Maura Finkelstein never hid her support for Palestinian liberation during her nine years working as a professor of anthropology at Muhlenberg College, a small liberal arts school in Allentown, Pennsylvania.
“I have always had an ethical practice of making sure that I include Palestine in my teaching,” Finkelstein told me. “It was never outside the bounds of what I do.” For Finkelstein, who is Jewish, this was not always easy. More than 30 percent of Muhlenberg’s 2,200 students are Jewish, many of them vocal supporters of Israel.
In late May, however, Muhlenberg told Finkelstein that she was fired. The reason? She had shared, on her personal Instagram account, in a temporary story slide, a post written not by herself but by Palestinian poet Remi Kanazi calling for the shunning of Zionist ideology and its supporters.
“Do not cower to Zionists,” Kanazi wrote on January 16. “Shame them. Do not welcome them in your spaces. Why should these genocide loving fascists be treated any different than any other flat out racist.” At the time, Israel had already killed over 22,000 Palestinians in Gaza, the majority of whom were women and children.
When you’re a college professor, it doesn’t really matter if you’re sharing on your “personal” Instagram page. Saying you’re going to shame your students, make them unwelcome, and treat them like genocide-loving racists, you ought to expect to be fired. There’s a way to get your message across without alienating your own students. In fact, that’s pretty much the entire job description for teaching.
Remember the good old days when it wasn’t controversial to say genocide enablers are bad people?
This is the problem, you’re talking about people, not crimes. Talk about the crime. Genocide is a crime. Enabling genocide is less clear. I voted for Biden, does that make me a genocide enabler? The factory worker who builds aluminum shells for bombs? The Israeli school child making care packages for soldiers as a school project?
When you reduce people to a single crime, it’s easier to paint with a wide brush, and it becomes easier to decide that all need to be punished equally. It’s like the people who call Hamas “terrorists” and decide all Hamas supporters deserve death. Treating all “Zionists” the same lends credence to the very argument that Israel is using to justify its own genocide. So are you a genocide enabler?
I’ve been called a Zionist for saying that Israel exists. I don’t support the Israeli government, I don’t support the genocide, I don’t support my country supporting it, and I don’t support the claim over the land. But a professor 20 miles from my house thinks I am the same as a violent racist.
That’s how you lose the high ground. You talk about people as criminals, and say they are bad people. All people have the capacity to be good or bad, but most people are just trying to survive the circumstances of their existence. It is their actions, their choices, that are good or bad, and if we focus on that, we can help people do better. Bad choices can be improved. Bad people can only be killed.
I’m not reducing them to anything. This is what they are. Genocidal colonists and genocide enablers. Just because some of them are more polite or friendly doesn’t change it. Saying anything else is just an insult to Jews like this professor who are from all over the world and have the guts to call them out on it.
In the latest development of liberals becoming increasingly unhinged as they struggle to ignore the deepening divide between their words and their actual beliefs:
Apparently treating genocide-loving racists like genocide-loving racists is now a breach of the precious double-standard social decorum liberals love so much.
So much for free speech.
She’s not being prosecuted for it so yeah, she has the freedom of speech still