Chris Hedges: Trump’s Useful Idiots
SCHEER POST
By Chris Hedges / Original to ScheerPost
The media, universities, the Democratic Party and liberals, by embracing the fiction of “rampant antisemitism,” laid the groundwork for their own demise. Columbia and Princeton, where I have taught, and Harvard, which I attended, are not incubators of hatred
towards Jews. The New York Times, where I worked for fifteen years and which Trump calls “an enemy of the people,” is slavishly subservient to the Zionist narrative. What these institutions have in common is not antisemitism, but liberalism. And liberalism,
with its creed of pluralism and inclusiveness, is slated by our authoritarian regime for obliteration.
The conflation of outrage over the genocide with
antisemitism is a sleazy tactic to silence protest and placate Zionist donors, the billionaire class and advertisers. These liberal institutions,
weaponizing antisemitism,
aggressively silenced and expelled critics, banned student groups such as Jewish Voice for Peace and Students for Justice in Palestine, allowed police to make
hundreds of arrests of
peaceful protests on
campuses, purged professors and groveled before Congress. Use the words ‘apartheid’
and ‘genocide’
and you are fired
or excoriated.
Zionist Jews, in this fictional narrative, are the oppressed. Jews who
protest the
genocide are slandered as Hamas stooges and punished. Good Jews. Bad Jews. One group deserves protection. The other deserves to be thrown to the wolves. This odious bifurcation exposes the charade.
In April 2024, Columbia University President Minouche Shafik, along with two board members and a law professor, testified before the House of Representative education committee. They accepted the premise that antisemitism was a significant problem at Columbia
and other higher education institutions.
When Co-Chair of the Board of Trustees of Columbia University David Greenwald and others
told the
committee that they believed “from the river to the sea” and “long live the intifada” were antisemitic statements, Shafik agreed. She
threw students and
faculty under the bus, including long-time professor Joseph Massad.
The day after the hearings, Shafik suspended all the students at the Columbia protests and called in the New York City Police Department (NYPD), who arrested at least 108 students.
“I have determined that the encampment and related disruptions pose a clear and present danger to the substantial functioning of the University,” Shafik
wrote in
her letter to the police.
NYPD Chief John Chell, however, told the
press, “the students that were arrested were peaceful, offered no resistance whatsoever, and were saying what they wanted to say in a peaceful manner.”
“What disciplinary action has been taken against that professor?” Representative Elise Stefanik asked in the hearing about Columbia law Professor Katherine Franke.
Shafik volunteered that Franke, who is Jewish and whose position at the law school where she had taught for 25 years was terminated, and other professors, were being investigated. In an apparent reference to visiting Columbia
Professor Mohamed Abdou, she claimed he
was “terminated” and promised he “will never teach at Columbia again.” Professor Abdou is
suing Columbia
for defamation, discrimination, harassment and financial and professional loss.
In an egregious attack on both academic freedom and Palestinian rights advocacy, Columbia University has entered into an “agreement” with Katherine Franke to leave her teaching position after an esteemed 25-year career. The move — “a termination dressed up in more palatable terms,” according to Franke’s statement — stems from her advocacy for students who speak out in support of Palestinian rights.
Her ostensible offense was a comment expressing concern about Columbia’s failure to address harassment of Palestinians and their allies by Israeli students who come to campus straight from military service — after Israeli students sprayed Palestinian rights protestors with a toxic chemical. For this, she was investigated for harassment and found to be in violation of Columbia’s policies. The actual cause of her forced departure is the crackdown on dissent at Columbia resulting from historic protests opposing Israel’s genocide of Palestinians in Gaza. Franke’s fate was sealed when former Columbia president Minouche Shafik threw her under the bus during her cowardly appearance before Congress.
Despite her capitulation to the Zionist lobby, Shark
resigned a
little more than a year after assuming her position as head of the university.
The crackdown at Columbia continues, with an estimated 80 people
arrested and
over 65 students suspended following
a protest in the library in the first week of May. Former television journalist and Columbia’s acting president Claire Shipman
condemned the
protest, stating,“Disruptions to our academic activities will not be tolerated and are violations of our rules and policies…Columbia strongly condemns violence on our campus, antisemitism and all forms of hate and discrimination, some of which we witnessed
today.”
Of course, appeasement does not work. This witch hunt, whether under the Biden or Trump administration, was never grounded in good faith. It was about decapitating Israel’s critics and marginalizing the liberal class and the left. It is sustained by lies and
slander, which these institutions continue to embrace.
Watching these liberal institutions, who are hostile to the left, be smeared by Trump for harboring “Marxist lunatics,” “radical leftists,” and “communists,” exposes another
failing of
the liberal class. It was the left that could have saved these institutions or at least given them the fortitude, not to mention analysis, to take a principled stand. The left at least calls apartheid
apartheid and genocide genocide.
Media outlets regularly
publish articles and OpEds uncritically accepting claims made by Zionist students and faculty. They fail to clarify the distinction between being Jewish and being Zionist. They demonize student protesters. They
never bothered reporting with any depth or honesty from the student encampments where Jews, Muslims and Christians made common cause. They routinely mischaracterize anti-Zionist, anti-genocide and pro-Palestinian liberation slogans and policy demands as hate
speech, antisemitic, or contributing to Jewish students feeling unsafe.
Examples include, The New York Times: “Why
the Campus Protests Are So Troubling,” “I’m
a Columbia Professor. The Protests on My Campus Are Not Justice,” and “Universities
Face an Urgent Question: What Makes a Protest Antisemitic?”; The Washington Post: “Call
the campus protests what they are” “At
Columbia, excuse the students, but not the faculty”; The Atlantic: “Campus
Protest Encampments Are Unethical” and “Columbia
University’s anti-Semitism Problem”; Slate: “When
Pro-Palestine Protests Cross Into Antisemitism”; Vox:
The Rising Tide of
Antisemitism on College Campuses Amid Gaza Protests”; Mother Jones: “How
Pro-Palestine Protests Spark Antisemitism on Campus”; The Cut (New York Magazine): “The
Problem With Pro-Palestine Protests on Campus”; and The Daily Beast: “Antisemitism
Surges Amid Pro-Palestine Protests at U.S. Universities.”
The New York Times, in a decision worthy of George Orwell, instructed its reporters to eschew words such “refugee camps,” “occupied territory,” “slaughter,” “massacre,” “carnage,” “genocide” and “ethnic cleansing,” when writing
about Palestine, according
to an internal memo obtained by The Intercept. It discourages the very use of the word “Palestine” in routine text and headlines.
In December 2023, Democratic Governor of New York Kathy Hochul
sent a letter to
university and college presidents who failed to condemn and address “antisemitism,” and calls for the “genocide of any group.” She warned that they would be subjected to “aggressive enforcement action” by New York State. The following year, in late August,
Hochul repeated these warnings during a virtual meeting with 200 university and college leaders.
Hochul made
clear in October 2024 that she considered pro-Palestine slogans to be explicit calls for genocide of Jews.
“There are laws on the books – human rights laws, state and federal laws – that I will enforce if you allow for the discrimination of our students on campus, even calling for the genocide of the Jewish people which is what is meant by ‘From the river to the
sea,’ by the way,” she said at a memorial event at the Temple Israel Center in White Plains. “Those are not innocent sounding words. They’re filled with hate.”
The Governor successfully pressured City University of New York (CUNY) to remove a job posting for a Palestinian studies professorship at Hunter College which referenced “settler colonialism,” “genocide” and “apartheid.”
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer in his new book “Antisemitism
in America: A Warning,” leads efforts by the Democratic Party — which has a dismal 27 percent approval rating in a recent NBC News poll — to denounce those protesting the genocide as carrying out a “blood libel”
against Jews.
“Whatever one’s view of how the war in Gaza was conducted, it is not and has never been the policy of the Israeli government to exterminate the Palestinian people,” he
writes,
ignoring hundreds
of calls by Israeli officials to wipe Palestinians from the face of the earth during 19 months of saturation bombing and enforced starvation.
The grisly truth, openly acknowledged by Israeli officials, is far different.
“We are disassembling Gaza, and leaving it as piles of rubble, with total destruction [which has] no precedent globally. And the world isn’t stopping us,”
gloats Israel’s
Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich.
“Last night, almost 100 Gazans were killed…it doesn’t interest anyone. Everyone has gotten used to [the fact] that [we can] kill 100 Gazans in one night during a war and nobody cares in the world,” Israeli Knesset member
Zvi Sukkot,
told Israel’s
Channel 12 on May 16.
The perpetuation of the fiction of widespread antisemitism, which of course exists but which is not fostered or condoned by these institutions, coupled with the refusal to say out loud what is being live streamed to the world, has shattered what little moral
authority these institutions and liberals had left. It gives credibility to Trump’s effort to cripple and destroy all institutions that sustain a liberal democracy.
Trump surrounds himself with neo-Nazi sympathizers such
as Elon Musk, and Christian fascists who condemn Jews for crucifying Christ. But antisemitism by the right gets a free pass since these “good” antisemites cheer on Israel’s settler colonial project of extermination, one these neo-Nazis and Christian fascists
would like to replicate on Brown and Black in the name of the great replacement theory. Trump trumpets the fiction of “white genocide” in South Africa. He signed an executive order in February that fast-tracked immigration to the U.S. for Afrikaners — white
South Africans.
Harvard, which is attempting to
save itself from the wrecking ball of the Trump administration, was as complicit in
this witch hunt as everyone else, flagellating itself for not being more repressive towards campus critics of the genocide.
The university’s former president Claudine Gay
condemned the
pro-Palestine slogan “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” which demands the right of an independent Palestinian state alongside Israel, as bearing “specific historical meanings that to a great many people imply the eradication of Jews from
Israel.”
Harvard substantially
tightened its regulations regarding student protests, in January 2024, and
increased the
police presence on its campus. It barred 13
students from graduating, citing alleged policy violations linked to their participation in a protest encampment, despite an earlier agreement to avoid punitive measures. It
placed more
than 20 students on “involuntary leave” and in some cases evicted students
from their housing.
The capitulations and
crackdowns on
pro-Palestine activism, academic freedom, freedom of speech, suspensions, expulsions and firings, since Oct. 7, 2023, have not spared U.S. colleges and universities from further attacks.
Since Trump took office, at least $11 billion in federal research grants and contracts have been cut or frozen nationwide
according
to NPR. This includes Harvard ($3
billion), Columbia ($400
million), University of Pennsylvania ($175
million) and Brandeis ($6-7.5
million annually).
On May 22, the Trump administration intensified its attacks on Harvard by terminating its
ability to enroll international students that make
up around 27 percent of the student body.
“This administration is holding Harvard accountable for fostering violence, antisemitism, and coordinating with the Chinese Communist Party on its campus,” Kristi Noem, DHS Secretary
wrote on
X, when posting screenshots of the letter
she sent to Harvard revoking foreign student enrollment. “Let this serve as a warning to all universities and academic institutions across the country.”
Harvard, like Columbia, the media, the Democratic Party and the liberal class, misread power. By refusing to acknowledge or name the genocide in Gaza, and persecuting those who do, they provided the bullets to their executioners.
They are paying the price for their stupidity and cowardice.