A call for courage in the face of rising fascism, antisemitism and anti-Palestinian racism and genocide
How the weaponization of accusations of antisemitism threatens free speech, academic freedom, democracy and justice at MIT and beyond
Preamble — these are the remarks I read at the MIT Faculty meeting on Wednesday, April 16, 2025. Passages in brackets were subsequently added:
I am troubled by recent ethical failures at the MIT Faculty Newsletter (FNL) that mirror the nation-wide crisis that’s destroying higher education.
I submitted to the FNL, for their March/April 2025 issue, an essay titled: “A call for courage in the face of rising fascism, including antisemitism and anti-Palestinian racism and genocide.” The FNL editors did not publish it. The decision letter mentions, without identifying, “...certain statements [that] could be considered as libelous...” Given the essay’s contents, this rationale is one that any competent student of journalism would recognize as censorship under the guise of legal prudence.
There is a troubling conflict of interest that undermines the integrity of the FNL review process. The President of MIT's chapter of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP@MIT) serves as FNL’s co-chair and was asked to help “review” and “decide” on whether my essay could be published — even though the essay includes a critique of AAUP@MIT’s silence about violations of my academic freedom and freedom of expression at MIT.
Also alarming is the contradiction in the FNL editors’ essay “Eyes on the Price” about upholding democracy, free speech and academic freedom. The editors rightly declare: “Silence is not neutrality; it is complicity...” Yet, not only did the FNL editors silence my voicing a perspective that’s already suppressed nation-wide, but the entire issue remains silent about the most ominous threat to democracy, free speech and academic freedom today, namely the weaponization of accusations of antisemitism for the silencing of the words “Palestine” and “Genocide.” As we’ve seen at Columbia and now at Harvard, this silencing threatens higher education as a whole.
As MIT faculty, let’s ask: What is the value of a faculty newsletter that claims to defend democracy while participating in repression? When will we, the MIT Faculty, have the courage to all stand up to defend academic freedom and freedom of expression without any Palestine exception?
[Please note that, on April 24, 2025, MIT faculty received the “Draft Report from Committee to Review Faculty Newsletter Policies and Procedures.” In the FNL editors’ own words, “What is published in the newsletter is essentially what the authors submit” and “If anything is submitted that's not libelous, you know, it will be published.” These quotes suggest that the FNL editors contradicted their own “articulated mission” and well-established “process” in order to censor my submission. Indeed my essay is not libelous — every factual statement there is documented. But it was not published in the March/April 2025 issue of the FNL. On April 24, 2025, I published an essay in Mondoweiss, “I faced censorship and attacks at MIT for trying to teach about Palestine. This reflects the rising fascism in higher education,” that includes additional details about the FNL’s censorship and the AAUP@MIT’s standing — or, rather, lack of standing — on academic freedom and freedom of speech.]
So now here comes my own call for courage. This is an expanded version of the essay that was censored by the FNL editors:
Yes, in time of rising fascism, silence is complicity
As a friendly amendment to the “Call for Courage in the Face of Rising Antisemitism, White Supremacy, Misogyny, and Authoritarianism” by Associate Professor of Urban Science and Planning Catherine D’Ignazio MS ’14, we must call out the omission of anti-Palestinian racism in her essay. This omission seems to me an instance of the “moral panic” that Israeli historian Ilan Pappé describes as “a situation in which a person is afraid of adhering to his or her own moral convictions because this would demand some courage that might have consequences.” Such lack of courage is particularly troubling when anti-Palestinian sentiment is overlooked in order to bolster membership in organizations like the AAUP@MIT and the MIT Council on Academic Freedom (MITCAF). These organizations should be defending free speech and academic freedom without any Palestine Exception. Yet, D’Ignazio’s “call for courage” on behalf of AAUP@MIT and MITCAF makes no mention of the fact that the most tragic and ongoing violations of academic freedom, freedom of expression, the right to health, housing and education, and every other human right are happening nowhere else but in Palestine where “Every university in Gaza has been destroyed” in “a stark act of scholasticide” as part of “the tumult of genocide.”
In light of D’Ignazio’s essay’s title, we must also denounce the pervasive and dangerous framing of pro-Palestinian anti-genocide advocacy as “rising antisemitism.” This conflation distorts the reality of antisemitism and marginalizes the lives of Palestinians who—for decades, long before the Hamas attack on Israel of October 7, 2023 — have endured a kind of systemic oppression so devastating that human rights organizations such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have described it as meeting the criteria for apartheid and even genocide now. A recent Amnesty International report, The State of the World’s Human Rights from April 2025, deems the situation in Palestine “a live-streamed genocide.”
The conflation of advocacy for Palestinian rights with antisemitism also harms MIT community members who are silenced or punished for supporting Palestinian liberation. As scholars and educators, we must engage in nuanced and historically informed analyses of antisemitism, anti-Palestinian racism and all forms of injustice based on race, ethnicity, religion, gender, caste, and language.
One central objective of this essay is to show that the ongoing repression in higher education and beyond is part of a larger historical pattern, as sketched by Henry Giroux in his essay on “Neoliberal fascism and the echoes of history” and Chris Edges in an essay titled “Surrendering to authoritarianism.” This ugly history of repression dates back at least to the turn of the 20th century, whereby anti-Palestinian racism is concealed through a well-entrenched series of political, intellectual, and linguistic trumperies for the benefit of Empire. A key tool of this Empire is what President Dwidght Eisenhower, in 1961 already, called the “military-industrial-academic complex” of which MIT is a central node, as noted in Stuart Leslie’s book The Cold War and American Science: The Military-industrial-academic Complex at MIT and Stanford and the MIT Coalition for Palestine’s research primer Science for Genocide. Eisenhower understood the Federal Government’s threat to free speech and academic freedom. In his 1961 Farewell Address, he expressed the fear that “the prospect of domination of the nation’s scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present and is gravely to be regarded.”
In the first part of this essay, I explore the historical entanglement of Zionism with both antisemitism and anti-Palestinian racism, providing the context for understanding how contemporary discussions of Palestine are repressed through false accusations of “antisemitism.” These accusations rely on the (now too familiar) dangerous equating of “Zionism” with “Judaism,” as formally codified in the now widely adopted International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s (IHRA) Working Definition of Antisemitism (in contrast with, say, the Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism). Demystifying these linguistic distortions and their role in “power-knowledge régimes of truth,” as analyzed by Michel Foucault, helps pave the way for more honest and historically-grounded discussions. My hope is that such discussions can move us closer to peace and justice for all, starting right here at MIT, as suggested in the up-close and personal case studies in the second part of the essay.
A (too) brief history of the entanglement of Zionism with antisemitism and anti-Palestinian racism
Settler-colonial Zionism, from its inception in late 19th and early 20th century in response to the age-old persecution of Jews in Europe, has enlisted both antisemitism and anti-Palestinian racism as “allies.” Theodore Herzl (1860–1904), founder of political Zionism, wrote in his Complete Diaries that “the anti-Semites will become our most dependable friends.” In the same diaries, Herzl sought to align Zionism in Palestine with colonial endeavors such as Cecil Rhodes’ white supremacist and expansionist vision in Africa.
In A Jewish State, even as he cast Zionism as one “rampart of Europe against Asia, an outpost of civilization as opposed to barbarism,” Herzl simultaneously argued against the integration of Jews in Europe. He opposed diasporic Jews who saw European countries such as Britain and France as their homelands and who denounced the anti-Palestinian racism that would eventually lead to the Nakba and to accusations of ethnic cleansing, fragmentation, apartheid and now a plausible genocide according to the International Court of Justice’s ruling in January 2024.
The 1917 Balfour Declaration falls in line with Herzl’s notion of anti-Semites as Zionists’ “most dependable friends.” It illustrates how antisemitism and anti-Palestinian racism intersected to help create a Zionist ethno-supremacist nation-state in Palestine — without regard for the indigenous population and their homeland. Lord Balfour, a white supremacist evangelical Christian, championed the cause of British antisemites who wanted Jews out of Britain and into Palestine — as one necessary step toward that “Last Judgment condemning all Jews to eternal suffering in Hell, unless they convert to Christianity.” Furthermore, in 1917, as in 2025, Western powers like Britain and the United States have aligned with Zionism to advance their own geopolitical interests in the Middle East, often subordinating the well-being of both Jews and Palestinians to strategic agendas. Historian Ilan Pappé’s book, Ten Myths about Israel, analyzes how Balfour's letter linked Zionism with both antisemitism and anti-Palestinian racism.
In his 1923 Iron Wall manifesto, Vladimir Jabotinsky (1880–1940), a prominent Zionist leader and founder of the paramilitary and still active organization Betar, articulated a vision of settler-colonial Zionism that requires violent domination over the native population (or “naked terrorism,” in Walter Zander’s description!):
“Zionist colonization [...] must either be terminated or carried out in defiance of the will of the native population. This colonization can, therefore, continue and develop only under the protection of a force independent of the local population—an iron wall which the native population cannot break through.”
Today, Betar, an openly racist organization whose slogan is “Every Jew, a .22,” is, alongside Canary Mission, suspected to work as an accomplice in the visa revocation of pro-Palestine students, like Mahmoud Khalil and Rümeysa Öztürk, in violation of their rights to free speech. This is according to a New York Times article on shadowy Zionist groups whose “mission is to expose antisemitic students.” The same article reports that Betar claims a “deport list” of thousands “jihadis … who support Hamas” and who are allegedly “engaged in support for terrorism” (read: in support of Palestinians’ human rights).
British film-maker Gillian Mosely, who grew up in a Zionist home but then learned to question Israel’s Hasbara (a Hebrew term for state-sponsored propaganda), has noted, in an article on Ben Gurion and the 1930’s Palestinian population transfer, that the Zionists’ program for a supremacist ethnonationalist state “preceded Hitler’s rise and the enactment of the Final Solution.”
Advocating for a Free Palestine is not antisemitic
Political Zionism emerged as one response to the persecution of Jews in Europe, but its alignment, in both Herzl’s and Jabotinsky’s vision, with colonial frameworks, and its framing as the sole legitimate expression of Jewish identity have marginalized alternative diasporic Jewish movements, such as the Yiddishist and Bund traditions, which opposed antisemitism, colonialism and anti-Palestinian racism. Itamar Mann and Lihi Yona’s article on “the new definition of antisemitism [that] is transforming America and serving a Christian nationalist plan” has documented aspects of Zionism that are antisemitic to the extent that they make Israel, even as an ethno-supremacist nation-state, essential to some Jews’ identity, thus excluding the increasing number of Jews who are anti-Zionist. This re-definition of antisemitism turns anti-Zionist Jews into… Semitic anti-semites aka “self-hating Jews,” “un-Jews” or “traitors.” Ilan Pappé as well, in his chapter debunking the “Zionism is Judaism” myth among Ten Myths about Israel, has dissected the ways in which Zionism triggered an increase in antisemitism, starting with the claim that Jews worldwide necessarily form a “nation” making them intrinsically distinct from non-Jewish co-citizens in whichever country they might have previously lived or were still living. In this version of Zionism, Jews outside of Israel cannot belong, and cannot be trusted to pledge allegiance, to the nations they are part of.
The Zionists’ contested redrawing of the boundaries of Jewish identity has a linguistic dimension as well. Hebrew has now become Israel’s sole official national language at the expense of both Arabic and Yiddish. Camelia Suleiman’s, Yonatan Mandel’s, and Chana Morgenstern’s guest lectures in my Fall 2024 seminar have shed light on the marginalization of Arabic in Israel, even among Mizrahi Jews whose ancestors spoke Arabic. They have documented the identity crises and the sometimes lethal dangers faced by Arabic-speaking Palestinians in Israel because of language barriers. As for Yiddish, which is now often seen as a symbol of anti-Zionist resistance, it has been denigrated as “ghetto language,” “corrupted German,” a language spoken by “half-men” and “an inferior breed of half-Jews, who preferred the comforts of life abroad to the challenges and dangers of life in Israel.” These anti-Yiddish attitudes are documented in Abraham Brumberg’s 1999 article on the “Centenary of the Jewish Socialist Labor Bund” and in Marc Volivici’s 2020 book German as a Jewish Problem: The Language Politics of Jewish Nationalism. These attitudes are all too reminiscent of Haiti’s own history of linguistic oppression with Kreyòl devalorized as “half-language” or “corrupted French,” as described in my New York Times article on the ways “I was taught to despise my language and myself.”
The weaponization of language for hegemony seems like a universal phenomenon. This is one recurrent topic of study in my “Black Matters” class (co-taught with Prof. Fox Harrell), my “Creole languages & Caribbean identities” class and my Fall 2024 “Special Topics” People’s Seminar / Speaker Series on language and linguistics for decolonization and liberation in Haiti, Palestine & Israel. The latter is still being censored by my MIT Linguistics colleagues who continue to allege that I “lack expertise” to offer such a seminar even as they claim that it only takes “basic common sense” to deconstruct such weaponization of language. The Palestine Exception triggers discrimination and contradictions that violate academic freedom at MIT Linguistics as well. Some of these are documented in my essay in The Tech on “Linguistics for liberation or for domination.” In a related vein, former MIT student Aaliya Hussain, who participated in my Fall 2024 seminar, wrote her “Independent Study” term paper on the language of MIT leadership which she mined for “the reproduction of fascist linguistic tropes and the promotion of neoliberal fascism, drawing upon the politics of disposability.”
These feats of political and linguistic trumpery underlying the politics of disposability, then and now as in Mahmoud Khalil’s case, would leave another Semitic people, the Palestinians, in the Kafkaesque predicament of being condemned as “antisemitic” by simply exercising their inalienable right to anti-colonial resistance. Worse yet, they would be labeled “antisemitic” even by antisemites such as Elise Stefanik, Donald Trump and other right-wing extremists!
Dear reader, would you call my enslaved African ancestors “racist” for revolting against their French oppressors on Haiti’s colonial plantations?
The entanglement of Zionism with antisemitism and anti-Palestinian racism throughout history has been further documented by Patrick Wolfe, Edward Said, Ilan Pappé (The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine), Noam Chomsky (On Palestine), Joseph Massad, Jonathan Ofir, and Tristan Sturm. This entanglement has now deepened through Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s alliances with Donald Trump and evangelical Christian Zionists who view Israel as part of apocalyptic prophecy. Tristan Sturm has dissected these un-kosher alliances whereby, in Netanyahu’s apocalyptic language, Trump, “as a vessel for God’s providential ends,” will help usher the salvation (the “Rapture”) of evangelical Christians. These alliances thus underscore troubling intersections of religion and politics at the core of settler-colonial Zionism. Within this inherently antisemitic biblical framework of Christian Zionism, Jews who do not convert to Christianity are ultimately condemned to divine punishment and will face apocalyptic suffering.
These Christian Zionist scenarios, going back to Lord Balfour’s in 1917, reflect an ideology that subordinates the long-term well-being of Jewish and Palestinian communities to geo-political and eschatological goals.
Today, accusations of "antisemitism” — with the formal backing of the widely adopted, yet tendentious, IHRA definition — in order to silence criticisms of Israel's policies against Palestinians are widespread in higher education. They persist despite growing protest among Jews, at MIT as well, against the ongoing risk of, if not actual, genocide and despite the fact that Jewish security is incompatible with a so-called “democratic Jewish state” — an oxymoron as long as Israel is considered, by organizations like Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, as implementing apartheid through systemic discrimination against Palestinians in both the occupied territories and within its own borders. Scholars such as Nurit Peled-Elhanan and Emmaia Gelman (founder of the Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism) and articles in Electronic Intifada, Jewish Forward, Jewish Currents, Mondoweiss, The Intercept, etc. have documented the various ways in which Palestinians are treated as disposable lesser humans by the Israeli state and its supporters, in Israel and beyond.
Freedom of expression, academic freedom, democracy and justice are under siege at MIT as well — up-close and personal case studies
At MIT, the consequences of the Zionism=Judaism equation have become painfully personal as I witness firsthand how it stifles dissent and demonizes advocacy for Palestinian rights, even advocacy on the part of MIT Jews for Collective Liberation, unleashing physical attacks, doxxing, accusations of antisemitism and terrorism (even “capital-T terrorism”!) and administrative pushback.
As I painstakingly documented in my August 2024 article in The Tech and in a more recent April 2025 Mondoweiss article, my efforts to teach about decolonization and liberation in Haiti, Palestine and Israel through the lens of language and linguistics have been met with intense pushback at MIT, starting in December 2023 until today in May 2025.
Despite the rejection, I transformed the course into a People’s Seminar/Speaker Series, with support from MIT’s MindHandHeart office, from Women’s and Gender Studies, and from a faculty colleague who requests anonymity. Ironically, five students — four undergraduates and one graduate, including Aaliya Hussain whom I previously mentioned — successfully petitioned to receive 12 credits each from MIT Linguistics for their participation in the seminar on a topic for which the department had claimed I lacked expertise.
I have even been blocked from accessing the MIT Linguistics Facebook page. This is all the more ironic that this block was a direct consequence of my now-deleted comment on a post for Noam Chomsky’s birthday on December 8, 2024, to:
“... remind my MIT Linguistics’ former colleagues that their actions against me (discrimination & attacks on my academic freedom and freedom of expression) constitute a betrayal of Noam’s legacy and his lifelong advocacy for a free Palestine out of Israel’s yoke, apartheid and now genocide. Please (re?)read his 1967 article “The Responsibility of Intellectuals” and block the ban: https://blocktheban.org.”
In his 1967 essay, Chomsky argued that academics and intellectuals have a moral obligation to challenge power and defend the oppressed. It thus seems reasonable to speculate that Chomsky would have been, at the very least, disappointed by MIT Linguistics’ ongoing violations of the principles of free speech and academic freedom he championed throughout his career. Such restrictions are also contrary to Chomsky’s anarchist libertarian politics, as articulated in works like On Anarchism and Understanding Power where he calls for resistance against hierarchical systems that suppress individual freedoms and critical inquiry.
A Palestine Exception at the MIT Chapter of the American Association of University Professors, at the MIT Council on Academic Freedom and at the MIT Faculty Newsletter
The president of AAUP@MIT justified their silence by citing the tension between “collective academic freedom” of departments to control curricula and the “individual academic freedom” of faculty. However, what happens when these freedoms clash, particularly for political reasons as in my case?
This question brings to mind historical abuses, such as those during the McCarthy era, when individual freedoms were sacrificed under the guise of institutional priorities favoring the “collective academic freedom” of universities to defend themselves against the alleged communism of individual faculty. This politically motivated notion that collective institutional norms, interests and reputation must trump faculty’s individual rights is analyzed by Ellen Schrecker in her book No Ivory Tower: McCarthyism and the Universities. In the McCarthy era as well, it’s “collective academic freedom” that was used for widespread suppression of dissent. This historical precedent underscores the dangers of subordinating “individual academic freedom” to “collective academic freedom,” particularly when institutional policies are so obviously shaped by political pressures — or by “the atmosphere on campus, ”in the words of one of the MIT Linguistics faculty who ruled against my course proposal.
These events reflect broader patterns of selective silence and complicity. While AAUP National has explicitly resisted “efforts to control what is thought, said, taught, and researched [as] antithetical to the educational mission of a university and the democratic values upon which it rests,” local chapters such as AAUP@MIT have failed to stand up for the principles they claim to defend. This silence perpetuates systems of oppression — including antisemitism, anti-Palestinian and anti-Black racism, and other forms of white supremacy — that undermine academic freedom, freedom of expression and the democratic mission of higher education.
Linguistic trumperies in service of anti-Palestinian racism
False accusations of antisemitism with grave repercussions at MIT and throughout academia are also evident in Congressional hearings and reports that tendentiously equate criticisms of Israel with hatred of Jews. These linguistic trumperies became flagrant at the Congressional hearing on December 5, 2023, which inspired my course proposal submitted to the MIT Linguistics section head a few hours later. There, Representative Elise Stefanik inaccurately claimed that “Intifada” means “calling for the genocide of Jews.” This misrepresentation distorts the term’s semantics and history, where it refers to Palestinian uprisings against occupation.
Equating Palestinian resistance (“Intifada”) and students’ anti-genocide protests with antisemitism is as flawed as labelling the Haitian Revolution “racist” for fighting the French enslavers and for liberating my African ancestors. Back then, the actual racist génocidaire was Napoleon. Yet, it’s the African revolutionaries’ own Intifada that was then, and is still now, portrayed as “barbaric.” In reality, the much celebrated Napoleon, really, “isn’t a hero to celebrate,” as Haitian-American historian Marlene Daut reminds us.
In the case of the students’ Intifada on U.S. campuses, not only does Stefanik’s claim do violence to the actual history and meaning of the word “Intifada,” it also contradicts a basic linguistic concept, namely the meaning of “meaning.” Then, there’s the fact that the most plausible case of genocide for us to fear, one made possible with U.S. funding, is that of Palestinians, not of Jews. Stefanik’s accusation in a mirror — or “reality-bending” in Lara and Stephen Sheehi’s theoretical framework in their book Psychoanalysis Under Occupation — aligns with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's strategy of using “rising antisemitism” to justify both Israel's genocide of Palestinians and U.S. support for the genocide. No wonder Congress gave his gaslighting a standing ovation.
MIT alumnus Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu referred to anti-genocide student activists as “Iran’s useful idiots.” However, I am not aware of any foreign state funding these students. In contrast, Israel finances organizations that promote Zionism, thus sidelining the increasing numbers of increasingly vocal anti-Zionist Jews protesting Israel’s genocide of Palestinians. As reported by The Guardian, in 2024 Hillel International highlighted MIT at the Knesset as a star example of Israel’s “expansive government effort to shape US discourse around the Gaza war.” This raises important questions about the ethics of institutional leadership at MIT vis-à-vis conflicts of interests that compromise academic freedom and freedom of speech on our campus. Indeed, shouldn’t we be concerned that the Vice-President of MIT Hillel, a pro-Israel organization, also holds the influential position of MIT Dean of Student Life overseeing disciplinary actions against pro-Palestine students? Concerns about discriminatory treatment of pro-Palestine students and student groups have been addressed by MIT students Prahlad Iyengar in the MIT Faculty Newsletter, Kate Pearce in The Tech, Aaliya Hussain in her term paper for my Fall 2024 seminar, and by a couple of Op Ed essays in the MIT Faculty Newsletter in 2024, alongside a nearly 7,000-word “Special Feature” article by Prof. Marah Gubar on “How the Rights of MIT Student Protesters Were Undermined...” documenting biased selective disciplining against pro-Palestine students.
It’s worth noting that, both at MIT and nationwide, the anti-genocide students and faculty who are being targeted and repressed by university administrations and the police, often with unprecedented disciplinary measures and verbal or physical violence, are disproportionately members of racialized and minoritized communities, including female, trans and non-binary students who are often the target of sexual harassment, as described by Kate Pearce’s “Open Letter to The MIT Committee on Discipline” in The Tech. The racial dimension of anti-Palestinian repression is highlighted, in the context of MIT, by the editors of the MIT Faculty Newsletter in an essay on “The Student Protesters and MIT” and, in the context of the U.S., by The Guardian in an article titled “They staged protests for Palestine. The consequences have been life-changing.” This echoes the fact that Zionism as well, from the onset, was a racist enterprise, as instantiated by Herzl’s and other Zionists’, from Max Simon Nordeau’s to Chaim Weizmann’s and David Ben Gurion’s and others’, racial hierarchies (see Shlomo Sand’s The Invention of the Land of Israel and Saree Makdisi’s Tolerance is a Wasteland: Palestine and the Culture of Denial for detailed studies of racist ideologies in Zionism).
A call for courage for solidarity with all the “Wretched of the Earth”
At MIT, we must demonstrate the courage to confront all forms of hate — be it antisemitism, Islamophobia, anti-Palestinian racism, anti-Black racism, or misogyny — without weaponizing one to veil the other. For example, we must keep challenging rhetoric that dehumanizes Palestinians and fuels genocidal violence. In Gaza, claims by Israeli leaders such as Isaac Herzog that “it is an entire nation out there that is responsible” reflect a troubling erasure of Palestinians’ humanity. As Prof. Nurit Peled-Elhanan observes, such language perpetuates the genocidal racist notion that there are no uninvolved civilians in Gaza.
This is urgent! Across the nation, universities are facing immense pressure to suppress discussions about Palestine, and to distort legitimate criticism of Israeli policies as antisemitism.
Our resistance begins with rejecting oversimplifications, false equivalences and other trumperies, so we can address the real forces threatening academic freedom, and diversity, equity and inclusion. This much was recognized by the editors of the MIT Faculty Newsletter (FNL) last year (2024) in their essays on “The Student Protesters and MIT,” “Reimagining MIT” and “In Defense of Learning, Research and Free Inquiry.” These challenges are not limited to Jews or Palestinians but extend to all disenfranchised groups, as Project 2025 demonstrates. Indeed, as I argue in my Newsweek article “Rhetoric Like Trump's Leads to Dark Places,” Trump doesn’t give a damn about Haitians and migrants either; his immigration policies and other abuses of power do not make America great.
Finally, it is our responsibility to hold ourselves and our institutions accountable for perpetuating injustice. We must condemn the complicity of powerful institutions like MIT in the military-industrial-academic complex that enables Israel’s horrific crimes against Palestinians—including children because, according to Nissim Vaturi, deputy speaker of the Knesset and Likud Member of Parliament, Gaza is “full of terrorists” since every child born there is “already a terrorist, from the moment of his birth.” Such crimes fall in the “elevated risk” and “red light” categories that are flagged as inacceptable in MIT’s own guidelines.
So MIT too must lead by example and must stand firm in its mission to build a #BetterWorld, promoting open inquiry and debates, and supporting dissenting voices. Together, with courage and integrity, we can work to advance knowledge. Let’s do so toward a future of genuine understanding and justice for all.
Michel DeGraff was professor at MIT Linguistics & Philosophy from 1996 to 2024. In November 2024, he was transferred out of MIT Linguistics and assigned a new title “Faculty-at-Large” at MIT’s School of Humanities, Arts & Social Sciences. Prof. DeGraff is co-founder and co-director of the MIT-Haiti Initiative, founding member of Akademi Kreyòl Ayisyen and fellow of the Linguistic Society of America.