[There are currently ongoing daily protests in NYC across from the U.N. In D.C., there is now a Gaza Media Accountability Encampment from 10 a.m. to 9 p.m. daily at 400 North Capitol St., where several media outlets are located, including NBC, MSNBC, NewsNation, and Fox. There will be a news conference there today, Tuesday, at 2 p.m. contact: [email protected].]
Rashid Khalidi recently wrote in The Guardian: “I spent decades at Columbia. I’m withdrawing my fall course due to its deal with Trump.”
The Department of Homeland Security has indicated it will target the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement, which — like the movement against apartheid South Africa — seeks to use economic pressure to change Israeli policy.
AVIVA CHOMSKY, [email protected]
Available for a limited number of interviews, Chomsky is a contributor to TomDispatch and is professor of history at Salem State University. She just wrote the piece “The Nightmare in Gaza: Preventing Criticism of Israel by Defining It as Antisemitic.”
She writes: “In 2016, the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA), a group of 35 mostly European countries, drafted what it called a working definition of antisemitism. The Alliance had been founded in 1998 to promote Holocaust education and, in its own words, to ‘strengthen governmental cooperation to work towards a world without genocide.’ All too sadly, right now, its definition is being used to do the opposite: it’s helping to criminalize opposition to genocide. …
“The United States imposes no legal prohibitions on challenging ethnonationalism in other lands. I am free to criticize India, Hungary, or any other country, democratic or otherwise, that in any way privileges one race, ethnicity, or religion over others — but I can’t criticize Israel for doing the same when it comes to Palestinians. I’m free to criticize racism, discrimination, and racist violence anywhere else on earth — but not in Israel. If any other country creates the equivalent of concentration camps or commits genocide, we can denounce it and try to stop it — but if Israel does that, I will be accused of antisemitism for telling the truth about what Israel is doing. According to the IHRA we can state those truths about any other country committing war crimes and genocide, but not about what Israel is doing in Gaza. Given what we are witnessing in Gaza, that is not just a double standard, it’s impunity for genocide. …
“By mid-2025, 46 countries had adopted the definition. President Trump implemented it with an executive order in 2019, citing Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 that prohibits discrimination based on race, color, or national origin for any program that gets federal financial assistance. As a result, Title VI proscriptions can now be applied to a person who criticizes Zionism, who uses the term genocide to describe Israel’s slaughter in Gaza, or who advocates the nonviolent Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement or indeed any withdrawal of U.S. support for what Israel is now doing. …”
“Harvard University’s decision in January 2025 to become the first Ivy League university to join the trend, adopting the definition (followed by Yale in April), specifically designated ‘Zionists’ as a protected class. Thus, the policy prohibits ‘antisemitic, racist, sexist, homophobic, anti-Zionist, anti-Arab, Islamophobic, anti-LDS, or anti-Catholic’ behaviors. …
“While the IHRA claims that stereotyping or caricaturing Jews, or attributing a particular version of pro-Israel politics to Jews, is antisemitic, its own definition stereotypes, caricatures, and attributes a particular politics about Israel to Jews.”