Asaf Romirowsky, executive director of both the Scholars for Peace in the Middle East (SPME), and of the Association for the Study of the Middle East and Africa (ASMEA), spoke to a January 19 Middle East Forum Podcast (video) about his book co-edited with SPME board member Donna Robinson Divine, October 7: The Wars Over Words and Deeds. The following summarizes his comments:
The final front was lost to the Islamists who ideologically hijacked U.S. democratic institutions, particularly those in higher education.
The book is a collection of essays by scholars who analyze Hamas’s October 7 attack and examine how the terror group’s savagery and hostage-taking has been used to reframe the Palestinian Arab-Israeli conflict and unleash a torrent of antisemitism that is influencing geopolitics, the media, and academe.
“The political economics of antisemitism” in academe exposes the mechanisms that permitted, funded, and exploited this “gap between the perceived reality on American college campuses and the reality in the Middle East at large.” Israel was fighting on several battle fronts: the ground war in Gaza; a multi-front war waged with Iran that was orchestrated through the regime’s regional proxies; and the very definition of how the Jewish state was perceived during and after October 7 by Americans and Europeans. The final front was lost to the Islamists who ideologically hijacked U.S. democratic institutions, particularly those in higher education.
In the 1960s, Palestinian Arabs realized that they were unable to defeat Israel militarily. Since then, the strategy of “soft power” influence via academe emerged in the 1990s after Hamas established itself in Gaza in 1987. By establishing multiple Palestinian Arab charities that facilitated money laundering, those funds were directed toward the purchase and establishment of chairs in departments of Middle East studies in universities. “If one buys a chair or department, one buys the politics in which these topics are being taught.”
From the 1960s until today, billions of dollars from the Saudis and Qataris were added to the Palestinian Arab investment in undermining Western educational institutions. It is not only higher education that has been affected, but also K-12 curricula that have been penetrated with the idea of “sanitizing the Islamist agenda on American society.” The Islamist project accelerated through the “red, green, and brown alliance,” converging with the worst of contaminants targeting Western civilization. The greens/Hamas, the reds/socialists, and the browns/Nazis may have their ideological differences, but all march in lockstep under the banner of “the greater hatred towards Jews and Israelis and Zionism” writ large.
Look no further than the multitude of encampments funded by the left and the right that sprang up across American campuses post-October 7. Those anti-Israel, anti-Zionist campus demonstrations received funding from groups as varied as the Soros Open Society Foundation, the Council for American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), Occupy Wall Street, and the Women’s March, to name but a few.
University professors who proudly supported the Hamas and Islamic State narratives perpetuated a noxious paradigm in framing the Israeli-Palestinian Arab dynamic. To spoon-feed campus students a digestible formula, Israeli Jews and Zionism were labeled a “white settler colonial movement,” leading to the predictable conclusion that Hamas’s attack on Israel was justifiable as “decolonialism.” Indoctrinating students with a simplistic binary theory to explain away the evil of Hamas’s actions was a matter of turning reality upside down by painting the Zionists as victimizers and the Palestinian Arabs/Hamas as victims.
Indoctrinating students with a simplistic binary theory to explain away the evil of Hamas’s actions was a matter of turning reality upside down.
Critical thinking, delving into the historical facts of the region, inquisitive research and debate were jettisoned while language was twisted to accommodate tortuous logic. Professors “bought into a ‘propagandish’ narrative that had a predetermined understanding.” Such lack of rigor and lazy scholarship was “basically sanitizing and normalizing terrorism within the academic ranks as a way to say this is okay.” The consequence of academia’s justification of aggression was that American Jews on campus were targeted because “somehow, every American Jew is basically a microcosm” of whatever happens in Israel.
Ignored was the “architecture” set in place by anti-Israel organizations on campuses such as Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) and American Muslims for Palestine (AMP). These groups were primed for activism prior to October 7 and were already in support of Hamas when they were mobilized on October 9 and 10 with their activist toolkits on hand.
“We know today, factually speaking, that you had connections between the hostage-takers and the students on the ground at Columbia University.” Hamas leaders went on Al Jazeera to thank their colleagues and students on American campuses, while Israel was “trying to dissect the intelligence as far as what was happening, how they allowed Hamas to basically thrive on an American college campus and to basically hijack all of this entire architecture and turn the reality on its head.”
Groups like CAIR, SJP and AMP are offshoots of the Muslim Brotherhood and “I would like to see designation here in the United States” that those groups are classified as Foreign Terrorist Organizations (FTO). “And what we discovered within a lot of litigation that’s going out there is that some of these groups were literally funneling money towards Hamas and use[d] these groups on college campuses at large to sell their agenda.” In designating the aforementioned groups as FTO’s, a “red line” would be created to identify suspect faculty and students on campuses.
The knock-on chilling effect against Israelis who come to the U.S. for research projects is that these projects are being shut down because of boycotts. Israelis seeking publication of their works are finding that academic publishing houses have become more problematic “because of the bias” against Israelis. The ideology that sustains the Hamas-supporting, anti-Israel organizations are not only antisemitic, but also anti-American and anti-Western.
The war in Gaza is almost two and a half years old, but today “you’re seeing a denialism of the reality of 10-7. And that denialism has been codified by our very institutions, and continues to manifest through every aspect in local politics as well as also as far as international politics.” It took root in academia, and to “fix these elements,” these institutions must be held accountable for abrogating their responsibility to understand “where the ideologies are coming from.”
Universities must be held accountable for abrogating their responsibility to understand “where the ideologies are coming from.”
The rot in academe is exposed by the lack of reform in higher education, which is sorely needed. “We’ve lost the rigor. We have allowed scholar-activists to take over the campuses,” where scholarship has been replaced by activism. Professors who teach students how to think and conduct inquisitive research should not be concerned with making the students comfortable; they should demand that students go back to the basics. In a move to correct the damage, “there’s a growth now of civic centers happening on American college campuses” to revitalize civics education.
Remember that the overarching reality of the Islamist narrative pushed by the Islamic Republic of Iran is that “America is the large Satan, Israel is [the] small Satan.” In tandem with the ayatollahs is the anti-American red, green, and brown alliance fueling the anti-Israel Islamist demonstrations. Many of those organizations receive funding from the Chinese Communist Party as well as from Russia. “None of these are beacons of American Western society who care about that. What they’re trying to do is use American institutions to basically turn American democracy on its head.”
