“We say, Justice, you say How?” The answer of some ‘progressive’ academics, clinging to the “strong is wrong” precept and to the words of Frantz Fanon, should disturb not only Zionists. The more violently the oppressed fight their oppressors, the more oppressive they, too, become. How should we address the spiral of oppression? The Clotting of the Academic Mind, Part III
Khymani James may be young, but he’s old enough to know what he deserves – gratitude. An undergraduate student at Columbia University, James has been leading the 2024 Columbia University pro-Palestinian campus encampment. “Zionists don’t deserve to live,” James proudly opined in April, “so be glad, be grateful that I'm not just going out and murdering Zionists.” It remains unclear if James himself does not murder Zionists just to gain our gratitude or because he recognizes others execute the murder mission more effectively. James, however, gladly glorifies and justifies the mission: “Zionists… They are Nazis. They are fascists. They are supporters of genocide. Why would we want supports of genocide to live? Zionists… need to not exist, they stop the world from progressing.”
To help the world progress, Columbia University Apartheid Divest (CUAD) recently issued a statement backing James and proudly declared that “echoing decolonial thinkers and revolutionaries like Frantz Fanon and Fidel Castro… We support liberation by any means necessary, including armed resistance.”
I wonder what true progressives, like Louis Brandeis and John Dewey, would have made of the current ab/use of the term. In our day and age, demonstrators near the NYC subway specified how a “progressive” agenda should be put into practice, namely, how the justified murder of Zionists is best accomplished and by whom, going so far as to adorn their mission statement with refined rhymes: “We say Justice, you say How? Burn Tel Aviv to the ground. Ya Hamas, we love you – We support your rockets too.”
Killer cadence aside, “progressive” academia offers higher credentials to justify the murder of Zionists, Israelis (or anyone who happens to live there) – in the form of tenured professors. Columbia University’s historian Sir Simon Schama was “struck at how little human empathy there was in academia already on October 7.”
Some professors seem to prove Schama's point. About a week after the Oct7 Hamas massacre, friends from Cornell University, where I have been teaching for quite a while, sent me a clip that went viral: a speech by Professor Russell Rickford at a pro-Palestinian rally on Sunday, Oct. 15 at the Ithaca Commons.
Rickford, a professor of history at Cornell, saw Hamas’s attack in historical terms and could hardly contain his excitement. Even his brief moment of moderation, a passing “I abhor the killing of civilians,” was quickly drowned in qualification: if I were an oppressed Palestinian “I who hate violence would take up arms.” Many, including prominent Israeli leaders like Ehud Barak and Ami Ayalon, argued the same, but “taking up arms” against whom? In the context of Hamas’s attack, Rickford’s answer, like CUAD, seems obvious: against everyone.
Why? First, empirically, because Israel is “a genocidal project… a death mission.” Second, normatively, because “I would never presume to tell an oppressed people how they should seek their liberation.” Taken together, Rickford’s empirical-normative argument exonerates the Oct7 massacre.
Should we follow suit? Perhaps so. After all, if there ever is a moral ground for “the end justifies all means,” stopping a genocide (perhaps even avenging it?) should be it. James and Rickford may have a point.
To take a still-obvious case of genocide – the Holocaust – many admonish the Allies for failing to stop it. But suppose they could and would have, how far should they have gone? Let’s imagine that the only way to stop the mass genocide of Jews would have been to incinerate the Third Reich with Dresden-like bombing, killing not 25 thousand, but 25 million, Germans – should the Allies have followed through?
It all seems to hinge, à la Rickford, on oppression, giving a carte blanche to any oppressed group to execute atrocities. But then, since Rickford himself designates pre-Israel Jews as unjustly persecuted, his reasoning must then also justify how oppressed Jews did “seek their liberation,” including the 1948 war and the Nakba – which, in turn, of course, justifies Palestinian killing.
There is no easy way out of this murderous cycle, but Rickford may have finally found it – it seems that not all oppressed peoples are created equal after all. Rickford makes an intriguing move. He proclaims that “all human beings have the right to self-determination” and to “human rights,” then insists, presumably against Zionism’s imagined stance, that “Palestinians are human beings!” Finally, fervently exalting Hamas’s “operation,” imparting how “exhilarating” and “energizing” the attack has been for “shifting [the] balance of power,” Rickford concludes: “if they weren't exhilarated by this challenge to the monopoly of violence, by this shifting of the balance of power, then they would not be human. I was exhilarated.”
I have been teaching my course “HOPE: What Makes Us Human” for many years now, not least at Cornell, and it never occurred to me that exhilaration at the slaughter of little children is the hallmark of our humanity, let alone its sine qua non.
Still, I have my limitations, and Rickford may have shown us the light. Any serious expert on (de)colonialism is surely aware of history's harsh lesson—the spiral of oppression: the more violently the oppressed fight their oppressors, the more oppressive they, too, eventually become.
Now, at long last, Rickford unwinds the spiral. Since exhilaration at the slaughter of little children by armed oppressed people is the hallmark of our humanity, and since Israeli Jews are evidently not that thrilled about being butchered, they are clearly non-human. Their murder may thus not be that bad, and in fact, is hardly “murder” at all (depending, of course, on what brand of non-human category Rickford assigns them to). Still, there’s hope. If Professor Rickford’s pedagogical skills match his seditious rhetoric, he might be able to teach Jews how to rejoice when they are hunted down, humiliated, and annihilated so that they, too, can become human. They can then thank James for not killing them.
In a previous post, we discussed one source of inspiration for the academic urge to “Be Violent!”: the prevalent “strong is wrong” precept. Hence, Rickford’s “exhilaration” at “this shifting of the balance of power.” Hamas’s massacre, by humiliating the strong Israel, becomes a sacrificial act, a purifying, even purging, resurrection of the weak against all odds. The price for this power shift pales in comparison to its uplifting effects.
Rickford romanticizes how the Palestinians “were able to breathe, for the first time in years.” Never mind that Oct7 ended a ceasefire, that in its wake tens of thousands, Israelis and Palestinians, literally breathe no more, while dozens slowly suffocate in Hamas’s Hades, where the organization poured much of its $1.8billion Qatari endowment (via Bibi’s aid). None of these matter. They all pale in comparison to “shifting the balance of power,” even if the shift itself is hideously oppressive, even if it leads to more oppression. At least the intoxicating metaphor can finally “breathe,” affirming one strong that’s never wrong, that should never be dethroned: progressive academia.
But beyond the “strong is wrong” precept, there is another, more individualized, source of inspiration and justification for such violence. Like CUAD and many others in the same vain moral vein, Rickford often hitches his wagon to the star of Frantz Fanon.
Born in Martinique, Fanon’s growing alienation from France encouraged him to decode its imperialism as the true origin of the malaise that plagued France’s Algerian population. Coining the terms decolonization and lived experience, Fanon’s first spelled French words were “Je suis français.” But later in life, he interlaced psychiatry and politics like few before, employing his rebel’s clinic to decode the disastrous mental dance of the colonizers and the colonized, pointing to the critical, sometimes essential, role of violence in breaking this cycle.
Too many read Fanon through the opening of his 1961 book The Wretched of the Earth: Jean-Paul Sartre’s Preface and its first chapter, “On Violence.” Sartre mainly targets his leftish compatriots: “You who are so liberal, so humane… you pretend to forget that you have colonies where massacres are committed in your name,” which are now coming to haunt you: “You said they [Algerian Arabs] understand nothing but violence? Of course; first, the only violence is the settlers; but soon they will make it their own; that is to say, the same violence is thrown back upon us as when our reflection comes forward to meet us when we go towards a mirror.” What goes around, comes around, the existentialist bent? Hardly. If anything, it’s Bad faith alley. What Sartre is missing in his karma-colonialism thesis is that people, if “condemned to be free,” are not condemned to kill.
Fanon joins him in that dead-end alley: “Decolonization is always a violent event.” But here, like his noted 1960 Accra talk, Why we use violence, Fanon, in the first chapter, directs his gaze at the colonized, not the colonizer. He sees violence as emancipating from the colonizer not only politically but internally and psychologically: “At the individual level, violence is a cleansing force. It rids the colonized of their inferiority complex, of their passive and despairing attitude. It emboldens them and restores their self-confidence.”
Yet, what many contemporary self-fashioned Fanonists fail to see is that Fanon himself, in subsequent chapters and elsewhere in his work, was far more reserved about the violence his followers enact, and justify, in his name. Unlike them, he was keenly aware of the spiral of oppression, and warned that liberation movements can become new oppressors once they attain power, exchanging one barbarism for another. Moreover, Fanon stressed, “We do not say to the settler ‘You are a stranger, go away.’ We do not say to him: ‘We will take over the leadership of the country and make you pay for your crimes and those of your ancestors.’” Of course, these words are almost verbatim what many supposed Fanonists, not least Hamas and its supporters, argue against Israel and Zionism.
Finally, we should note: Fanon was wrong. Decolonization is not always violent. While most colonized peoples did resort to armed struggle, some did not, and peacefully gained independence. Britain relinquished parts of its immense Empire peacefully, including vast countries, like Canada; heavily populated, like India (“the jewel in British crown”); or small, like Malta. The US peacefully relinquished the Philippines (1946), as did the Netherlands with Suriname (1975). Many Pacific Island territories likewise gained independence without bloodshed, like Samoa (from New Zealand), Vanuatu (from France and the United Kingdom), and the Marshall Islands (from the United States).
Gandhi’s Satyagraha – truth-focused, non-violent resistance – was pivotal in Britain’s decision to pull back. Other followed. Martin Luther King, Jr., for example, wrote that he “found in the nonviolent resistance philosophy of Gandhi… the only morally and practically sound method open to oppressed people in their struggle for freedom.” Were Gandhi and MLK naïve? Perhaps, but their political accomplishments should at least indicate to the proponents of “always/only violence against oppression,” that it ain’t necessarily so.
A couple of months ago, I was fortunate to debate and deliberate the matter with Peter Singer and Ghada Karmi at HowTheLightGetsIn festivel 2024, in a panel on Violence, Vengeance and Virtue:
From academia abroad to Israeli universities, my academic institute, Tel Aviv University, recently rejected pressure, from both its students and Israeli ministers, to fire senior lecturer Dr. Anat Matar, for lamenting her “dear and beloved friend” and “an endless source of inspiration,” Walid Daqqa, who died in prison of cancer.
Daqqa was sentenced to life in prison in 1987 for commanding a PFLP cell that abducted and killed Israeli soldier Moshe Tamam in 1984. Daqqa did not actively partake in the killing, and later publicly repented, inviting Mater to join his moral-emotional journey. “To feel the people and their pain,” he wrote to her, “this is the essence of the entire human culture.” He related an anecdote from prison life:
One day my cellmate says to me: ‘Tell me, didn’t you have enough saying good morning to that jailer every day he opens the cell door and doesn’t bother to answer you?! Don't you have any self-respect?! Enough, don't say good morning to him and that's it.’ I didn't have much to answer to my friend. But I didn’t give up and I didn’t stop saying good morning to the jailer, because I’m human and I don’t give up. Because every good morning is a reminder to the jailer that I am a human being, and every good morning reminds him that he is, and the fact he doesn’t answer is because he’s still afraid to remember it, and if I stop my good morning, it means that his fear has defeated me and turned me into something else. I will not let prison change me or control me. And in your words, I am a subject who has will and consciousness, I will not let myself be turned into an object. This is self-respect, to have free will in prison. This mirror that I place every morning before the jailer – it will change him. And it matters.
Perhaps realizing that some words can indeed maketh murder, Daqqa turned to other words. There was more humanity in his mirror, in his unyielding “good morning,” than in the murderous manifestations of many Fanonists.
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