Faculty Anti-Semitism: All Four Posts

I have combined all four installments of my series on Faculty Anti-Semitism into this single post, so they may be accessed from one link.

The four posts, with some slight editing, can be found after the jump.  They cover Michael Chikindas (Rutgers), Hatem Bazian (Berkeley), defenses and defenders, and why it matters.

Faculty Anti-Semitism, Part One: Michael Chikindas at Rutgers

This is a four-part series on the phenomenon of anti-Semitism among university faculty members. Part One addresses the situation of Prof. Michael Chikindas at Rutgers, who has been sanctioned for posting anti-Semitic memes on his Facebook page.  Part Two will discuss Hatem Bazian, a lecturer at UC Berkeley and a founder of Students for Justice in Palestine, who has circulated equally bigoted images via Twitter. Part Three will respond to some of the defenses that have been raised on behalf of Chikindas and Bazian.

Michael Chikindas is a tenured professor of Food Science at Rutgers University. He is also an anti-Jewish bigot, as is evidenced by his Facebook posts, which often feature classic anti-Semitic conspiracy theories and grotesque cartoons that would be thoroughly familiar to readers of the Daily Stormer.  Chikindas's anti-Jewish ravings were first reported by the website Israellycool, and later by Tablet, The Algemeiner, and NJ.com, and other sites.  Chikindas is nothing if not inventive.  He claims not only that Israelis were responsible for 9/11 -- as do many well-known conspiracy theorists -- along with the standard Holocaust denial, but also that Jews, masquerading as Turks, were responsible for the Armenian genocide.  Perhaps needless to say, Chikindas denies any anti-Jewish prejudice, and claims that he is merely an anti-Zionist.  You can see several of Chikindas's posts after the jump [I am not putting them on the main page for obvious reasons] and decide for yourself about the relationship between anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism.

Meanwhile, Rutgers president Robert Barchi and Chancellor Deba Dutta have issued a strong condemnation of Chikindas's bigotry, and announced that he will not be allowed to teach required courses, so that "No Rutgers student will be required to take a course that he teaches." Chikindas has been removed from his position as the director of the Center for Digestive Health, and "No Rutgers employee will be required to work in an administrative unit that he heads."  Finally, the university is exploring further disciplinary proceedings against Chikindas, under the terms of the faculty union contract, that may possibly lead to "suspension at less than full pay."

I have posted below several of the offensive images from Chikindas's Facebook page. In the next installment I will also post some similar images that were tweeted by Hatem Bazian. I am a little hesitant to post such venomous memes, but I decided it was necessary to illustrate the point about anti-Semitism in the guise of anti-Zionism, and I am confident that readers of The Faculty Lounge will recognize them for what they are.

The images do not leave any doubt about Chikindas's sentiments, but that does not mean that all of President Barchi's disciplinary measures are justified. 

 

There is more of this stuff, but I think that's enough to convey the general tenor of his posts. And it is easy to see why Rutgers President Barchi decided to take action.  Academic freedom does not entitle a faculty member to teach any particular class, nor to hold an administrative position, so the first two measures regarding Chikindas seem reasonable enough for the protection of students and staff.  The potential suspension of Chikindas, which is under investigation but has not been determined, is more problematic.  In 1967, the Rutgers Trustees adopted the following Statement of Academic Freedom, which is also incorporated in the contract with the Rutgers faculty union:

Outside the fields of instruction, artistic expression, research, professional and clinical practice, and professional publication, faculty members, as private citizens, enjoy the same freedoms of speech and expression as any private citizen and shall be free from institutional discipline in the exercise of these rights. The conduct of the faculty member shall be in accordance with standards dictated by law.

In other words, a faculty member can be disciplined for bigoted speech within the course of his or her academic or related work, but not for purely "extramural" speech. (This accords with AAUP principles as well.)  Chikindas's Facebook-posted anti-Semitism has nothing to do with his field of food science, so it would seem that "institutional discipline" -- which would include suspension, but not administrative re-assignment -- should be barred on academic freedom grounds.  This is the position taken by my own university regarding the Holocaust denier Arthur Butz, who teaches electrical engineering, and I think it is the right result.

Faculty Anti-Semitism, Part Two: Hatem Bazian at UC Berkeley

This is the second of a four-part series about the problem of anti-Semitism among university faculty members. Today’s post will discuss Dr. Hatem Bazian, a lecturer at UC Berkeley and a founder of Students for Justice in Palestine, who has circulated equally venomous images via Twitter. 

Chikindas and Bazian are probably quite dissimilar politically, apart from their animosity toward Israel and their displays of anti-Semitism in the guise of anti-Zionism.  In their social media depictions of Jews,however, they turn out to have more in common than either one is likely to admit. 

A key difference, however, is that Bazian is a recognized leader in a national movement. He has over 16,000 followers on Twitter, which no doubt far exceeds the number of Chikindas's Facebook friends. Bazian’s foray into anti-Semitism is not merely cranky or idiosyncratic; rather, it is influential and strategic.  Protected speech can nonetheless be damaging speech.

As you can see, the images that Bazian recently retweeted, are nearly as bad as Chikindas's:

 

 

A Berkeley spokesman (but not the president or chancellor, as at Rutgers) has condemned Bazian's posts as crossing the line from "criticism of Israel’s governmental policies" into "anti-Semitism," while taking no further action.  Given the evident religious malice in the tweet, the reference to Israel's governmental policies was gratuitous. (As pointed out by The Atlantic's Graeme Wood, the tweet was also racist, as it ridiculed the Korean Kim Jong Un for saying "Donald Tlump.")

Bazian deleted the retweet and offered a feeble semi-apology, in which he devoted more energy to slamming Israel than to expressions of regret.  According to Bazian, he "did not realize or read the full text in detail" until after he had retweeted the images, as though the use of the graphics was otherwise unobjectionable.  And when the problem was first brought to his attention, he did not respond "as a matter of policy," because he assumed that the complaints were Zionist attacks. The original tweeter, btw, was a guy named Ron Hughes, whom Bazian evidently follows.  Hughes's other virulent tweets include such venerable anti-Semitic memes as the phony charge -- really, a form of birtherism -- that virtually every Jewish senator and congressperson is a dual Israeli citizen.  

According to Bazian, his "problem is with Zionism," not with "Judaism or Jews" (so long as they "express solidarity" with him politically).  He added, absurdly, that "In the future, I will make sure to include that retweets don't represent an agreement or support for the ideas that are shared." So I guess he plans to continue retweeting anti-Semitic memes to his 16,000 followers, but now with a built-in excuse.  Wink, wink; nudge, nudge.  President Trump recently retweeted three inflammatory anti-Muslim videos. I doubt that Bazian would accept the excuse that they were only retweets; I certainly don’t. 

There is actually a stronger case for disciplining Bazian than there is against Chikindas, given that Bazian's expression of bigotry is directly related to his academic appointment in the Department of Ethnic Studies.  According to the AAUP Statement on Extramural Utterances, a faculty member may be disciplined if "the professor’s extramural utterances raise grave doubts concerning the professor’s fitness" for service in his or her position.  Religious biases may be irrelevant to Chikindas's teaching of Food Science, but they go right to the heart of teaching Ethnic Studies. As far as I know, Bazian does not teach any required courses and, unlike Chikindas, he holds no administrative office.  According to Bazian's website, however, he is an "adviser to the Religion, Politics and Globalization Center at UC Berkeley," which is a position that ought to be reconsidered by the university administration. But as I have already explained, I do not think any more severe measures are appropriate consequences of even hateful extramural speech.

Although I am generally opposed to disciplining faculty for extramural speech, I am also in favor of calling people to account for bigotry, no matter how much they try to rationalize or justify it.  No one who is actually opposed to anti-Semitism could circulate those images, as Bazian did, with or without reading the accompanying text.  Only someone with an underlying antagonism toward Jewishness would use memes that deride the markers of Orthodox Judaism -- kippah and payot --  to make even the most heartfelt political point. It is easy to be repelled by Michael Chikindas, who has no constituency, but Hatem Bazian has behaved just as badly, with greater impact, and for a much bigger audience.

Faculty Anti-Semitism, Part Three: The Defenses

This is the third in a four-part series on faculty anti-Semitism.  This post discusses some of the defenses that have been raised on behalf of Chikindas and Bazian.

The most extensive defense of Chikindas was written on the AAUP's Academe Blog by John K. Wilson, who says that "Chikindas is an anti-Semite, and an idiot," while arguing against the measures taken against Chikindas because "Perpetuating 'toxic stereotypes' is not a violation of any campus rules, nor is upsetting people." Thus, says Wilson, a professor could not be sanctioned for asserting that "gay men have a propensity to molest children,"  or "that Muslims are a terrorist threat," or "that blacks are less intelligent than whites on average."  Wilson is an academic freedom absolutist, but he makes some key mistakes.

First, though perhaps most understandable, it is trivializing for Wilson to call Chikindas "an idiot."  The problem with Chikindas is not stupidity or poor judgment, it is bigotry.  The reference to anti-Semitism as idiocy has the effect of minimizing the seriousness of Chikindas's Facebook posts -- which would be familiar to any reader of The Daily Stormer -- and the historic harms that have been committed in the name of similar anti-Jewish tropes.  A synagogue was firebombed in Sweden last weekend by people who share Chikindas's beliefs.  They were racists, not idiots.  The dismissal of bigots as fools has a certain knee-jerk attractiveness, especially among those who have not been subjected to their vitriol, but the ultimate effect of that response is to deemphasize the actual danger of racism, which is based on hatred rather than ignorance.

More significantly, Wilson failed to recognize the scope of academic freedom.  Chikindas has been subjected to two consequences, and the possibility of a third.  He has been prohibited from teaching required courses and removed from an administrative directorship -- neither of which implicate academic freedom -- and he is facing the prospect of suspension at reduced pay.  

The question here is whether Rutgers students and staff should be compelled to study or work under someone who has grotesquely ridiculed their ethnicity and religion. Rutgers has decided as an administrative matter that no one should have to be placed, against their will, under Chikindas's authority. This is not punishment of Chikindas, but rather a protective measure for students and staff.

Wilson rejects the idea that students might have a legitimate objection to mandatory studying under a bigot. If Chikendas is "qualified to teach classes, then that should include required courses. The fact that some students feel uncomfortable about a professor’s views is not a good reason to ban [him] from teaching required courses."  This conclusion can only be reached by someone who dismisses anti-Semitism as nothing more an "uncomfortable view," which of course is another form of trivialization. (Wilson's citation of Levin v. Harleston is inapposite, as that case involved the creation of "shadow classes" for a professor, and not the reassignment of required courses.")

As I explained in Part One, Wilson is on solid ground when he objects to the ongoing investigation of Chikindas that may result in suspension from the university, but that does not mean the the university's hands must be completely tied. Wilson says, "If we allow personal opinions to be the basis of penalties, almost any controversial professor could be punished."  The slippery slope argument, as it often does, proves too much. Rutgers has thus far taken only measured steps in the face of breathtaking bigotry. Wilson thinks that the university can only act following proof of discrimination in the classroom; I think Rutgers students and staff deserve better. Again, with the recognition that a suspension would in fact implicate academic freedom. (I also agree with Wilson that sending Chikindas to a "cultural sensitivity training program" would be pointless and overbearing.)

This brings us to Hatem Bazian, who has received nothing more at UC Berkeley than a mild rebuke for circulating racist memes about Jews. To Bazian's defenders, however, this is apparently the work of  "powerful allies of the Trump administration and the UC Board of Trustees [who] seek to intimidate, bully and silence any and all advocacy for justice in/for Palestine by pressure, strong arming and bribing public universities."

According to Prof. Rabab Abdulhadi of San Francisco State University, Bazian's behavior was nothing more than "a mistake he made and for which he took responsibility and has publicly apologized." In a letter to UC Berkeley Chancellor Carol Christ, Abdulhadi asserted that Bazian had merely "inadvertently retweeted an offensive meme." Abdulhadi said nothing about the nature or content of Bazian's retweet, as she evidently could not bring herself to acknowledge that it included vile and unmistakable anti-Semitic imagery.  Instead, Abdulhadi insists that "Hatem is being attacked because the Zionist establishment would like to silence all of us and use bullying, smear campaign and outright incitement to violence to take us out once and for all."  To Abdulhadi, it seems that complaints about anti-Semitism have no intrinsic legitimacy and can be readily discounted as coming from the "Zionist establishment."

Some of the overheated complaints against Bazian have no doubt called for his firing, which, as I explained in Part Two, would be a disproportionate infringement of academic freedom. But neither should his foray into ugly anti-Semitism be brushed off as an innocent error.  It was a slip-up, alright, but not an inadvertent one.  Sadly enough, it is obvious that anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism have become inextricably intertwined, to the point that BDS advocates like Abdulhadi cannot even respond to anti-Jewish memes without invoking conspiracy theories.

Neither Michael Chinkindas nor Hatem Bazian is an idiot.  They are well-educated and highly intelligent, and Bazian, as Abdulhadi describes him, is also "an astute political strategist and thinker."  Their defenders, one out of naivete and the other out of zealotry, have sadly failed to appreciate the seriousness of anti-Semitism, which is far more than, as Wilson called it, a "personal opinion."

Faculty Anti-Semitism, Part Four: Why It Matters

This is the final installment in the series. It will expand on the phenomenon of trivialization, which occurs when anti-Jewish bigotry is treated as a nothing more than an annoyance or a slip-up, as opposed to the seriousness with which other forms of racism are addressed.  I am not arguing here that Chikindas or Bazian should be disciplined, but rather that faculty anti-Semitism has been treated with far too much complacency.

Both Bazian and Chikindas circulated cartoon figures that mocked Jews and Judaism (included in Parts One and Two) while repeating venerable anti-Jewish slanders.  For centuries, similar images have served as both the motive and excuse for violence against Jews.  As the author Neil Gaiman has pointed out, “all images, particularly images of people, go straight into our heads and create empathy, create disgust.” That is why they need to be taken seriously.  If the defenders of Chikindas and Bazian do not recognize the historical power of anti-Semitic images, the neo-Nazis at Stormfront understand it all too well, as explained in their “Style Guide”:

Packing our message inside of cultural memes and humor can be viewed as a delivery method.

Writing on the AAUP’s Academe Blog, however, John Wilson dismissed Michael Chikindas’s posting of Nazi-like anti-Jewish caricatures as idiocy that amounted to nothing more than “uncomfortable” views.  Following Hatem Bazian’s retweet of equally vile memes, San Francisco State’s Prof. Rabab Abdulhadi brushed it off as merely an inadvertent “mistake” that led to an overreaction by the “Zionist establishment.”

Both Wilson and Abdulhadi – out of either naiveté or zealotry – miss the point.  Anti-Jewish caricatures and internet memes have harmful consequences in the real world.  Anti-Semitism is not an unpleasant artifact of the past, but rather a present danger, as we have seen in recent violent attacks on Jewish institutions including synagogues, day schools, community centers, and museums.  Moreover, there is a clear relationship between the circulation of hateful images and the spread of dangerous anti-Semitism.

Hatem Bazian, for example, is a founder of Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) and a well-known BDS advocate with over 16,000 followers on Twitter.  Here are some tweets that have been posted by members of an autonomous SJP affiliate chapter (all punctuation and orthography original):

Hitler should have took you all.

I honestly wish I was born at the time of the second world war just to see the genius, Hitler, at work.

Where is hitler when u need one?’ I literally ask this every day.

the reason i kept some jews alive is so i can show you why i killed them in the first place. –Hitler

I suspect my french teacher of being a jew cause I saw her picking up a penny off the floor yesterday.

Zionists don’t count as human beings. I would say they’re cockroaches, but that’s offensive to the cockroaches.

I keep saying, we need to cleanse the world of creatures such as these dirty white Americans.

[Note: I have not linked to the sources for these anti-Jewish tweets, because they identify the individuals, most of whom are undergraduates, by their names, photographs, and twitter accounts.  My intention is to use their tweets as exemplars, but not to encourage anyone to threaten or troll the students.]

Bazian and Abdulhadi will surely express abhorrence of the on-line Hitler-fest, but how many of the bigoted students are followers of Bazian’s twitter feed?  How many of them felt encouraged or reinforced in their hatred by Bazian’s retweet of the charge of Jewish “organ smuggling”?  Both of Bazian’s memes included derision of Jews as the “chosen” people (which in Biblical terms, of course, means chosen for a task and does not imply superiority), which is echoed in one of the more foul tweets of the young BDSers:

‘Gods chosen people’ lmfaoooo oh you mean god chose you to kindle hell fire with.. Tru.”

However innocent their intentions, Bazian, Abdulhadi, and others have played a role in producing a generation of activists at ease with the idea of genocide. Nor are those sentiments unrelated to the murder of Jewish schoolchildren in Toulouse and Sabbath-eve shoppers in Paris. Quoting again from the Daily Stormer Style Guide:

There should be a conscious agenda to dehumanize the enemy, to the point where people are ready to laugh at their deaths.

Against that backdrop, Bazian’s retweet of blatantly anti-Jewish images – especially in the guise of humor – must be recognized as something far more troubling than an inadvertent mistake.

Chikindas does not have the same broad constituency as Bazian, but his Facebook posts included even more anti-Jewish caricatures, complete with hook-noses and greedy leering.  His appeal seems more directed to the Alt-Right than to the campus left, although he also frames his bigotry in terms of anti-Zionism. More characteristically, Chikindas says that Jews control the Federal Reserve, Wall Street, Hollywood, the law courts, pornography, sex-trafficking, and something he calls “the cancer industry.” The Daily Stormer agrees (boldface original):

Prime Directive: Always Blame the Jews for Everything:

As such, all enemies must be combined into one enemy, which is the Jews. This is pretty much objectively true anyway, but we want to leave out any and all nuance.

So no blaming Enlightenment thought, pathological altruism, technology/urbanization, etc. – just blame Jews for everything.

Wilson’s post on the Academe Blog discounted such stuff as idiocy and “personal opinions,” but there is more at play here than quirkiness or eccentricity.  The white supremacist demonstrators in Charlottesville marched past a synagogue shouting “Jews will not replace us.”  The next day, Heather Heyer was murdered, and 19 more people were injured, when one of the white nationalists drove a speeding car into a crowd of counter-demonstrators.  The alleged driver, James Alex Fields, was a known Nazi sympathizer.  What sort of caricatures and “personal opinions” do you think he encountered at the neo-Nazi websites he had frequented for years?

Chikindas did not draw the anti-Semitic caricatures himself.  He found them on the internet and posted them on his Facebook page, in a move that was directly out of the Daily Stormer playbook.  That is just how anti-Semitism spreads, as seemingly respectable figures such as university professors endorse its memes. The results are sadly predictable and not the work of idiots. 

Comments

[Deep State Special Legal Counsel]

The difference between these academics and Charlottsiville is that I can almost forgive the young Nazi white extremists. They are influenced by people like Donald Trump (America First (Blood and Soil) and Mexican rapists), Lt. General Michael Flynn, Julie Kirchner and a whole host of external sources. They have never had a caring Jewish friend, co-worker, teacher, doctor, etc. On the other hand, these scum bag academics are seasoned, experienced, educated professionals with Jewish colleagues.