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Wednesday, March 28, 2018

It is worth reminding ourselves how screwed up the campuses have become

I just saw this statement given by the San Francisco State University's Department of Gender and Women's Studies i response to SFSU's president saying that Zionists are welcome on campus:

Zionism mobilizes race, gender, and sexuality in specific ways, which continue to be a topic of investigation and contestation in fields such as Women and Gender Studies. The history and contemporary discourse of racialized gender and sexuality for Jewish people in Zionism is a site of debate and political protest today--especially as the Israeli state’s project of “pinkwashing” is decried by queer activists internationally. In addition, there is strong contestation among feminists regarding Zionist ideologies. As the case of Palestinian teenager Ahed Tamimi illustrates, feminists are identifying and protesting contemporary conditions of emergency in Palestine, and pointing out how Zionism targets women and families in broader projects of racialized population control. This, among other histories of feminist debate, show that Zionism as a political ideology needs to be up for debate at minimum.
Palestinian nationalism is not up for debate. Certainly, Palestinian misogyny is not up for discussion. The fiction of "pinkwashing" is not up for debate. The absurd idea that Zionism targets women specifically is not up for debate. Arab antisemitism is not even a remote possibility for discussion.

But the idea of Jewish nationalism - that a people that have been a nation for thousands of years should be allowed to have  a state today -  that is up for debate "at a minimum."

The absurd statement is followed by a highly biased reading list of anti-Israel pseudo-academia to buttress the argument that while every possible idea is welcome on campus, Jewish nationalism is beyond the pale.






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