Wednesday, October 02, 2024

The Intercept:
"Maura Finkelstein never hid her support for Palestinian liberation during her nine years working as a professor of anthropology at Muhlenberg College, a small liberal arts school in Allentown, Pennsylvania. 'I have always had an ethical practice of making sure that I include Palestine in my teaching,' Finkelstein told me. 'It was never outside the bounds of what I do.'

For Finkelstein, who is Jewish, this was not always easy. More than 30 percent of Muhlenberg’s 2,200 students are Jewish, many of them vocal supporters of Israel.
Neither her longtime public support of Palestinians, however, nor the courses on Palestine she taught in her early years at the school prevented Finkelstein from earning tenure in 2021. Following the arduous tenure process, professors are supposed to enjoy lifetime job security and robust safeguards of academic freedom. The bar for dismissal from a tenured academic position is by design meant to be extremely high, requiring justifiable cause.

In late May, however, Muhlenberg told Finkelstein that she was fired. The reason? She had shared, on her personal Instagram account, in a temporary story slide, a post written not by herself but by Palestinian poet Remi Kanazi calling for the shunning of Zionist ideology and its supporters."
https://theintercept.com/2024/09/26/tenured-professor-fired-palestine-israel-zionism

-->This is an important story if you care about the new McCarthy Era. Finkelstein was fired for putting a Palestinian poem on her social media account. That's the criteria, or really the lack of criteria for firing tenured professors. This firing will set the stage for the muzzling of an entire class of people, who are hired to teach young people how to think and write. State censorship has arrived. Although no major media bothered to cover the end of freedom of speech on campuses across the country.

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No US publication has published some of the writings and quotes of Hasan Nasralla, the Hezbollah chief in Lebanon. Isn't murdering him enough? It was our plaines and bombs that assassinated him. Time to let him speak!

-The day will come when the Palestinian people will be free and the usurpers expelled.
-It is our duty to support all those who resist colonialism and imperialism.
-Our struggle is not just for the Palestinians; it is a struggle for justice everywhere.
-Our resistance is a beacon of hope for all oppressed peoples around the world.
-Our fight is not with the Jewish people; it is with the state of Israel.
-Resistance is not terrorism; it is a legitimate response to occupation and injustice.
-Would you allow a people to come from somewhere else and occupy a part of the United States, and set up an independent state, and, after 50 years, you would not be able to stay on this land?
-The real danger to the world's resistance movements is the attempt to distort reality and to place the blame on the resistance groups' actions without allowing them to portray their perspective, thus ignoring the reality of the occupation and the siege, like the situation in occupied Palestine.
https://www.aljazeera.com/program/newsfeed/2024/9/28/who-was-hassan-nasrallah-2

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The Intercept:
"Faculty from seven University of California campuses took a stand against the repression of protest over Israel’s war on Gaza on Thursday, taking the historic step of filing a joint unfair labor practice charge against their employer. The professors from the top-tier California public university system alleged that their schools targeted them for speaking out on Israel’s war in Gaza and for joining students’ pro-Palestine protests in the spring.

The 581-page labor violation charge, filed with California’s Public Employment Relations Board, largely focuses on the universities’ crackdowns on the student-led Palestine solidarity protests and encampments, in which school officials called on police to arrest hundreds of students, faculty, and staff members in May and June.
In some instances, police beat demonstrators with batons, fired rubber bullets and pepper ball munitions, and sprayed chemical agents. In the aftermath of the crackdown, faculty and staff have faced punishment for their role in the protests, from suspensions to firings.

'UC’s actions to suppress speech about Palestine on our campuses, which represents an illegal content-based restriction of faculty rights, sets an alarming precedent,' said Constance Penley, president of the Council of UC Faculty Associations, which, along with faculty associations from the seven campuses, filed the labor charge. 'Our unfair labor practice filing demands they change course and follow the law, and make whole the faculty who have been harmed.'

Anna Markowitz, a UCLA faculty association member, said the school’s crackdown had one goal: 'to end Palestine solidarity activism on campus.' ”
https://theintercept.com/2024/09/20/uc-professors-palestine-protest-labor-violation

-->The violent crackdown on dissent at the nation's colleges and universities. And you are worried about a Trump fascist regime? Why you have fascism that is alive and well in the Democratic Party too.