I teach linguistics at MIT. Here's how a pro-Israel lawsuit uses language to silence critics Submitted by Michel DeGraff on Sun, 01/11/2026 - 18:15 Zionist lawfare relies on lies, distortions, mirror accusations and denial to justify genocidal violence and suppress academic freedom and Palestinian solidarity Since late 2023, pro-Israel groups have intensified anti-Palestinian lawfare across US universities, seeking to redraw the boundaries of permissible speech on Palestine . In the wake of Hamas's 7 October attack and the launch of Israel's genocide in Gaza , the Louis D Brandeis Center and the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) published an open letter urging nearly 200 university presidents to investigate Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) for alleged violations of federal "material support for terrorism" laws. The letter was part of a wider campaign to criminalise peaceful anti-genocide activism and pressure universities to take disciplinary action against campus organisers. StandWithUs and campus organisations such as Hillel and Olami , often described as fronts for pro-Israel lobbying , have likewise weaponised false accusations of " antisemitism " through politically motivated Title VI complaints , civil lawsuits and administrative manoeuvres to silence those who defend Palestinian human rights. I have found myself among those targeted by these same forces of repression, alongside pro-Palestine students and co-workers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where I teach . As a Haitian linguist, my work over the past three decades has focused on the power of language for decolonisation and liberation. Yet I now stand as a co-defendant with MIT in a federal lawsuit brought by a small group of complainants - including one who remains anonymous - and backed by a pro-Israel lawfare organisation. The plaintiffs allege that my teaching and activism have veered into antisemitism, harassment, defamation and retaliation. Both MIT and I have moved to dismiss , supported by an amicus brief from Palestine Legal as well as an October 2025 ruling by Boston's First Circuit Court of Appeals reaffirming that criticism of Israel is protected speech under the First Amendment and directly challenging the premises on which such accusations of "antisemitism" rest. Language on trial On 5 January 2026, Judge Richard G Stearns of the District Court for Massachusetts granted the motions to dismiss the plaintiffs' federal claims. The ruling was based solely on legal sufficiency: the court assumed the truth of the plaintiffs' allegations for the limited purpose of testing the legal arguments, but conducted no fact-finding. Crucially, the court noted that there is "no basis on which to distinguish the First Circuit's conclusion that anti-Israeli sentiment is not, without more, antisemitic messaging". The allegations in my case, as part of this global pattern of anti-Palestinian censorship, help illustrate how these strategies are deployed The decision is thus another firm rejection of the equation - by the plaintiffs and others, including the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) - of criticism of Israel with antisemitism. But what is at stake here extends far beyond my own case. Such lawfare threatens academic freedom, freedom of expression and the foundations of a liberal education while helping generate fog around Israel's ongoing genocide against Palestinians - a 75-year-in-the-making " incremental genocide ", according to Israeli Jewish historian Ilan Pappe . Given my field, I recognise how this broader political project enlists discursive strategies alongside lawfare that undermine the principles of higher education and democratic inquiry. Concepts such as "mental viruses", "mind infection", "cognitive dissonance" and "hate-narratives", "mirror accusations" for "reality-bending" and "interpretive" and "implicatory denial" offer a framework for understanding the linguistic mechanisms in propaganda - or "hasbara" in the context of Israel - that invert the roles of victim and perpetrator and entrench the tendentious conflation of Zionism and Judaism. The allegations in my case, as part of this global pattern of anti-Palestinian censorship, help illustrate how these strategies are deployed. Examining the plaintiffs' false claims not only clarifies the factual record, but also exposes the sort of distortion that justice studies professor Sang Hea Kil has described as a " Zionist lie machine ". 'Mind infection' At the heart of mass violence, including genocide, are linguistic and psychological mechanisms that transform ordinary people into participants or enablers of atrocity. One of these mechanisms is what scholars have analysed under the term "mind infection". In his 1991 essay " Viruses of the Mind ", evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins analyses how ideas - myths, propaganda and hate-narratives, especially related to religion - spread like viruses, bypassing rational scrutiny and shaping destructive, even self-destructive, behaviour. At US universities, free speech isn't free for pro-Palestine activists Read More » Israeli Jewish scholar Nurit Peled-Elhanan, winner of the European Parliament's Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought in 2001, has analysed Israeli education materials to show how they weaponise Holocaust memory for "othering" Palestinians and propagate dehumanising myths that " nazify " them. Such content, she argues, indoctrinates children into a worldview that both legitimises massacres of Palestinians "as an effective tool to preserve a secure Jewish state with a Jewish majority", and "prepare Israeli youth to be good soldiers and to carry on the practices of occupation". Peled-Elhanan links this " mind infection " directly to the genocidal violence we see today in Gaza: "Zionist leaders use racist discourse to vilify the Indigenous populations, and to legitimate its discrimination and its elimination." She further demonstrates how the racism inherent in settler-colonial Zionism extends to non-European Jews, who become "the victims of the victims" within Israel's system of internal or "inner" colonialism. It was a rare privilege, then, to count Peled-Elhanan among the eminent guest speakers in my People's Seminar , a Fall 2024 speaker series on language and linguistics in decolonisation and liberation struggles in Haiti, Palestine and Israel. The seminar was excluded from MIT Linguistics' course offerings, and portions of its contents - including Peled-Elhanan's materials and those I shared on social media - were cited in the legal complaint against me. As Peled-Elhanan has argued extensively in her books, essays and speeches, mind infection is not unique to any group; it results from the political exploitation of religious or cultural elements by educators, politicians and institutions that normalise and embed hate-narratives in public discourse - be it in Israel or in my native Haiti, as I myself have argued , using the term "mental colonisation" as a conceptual equivalent of "mind infection". Cognitive dissonance Social psychologist Leon Festinger's theory of " cognitive dissonance " explains how individuals maintain hate narratives even when confronted with facts that contradict them. Historian Benjamin Lieberman's work on ethnic cleansing in modern Europe illustrates this dynamic, which recurs across ethnic-, clan- and religious-based campaigns of "cleansing" and genocide. He details how mythical histories of victimisation transform peaceful neighbours into mortal enemies, with violence used to resolve the resulting psychological gaps. While mind infection describes the initial implantation of racist myths, cognitive dissonance helps explain their long-term endurance, even at some psychological cost. This sheds light on Peled-Elhanan's question about the propagation of anti-Palestinian racism across Israeli society, reflected in viral videos of unspeakable depravity and cruelty: "How do you take nice Jewish boys and girls and turn them into monsters, killers of children, when they turn 18?" In his 2006 article in the Journal of Genocide Research, Lieberman shows the persistence of mythical victimhood narratives that legitimise mass violence. Widely understood as a universal ethical commitment, the phrase "Never again" has long been mobilised in Zionist discourse to mean "this must never happen to us again". As Yehuda Elkana argued in his 1988 essay "The need to forget", this exclusively inward-facing reframing encapsulates the ironic weaponisation of past Jewish suffering and allegations of "antisemitism" to secure impunity for Israeli state violence - a hasbara strategy that Israeli philosopher Adi Ophir has called Israel's " discursive Iron Dome ". Myth-making and moral inversion This victim-turned-perpetrator narrative, stretching from ancient warfare to modern existential threats, is used to justify the annihilation of the "other". One example is the appropriation of biblical history to support Israeli claims of " indigeneity ". Peled-Elhanan's research into the " nazification of Palestinians " in Israeli schoolbooks has also helped explain the " legitimation of massacres " in the ongoing Palestinian Nakba. She shows how this trope became central to Zionist hate-narratives, which Pappe also exposes in his scholarship . Follow Middle East Eye's live coverage of Israel's genocide in Gaza Talmudic scholar Daniel Boyarin's fascinating study of political Zionism's "colonial mimicry" also examines the psychological underpinnings of this movement among western European Jews. He explains how Theodor Herzl, the father of settler-colonial Zionism, sought to create the identity of a "new muscle Jew", distinct from the "degenerate Jew" of antisemitic Europe. Herzl's A Jewish State called on fellow Jews to "do our Christian duty" and assimilate into European nationalism, racism, sexism and antisemitism by restoring a mythical "biblical glory days" kingdom as a cure for despised "Jewishness" - which remained despised, even by influential Zionists such as Herzl. Lieberman's analysis suggests that this sort of myth-making dissolves everyday encounters into sweeping historical narratives, in which violence becomes righteous war against "inherently evil enemy nations". Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's genocidal invocation of " Amalek " exemplifies this hate-narrative. Likewise, as Pappe has noted , Israeli intellectuals have drawn on Samuel Huntington's "clash of civilisations" thesis to classify Palestinians as irrational, echoing Netanyahu's language about a "cultural and moral abyss". Profound cognitive dissonance arises from the gap between recognising neighbours as equals in their human dignity and perceiving them as subhumans... or 'nazified Palestinians' Profound cognitive dissonance arises from the gap between recognising neighbours as equals in their human dignity and perceiving them as subhumans and existential threats - or "nazified Palestinians". This psychological discomfort must be resolved. When the reality of shared humanity clashes with hate narratives, individuals may justify mass violence as necessary or even heroic. As Lieberman explains , the neighbour-turned-enemy becomes part of an "inherently evil group that deserves destruction", making acts such as looting or killing appear as "righteous combat". Historian Lidwien Kapteijns's case study of clan cleansing in Somalia illustrates these mythical-historical hate-narratives, or "mental viruses", as Dawkins and Peled-Elhanan put it. Across history and geographies, dehumanising rhetoric by political, educational, journalistic and even religious or human rights institutions has repeatedly transformed ordinary neighbours into a supposedly homogeneous, evil population (or " garbage " in recent Maga terminology) deemed deserving of destruction. This phenomenon recurs from Germany and Yugoslavia to Armenia , Syria , Rwanda , and again today in the treatment of Haitian , Somali and other Black and Brown communities in the US. This discursive transformation creates a permission structure that enables ordinary citizens to cross the threshold from coexistence to mass violence - the banality of evil , in Hannah Arendt's analysis. Reality-bending and mirror accusations In their joint study, Psychoanalysis Under Occupation , Lara and Stephen Sheehi highlight "reality-bending" as a settler-colonial tactic that inverts victim and perpetrator through "mirror accusations", whereby " every accusation is a confession ". The projection of one's own violence onto the victim to justify repression is a hallmark of mass atrocity and has long underpinned Zionist propaganda. Israeli accusations of rape are confessions of their own crimes Joseph Massad Read More » Israel accuses Palestinian fighters of using civilians as human shields in the face of mounting evidence of its own systematic use of Palestinians as human shields in Gaza. It alleges that Palestinian mothers starve their own children while weaponising mass starvation as a tool of genocide . It even declares a planned concentration camp in Rafah a " humanitarian city ", despite experts describing it as a "blueprint for crimes against humanity". An Arabic proverb captures the logic with precision: "He hit me and cried, then ran to complain first." Similar distortions abound in US political discourse. Congresswoman Elise Stefanik mislabels Palestinian resistance as "terrorism" and mistranslates the Arabic word "intifada", meaning "shaking off" or "uprising", as "a call for the genocide of the Jews". Yet leading authorities, including Amnesty International , the International Association of Genocide Scholars and the United Nations , have concluded that Israel is committing genocide against Palestinians - a "live-streamed genocide". This semantic sleight of hand has long been used not only against Palestinians but also to discredit their supporters in the West. Peaceful protesters, including anti-Zionist Jewish students, are maligned as "antisemitic" or "domestic terrorists", with chants of "intifada" equated with "calls for terror acts". Even documenting a public event is twisted into accusations of "harassment" or "doxxing". Such bad-faith attacks are not random, but reflect a broader strategy of linguistic misrepresentation used to justify repression and silence dissent. This weaponisation of language echoes the rhetoric US President Donald Trump and Vice President JD Vance directed against anti-genocide activists , Diversity, Equity and Inclusion initiatives and marginalised groups , including immigrants . Its cumulative impact and historical manipulations are a major concern for this Haitian-born linguist. Pro-Palestine student protesters chant holding signs and flags at a rally in front of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on 28 May 2024 (Joseph Prezioso/AFP) What emerges is a systematic deployment of Orwellian language : perpetrators recast themselves as victims acting in "self-defence" while accusing those they oppress of the very violence they inflict. Jewish writer Sasha Abramsky calls this a grotesque inversion of Jewish ethical traditions. Arielle Angel, editor-in-chief of Jewish Currents, pushes further, insisting : "Jewishness must mean justice for the Palestinian people or nothing at all." That principle has resonated strongly with anti-Zionist Jewish student activists - a contingent routinely erased in official narratives of campus dissent . At MIT, these students - excluded by both the Hillel rabbi and the university president, Sally Kornbluth , whose references to "our Israeli and Jewish students" conflate Jewishness with Zionism - proudly formed MIT Jews for Ceasefire (now MIT Jews for Collective Liberation ) and helped launch the MIT Scientists Against Genocide Encampment (Sage). Interpretive denial In States of Denial , the late sociologist Stanley Cohen examines how societies respond to atrocities such as genocide. He identifies three forms of denial: literal (it did not happen); interpretive (it happened, but its significance is minimised); and implicatory (it happened, but responsibility is denied). Cohen applied this framework to contexts such as apartheid South Africa and Latin American dictatorships, where official discourse reinterpreted atrocities as either necessities or isolated incidents. How US universities are trying to muzzle pro-Palestine protests before they begin Read More » Interpretive denial operates through euphemism and blame-shifting: torture becomes "moderate physical pressure", expulsions "population transfer", disappearances "relocations", and civilian deaths "collateral damage". Similar evasions appear in discussions on Israel and Palestine - even among linguists - where mass slaughter is diluted to "ethnic cleansing", or a settler-colonial project is astonishingly labelled "non-colonial" or even "anti-colonial", despite early Zionist calls for the " colonisation " of Palestine. The danger of interpretive denial, Cohen warned, is that it allows societies to "know" and "not know" at the same time. A striking example is a lecture at MIT last September by Israeli academic Ute Deichmann of Ben Gurion University. In both her talk and subsequent email exchanges with me, Deichmann cited Israel's massive arsenal as proof that it could not be committing genocide, arguing that despite having the capacity to kill all Palestinians in Gaza, it has chosen not to do so. She also repeated familiar, debunked hasbara claims that the Israeli army goes out of its way to warn civilians ahead of attacks, while Hamas uses Palestinians as human shields . Deichmann's interventions further illustrate how interpretive denial and mirror accusation are laundered through academic authority to delegitimise anti-genocide activism. By smearing morally upright student protests as Hamas-organised and Qatar-funded, she reframed dissent as "terrorism" by association, while obscuring Israel's extensive funding of on-campus Zionist organisations to suppress pro-Palestine advocacy. Yet she was welcomed by her MIT host as "one of us historians", a historian whose dangerous assertions place anti-genocide students in harm's way, as seen in the recent sagas of Mahmoud Khalil and Rumeysa Ozturk. Implicatory denial Implicatory denial, which Cohen described as "the preferred move of perpetrators", is even more pernicious: it insists on moral self-righteousness while shifting blame onto the victim. As political sociologist Martin Shaw observes , the overwhelming evidence of atrocities in Gaza has shattered literal and interpretive denial, yet implicatory denial persists. Major western outlets now acknowledge genocide while avoiding calls for government action and reframing facts, describing Israel's indiscriminate bombing as "precision strikes" and parroting the myth of its "most moral army" - in a mix of implicatory and interpretive denial. Such Orwellian language, legal misinterpretation and colonial narratives converge into what human rights scholar Neve Gordon calls Israel's " recipe for genocidal retribution ", which deems Palestinians "human animals" deserving of state violence. In The Problems of Genocide , political scientist Dirk Moses goes one step further, explaining how the narrow legal definition of genocide - de-politicised killing driven by identity-based hatred - enables this implicatory denial. Israeli politicians and others "from the bottom to the top of the Israeli military" can openly advocate killing civilians, including children, yet claim such actions fall under "counter-insurgency" or "permanent security" against "terrorists" and are not due to hatred of an indigenous population. This denial structure frames Palestinians as perpetual threats and Israel as the eternal victim, normalising the mass killing of a starved population as self-defence. As historian Daniel Blatman states : "Israel has been building a victim identity for three generations, thus denying the genocide in Gaza." In the same vein, bad-faith Zionists who denounce even non-violent Palestinian resistance as "terrorism" and, closer to my academic home, those who decry peaceful anti-genocide protests as "antisemitism", while minimising Palestinian suffering, ultimately seek to delegitimise dissent, obscure the reality of Israeli occupation and justify further violence against Palestinians. Zionist propaganda has long relied on these psychological and linguistic mechanisms as interlocking tools in its arsenal: mind infection socialises children into hate-narratives; cognitive dissonance arises when reality contradicts those narratives; reality-bending and mirror accusations resolve that tension by projecting guilt onto victims; interpretive denial acknowledges violence while stripping it of moral consequence; and implicatory denial insists on innocence despite clear responsibility. Comedian Bassem Youssef captures this strategy in a brief, darkly comic monologue that reveals a hasbara playbook as absurd as it is insidious. Mechanisms at work In its various allegations, the lawsuit filed against me and MIT reproduces the same patterns of distortion, reality-bending, mirror accusations, cognitive dissonance, and denial examined above. It thus offers an instructive case study in how these psychological and linguistic mechanisms operate at an institution like MIT to silence criticism of Israel and delegitimise anti-genocide advocacy. Claim 1: 'Mind infection' is antisemitic A central allegation by one of the plaintiffs, the then-president of Grad Hillel at MIT, is that I used the phrase "Jewish mind infection", described by the plaintiffs as antisemitic. Yet I have never used this wording. My scholarship refers specifically to " Zionist mind infection", drawing from Peled-Elhanan's analyses of state-sponsored dehumanising pedagogy in Israeli school curricula. By substituting "Jewish" for "Zionist", or treating the two as interchangeable, the lawsuit misrepresents my work, erases Peled-Elhanan's academic contributions, and mischaracterises a scholarly critique of racist state indoctrination as hatred of Jews. View this post on Instagram A post shared by Michel DeGraff (@micheldegraff) This is a clear instance of interpretive denial and mirror accusation, projecting "extremely dangerous rhetoric" onto those who critique anti-Palestinian racism and its deadly consequences. The plaintiff had applied this phrase to me in a public post on X , even as he instigated a thread laced with racist insults and threats such as: "...Make them bear the risks they inflict on others and their balls will retract so hard and so fast they'll rupture their stomachs..." "...This is the sort of retardation that turned Haiti into Haiti..." "You used the term mind virus without attributing it. To argue that it came from Dawkins does not aid your argument. You come from a desperately troubled island country beset by tragedy. Maybe use your @MIT platform to help Haiti instead of attacking Jews." "If I wanted to be a REAL prick, I'd point out that Mr. Degraff and his live-in girlfriend are publicly locatable in... [redacted for privacy]" "... I am going to point out that it took less than five minutes to find, and someone who is that easy like "Doctor" DeGraff should not be cheering violence." Contrast the venom unleashed against me in the thread with the measured, even professorial tone of my replies to their lies, distortions, insults and slander. These attacks, the predictable result of the plaintiff's own "extremely dangerous rhetoric", escalated to the point that MIT police asked Cambridge police to increase patrols around my home. Yet he accused me of leading an online mob against him - a textbook example of the Arabic proverb in which the aggressor cries victim. Claim 2: Conflating vs separating Zionism and Judaism The lawsuit alleges that I simultaneously conflate Zionism with Judaism and deny any connection between them. In reality, I have consistently distinguished the two, while it is the plaintiffs who collapse a political ideology into a religious identity (or, more accurately, corrupt it). Their view echoes the widely criticised IHRA definition of antisemitism, which, unlike the Jerusalem Declaration , erases the diversity of Jewish perspectives, including anti-Zionist student groups on my campus. This semantic slippage also obscures the prominence of Christian Zionism, whose end-times theology carries its own antisemitic implications. Treating "Zionist" as a codeword for "Jew" turns criticism of a political project into an existential threat, even when voiced by Jewish thinkers themselves. Treating 'Zionist' as a codeword for 'Jew' turns criticism of a political project into an existential threat, even when voiced by Jewish thinkers themselves Claim 3: 'Aggressive' filming Another allegation is that I "aggressively filmed" one of the plaintiffs and "shoved" my phone in his face. Video evidence from various angles (20:00 timestamp here ) shows the opposite: the plaintiff initially waved me over from a distance, and when I declined to join his group, he then approached me and "shoved" his face towards my phone in a manner clearly intended to intimidate. This inversion is a textbook case of mirror accusation, in which the aggressor projects his actions onto the target to construct a narrative of harassment. Claim 4: Doxxing and endangerment The plaintiffs further claim that I "doxxed" one of them (a mathematics instructor at MIT) by sharing information about his Israeli military service. However, this information was already public : the plaintiff had already disclosed his service in Israel's navy on his personal site and MIT-affiliated pages, and in Fox News interviews in which he announced his Israeli citizenship (military service being compulsory for most Israeli Jewish citizens) while slandering pro-Palestine students as "terrorists" - interviews that went viral across social media . Labelling the sharing of widely available information as "harassment" or "online doxxing" is classic reality-bending and interpretive denial, used to advance a false image of me as a threat. Claim 5: Bullying Jewish and Israeli students The lawsuit alleges that Jewish and Israeli students were "bullied" or "blocked" from accessing the Gaza encampment. However, video evidence and testimony from multiple students once again reveal the exact opposite: pro-Israel students were the ones brazenly entering the encampment to harass a diverse group of anti-genocide protesters, including Jewish students. The roles of aggressor and target are again inverted, with such claims functioning as further mirror accusations. Claim 6: 'Intifada' as a call for terror The plaintiffs argue, both publicly and in the complaint, that chanting the Arabic word "intifada" is a call for terrorism against Jews, despite its well-established primary use in non-violent contexts to mean "shaking off" or "resistance". Like protest, resistance can take many forms, including non-violent ones, as in the early phase of the First Intifada. Equating "intifada" with "terrorism" is another act of reality-bending that weaponises language to conflate anti-genocide activism with violence and delegitimise protest. Claim 7: Reporting as 'defamation' and 'smear campaign' The plaintiffs have mischaracterised my accurate reporting on public attacks against anti-genocide activists at MIT as a "smear campaign". Their objection that the student group referenced in my Le Monde Diplomatique article had not yet been formally named "Sage" ignores the clear continuity of membership and activism within MIT's Coalition for Palestine, the same coalition that later helped form the Gaza encampment during the nationwide student mobilisation. After police dismantled the encampment, the "Sage" acronym was repurposed to mean Students Against Genocide Everywhere, while the group's overall identity and objectives remained the same. Similar continuity applies to MIT Jews for Ceasefire, which later became MIT Jews for Collective Liberation. Fixating on shifting organisational labels rather than on the actual targets of the plaintiffs' accusations, including maligning anti-genocide protesters as "pro-Hamas" or alleging they were "calling for terror acts", is semantic trickery designed to deflect scrutiny. In their response to the dismissal motions filed by MIT and me , the plaintiffs argue that my reference to one of them having "powerful connections" in government and media constitutes a "classic antisemitic trope". Yet that individual routinely advertises his ties to right-wing personalities such as Christopher Rufo , Elise Stefanik , Howard Lutnick and Tim Walberg . The latter, as chair of the House Committee on Education and Workforce, has recently sought to bypass the courts by demanding that MIT disclose discovery documents related to antisemitism, Zionism, Palestine and research collaboration with Israel. It is an underhanded manoeuvre to protect MIT's science and engineering partnerships with Israeli institutions implicated in grave violations despite the Leahy laws and MIT's own " red lights " and " elevated risks " policies, which require divestment in such cases. Ultimately, the audacity of the "defamation" claim epitomises the broader pattern of mirror accusations running through their complaint . By inverting defamer and defamed, bully and bullied, perpetrator and victim, the plaintiffs displace their own fabrications onto those who have consistently exposed and challenged such reality-bending in service of settler-colonial impunity. Institutional failures Ironically, I agree with the plaintiffs that MIT has failed to address antisemitism, but not in the way alleged. MIT leadership has repeatedly ignored the pleas of anti-Zionist Jews to halt its complicity in Israel's genocide and has excluded them from the scope of official concerns about Jewish students "feeling unwelcome". MIT has also failed to address anti-Palestinian racism and Islamophobia, including faculty collaborations with an army accused of genocide, as documented by student researchers and cited in both a UN report and a letter from UN rapporteurs to MIT's president regarding the university's violations of students' human rights. Rather than engage with the troubling details of these findings or how they bear on MIT's own " red lights " and " elevated risks " safeguards to help prevent human rights violations, the president dismissed the students' report as unacceptable provocations and wilful mischaracterisations . Israel-Palestine war: MIT students undeterred by looming suspension over pro-Palestine rally Read More » Their research, published in the student paper The Tech, was subsequently retracted - a move the UN rapporteurs described as "a 'Palestine exception' to free expression on MIT's campus". Since October 2023, I have also faced retaliation for my efforts to advance knowledge about Palestine and Israel. These measures include censorship , restrictions on speech, exclusion from my academic unit of 28 years (including its Facebook page ) and reductions in my salary. Institutional double standards extend beyond administrative action. My submission to the MIT Faculty Newsletter of an essay on academic freedom was censored under vague claims of libel risk, even as another essay containing defamatory allegations against me was published. The public record - some of which I've already mentioned -  contradicts those allegations and reveals a long pattern of distortions and mirror accusations directed at me for documenting attacks on student activists. This pattern reflects a broader climate of repression across US campuses, where scholars face lawsuits , administrative retaliation and censorship for examining Zionist history and Israel's actions in Palestine. Such tactics weaponise accusations of antisemitism to stifle anti-Zionist speech and turn universities into outposts of repression rather than sites of genuine inquiry. Recent court rulings rejecting attempts to stifle anti-Zionist expression, including last week's order , offer an important defence of academic freedom and the right to criticise any political project, including settler-colonial Zionism. Critical scholarship If politically motivated lawsuits are allowed to proceed, universities risk becoming co-authors of atrocity, undermining academic freedom and the pursuit of truth. I refuse to accept such a future. Why academic scholarship on Israel and Palestine threatens western elites Read More » The plaintiffs' misinterpretation of terms such as "Zionism", "antisemitism", "colonial", "intifada" and "resistance" only underscores why linguistics and critical scholarship are indispensable tools for mutual understanding - #MindHandHeart for a #BetterWorld, as in MIT's mottos. But the threat to academic freedom is not limited to external lawfare. Inside universities, selective standards of speech and publication reproduce wider structures of anti-Palestinian repression, as my open letter to the faculty newsletter and the cancellation of an entire special issue of the Harvard Educational Review on "Education and Palestine" have shown. Editors who evoke the "potential libel" pretext to suppress critiques of institutional complicity freely publish essays that defame dissenting faculty. Such administrative censorship mirrors the weaponisation of Title VI and accusations of antisemitism to punish those who speak for Palestinian freedom. These double standards were evident in the lecture that bent the reality of Israel's genocide in Gaza and likened anti-genocide student protesters, including Jewish anti-Zionists, to antisemitic Nazi mobs in 1930s Germany. Such " mind infection ", masquerading as scholarship at universities such as MIT, gives propaganda an academic veneer while vilifying those who challenge it. Would MIT History invite a Holocaust denier as a colloquium speaker for the sake of "viewpoint diversity" or "neutrality"? The real story here is not the Zionist activists who have the material means and political backing to engage in anti-Palestinian lawfare, but the ongoing atrocities in Gaza We urgently need academic and public spaces where truth and justice can be pursued without fear. As MIT's Coalition of Palestine students reminds us, the real story here is not the Zionist activists who have the material means and political backing to engage in anti-Palestinian lawfare, but the ongoing atrocities in Gaza: bombed schools, incinerated families, systematic torture and a population under siege . To resist these assaults on truth and humanity, we must defend the freedom to teach, to learn and to dissent, confronting what Muhammad Ali Khalidi calls " the production of ignorance " about Palestine within our own institutions. The choice before academia is now a defining test: to normalise genocide or to reclaim our vocation as " responsible intellectuals ", building intersectional solidarity towards our collective and mutual liberation. The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye. Academic Freedom The Big Story Post Date Override 0 Update Date Mon, 05/04/2020 - 21:28 Update Date Override 0