Amid Gaza War, College Campuses Become Free Speech “Testing Ground”
Intercepted
Intercepted Podcast
Protests at universities are now being met with a wave of censorship and suppression, targeting students most directly.

The conflict in Gaza has galvanized a new generation of young anti-war activists, in the same way that opposition to the Vietnam War and apartheid South Africa did in decades past. A backlash is now building in the United States, led by right-wing activist and pro-Israel groups aimed at eliminating any public dissent over U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East.

As the death toll of Palestinians rises, a new authoritarian climate is sweeping across the U.S. — particularly on college campuses, which have transformed into laboratories for censorship and surveillance. Intercepted host Murtaza Hussain discusses this new political reality with Sahar Aziz, distinguished professor of law at Rutgers Law School and author of a new report on free speech and discrimination in the context of the Gaza conflict.

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Murtaza Hussain: Welcome to Intercepted. I’m Murtaza Hussain.

The conflict in Israel/Palestine has triggered an outpouring of public grief, anger, and protest in the United States over the U.S. government’s role in the war. Student activists in particular have led demonstrations denouncing what they view as U.S. complicity in Israeli human rights abuses in Gaza, including possible facilitation of the crime of genocide. This protest movement is now facing a wave of censorship and repression, with university campuses emerging as the new ground zero in a battle over free speech and American foreign policy.

I’m now joined by Sahar Aziz, Distinguished Professor of Law and Chancellor’s Social Justice Scholar at Rutgers University Law School. Aziz is the author of the book “The Racial Muslim: When Racism Quashes Religious Freedom,” host of the “Race and Rights” podcast, and the founding director of the Center for Security, Race and Rights.

The Center just published a new report on antisemitism and Islamophobia in the context of the Israel-Palestine conflict.

Sahar Aziz, welcome to Intercepted.

Sahar Aziz: Thank you for having me. It’s always a pleasure.

MH: Sahar, I want to ask you a bit about the environment for academic freedom in the United States after the October 7 attacks. We’re about six months away from those attacks now. Obviously, there’s been a groundswell of protests in the United States, as well as a backlash to those protests we’ve seen in institutions, and even from politicians.

I’m curious about your own perception. What have you seen, being someone on campus? And what are you looking at, in terms of people trying to push back against this historic upsurge of pro-Palestinian speech in the United States?

SA: To say that university campuses are ground zero for testing our free speech and academic freedom principles would not be an overstatement. What we’re witnessing right now is similar to what we witnessed during the Black Lives Matter social movement, during the anti-Vietnam War social movement, the Civil Rights Movement, Women’s Rights Movement.

So, we are living through a period in American history where the young people, the university students, are seeking systematic changes about a particular issue — in this case, U.S. foreign policy on Palestine and Israel — and they’re doing it through a very American tradition of sit-ins, and protests, and conferences, and teach-ins at universities. So, in many ways what we’re witnessing isn’t new, if you look at American history.

What is new, though, as you stated, is the subject matter. This is arguably the first time that we’ve seen such a large number of students at numerous universities, especially in the east and west coast — and then with some universities within what we call middle America — where students who are Muslim, Arab, South Asian, and their allies, who are Jewish Americans and other identity groups, are realizing that the narrative on Palestine-Israel is anti-Palestinian, that the U.S. foreign policy on Palestine-Israel is anti-Palestinian, and that the media is portraying Palestinians as barbaric and savages and terrorists and antisemites.

And all of this is happening while these college students are watching live, in real time, the mass bombing, mass starvation, targeted assassinations of Palestinian civilians and journalists and doctors in Gaza, so they can see for themselves this disconnect between what’s happening on the ground in Gaza — thanks to citizen journalism from Palestinians who are risking their lives, and being killed by the Israeli military, being targeted as a result of their journalism — and then what university presidents and U.S. elected officials are saying, and the positions that they’re taking, which send a very clear message, which is that: Palestinian lives do not matter, and only Israeli lives matter.

MH: It’s interesting, you mentioned that university campuses have been the ground zero of this sort of upsurge. And, oftentimes, in most cases, you’d see university officials — particularly even the more conservative officials — would encourage free speech, qua free speech as a value on campuses. And, obviously, in the last few years, there’s been an upsurge of progressive activism, and there’s been this sort of free speech movement, so to speak, led mostly by conservatives, but ostensibly in everyone’s interest.

But now, it seems like they’re shifting from welcoming speech to more of a mode of censorship and suppression. And I find it a little ironic — I’m curious about your own take, as someone looking at it from the inside a bit more — because there seems to be quite a disconnect, actually, between wanting to welcome speech, which is to describe as uncomfortable or controversial and so forth, but then responding in a manner which is so hostile to speech which they don’t like, which is on behalf of Palestinian rights, or critical of the Israeli government, or U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East.

I’m curious how people in academia have navigated that, and students and professors as well, too. How do we deal with administrations and authorities, which sort of seem to give conflicting messages in this regard?

SA: Well, the attempts to censor speech, and academic programming, and political activism on college campuses is bipartisan, and it is supported by both the liberals and the conservatives, but through different means.

So, the conservatives — or what I’ll say, those who are on the political right — are much more overt and aggressive and hostile in their attempts to censor, where they are sending clear messages through letters, or through press releases, or public statements, stating that these students should be criminalized, that they should be kicked out of universities, suspended, and they are not in any way hiding their objective to censor.

The liberals are not using the same tactics, but it is the same objective. And, oftentimes, they will use pretext to claim that the request for the event wasn’t early enough, the security situation requires that this event cannot happen, or all sorts of what we call pretexts and excuses. And, also, they have been accommodating the conservatives’ clear witch hunt against Palestinian, Muslim, and Arab students in particular, and faculty as well, who are seeking to add to the debate, to the conversation, to the discussion about a very hot topic, a contemporary issue in which the United States is directly involved by providing billions of dollars to the Israeli military, and by providing political support to the Israeli government at the same time that what many of these students and faculty believe is a genocidal campaign by Israel in Gaza, and what South Africa is alleging is genocide before the International Court of Justice.

And although whether or not it is genocide is a legal question that will be determined on the merits over the next few months or years, there is certainly sufficient evidence to believe that there are numerous war crimes that have been committed by Israel — as well as Hamas, on October 7th — and the question is, why don’t the elected officials, the university administrators, the politicians, and members of the media and other members of the elite, why don’t they want students doing exactly what they went to the university to do? Which is to learn about different ideas and different perspectives, and to hear from different types of experts. And instead of encouraging students and faculty to hold their own events, and let students shop with their feet, so to speak. In other words, if you want to attend the event, you go choose to. If you want to attend the protest, you choose to. But instead of doing that, they are reverting to just shutting everything down.

And that then leads us to wonder why. Why don’t you want there to be a conversation? Why don’t you want the Palestinian perspective and the Palestinian experience to be included in the marketplace of ideas, in the debate, and in the discussion? And that is causing many of the students to be suspicious of the motivations of those people seeking to censor.

And, oftentimes, the stated motivation is to combat antisemitism. The problem with that stated motivation or objective is that, when you look at the evidence that is being cited as the basis for wanting to shut events down, or shut down protests or speech, or infringe on academic freedom, it is not cases where an individual Jewish student is being targeted, directly harassed, intimidated, verbally abused, or physically abused. That situation is antisemitism, and there have always been processes in place in universities for students to be protected against that, whether they’re Jewish, Muslim, Christian, any other identity group that’s protected by the law.

But that’s not what we’re seeing, right? For the most part, the majority of the complaints are based on students claiming that other students’ chants and protests make them feel unsafe, make them feel uncomfortable, they find [them] offensive. And if that’s going to be the criteria, then we’re not going to be able to talk about very much at all on university campuses, and then we can’t have open and public inquiry about controversial issues.

Now, the right is claiming, “well, that’s what we’ve been trying to tell you” to the left, because they have an axe to grind against the political left, saying, your cancel culture, your woke culture, all of the work you do that is antidiscrimination, antiharassment, Title VI, Title IX. Those are all part of the problem, and you essentially made your bed, and now you have to lie in it.

Of course, the flaw in that argument is that the political left, when they are seeking to decrease harassment, intimidation, discrimination on college campuses, that is when it is directed at students, right? And it is when people come and provide what we call very low value speech — or, more specifically, misinformation and disinformation — that is effectively peddling racial tropes.

That is not what we’re seeing on college campuses today. What we’re seeing in college campuses today are demands for a ceasefire, are demands for divestment from Israel, are demands for the U.S. government to either condition military aid to Israel based on adherence to human rights norms, or stop it altogether.

Many of these types of objectives in this political activism on college campuses today, we’ve seen it vis a vis Ukraine, Syria, Iran, Saudi Arabia, or other countries where there is a dissent in the United States against U.S. foreign policy on a particular issue. And no one responds to that political activism by saying, oh, well, you’re Islamophobic, or you’re anti-Latino, or you’re anti-Black, or you’re anti-Christian. They may respond and say, we don’t agree with you, we think you’re misinformed, we think your facts are not accurate, we think this is false, so you’re having a debate on the merits. That’s fair game in an academic setting and, in fact, it should be welcome.

But that’s not what we’re seeing right now at university campuses. What we’re seeing is the weaponization of antisemitism, which I think is to the detriment of Jewish communities, because if you define antisemitism incorrectly to mean political dissent or criticism of a nation state — in this case Israel — then you dilute its meaning, and you weaken the enforcement of real antisemitism. And I would make the same argument if someone was alleging that criticizing Iran was Islamophobic, or criticizing Saudi Arabia was Islamophobic, or criticizing a sub-Saharan country was anti-Black.

There is no exception for Israel. In fact, to treat Israel like any other nation is demonstrating that you’re not antisemitic in many ways, that it is like any other nation. And, right now, what’s happening in Gaza is so unprecedented, and so devastating, that it absolutely warrants the amount of attention that it’s been getting in the United States.

MH: I do wonder if there’s a counterproductive aspect of these censorship attempts because, as you mentioned, there’s this effort to suppress any discussion of this subject in a critical manner by young people, who tend to be the most curious and energetic about political issues. And, at the same time, U.S. politicians talk about Israel-Palestine all the time; it’s one of the most high profile foreign policy issues in the United States, so the difference, the gap between these two things is quite considerable.

And if you look at authoritarian regimes like the Soviet Union, for instance, people would publish samizdat about certain subjects which were verboten by the government. It increased the interest and appeal, and made more of a salient ideological ground of conflict because, you know, what are you trying to hide? That’s kind of the implication behind censorship.

And you alluded, Sahar, to this issue of the weaponization of charges of bigotry — in this case, antisemitism — to suppress dissent. And, obviously, any form of racism, including antisemitism, is condemnable in any form. But there is this usage of it — and I think it’s been noted for many, many years — to specifically make verboten criticism of the policies of a particular nation state — in this case, Israel — and the U.S. relationship with that country.

One thing that it does remind me of a little bit is, in the years after 9/11— So, a lot of the students who were protesting — not all, but many of them — either have heritage, are Palestinian, or are from the Middle East, or of their Muslim background — I wouldn’t necessarily even say majority, but a significant number of them are of those backgrounds — and their identities, in some way, are weaponized against them, because they are treated as though their criticisms are somehow suspect, or there’s something sinister behind it.

And you published this report through your center at Rutgers University recently, talking about how Islamophobia has been used as a tool in conjunction with accusations of antisemitism against many of these students. And it did remind me of post-9/11 when anyone who was Muslim making these critiques was somehow deemed suspect.

Tell us a bit about that report, and some of your findings in that regard.

SA: So, the report is called “Presumptively Antisemitic: Islamophobic Tropes in the Palestine-Israel Discourse.” And, as you noted, it was published by the Rutgers Center for Security, Race and Rights, and myself and Mitchell Plitnick are the coauthors of the report.

We had been working on this report for nearly two years — it predated October 7, 2023 — because each time that a Palestinian or an Arab or a Muslim was involved in the Palestine-Israel debate— And, oftentimes, those three identities would get homogenized into “presumptively Muslim,” which, we know the majority of Arabs in America are actually Christian, and we know that the Middle East is full of various faiths, including Jewish, Christian, and other faiths. But everyone would be homogenized into this Muslim identity that had been racialized as presumptively violent, hateful, despotic, and antisemitic. And these racial stereotypes were then used to silence, discredit, censor those speakers, even when those speakers were experts. And that would be the equivalent of peddling an anti-Black racist trope in order to exclude African Americans from engaging in the discussion about racism in America, or peddling antisemitic racial tropes to exclude Jews from engaging in the discussion about religious freedom in America, right?

So, this topic, the Palestine-Israel topic, is extremely important for these diverse communities, because many of them are of Palestinian ancestry, or they have friends who are Palestinian, or their origins are in the Middle East. And so, there is this cultural connection, and this personal connection. And the fact that they happen to have that identity suddenly then places them outside the purview of free speech rights, or political activism rights, because they are accused of having hateful motivations towards Jews, rather than simply being critical of the status quo politically, and militarily, and socioeconomically, which is effectively what you do when you have a debate or a discussion that is based on facts, and an analysis of the current situation and the historical situation.

So, effectively what we did is we unpacked that stereotype to show that to presume that a Muslim or an Arab or a Palestinian is antisemitic without any evidence other than simply that they are criticizing Israeli government practices, or Israeli military practices, or Israeli policy, or U.S. foreign policy, that if that’s all you have, that’s the only evidence you have, or that you’re critical of Zionism as a political ideology, well, then you’re really peddling a racial trope that’s Islamophobic.

And, again, the ultimate objective is to ensure that one does not contribute towards bigotry towards one group — which, in this case, would be Muslims — in the name or claiming to do it to protect bigotry or to stop bigotry against another group: Jews. Because that is effectively not the objective; the objective is to ensure that there is a monopoly over the narrative about Palestine-Israel in America that is unconditionally and staunchly pro-Israeli. My position is, that’s very un-American. I mean, that’s fascist, and that’s propaganda. And I would say that if the conversation were limited to any one perspective on what was acceptable.

So, ultimately, that report is an attempt to educate people about that racial trope so that they’re more careful, they’re more thoughtful, and they actually look to the facts when a Muslim, Arab, or Palestinian is accused of antisemitism. To determine, did this person in fact engage in antisemitism, or is this person simply communicating political beliefs through which the accuser disagrees with, and the accuser wants to discredit and silence in bad faith?

And I’ll just add that this stereotype of being presumptively antisemitic is an extension of these post-9/11 stereotypes, which resulted in significant material, liberty, and economic and dignitary harms to Muslims, Arabs, and South Asians across America after 9/11, which is effectively the subject of my book “The Racial Muslim: When Racism Quashes Religious Freedom.”

So, this is an extension of that. To make people cognizant that, when you assume that Muslims are violent and hateful people without any evidence, when that’s just a racial stereotype, then it makes it very easy for bad faith actors to then extend that to, oh, they also hate Jews.

And, again, that doesn’t mean antisemitism doesn’t exist among Muslim communities, but Islamophobia also exists among Jewish communities and Christian communities, but that doesn’t mean that every Jew is Islamophobic, and it doesn’t mean every Christian is Islamophobic, just like it doesn’t mean that every Muslim is antisemitic. So, providing that individual responsibility, looking for the facts to determine whether or not someone is in fact hateful towards a particular group, is extremely important, because otherwise you are defaming, you are slandering, you are libeling, and you are smearing individuals.

And if that same type of behavior were conducted against a white person, a white Christian person, or a white Jewish person, everybody would understand that that is unacceptable. And that, in fact, the person that should be discredited is the bad faith accuser, not the victim of these racist tropes that are being peddled at them or deployed against them.

MH: You made the very good point about these measures being taken place ostensibly on behalf of protecting the safety of minorities, but we’ve seen in the last few months very severe and very violent attacks on Palestinians in the United States, symbols of Palestinian identity. There was a murder of a young boy in Chicago a few months ago, there was a shooting attack on several young Palestinian students, one of whom was left paralyzed as a result of that. And there seems to be a grave disjuncture between the level of concern being expressed for emotional harms, as opposed to real harms which are taking place right now.

And, to the point about campuses as well, too, there was a chemical attack on some Palestinian students at Columbia University recently, which the administration of that school and the press has taken quite minimal interest in, compared to how grave it is in reality.

I was curious about one thing particularly, Sahar, that I saw in the news a few months ago in Florida: efforts to ban Palestinian student groups from campus entirely. And it seems that Florida may be a testing ground for further measures that may be rolled out in the rest of the country.

Is there a legal basis, really, for banning this type of speech entirely by law? I know that the administrations were putting great administrative pressure and political pressure on these groups and these young people, but can they actually make Palestinian activism verboten legally on campuses in the United States in the future?

SA: Well, without knowing the specifics of the case, generally what universities do if they shut down or suspend student groups is they do not state that it is because of their viewpoint, and it is not because of their exercise of their constitutional rights. Usually they will find what we call pretext; you violated this policy by not reserving the room appropriately, or by inviting outside speakers or outside attendees when you were not allowed to. There are all sorts of policies that universities have on a range of topics and, if the administrators want to harass students and give them a hard time, they can find these so-called “facially neutral” policies and say, well, it has nothing to do with, with your viewpoint, it has to do with you violating this viewpoint-neutral policy.

And then the question becomes, well, is the enforcement viewpoint-neutral? And if there are other clubs or university student groups that have also violated those policies, are they being treated in the same manner? And that’s why you’re seeing more litigation that is being brought by Palestinian groups and Muslim student groups, represented often by Palestine Legal, which has started to represent these student groups who clearly— Well, there’s reason to believe that they are being targeted, based on their viewpoint and based on their identity, but oftentimes that then gets resolved in court.

But what the university administrators will claim is that, no, it’s not related to their identity or their viewpoint.

But, again, I think that when you’re looking at places like Florida, or Texas, or other what we call “anti-DEI states,” this is just the beginning of a much broader agenda, which is to quash and eliminate any type of agency, or mobilization, or programming, or curriculum that centers the experiences and the voices and the knowledge production of minority communities, whether they’re Black communities, Native American communities, Indigenous communities, Muslim or Arab communities. And it’s easy, and it’s politically expedient, to punch down at Palestinian student groups, because anti-Palestinian racism is so bipartisan, and Islamophobia is so mainstream and normalized, that they can get away with it.

But it sets a dangerous precedent, because what they really want is they don’t want Black history to be taught in any schools that is not simply glorifying a white-dominant narrative, and that in any way provides the African American diversity of experiences. And we can then apply that to American history vis a vis Native/Indigenous populations, American history vis a vis immigrant populations, and so on and so forth.

So, this is where I hope that people across the country who may not have any particular connection to Palestine or to the Palestine-Israel issue, but if they care about ensuring that our universities, and our schools, and our government, and our media represents the rich diversity of perspectives and lived experiences in the United States, that they really need to pay attention and push back against this censorship.

Because what we saw after 9/11 was, they came for us first as the Muslims, and they justified expanding government authority — especially executive authority — and they justified heightened judicial deference by telling the population, don’t worry, we’re not going to take away your civil liberties, we’re going to take away their civil liberty; these Muslims, these outsiders, these threats. And, over time, that expanded, and then surveillance and the dilution of civil liberties became more normalized.

So, even if someone doesn’t care much about the Palestine-Israel issue per se, they absolutely should care about their free speech rights, their academic freedom rights, and the ability for our country to function in a way that does not perpetuate white Judeo-Christian dominance. Because, by 2050, this country, there will be no majority race, and there will be no majority sectarian religion, right? There will be such a diversity even among Christians, and then with Islam, and Hinduism, and Judaism, and Buddhism, we need to have a country that educates our students in a way that allows them to understand the reality of America.

MH: You make a really good point, too, because, obviously, these anxieties about the student activism in Palestine ties into much broader anxieties that were also visible during the Black Lives Matter protests a few years ago. And it’d been an ongoing sort of theme on campuses, particularly in the last decade; [even] beyond that, I would say.

And one thing I want to also make a point to listeners, too, is that oftentimes developments in universities are treated as somehow separate from society, or somehow less serious than main federal politics, and what have you and so forth. But, really, the reason that there’s so much scrutiny from, say, in this case, a group seeking to suppress criticism of Israel is they know that, on campuses, you’re seeing the future elite of the country are there, and having their worldviews formed. They’re being groomed and developed and getting their skills together to take on these very important roles in society, so they’d like to shape the debate at that level, such that the downstream effects as they see it will later manifest in their favor. So, it’s very, very important what happens on these campuses as well.

And one thing, Sahar, which I saw in the news and found very alarming and I think people should know it as well, too is that former President Trump — and, maybe, future President Trump, depending on the election — he had said recently in response to questions about these protests on campuses that he would take the step of revoking the visas of students who are foreign students who take part in what he called pro-Hamas rallies. And, really, in practice, this seems to be any rally which is for the support of a Palestinian rights, and so forth.

And this proposal, as extreme as it is, seems to tie into a broader theme of hostility to immigration, or immigrants and minorities, and so forth. And it’s actually wedding support for Israel into a much more extreme set of far-right policies, you could say, aimed at changing the composition of the United States.

I was curious of your perspective of how the evolution of support for Israel as a component of U.S. domestic politics has been playing out, and how this realignment — this support for Israel towards the far right — is manifesting itself on the ground.

SA: Israel is a very unusual subject matter when looking through the domestic politics lens, because it’s so bipartisan in the unconditional support for its policies and practices, even though its policies and practices are hawkish, militaristic— It’s a permanent occupation, it’s now been called an apartheid state by many human rights organizations, and it is now being charged with genocide by South Africa.

And the fact that you have such strong unconditional support for it by both Democrats and Republicans makes it stand out, as opposed to other issues, like abortion, voting rights, diversity, equity, inclusion, social welfare programs. And what I believe we’re witnessing is the conservatives, the political right, taking advantage, and exploiting the support for Israel that is in the Democratic Party. And, for various reasons which we don’t have enough time to go into, in terms of why there’s so much political domestic support for Israel, especially among elected officials— And a lot of it absolutely has to do with the influence of special interest groups in our political system overall, not just on the issue of Israel, whether it’s gun rights, or abortion, or other what we call hot topics.

But they are leveraging that to quash the university activity, and to oppose DEI with the objective, the long term objective to — as I stated before — to regress our education system back to an era when it was European origin, or people of European ancestry, they were centered in how we educated people, that it was Judeo-Christian tradition that centers how we educate people. And so, if you are not from the Global North, and if you are not of Judeo-Christian tradition, then you are a permanent outsider. You will not see yourself in the books that are assigned, in the type of knowledge production, in the professors, in anything, right? You will be an outsider. And that, then, perpetuates that system.

And so, what we’ve seen, I would say, since 9/11 by this generation, by this post-9/11 generation is a rebuke of that white Judeo-Christian-dominant system. The #MeToo movement, which was a gender rights movement, the LGBTQ movement, the Black Lives Matter movement, now the Palestine human rights movement. All of these are part of a pattern, or a manifestation of the change in the demographics of this country, because these are the college students who are now in there from 18 to 25, and they are realizing that the America that they were born into simply is not acknowledging their lived experiences. And they’re demanding change. And that’s why you have to understand the Palestinian social movement as an extension of that.

What’s paradoxical is that, if it was anything but Palestine-Israel, the Democrats would be supporting the movement, just like they did the Black Lives Matter, and the #MeToo movement, and the LGBTQ movement. But, because Israel is unconditionally supported by both the political right and left, you’re seeing liberals engage in illiberal ways, in illiberal practices. And they are creating a dangerous precedent, they are doing the dirty work — and I call it dirty work because it’s so un-American — of the conservatives of the political right who are, in fact, seeking more censorship, less free speech, less academic freedom for those on the political left.

For themselves, of course, they want as much free speech as possible, as much academic freedom as possible. And, when DEI includes ideological diversity, suddenly the political right is on board, because they use that as code for, “hire more white male conservatives.”

And so it’s all about, if it serves us, we want it. If it doesn’t serve us, we don’t want it. Rather than looking at DEI as an objective, the objective is for there to be more representation in workplaces, in universities, in professors, as students, in the media, that represents America. And that is going to change based on the state, based on the region of the country, but just acknowledging that no group of people should be in a country where they feel that they’re completely invisible, if not outright oppressed.

So, the message I think that I have for the liberals is: be careful how you respond to the censorship on Palestine, because it will expand. It will expand to the various issues that you care about, like abortion rights, and voting rights, and anti-gerrymandering, and gun rights. Pick the issue that you care about. Once you make it normal for there not to be any type of open debate and discussion by experts— And I will highlight “by experts.” I don’t think that speech by pundits and people who rant is very helpful speech, whatever the position is.

But remember [that] in universities we have a peer review process. We have a process where, if you go and start stating things that are false, there are peers who will call you out for it. And that is a form of quality control that doesn’t exist on social media, or doesn’t exist in other media outlets. And that’s why universities are so well suited to have contentious debates and discussions, and let the university administrators, and the faculty, and the students figure out ways to do it in a robust, healthy way that is not harassing to individual students, that is not racist towards individual students, but in a way that allows students to have access or exposure to different ideas by experts. But what we’re seeing now is attempts to completely stop that.

And so, then the question is: well, where can students go learn? If it’s social media, that is bad news for education. You can’t learn much from 240 characters, or from a three-minute TikTok video, or from a five- or ten-minute YouTube video. Universities are there so that you can take the time and learn things in depth through a class, through programming, through conferences, through conversations, through mentoring. And so, this political intervention by these House Un-American Activities Committees, and these Senate Un-American Activities Committees, is bad for our universities. It’s bad for the quality of higher education in the United States.

And I think it just goes without saying that Congress has no business interfering with universities, and they need to stay out of universities’ businesses, and let them be managed and run by professionals.

MH: Sahar, it’s interesting, it seems like every generation of young people in the United States has a cause which they’re very galvanized by. We saw in the last century the Civil Rights Movement, the Vietnam War, the struggle against apartheid. It strikes me very much that the pro-Palestine movement is that cause for a younger generation of young student activists.

I was reading a book recently by Rashid Khalidi, “The Hundred Years War in Palestine;” we had him on the podcast a few months back as well, too. There was a very interesting anecdote of his own time as a student in New York and, at that time, many decades ago, the Palestinian cause was much less— The framing of it was much different in the United States, if the Palestinian perspective was discussed at all.

And he said he recalled going to a protest of Golda Meir giving a speech in New York. And, at his protest, there were about four people [there] protesting against her appearance. And there were hundreds and hundreds if not thousands of students who were going to watch her speech in support of it. And now, it seems like the whole dichotomy is flipped, and that change, which is so manifest on a popular level, is not manifest yet at an institutional level at all.

I’m curious, just to conclude, your own perspective of how important or defined perspective has become for young people that you see as a professor or engaging in activism. What has the Palestinian cause come to symbolize for them, and how it may develop in the U.S. in the future?

SA: I think the Palestinian issue, or the experience that they are witnessing right now, the events they’re witnessing, is waking up a generation to the contradictions between what they learn in school, that the United States is a beacon of freedom, it is a place where one can speak freely and express dissenting views without fearing persecution, without fearing being arrested, or being expelled from school, or being surveilled, or being threatened with physical harm. Because they’re also taught in schools that those types of repressive measures happen abroad in autocracies, and now they are witnessing these types of practices here in the United States, and these practices are being demanded by Congress and imposed on university administrators.

So, they’re realizing that their country has a democracy crisis and a constitutional crisis, where the very people elected to uphold the constitution are now abusing their authority to violate the constitution, but only for certain students. So, they’re also realizing how racism works, and how — as I discuss in my book “The Racial Muslim” when focusing on religious freedom in particular — that these constitutional rights have historically always been constrained by the racial identity of the person seeking to exercise those rights.

And so, if you are white and Judeo-Christian, you have the fullest extent and the full liberty to exercise those rights, and you’re much, much less likely to have those rights violated, either by private actors or by the government. But the more subordinated, or racialized, or stereotyped, or hated your minority group is, the less likely you can exercise those rights without repression. And, again, one need only look at the history of African Americans in America to know that reality.

And so, they’re seeing that American racism, and American democratic deficits are not a thing of the past, and that they’re realizing that their generation has numerous challenges that they now must face, because they are the future leaders. I will tell you that many of us in the academy are using this moment to educate our students, to make them realize that you have a responsibility to be an agent that defends American fundamental values, and those values are being tested.

Right now, you’re living through it and, rather than cowering in fear, or rather than being so pessimistic that you check out of the system, you have an obligation to lean in, and to demand and expect that your university leaders, your elected officials, and any other members of the elite that have decision-making powers, that you demand that they uphold the constitution, and that they uphold American fundamental values of free speech, academic freedom, racial equality. And the fact that you are one of the case studies is— It can either be a privilege or a burden, but it is their reality.

So, yes, we are in another social movement. We are seeing a major transition in how the Palestine-Israel issue is being addressed, discussed, and examined, at least among college students. And the biggest fear of the individuals and groups who do not want that change, who want to continue that monopoly over the narrative on Israel that it is always the victim, and that Palestinians are always the terrorists, which is a false narrative, that they are going to do everything they can to repress that competition of ideas in the marketplace of ideas.

And so, the question we have to ask ourselves is, are we going to sit by and be quiet and be complicit, or are we going to stand up and defend the values, but also be willing to defend those values, when the speaker is someone you disagree with? My position is, universities need to be places for robust discussion and robust debate, and utilize the peer review process, where if someone states something that is false or that is misinformation, there will be others in the room that can challenge that, or that can provide alternative programming that challenges that.

But censorship is absolutely not the American way, and if we make it the American way, then we are going down the path of autocracy.

MH: Sahar Aziz, thank you so much for joining us today.

SA: Thank you.

MH: That’s Sahar Aziz, Distinguished Professor of Law and Chancellor’s Social Justice Scholar at Rutgers Law School, and author of the book “The Racial Muslim: When Racism Quashes Religious Freedom.”

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And that does it for this episode of Intercepted. Intercepted is a production of The Intercept. Laura Flynn produced this episode. Rick Kwan mixed our show. Legal review by Shawn Musgrave and Elizabeth Sanchez. This episode was transcribed by Leonardo Faierman. And our theme music, as always, was composed by DJ Spooky.

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Thank you so much for joining us. Until next time, I’m Murtaza Hussain.
Protests at universities are now being met with a wave of censorship and suppression, targeting students most directly.
The conflict in Gaza has galvanized a new generation of young anti-war activists, in the same way that opposition to the Vietnam War and apartheid South Africa did in decades past. A backlash is now building in the United States, led by right-wing activist and pro-Israel groups aimed at eliminating any public dissent over U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. As the death toll of Palestinians rises, a new authoritarian climate is sweeping across the U.S. — particularly on college campuses, which have transformed into laboratories for censorship and surveillance. Intercepted host Murtaza Hussain discusses this new political reality with Sahar Aziz, distinguished professor of law at Rutgers Law School and author of a new report on free speech and discrimination in the context of the Gaza conflict. [Intercepted theme music.] Murtaza Hussain: Welcome to Intercepted. I’m Murtaza Hussain. The conflict in Israel/Palestine has triggered an outpouring of public grief, anger, and protest in the United States over the U.S. government’s role in the war. Student activists in particular have led demonstrations denouncing what they view as U.S. complicity in Israeli human rights abuses in Gaza, including possible facilitation of the crime of genocide. This protest movement is now facing a wave of censorship and repression, with university campuses emerging as the new ground zero in a battle over free speech and American foreign policy. I’m now joined by Sahar Aziz, Distinguished Professor of Law and Chancellor’s Social Justice Scholar at Rutgers University Law School. Aziz is the author of the book “The Racial Muslim: When Racism Quashes Religious Freedom,” host of the “Race and Rights” podcast, and the founding director of the Center for Security, Race and Rights. The Center just published a new report on antisemitism and Islamophobia in the context of the Israel-Palestine conflict. Sahar Aziz, welcome to Intercepted. Sahar Aziz: Thank you for having me. It’s always a pleasure. MH: Sahar, I want to ask you a bit about the environment for academic freedom in the United States after the October 7 attacks. We’re about six months away from those attacks now. Obviously, there’s been a groundswell of protests in the United States, as well as a backlash to those protests we’ve seen in institutions, and even from politicians. I’m curious about your own perception. What have you seen, being someone on campus? And what are you looking at, in terms of people trying to push back against this historic upsurge of pro-Palestinian speech in the United States? SA: To say that university campuses are ground zero for testing our free speech and academic freedom principles would not be an overstatement. What we’re witnessing right now is similar to what we witnessed during the Black Lives Matter social movement, during the anti-Vietnam War social movement, the Civil Rights Movement, Women’s Rights Movement. So, we are living through a period in American history where the young people, the university students, are seeking systematic changes about a particular issue — in this case, U.S. foreign policy on Palestine and Israel — and they’re doing it through a very American tradition of sit-ins, and protests, and conferences, and teach-ins at universities. So, in many ways what we’re witnessing isn’t new, if you look at American history. What is new, though, as you stated, is the subject matter. This is arguably the first time that we’ve seen such a large number of students at numerous universities, especially in the east and west coast — and then with some universities within what we call middle America — where students who are Muslim, Arab, South Asian, and their allies, who are Jewish Americans and other identity groups, are realizing that the narrative on Palestine-Israel is anti-Palestinian, that the U.S. foreign policy on Palestine-Israel is anti-Palestinian, and that the media is portraying Palestinians as barbaric and savages and terrorists and antisemites. And all of this is happening while these college students are watching live, in real time, the mass bombing, mass starvation, targeted assassinations of Palestinian civilians and journalists and doctors in Gaza, so they can see for themselves this disconnect between what’s happening on the ground in Gaza — thanks to citizen journalism from Palestinians who are risking their lives, and being killed by the Israeli military, being targeted as a result of their journalism — and then what university presidents and U.S. elected officials are saying, and the positions that they’re taking, which send a very clear message, which is that: Palestinian lives do not matter, and only Israeli lives matter. MH: It’s interesting, you mentioned that university campuses have been the ground zero of this sort of upsurge. And, oftentimes, in most cases, you’d see university officials — particularly even the more conservative officials — would encourage free speech, qua free speech as a value on campuses. And, obviously, in the last few years, there’s been an upsurge of progressive activism, and there’s been this sort of free speech movement, so to speak, led mostly by conservatives, but ostensibly in everyone’s interest. But now, it seems like they’re shifting from welcoming speech to more of a mode of censorship and suppression. And I find it a little ironic — I’m curious about your own take, as someone looking at it from the inside a bit more — because there seems to be quite a disconnect, actually, between wanting to welcome speech, which is to describe as uncomfortable or controversial and so forth, but then responding in a manner which is so hostile to speech which they don’t like, which is on behalf of Palestinian rights, or critical of the Israeli government, or U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. I’m curious how people in academia have navigated that, and students and professors as well, too. How do we deal with administrations and authorities, which sort of seem to give conflicting messages in this regard? SA: Well, the attempts to censor speech, and academic programming, and political activism on college campuses is bipartisan, and it is supported by both the liberals and the conservatives, but through different means. So, the conservatives — or what I’ll say, those who are on the political right — are much more overt and aggressive and hostile in their attempts to censor, where they are sending clear messages through letters, or through press releases, or public statements, stating that these students should be criminalized, that they should be kicked out of universities, suspended, and they are not in any way hiding their objective to censor. The liberals are not using the same tactics, but it is the same objective. And, oftentimes, they will use pretext to claim that the request for the event wasn’t early enough, the security situation requires that this event cannot happen, or all sorts of what we call pretexts and excuses. And, also, they have been accommodating the conservatives’ clear witch hunt against Palestinian, Muslim, and Arab students in particular, and faculty as well, who are seeking to add to the debate, to the conversation, to the discussion about a very hot topic, a contemporary issue in which the United States is directly involved by providing billions of dollars to the Israeli military, and by providing political support to the Israeli government at the same time that what many of these students and faculty believe is a genocidal campaign by Israel in Gaza, and what South Africa is alleging is genocide before the International Court of Justice. And although whether or not it is genocide is a legal question that will be determined on the merits over the next few months or years, there is certainly sufficient evidence to believe that there are numerous war crimes that have been committed by Israel — as well as Hamas, on October 7th — and the question is, why don’t the elected officials, the university administrators, the politicians, and members of the media and other members of the elite, why don’t they want students doing exactly what they went to the university to do? Which is to learn about different ideas and different perspectives, and to hear from different types of experts. And instead of encouraging students and faculty to hold their own events, and let students shop with their feet, so to speak. In other words, if you want to attend the event, you go choose to. If you want to attend the protest, you choose to. But instead of doing that, they are reverting to just shutting everything down. And that then leads us to wonder why. Why don’t you want there to be a conversation? Why don’t you want the Palestinian perspective and the Palestinian experience to be included in the marketplace of ideas, in the debate, and in the discussion? And that is causing many of the students to be suspicious of the motivations of those people seeking to censor. And, oftentimes, the stated motivation is to combat antisemitism. The problem with that stated motivation or objective is that, when you look at the evidence that is being cited as the basis for wanting to shut events down, or shut down protests or speech, or infringe on academic freedom, it is not cases where an individual Jewish student is being targeted, directly harassed, intimidated, verbally abused, or physically abused. That situation is antisemitism, and there have always been processes in place in universities for students to be protected against that, whether they’re Jewish, Muslim, Christian, any other identity group that’s protected by the law. But that’s not what we’re seeing, right? For the most part, the majority of the complaints are based on students claiming that other students’ chants and protests make them feel unsafe, make them feel uncomfortable, they find [them] offensive. And if that’s going to be the criteria, then we’re not going to be able to talk about very much at all on university campuses, and then we can’t have open and public inquiry about controversial issues. Now, the right is claiming, “well, that’s what we’ve been trying to tell you” to the left, because they have an axe to grind against the political left, saying, your cancel culture, your woke culture, all of the work you do that is antidiscrimination, antiharassment, Title VI, Title IX. Those are all part of the problem, and you essentially made your bed, and now you have to lie in it. Of course, the flaw in that argument is that the political left, when they are seeking to decrease harassment, intimidation, discrimination on college campuses, that is when it is directed at students, right? And it is when people come and provide what we call very low value speech — or, more specifically, misinformation and disinformation — that is effectively peddling racial tropes. That is not what we’re seeing on college campuses today. What we’re seeing in college campuses today are demands for a ceasefire, are demands for divestment from Israel, are demands for the U.S. government to either condition military aid to Israel based on adherence to human rights norms, or stop it altogether. Many of these types of objectives in this political activism on college campuses today, we’ve seen it vis a vis Ukraine, Syria, Iran, Saudi Arabia, or other countries where there is a dissent in the United States against U.S. foreign policy on a particular issue. And no one responds to that political activism by saying, oh, well, you’re Islamophobic, or you’re anti-Latino, or you’re anti-Black, or you’re anti-Christian. They may respond and say, we don’t agree with you, we think you’re misinformed, we think your facts are not accurate, we think this is false, so you’re having a debate on the merits. That’s fair game in an academic setting and, in fact, it should be welcome. But that’s not what we’re seeing right now at university campuses. What we’re seeing is the weaponization of antisemitism, which I think is to the detriment of Jewish communities, because if you define antisemitism incorrectly to mean political dissent or criticism of a nation state — in this case Israel — then you dilute its meaning, and you weaken the enforcement of real antisemitism. And I would make the same argument if someone was alleging that criticizing Iran was Islamophobic, or criticizing Saudi Arabia was Islamophobic, or criticizing a sub-Saharan country was anti-Black. There is no exception for Israel. In fact, to treat Israel like any other nation is demonstrating that you’re not antisemitic in many ways, that it is like any other nation. And, right now, what’s happening in Gaza is so unprecedented, and so devastating, that it absolutely warrants the amount of attention that it’s been getting in the United States. MH: I do wonder if there’s a counterproductive aspect of these censorship attempts because, as you mentioned, there’s this effort to suppress any discussion of this subject in a critical manner by young people, who tend to be the most curious and energetic about political issues. And, at the same time, U.S. politicians talk about Israel-Palestine all the time; it’s one of the most high profile foreign policy issues in the United States, so the difference, the gap between these two things is quite considerable. And if you look at authoritarian regimes like the Soviet Union, for instance, people would publish samizdat about certain subjects which were verboten by the government. It increased the interest and appeal, and made more of a salient ideological ground of conflict because, you know, what are you trying to hide? That’s kind of the implication behind censorship. And you alluded, Sahar, to this issue of the weaponization of charges of bigotry — in this case, antisemitism — to suppress dissent. And, obviously, any form of racism, including antisemitism, is condemnable in any form. But there is this usage of it — and I think it’s been noted for many, many years — to specifically make verboten criticism of the policies of a particular nation state — in this case, Israel — and the U.S. relationship with that country. One thing that it does remind me of a little bit is, in the years after 9/11— So, a lot of the students who were protesting — not all, but many of them — either have heritage, are Palestinian, or are from the Middle East, or of their Muslim background — I wouldn’t necessarily even say majority, but a significant number of them are of those backgrounds — and their identities, in some way, are weaponized against them, because they are treated as though their criticisms are somehow suspect, or there’s something sinister behind it. And you published this report through your center at Rutgers University recently, talking about how Islamophobia has been used as a tool in conjunction with accusations of antisemitism against many of these students. And it did remind me of post-9/11 when anyone who was Muslim making these critiques was somehow deemed suspect. Tell us a bit about that report, and some of your findings in that regard. SA: So, the report is called “Presumptively Antisemitic: Islamophobic Tropes in the Palestine-Israel Discourse.” And, as you noted, it was published by the Rutgers Center for Security, Race and Rights, and myself and Mitchell Plitnick are the coauthors of the report. We had been working on this report for nearly two years — it predated October 7, 2023 — because each time that a Palestinian or an Arab or a Muslim was involved in the Palestine-Israel debate— And, oftentimes, those three identities would get homogenized into “presumptively Muslim,” which, we know the majority of Arabs in America are actually Christian, and we know that the Middle East is full of various faiths, including Jewish, Christian, and other faiths. But everyone would be homogenized into this Muslim identity that had been racialized as presumptively violent, hateful, despotic, and antisemitic. And these racial stereotypes were then used to silence, discredit, censor those speakers, even when those speakers were experts. And that would be the equivalent of peddling an anti-Black racist trope in order to exclude African Americans from engaging in the discussion about racism in America, or peddling antisemitic racial tropes to exclude Jews from engaging in the discussion about religious freedom in America, right? So, this topic, the Palestine-Israel topic, is extremely important for these diverse communities, because many of them are of Palestinian ancestry, or they have friends who are Palestinian, or their origins are in the Middle East. And so, there is this cultural connection, and this personal connection. And the fact that they happen to have that identity suddenly then places them outside the purview of free speech rights, or political activism rights, because they are accused of having hateful motivations towards Jews, rather than simply being critical of the status quo politically, and militarily, and socioeconomically, which is effectively what you do when you have a debate or a discussion that is based on facts, and an analysis of the current situation and the historical situation. So, effectively what we did is we unpacked that stereotype to show that to presume that a Muslim or an Arab or a Palestinian is antisemitic without any evidence other than simply that they are criticizing Israeli government practices, or Israeli military practices, or Israeli policy, or U.S. foreign policy, that if that’s all you have, that’s the only evidence you have, or that you’re critical of Zionism as a political ideology, well, then you’re really peddling a racial trope that’s Islamophobic. And, again, the ultimate objective is to ensure that one does not contribute towards bigotry towards one group — which, in this case, would be Muslims — in the name or claiming to do it to protect bigotry or to stop bigotry against another group: Jews. Because that is effectively not the objective; the objective is to ensure that there is a monopoly over the narrative about Palestine-Israel in America that is unconditionally and staunchly pro-Israeli. My position is, that’s very un-American. I mean, that’s fascist, and that’s propaganda. And I would say that if the conversation were limited to any one perspective on what was acceptable. So, ultimately, that report is an attempt to educate people about that racial trope so that they’re more careful, they’re more thoughtful, and they actually look to the facts when a Muslim, Arab, or Palestinian is accused of antisemitism. To determine, did this person in fact engage in antisemitism, or is this person simply communicating political beliefs through which the accuser disagrees with, and the accuser wants to discredit and silence in bad faith? And I’ll just add that this stereotype of being presumptively antisemitic is an extension of these post-9/11 stereotypes, which resulted in significant material, liberty, and economic and dignitary harms to Muslims, Arabs, and South Asians across America after 9/11, which is effectively the subject of my book “The Racial Muslim: When Racism Quashes Religious Freedom.” So, this is an extension of that. To make people cognizant that, when you assume that Muslims are violent and hateful people without any evidence, when that’s just a racial stereotype, then it makes it very easy for bad faith actors to then extend that to, oh, they also hate Jews. And, again, that doesn’t mean antisemitism doesn’t exist among Muslim communities, but Islamophobia also exists among Jewish communities and Christian communities, but that doesn’t mean that every Jew is Islamophobic, and it doesn’t mean every Christian is Islamophobic, just like it doesn’t mean that every Muslim is antisemitic. So, providing that individual responsibility, looking for the facts to determine whether or not someone is in fact hateful towards a particular group, is extremely important, because otherwise you are defaming, you are slandering, you are libeling, and you are smearing individuals. And if that same type of behavior were conducted against a white person, a white Christian person, or a white Jewish person, everybody would understand that that is unacceptable. And that, in fact, the person that should be discredited is the bad faith accuser, not the victim of these racist tropes that are being peddled at them or deployed against them. MH: You made the very good point about these measures being taken place ostensibly on behalf of protecting the safety of minorities, but we’ve seen in the last few months very severe and very violent attacks on Palestinians in the United States, symbols of Palestinian identity. There was a murder of a young boy in Chicago a few months ago, there was a shooting attack on several young Palestinian students, one of whom was left paralyzed as a result of that. And there seems to be a grave disjuncture between the level of concern being expressed for emotional harms, as opposed to real harms which are taking place right now. And, to the point about campuses as well, too, there was a chemical attack on some Palestinian students at Columbia University recently, which the administration of that school and the press has taken quite minimal interest in, compared to how grave it is in reality. I was curious about one thing particularly, Sahar, that I saw in the news a few months ago in Florida: efforts to ban Palestinian student groups from campus entirely. And it seems that Florida may be a testing ground for further measures that may be rolled out in the rest of the country. Is there a legal basis, really, for banning this type of speech entirely by law? I know that the administrations were putting great administrative pressure and political pressure on these groups and these young people, but can they actually make Palestinian activism verboten legally on campuses in the United States in the future? SA: Well, without knowing the specifics of the case, generally what universities do if they shut down or suspend student groups is they do not state that it is because of their viewpoint, and it is not because of their exercise of their constitutional rights. Usually they will find what we call pretext; you violated this policy by not reserving the room appropriately, or by inviting outside speakers or outside attendees when you were not allowed to. There are all sorts of policies that universities have on a range of topics and, if the administrators want to harass students and give them a hard time, they can find these so-called “facially neutral” policies and say, well, it has nothing to do with, with your viewpoint, it has to do with you violating this viewpoint-neutral policy. And then the question becomes, well, is the enforcement viewpoint-neutral? And if there are other clubs or university student groups that have also violated those policies, are they being treated in the same manner? And that’s why you’re seeing more litigation that is being brought by Palestinian groups and Muslim student groups, represented often by Palestine Legal, which has started to represent these student groups who clearly— Well, there’s reason to believe that they are being targeted, based on their viewpoint and based on their identity, but oftentimes that then gets resolved in court. But what the university administrators will claim is that, no, it’s not related to their identity or their viewpoint. But, again, I think that when you’re looking at places like Florida, or Texas, or other what we call “anti-DEI states,” this is just the beginning of a much broader agenda, which is to quash and eliminate any type of agency, or mobilization, or programming, or curriculum that centers the experiences and the voices and the knowledge production of minority communities, whether they’re Black communities, Native American communities, Indigenous communities, Muslim or Arab communities. And it’s easy, and it’s politically expedient, to punch down at Palestinian student groups, because anti-Palestinian racism is so bipartisan, and Islamophobia is so mainstream and normalized, that they can get away with it. But it sets a dangerous precedent, because what they really want is they don’t want Black history to be taught in any schools that is not simply glorifying a white-dominant narrative, and that in any way provides the African American diversity of experiences. And we can then apply that to American history vis a vis Native/Indigenous populations, American history vis a vis immigrant populations, and so on and so forth. So, this is where I hope that people across the country who may not have any particular connection to Palestine or to the Palestine-Israel issue, but if they care about ensuring that our universities, and our schools, and our government, and our media represents the rich diversity of perspectives and lived experiences in the United States, that they really need to pay attention and push back against this censorship. Because what we saw after 9/11 was, they came for us first as the Muslims, and they justified expanding government authority — especially executive authority — and they justified heightened judicial deference by telling the population, don’t worry, we’re not going to take away your civil liberties, we’re going to take away their civil liberty; these Muslims, these outsiders, these threats. And, over time, that expanded, and then surveillance and the dilution of civil liberties became more normalized. So, even if someone doesn’t care much about the Palestine-Israel issue per se, they absolutely should care about their free speech rights, their academic freedom rights, and the ability for our country to function in a way that does not perpetuate white Judeo-Christian dominance. Because, by 2050, this country, there will be no majority race, and there will be no majority sectarian religion, right? There will be such a diversity even among Christians, and then with Islam, and Hinduism, and Judaism, and Buddhism, we need to have a country that educates our students in a way that allows them to understand the reality of America. MH: You make a really good point, too, because, obviously, these anxieties about the student activism in Palestine ties into much broader anxieties that were also visible during the Black Lives Matter protests a few years ago. And it’d been an ongoing sort of theme on campuses, particularly in the last decade; [even] beyond that, I would say. And one thing I want to also make a point to listeners, too, is that oftentimes developments in universities are treated as somehow separate from society, or somehow less serious than main federal politics, and what have you and so forth. But, really, the reason that there’s so much scrutiny from, say, in this case, a group seeking to suppress criticism of Israel is they know that, on campuses, you’re seeing the future elite of the country are there, and having their worldviews formed. They’re being groomed and developed and getting their skills together to take on these very important roles in society, so they’d like to shape the debate at that level, such that the downstream effects as they see it will later manifest in their favor. So, it’s very, very important what happens on these campuses as well. And one thing, Sahar, which I saw in the news and found very alarming and I think people should know it as well, too is that former President Trump — and, maybe, future President Trump, depending on the election — he had said recently in response to questions about these protests on campuses that he would take the step of revoking the visas of students who are foreign students who take part in what he called pro-Hamas rallies. And, really, in practice, this seems to be any rally which is for the support of a Palestinian rights, and so forth. And this proposal, as extreme as it is, seems to tie into a broader theme of hostility to immigration, or immigrants and minorities, and so forth. And it’s actually wedding support for Israel into a much more extreme set of far-right policies, you could say, aimed at changing the composition of the United States. I was curious of your perspective of how the evolution of support for Israel as a component of U.S. domestic politics has been playing out, and how this realignment — this support for Israel towards the far right — is manifesting itself on the ground. SA: Israel is a very unusual subject matter when looking through the domestic politics lens, because it’s so bipartisan in the unconditional support for its policies and practices, even though its policies and practices are hawkish, militaristic— It’s a permanent occupation, it’s now been called an apartheid state by many human rights organizations, and it is now being charged with genocide by South Africa. And the fact that you have such strong unconditional support for it by both Democrats and Republicans makes it stand out, as opposed to other issues, like abortion, voting rights, diversity, equity, inclusion, social welfare programs. And what I believe we’re witnessing is the conservatives, the political right, taking advantage, and exploiting the support for Israel that is in the Democratic Party. And, for various reasons which we don’t have enough time to go into, in terms of why there’s so much political domestic support for Israel, especially among elected officials— And a lot of it absolutely has to do with the influence of special interest groups in our political system overall, not just on the issue of Israel, whether it’s gun rights, or abortion, or other what we call hot topics. But they are leveraging that to quash the university activity, and to oppose DEI with the objective, the long term objective to — as I stated before — to regress our education system back to an era when it was European origin, or people of European ancestry, they were centered in how we educated people, that it was Judeo-Christian tradition that centers how we educate people. And so, if you are not from the Global North, and if you are not of Judeo-Christian tradition, then you are a permanent outsider. You will not see yourself in the books that are assigned, in the type of knowledge production, in the professors, in anything, right? You will be an outsider. And that, then, perpetuates that system. And so, what we’ve seen, I would say, since 9/11 by this generation, by this post-9/11 generation is a rebuke of that white Judeo-Christian-dominant system. The #MeToo movement, which was a gender rights movement, the LGBTQ movement, the Black Lives Matter movement, now the Palestine human rights movement. All of these are part of a pattern, or a manifestation of the change in the demographics of this country, because these are the college students who are now in there from 18 to 25, and they are realizing that the America that they were born into simply is not acknowledging their lived experiences. And they’re demanding change. And that’s why you have to understand the Palestinian social movement as an extension of that. What’s paradoxical is that, if it was anything but Palestine-Israel, the Democrats would be supporting the movement, just like they did the Black Lives Matter, and the #MeToo movement, and the LGBTQ movement. But, because Israel is unconditionally supported by both the political right and left, you’re seeing liberals engage in illiberal ways, in illiberal practices. And they are creating a dangerous precedent, they are doing the dirty work — and I call it dirty work because it’s so un-American — of the conservatives of the political right who are, in fact, seeking more censorship, less free speech, less academic freedom for those on the political left. For themselves, of course, they want as much free speech as possible, as much academic freedom as possible. And, when DEI includes ideological diversity, suddenly the political right is on board, because they use that as code for, “hire more white male conservatives.” And so it’s all about, if it serves us, we want it. If it doesn’t serve us, we don’t want it. Rather than looking at DEI as an objective, the objective is for there to be more representation in workplaces, in universities, in professors, as students, in the media, that represents America. And that is going to change based on the state, based on the region of the country, but just acknowledging that no group of people should be in a country where they feel that they’re completely invisible, if not outright oppressed. So, the message I think that I have for the liberals is: be careful how you respond to the censorship on Palestine, because it will expand. It will expand to the various issues that you care about, like abortion rights, and voting rights, and anti-gerrymandering, and gun rights. Pick the issue that you care about. Once you make it normal for there not to be any type of open debate and discussion by experts— And I will highlight “by experts.” I don’t think that speech by pundits and people who rant is very helpful speech, whatever the position is. But remember [that] in universities we have a peer review process. We have a process where, if you go and start stating things that are false, there are peers who will call you out for it. And that is a form of quality control that doesn’t exist on social media, or doesn’t exist in other media outlets. And that’s why universities are so well suited to have contentious debates and discussions, and let the university administrators, and the faculty, and the students figure out ways to do it in a robust, healthy way that is not harassing to individual students, that is not racist towards individual students, but in a way that allows students to have access or exposure to different ideas by experts. But what we’re seeing now is attempts to completely stop that. And so, then the question is: well, where can students go learn? If it’s social media, that is bad news for education. You can’t learn much from 240 characters, or from a three-minute TikTok video, or from a five- or ten-minute YouTube video. Universities are there so that you can take the time and learn things in depth through a class, through programming, through conferences, through conversations, through mentoring. And so, this political intervention by these House Un-American Activities Committees, and these Senate Un-American Activities Committees, is bad for our universities. It’s bad for the quality of higher education in the United States. And I think it just goes without saying that Congress has no business interfering with universities, and they need to stay out of universities’ businesses, and let them be managed and run by professionals. MH: Sahar, it’s interesting, it seems like every generation of young people in the United States has a cause which they’re very galvanized by. We saw in the last century the Civil Rights Movement, the Vietnam War, the struggle against apartheid. It strikes me very much that the pro-Palestine movement is that cause for a younger generation of young student activists. I was reading a book recently by Rashid Khalidi, “The Hundred Years War in Palestine;” we had him on the podcast a few months back as well, too. There was a very interesting anecdote of his own time as a student in New York and, at that time, many decades ago, the Palestinian cause was much less— The framing of it was much different in the United States, if the Palestinian perspective was discussed at all. And he said he recalled going to a protest of Golda Meir giving a speech in New York. And, at his protest, there were about four people [there] protesting against her appearance. And there were hundreds and hundreds if not thousands of students who were going to watch her speech in support of it. And now, it seems like the whole dichotomy is flipped, and that change, which is so manifest on a popular level, is not manifest yet at an institutional level at all. I’m curious, just to conclude, your own perspective of how important or defined perspective has become for young people that you see as a professor or engaging in activism. What has the Palestinian cause come to symbolize for them, and how it may develop in the U.S. in the future? SA: I think the Palestinian issue, or the experience that they are witnessing right now, the events they’re witnessing, is waking up a generation to the contradictions between what they learn in school, that the United States is a beacon of freedom, it is a place where one can speak freely and express dissenting views without fearing persecution, without fearing being arrested, or being expelled from school, or being surveilled, or being threatened with physical harm. Because they’re also taught in schools that those types of repressive measures happen abroad in autocracies, and now they are witnessing these types of practices here in the United States, and these practices are being demanded by Congress and imposed on university administrators. So, they’re realizing that their country has a democracy crisis and a constitutional crisis, where the very people elected to uphold the constitution are now abusing their authority to violate the constitution, but only for certain students. So, they’re also realizing how racism works, and how — as I discuss in my book “The Racial Muslim” when focusing on religious freedom in particular — that these constitutional rights have historically always been constrained by the racial identity of the person seeking to exercise those rights. And so, if you are white and Judeo-Christian, you have the fullest extent and the full liberty to exercise those rights, and you’re much, much less likely to have those rights violated, either by private actors or by the government. But the more subordinated, or racialized, or stereotyped, or hated your minority group is, the less likely you can exercise those rights without repression. And, again, one need only look at the history of African Americans in America to know that reality. And so, they’re seeing that American racism, and American democratic deficits are not a thing of the past, and that they’re realizing that their generation has numerous challenges that they now must face, because they are the future leaders. I will tell you that many of us in the academy are using this moment to educate our students, to make them realize that you have a responsibility to be an agent that defends American fundamental values, and those values are being tested. Right now, you’re living through it and, rather than cowering in fear, or rather than being so pessimistic that you check out of the system, you have an obligation to lean in, and to demand and expect that your university leaders, your elected officials, and any other members of the elite that have decision-making powers, that you demand that they uphold the constitution, and that they uphold American fundamental values of free speech, academic freedom, racial equality. And the fact that you are one of the case studies is— It can either be a privilege or a burden, but it is their reality. So, yes, we are in another social movement. We are seeing a major transition in how the Palestine-Israel issue is being addressed, discussed, and examined, at least among college students. And the biggest fear of the individuals and groups who do not want that change, who want to continue that monopoly over the narrative on Israel that it is always the victim, and that Palestinians are always the terrorists, which is a false narrative, that they are going to do everything they can to repress that competition of ideas in the marketplace of ideas. And so, the question we have to ask ourselves is, are we going to sit by and be quiet and be complicit, or are we going to stand up and defend the values, but also be willing to defend those values, when the speaker is someone you disagree with? My position is, universities need to be places for robust discussion and robust debate, and utilize the peer review process, where if someone states something that is false or that is misinformation, there will be others in the room that can challenge that, or that can provide alternative programming that challenges that. But censorship is absolutely not the American way, and if we make it the American way, then we are going down the path of autocracy. MH: Sahar Aziz, thank you so much for joining us today. SA: Thank you. MH: That’s Sahar Aziz, Distinguished Professor of Law and Chancellor’s Social Justice Scholar at Rutgers Law School, and author of the book “The Racial Muslim: When Racism Quashes Religious Freedom.” Before we go, I wanted to share with you that Intercepted has been nominated for a Webby Award under the category of “Best News and Politics Podcast.” Thank you to all our listeners, guests, and everyone that makes this show happen every week. You can help us win the category by casting a vote, and we’ll share the link in the show notes. And that does it for this episode of Intercepted. Intercepted is a production of The Intercept. Laura Flynn produced this episode. Rick Kwan mixed our show. Legal review by Shawn Musgrave and Elizabeth Sanchez. This episode was transcribed by Leonardo Faierman. And our theme music, as always, was composed by DJ Spooky. If you want to support our work, you can go to theintercept.com/join. Your donation, no matter what the size, makes a real difference. And, if you haven’t already, please subscribe to Intercepted and Deconstructed. Also, do leave us a rating and review whenever you find our podcasts. It helps other listeners to find us as well. If you want to give us additional feedback, email us at podcasts@theintercept.com. Thank you so much for joining us. Until next time, I’m Murtaza Hussain.