Florida's Dangerous Censorship Push— When Education Becomes Indoctrination
I was the first one from my family to go to college. Many years later, after I had retired from a successful career in the music business, I used to teach at McGill in Montreal. It has the highest academic standards of any university in Canada. Think about Harvard as the McGill of the U.S. On the other hand, luckily for me, I’m not teaching at Trinity College in Pasco County, Florida, an evangelical college for well… low academic achievers.
Yesterday Juan Cole published a post by Jay Waagmeester, Florida Universities ordered to Scrutinize Course Materials for Criticisms of Israel (“Antisemitism”). I have no truck with anti-Semitism. In fact I’m here because my teenage grandfather escaped from a pogram in Czarist Russia and settled in the U.S. He was a socialist and though Israel— a socialist paradise in 1948— was a good idea. And it was except it was premised on stealing the land that was already occupied and subjugating those people and treating them as a lesser species of being. It took my a while to figure out that Zionism and Israel… well whether a good idea that went bad or a bad idea from the start, is a monstrosity today. But this potential censorship thing at Florida institutions of higher learning doesn’t seem like a good idea.
Already one of the most anti-freedom states in America, Florida’s university presidents have been instructed to scan their syllabi for material exhibiting anti-Israeli bias following a shit fit by Brevard County Rep. Randy Fine, a crackpot Jewish Republican and former gambling industry. A former assistant to Congressman B-1 Bob Dorman (R-CA), Fine flipped out because a Florida International University course was using a textbook, Terrorism and Homeland Security, that asked students, “When Israelis practice terrorism, they often refer to it as _____,” and, “In which country did the Zionists purchase land to create their new homeland?” Fine call it Muslim Terror. Considered one of the nastiest and most personally obnoxious members of the legislature, Fine, a deranged homophobic maniac, is known in Miami and Tampa for demanding— unsuccessfully— Lorde concerts be canceled because she had canceled a concert in Israel. Oh, and he’s also known as a rah-rah genocidal maniac who publicly celebrated Israel’s killing of civilians in Gaza.
Fine bitched to State University System Chancellor Ray Rodrigues and bullied him into sending “a letter to university presidents asking them to investigate course materials and syllabi that include a list of suspect words… Israel, Israeli, Palestine, Palestinian, Middle East, Zionism, Zionist, Judaism, Jewish, or Jews.”
Once a course has been reviewed and all instances of antisemitism and anti-Israel bias have been flagged, universities must report their findings to the chancellor’s office, Rodrigues instructed.
The Florida chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) condemned Rodrigues for the order and urged Floridians “to stand up for our constitutionally guaranteed freedom of speech and for academic freedom in our public university system.”
“It is logical to assume that any courses that are ‘flagged for review’ will be scrubbed of any criticism of the genocidal Israeli government and especially its military,” said Imam Abdullah Jaber, the Florida chapter’s executive director, in a news release.
CAIR’s stated mission is “to defend the civil rights of Florida’s Muslim community and to promote a more just and equitable society for all.”
Fine indicated his displeasure with Cengage, the book’s publisher, on Twitter.
Writing for The Forward yesterday, Emily Tamkin warned against right-wingers— she had Trump and Musk in mind— pretending to be friends of Jews. “The point of a conspiracy,” she wrote, “is to convince you that something that is not real is true. People reach for conspiracy theories to explain things that they can’t understand, or that are beyond their control. And they fall for conspiracies pushed by the powerful— who deploy them not to make sense of things, but to take and keep control. If people don’t know what to believe, why shouldn’t they believe the person who is telling them what they want to hear? I thought of this on Monday night listening to Elon Musk, the richest man in the world, conduct an interview on Twitter, with Trump. It was conspiracy central, and it boded ill for Jews… According to these two men, nothing is as it seems and nobody can be believed. Only they, Musk and Trump, would tell you the truth. We’ve seen this show before. It tends to go badly for Jews. If you’ve ever encountered an antisemitic stereotype in your life, you know who those inside enemies behind the government are supposed to be. On Twitter, some baselessly suggested that Hungarian-born billionaire philanthropist George Soros was behind the cyber attack that delayed the conversation, while others said it was the doing of “globalists”— a word long understood to be antisemitic, even if some who use it deny that connotation— trying to silence Trump and Musk.
“Part of the trouble,” she continued, “is that in a sea of lies, many of which may seem innocuous, the poison of the truly dangerous can come off as almost silly, not worth mentioning… It isn’t only bad for Jews, of course, to live in a distrustful and conspiratorial society. But it is uniquely bad for Jews, in that we tend to end up the scapegoats in such a situation, with predictably grim results. (Trump evidently does not recognize or care about this danger, as he once again reiterated that Jews who plan to vote for Harris need to have our heads examined— which is to say, if she wins, we Jews who voted for her, crazy and disloyal, will be in no small part to blame.”
Not a conspiracy theory at all— Israel’s genocide against Palestinians, as they rush to kill as many of them as they can before they’re forced into stopping (a ceasefire). If Ronen Bergman, Patrick Kingsley and Adam Rasgon are correct, that ceasefire is probably a long way off, Netanyahu dragging his feet every step of the way, while denying “that he is trying to block a cease-fire deal in Gaza by hardening Israel’s negotiating position. Netanyahu has consistently placed all blame for the deadlocked negotiations on Hamas, even as senior members of the Israeli security establishment accused him of slowing the process himself. But in private, Netanyahu has, in fact, added new conditions to Israel’s demands, additions that his own negotiators fear have created extra obstacles to a deal. According to unpublished documents reviewed by the New York Times that detail Israel’s negotiating positions, Israel relayed a list of new stipulations in late July to American, Egyptian and Qatari mediators that added less flexible conditions to a set of principles it had made in late May.
Among other conditions, the latest document, presented to mediators shortly before a summit in Rome on July 28, suggested that Israeli forces should remain in control of Gaza’s southern border, a detail that was not included in Israel’s proposal in May. It also showed less flexibility about allowing displaced Palestinians to return to their homes in northern Gaza once fighting is halted.
Some members of the Israeli negotiating team fear that the new additions risked scuppering the deal, according to two senior officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to the press.
…While Hamas has also proved intransigent, Netanyahu’s Israeli critics partly blame the prime minister for the deadlock because his new conditions risk derailing the talks at a time when a deal appears within reach. Some have argued that he is prioritizing the stability of his coalition government above the freedom of the hostages: His small majority in Parliament depends on several far-right lawmakers who have conditioned their support for his government on the prevention of a cease-fire.
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