were you always thinking of writing poems as something that could become a job or were you just generally like, “I don’t want to get a day job.”

Yeah, I think I just didn’t want a day job. I knew I wanted to make art in some way. The thing was to figure out how not to really have to work. [My parents] hated their jobs. My dad worked Burger King or Red Lobster and he always worked 60 or 70 hours a week. And my mom worked for a bank, a job she didn’t give a shit about and she worked a lot too. So regular, dutiful, and I love them for taking care of us, but I also was like, “God, that is so…” I don’t know. I don’t know if I’d last with that. When I was in grad school, I would work construction jobs that would come up and then go away. I worked at basketball camps. I’d go do a weekend thing, make 500 bucks and be good for a little bit. But that idea of…

The 9:00 to 5:00?

Oh man. Yeah, I think some people, it feels good to and [for] some people really not good to.

You’ve never wished that you could just clock in and clock out?

I’m really not good at having to be somewhere.

That’s so admirable that you figured out ways to make that work. That makes me wonder if you had a certain belief in yourself because I feel like it’s impossible to follow that trajectory unless you do, right?

Yeah, I probably did. I probably had enough. I can hear myself saying things that make me cringe now, that [could be] read as a kind of belief in oneself, which makes me think in some way, I probably had a certain belief in myself and at the same time, I know in fact that I was profoundly insecure at the same time, you know? I don’t know, maybe it’s belief in oneself or maybe hope.

That feels like a better way to guide oneself to something than what we’re told, you know?

Oh my god. Totally, totally. Obviously, it’s hard to negotiate all of the things that we’re told by all of the things that tell us things, to discern, to get rid of all that noise and to hear actually, “What do I actually want to sing about?” Which is why it’s so lovely when you have beloveds who will be like, “I don’t think that’s actually what you’re… Are you really interested in that?” I’ve had really beautiful friends over the years be like, “Why are you doing that?”

There’s this tendency in American culture for us to fully equate our identities, our worth to what we’re doing on a daily basis for work. I’m wondering if that’s a struggle for you and how you resist that temptation. Also, I would assume by resisting that temptation, there are other things that have to nourish you, fill you up, so I’m wondering what those things are for you.

It’s a great question because I was thinking [about] my job is as a teacher. I love [teaching]. It’s really fun to me. Hanging out with folks is really fun, spending time together and working on our imagination. I’m deeply involved in gardening and serious about basketball in certain kinds of ways and I have all these friendships and I get kind of deep into whatever, music or letterpress printing or any number of things come up for me. Rollerskating. In this building where I work, it’s so empty around here these days. At night, I was up here in this building rollerskating.

That’s so nice.

Oh my god, it’s so good. The floor is perfect. No one’s around. And [I’m] not necessarily good at it, I’m always falling down.

I love that at any given moment, people are preparing dinner, crying, talking to their mom, whatever and Ross Gay is probably around in the building rollerskating.

He’s rollerskating.

That’s so precious to me.

Your question makes me think that my writing life is not particularly discrete from the rest of my life. In part because the more I’m with it, the more it’s just holding the questions that I have, period. It’s not like I go to write to think about things that I’m not thinking about otherwise. It’s kind of like, man, I got these roller skates. What’s the feeling of trying to learn how to roller skate backwards? Let me think about… Oh, this is writing.

In a way, I don’t know that I feel like there’s a separation between the things and I think there’s something to that it’s important and precious in a way, but not more important or precious than… I was going to say my rollerskating life. But in a way, I just mean it’s all part of the same thing.

It’s all interconnected, yeah.

I believe this—It’s most important to take care of this thing that we do, which is one of the ways that we are in community or, for me, I feel like it’s one of the ways that I practice and study being with other people in my writing life.

[Writing] is not discreet from or more important than really just looking closely at [something]. Or really just having a conversation with someone. They’re not discreet and one is not more important than the other.

Is that how you keep yourself in check then from leaning into the capitalistic hell hole?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. It might be and also, the sort of preciousness of the writer or the artist, that kind of specialness. It’s special, whatever, but everything’s kind of special.

And I think maybe too, just in a practical way, it’s kind of like, “Yeah, I’m going to go sit down and fuck around for a little bit,” as opposed to I’m going to go and sit until everything comes out and if it doesn’t come out genius, then what is it? What am I doing?

That’s extremely inspiring because it seems like ultimately—and this is no surprise to me just based on all of your work that I’ve read—but it seems like… the difference between the way our society tells us to think about work versus the way that you think about your work is that our world tells us you have to be… Well, there’s this sort of professionalism that’s expected, which in some ways might be important too, it’s important to show up to things, it’s important to commit. But that should just be about being a good person. Anyway, it seems like instead of giving into that, you are just looking for ways to play and imagine and still taking your work seriously, but also not taking yourself too seriously. Is that correct?

You said it exactly right. Playing, exploring, attempting, and wondering is so important. It’s so important and it feels like a practice a sort of vocation—in all kinds of things, it just feels important not to necessarily make it beautiful or not to necessarily make it the best or not to have aspirations to be the best. But to have it be like what you said, a sort of play.

To me, that is profoundly rigorous and it’s a kind of suspension of something. If we’re able to, at least to some extent, approach work with a playful sensibility or relationship to play rather than relationship to accomplishment.

I mean, I think I’d probably be happier, we’d be happier but also, I just feel like… I don’t know. It just might be more interesting. In my own experiences, I think I write stuff that I want to read again when I’m not trying to be the best, when I’m just sort of…unfixing things.

I also feel like when you’re approaching work through that lens, you’re more inclined to write stuff that is tune with yourself, with your voice, your soul, whatever you want to call that thing. Whereas I found that if my main motivation is to “accomplish” something or get a pitch accepted or get a poem accepted or whatever, then I end up chasing this idea of what a writer is supposed to be, instead of going back to the roots of myself. Ultimately, for me, poetry is just about being in communion with ideas and thoughts and trying to, yeah, like what you said, imagine and play and engage with the invisible things. But I feel like you can’t do those things at the same time. You can’t try to achieve and play… I don’t know.

I think it’s a great question. Can you be trying to achieve and be trying to play? It feels like there’s some tension between the two. There might be some potential overlap, but there’s absolutely some tension between play—which is I think probably exploratory, experimental, does not have a kind of terminal point—and achievement, which is in a different kind of relationship to maybe all those things.

In the beginning of the pandemic, a friend and I were going on a walk, talking about how we wished you had [social media] so we could see how you’re dealing with this right now. Of all the people on Earth, we wish we could just have a short little tweet from you. What is your relationship to the internet, social media, all that?

I never got into that and I suspect it wouldn’t be great for my mental health.

Yeah, you’re not missing anything honestly.

Okay. Yeah, thank you.

There’s some good memes but I don’t know if it’s worth all the other stuff.

I understand it as having a utility. [But] it’s a pace that I’m not particularly interested in. I think ultimately, there’s something, both ethically and aesthetically, that disinclines me from that, but also something self-preservational. I just don’t think it would be good for my brain… I have a telephone, but I just turn it off.

Do you ever feel like you’re missing out from the art world?

No. God, oh my god. Not even a drop. Again, I’m 46 years old, I live in Indiana.

How are you finding delight these days? How are you balancing everything?

Right away when things started shutting down, I found myself wanting to collaborate a little bit. So I got into writing these long poems with friends or doing things collaboratively, figuring out ways to collaborate. Gardening is a thing that I adore. So, that’s that.

One of the things I learned in [writing The Book of Delights] is that to some extent, the practice is just to find what’s with you wherever you go.

The cat who lives with us, her name is Daisy, had been gone for two weeks and we were a little bit like, “Well, maybe Daisy’s gone.” I had started to imagine my life without her. Then, I was taking some compost out and I walked back to the house and Daisy was like, “Meow.” She showed up and I was like, “Oh, that’s a delight.”

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