The Journal of International and Intercultural Communication (JIIC) is published by the National Communication Association. JIIC says it "publishes original scholarship that expands understanding of international, intercultural, and cross-cultural communication" and that "articles in this journal have undergone rigorous peer review, including screening by the editor and review by at least two anonymous referees."
Its most recent issue featured the theme, "Writing occupied Palestine: Toward a field of Palestinian communication and culture studies." Of course, the articles in the issue have little to do with Palestinian culture and everything to do with demonizing Israel under the rubric of "communications studies."
Besides the introduction and forward, there are four articles in the issue on this theme.
"Boycott eurovision singing to the song of its own tune: Global boycotts as sites of hybridity" has a classic impenetrable abstract:
Following (Kraidy, M. M., & Murphy, P. D. (2003). Media ethnography: Local, global, or translocal? In P. D. Murphy & M. M. Kraidy (Eds.), Global media studies: Ethnographic perspectives (pp. 299–307). Routledge; Kraidy, M. M., & Murphy, P. D. (2008). Shifting Geertz: Toward a theory of translocalism in global communication studies. Communication Theory, 18(3), 335–355. 10.1111/j.1468-2885.2008.00325.x) call to look at global communication through lenses of translocalism and hybridity, I find that global boycotts are hybridized sites that facilitate translocal recognition. Using Boycott Eurovision as a case study, two locales are investigated: petitions and Globalvision. By uncovering the translocal recognition in each locale, global boycotts become crucial avenues of inquiry to understand how global social movements grapple with globalization. The essay describes the importance of understanding the vulnerabilities of international boycotts’ hybridized status, calling forward analysis of structure, specific initiatives, and the enactments of hegemonic ideologies found in locales.
The article itself should not have passed even a cursory editorial review, let alone a "rigorous peer review." It is a polemic, not analysis. It deliberately uncapitalizes "Eurovision," it refers to the IDF as the "Israeli Occupation Forces," it fully accepts as truth that Israel engages in "settler-colonialist, apartheid, and military violence against Palestinians."
The author, Sarah Cathryn Majed Dweik, writes, "I focus on introducing vocabulary innate to Boycott Eurovision, heeding Lechuga’s (2020) call to develop praxis-driven theory within rhetoric." In other words, she can write whatever she wants because she creates her own vocabulary.
An example is in how she calls Israel racist by defining it as "white:"
[T]he Israeli national identity replicates the historical whiteness and settler-colonialism crafted by early Zionists and the British empire. I define whiteness as a global system of domination that reflects the logics of colonialism, racism, anti-Blackness, patriarchy, classism, ableism, and heteronormativity to recenter the white subject as that which is normal and required to attain (see Al-Saif & Ghabra, 2016; Ahmed, 2009; Ghabra, 2020a; Nakayama, 2020). In the historical moves that Israel made to establish itself as a country, Israel crafted the Jewish national subject in relation to Europeanness, whiteness, and settler-colonialism through the juridical exclusion of the Palestinian and Arab Others (Erakat, 2015) and relying on the state to guide where whiteness presents itself within the Israeli national identity (Yadgar, 2011). By utilizing whiteness as a heuristic to obscure specific meanings of Jewish-ness and Israeli-ness, material spaces are necessary to participate in this work, such as a fun singing competition.
Why bother to mention that Israel has had Mizrahi, Arab and Black Ethiopian contestants for Eurovision? Facts get in the way of the all-important discourse. Dweik can simply define them all as "white" for her purposes, and the reviewers are none the wiser.
Another article, "Disability as metaphor or resilience: A Palestinian poetic inquiry," parrots as fact the absurd thesis by academic fraud Jasbir Puar that Israel has an intentional policy to maim Palestinians.
A third article is called "Structural violence and sources of resistance among Palestinian children living under military occupation and political oppression." Based on an interview with 22 Palestinian children, it makes it sound as if most of them experience direct violence from Israel for no reason. Yet the methodology of choosing the interview subjects was biased:
The participants were recruited between November and December 2020 from a pool of children who accessed a local center organizing psychosocial activities. Researchers targeted a purposive convenience sample of 22 participants across various settings (villages, cities, and refugee camps) in the West Bank....[B]oth caregivers and participants were carefully informed about the aim of the task, the purposive confidentiality procedures, and their right to refuse or discontinue their participation at any time. All participants and families provided informed consent.
And what were the aims of the task that the caregivers had to agree to? We don't know the exact words used, but it is very clear both from the very title of the paperand the contents that they were told that this was a study meant to demonize Israel:
Thus, the present study explored the diverse everyday experiences of structural colonial oppression in children living in the Occupied Palestinian Territories. Our research aimed to investigate the main antecedents and determinants of risk and violence exposure in a setting characterized by settler-colonial violence and military occupation.
Only those who agreed to participate with that purpose in mind are included in the study! If there was ever a self-selecting group, this is it.
There are well over a million children in the West Bank. The vast majority live in Area A, under full Palestinian control where Israeli forces only rarely enter (as they did this year when the PA did not act to restrain the "Lion's Den" terrorists.) If they don't participate in demonstrations, they would only see Israeli soldiers at checkpoints, and the vast majority pass right through. Yet the study includes a very high number of kids who supposedly experienced Israeli forces invading their schools or homes, or even shooting them.
Statistically, this isn't close to a random sample. But the peer reviewers don't know that.
This issue, except for the last article on how Palestinian kids use Tiktok, shines no new light on Palestinians and communications. On the contrary, it is anti-Israel propaganda that hijacks an academic discipline for promoting hate - just as Palestinian academics do with other disciplines.
It is a shame that the social sciences are so susceptible to being manipulated and taking part in incitement disguised as academic studies.
