Yalies 4 Terrorism

By Kayla Bartsch

Thursday, October 19, 2023

 

There have been many articles of late outlining the, shall we say, mixed responses on college campuses to Hamas’s attack on Israel. The Ivy League has hogged the spotlight in this matter: From an assault on an Israeli student at Columbia to the justification of terrorism by dozens of Harvard student groups, the list of pro-Hamas displays within the ivory tower is long. Loath to be outshone by other, lesser institutions, Yale University has hosted its own headlining events.

 

In an Instagram post, Yalies 4 Palestine (an official student organization at Yale with a self-explanatory name) advertised a pro-Hamas rally in downtown New Haven. The graphic read: “On Indigenous People’s Day –– All out for Palestine!” Yalies 4 Palestine originally captioned the post (since edited): “We call on our allies and the Yale community to celebrate the resistance’s success, uplift their calls, and march this Monday October 9 at 3pm at New Haven City Hall.”

 

To the surprise of none, the students who organized Yalies 4 Palestine and issued the call for the rally are bona fide activists on the campus left. They are the same who organized Students Unite Now sit-ins, Yale’s first boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) campaign, and Students Demand Action events.

 

It must be noted that these are not “fringe” positions on campus. Craig Birckhead-Morton (’24), an active member of Yalies 4 Palestine, served on the 2022–23 Yale College Council as the “inaugural student organization liaison” and nearly won the election for YCC vice president this past spring.

 

In February, Birckhead-Morton published an op-ed in which he says students “should be doing everything we can” to challenge systems of oppression (including “neocolonial” Yale University). He opens the piece with the words of Malcolm X: “When [one] is exercising extremism in defense of liberty for human beings, it’s no vice.” He then praises a khutbah (sermon) by Bilal Ansari, the assistant vice president for campus engagement at Williams College and Williams’s first Muslim chaplain, in which Ansari argues that “Muslims have a religious obligation to pursue justice, to be revolutionary and to embody the emancipatory spirit of the Islamic tradition.” To close the piece, he calls on minority students to “stop seeking representation in a genocidal system that historically has and contemporarily is oppressing our people. It’s time to organize against the system.” (Apparently, the “system” to which he is referring is “this settler colony called America.”)

 

Reading the op-ed now in light of recent Hamas violence is chilling. The same anti-colonizer rhetoric is used by Ruqaiyah Damrah (’23), one of the original founders of Yalies 4 Palestine. She told the Yale Daily News in 2022, in a piece on the group’s BDS-campaign launch, that she believes the Palestinians are suffering under the weight of “white supremacy modeled after European forms of colonialism.” Damrah goes on to share hopes that the “campaign will generate important discussions around what it means to stand in solidarity with oppressed and colonized people around the world and what we mean when we say that all struggles are fundamentally connected.” (This is the kind of logic that unites woke feminists with radically sexist Islamic terrorists, but that’s for another article.)

 

The now-infamous Yale professor Zareena Grewal, whose since-deleted tweets praising Hamas went viral, utilizes the same anti-colonizer language to defend terrorism. Grewal, who teaches in the Religious Studies and American Studies departments as well as the Program in Ethnicity, Race, and Migration and is currently giving a seminar called “Muslims in the United States,” posted immediately following the news of Hamas atrocities in Israel:

 

My heart is in my throat. Prayers for Palestinians. Israeli is a murderous, genocidal settler state and Palestinians have every right to resist through armed struggle, solidarity #FreePalestine”

 

A current undergraduate at Yale who wished to remain anonymous told me, “I think Zareena speaks for a lot of the other professors here, but they are too smart to say anything.” So what exactly is the font from which they are all drinking?

 

In the Program on Ethnicity, Race, and Migration, students can pick from a banquet of courses such as Comparative Colonialisms, Indigenous Thought and Anticolonial Theory, and Racial Republic: African Diasporic Literature and Culture in Postcolonial France. Sensing a theme?

 

Indigenous Politics Today is also listed as an option in the course book for fall 2023, but it seems to have been canceled, alas, before the semester began. According to the course description:

 

Readings for this course hedge closely to Native North America before extending comparatively to Oceania, Palestine, and South America in order to think broadly about the effects of globalization and neoliberalism; climate change and environmental racism; and extractive regimes and racial capitalism upon Indigenous communities around the world. This material, then, helps us to envision the kinds of decolonial futures proposed by the activists, scholars, and artists encountered in this course.

 

These kinds of courses may help to explain the frequency with which the “de-colonization” rhetoric was used by those on American campuses and elsewhere who cheered the Hamas attack. I am certainly no scholar of Middle Eastern history, nor am I an expert in contemporary frictions in the region. But that’s exactly the point — one does not need specialized knowledge to say that a left-wing political agenda shouldn’t be invoked to celebrate the mass murder of innocent civilians.

 

As Helen Lewis shrewdly observed in the Atlantic:

 

The terror attack on Israel by Hamas has been a divisive—if clarifying—moment for the left. The test that it presented was simple: Can you condemn the slaughter of civilians, in massacres that now appear to have been calculatedly sadistic and outrageous, without equivocation or whataboutism? Can you lay down, for a moment, your legitimate criticisms of Benjamin Netanyahu’s government, West Bank settlements, and the conditions in Gaza, and express horror at the mass murder of civilians?

 

For those whose minds have been formed in the pressure-cooker of the Ivy League’s critical-theory, colonialist conceptions of human history, the answer is a resounding “no.”

 

Though I can attest that there are still many excellent classes offered at Yale, it is undeniably true that the Left has weaponized the study and teaching of history in dishonest ways to achieve its own political ends. In particular, this recurring move –– defining the Israel–Hamas war in terms of evil-settler-oppressor vs. innocent-colonized-oppressed –– is fed by an approach to history where the nuances of all civilizations are collapsed into this single dichotomy: colonizer and colonized. Certainly, these categories are applicable to a certain extent, as, e.g., in understanding the expansion of the British Empire in the 18th and 19th centuries, but they ought never be used as rigid moral categories. And they especially shouldn’t be used to justify the slaughter of babies in their cribs.

 

Harrison Muth (’24) summarized the phenomenon thus: “The problem is not the categories themselves — the problem is that the categories are applied in a totalizing way. They are used as the sole heuristic through which to interpret all political moral life . . . which means you can justify genocide when it’s on behalf of the oppressed.”

 

Mika Bardin (’26) has been horrified by the response of many of her peers to the attacks in Israel. She hopes that much of the sympathy for terrorism she has witnessed among them is a result of ignorance. Certainly, we will see the separating out of those who hold onto cataclysmically bad ideas from those who are open to correction.

 

Bardin, a dual citizen who grew up in Israel and moved to the U.S. as a kid, has spent the past week fielding calls from journalists and trying to reach friends and family at the center of the conflict. Many are unreachable, as they are currently serving in the Israel Defense Forces. Bardin herself has been an active critic of several of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s policies and has lobbied for a better future for Palestinians. But right now, she is experiencing the whiplash of the terrorism her classmates have endorsed. “I have nightmares that I’m in my old house, with my friends who are deployed,” she told me. “Most of the Jewish community isn’t making this political, most of the Jewish community is grieving.” Bardin described a Jewish community at Yale rattled by recent events, newly cautious of their peers. She told me she had spent days holed up at Slifka, the Jewish center at Yale, which had extra guards stationed outside to protect the students within.

 

Netanel Crispe (’25) started a petition –– which has garnered over 50,000 signatures –– asking Yale to remove Grewal from her position. The petition brings together a coalition of students of varying backgrounds and religious persuasions who all found Grewal’s rhetoric in violation of her role as one entrusted to teach undergraduates. For Crispe, this matter couldn’t be more serious. An Israeli citizen who grew up in Vermont, he knows many whose friends and family members were killed or abducted by Hamas. He hopes that Yale will take a stand publicly, asserting that Grewal’s defense of terrorism contradicts the university’s mission as an institution dedicated to “the free exchange of ideas in an ethical . . . community.” Crispe doesn’t see the petition as a political endeavor, but rather giving voice to “an issue that supersedes politics, that concerns humanity as a whole.”

 

If there is a silver lining in what’s unfolded at Yale and on other U.S. campuses, not to mention in displays of support for Hamas in various cities and in certain corners of Congress, it’s the opportunity for renewed unity among rational Americans. We might also hope that the Left begins to rethink its blanket enthusiasm for critical-theory conceptions of history. But it took the slaughter, maiming, and kidnapping of thousands of innocents to reach this point.