The straight line from Gaza to Kirk
The crackdown on Gaza protests paved the way to today’s full on assault on free speech.
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The UN's Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory released a major report today officially finding that Israel has committed genocide against Palestinians in Gaza. As Commission head Navi Pillay, former chair of the Rwanda genocide inquiry and one of the most respected jurists in the area, explained in the New York Times:
The scale of destruction is devastating. More than 64,000 Palestinians have been killed, including over 18,000 children and nearly 10,000 women, according to Gazan health officials. Estimated life expectancy in Gaza has collapsed from 75 years to just over 40 in a single year, one of the steepest declines recorded. Hospitals, schools, churches, mosques and entire neighborhoods have been destroyed. Our analysis found that starvation has been used as a weapon of war and that the medical system has been deliberately destroyed. Maternal health care has been severely undermined. Children have been starved, shot and buried under rubble. According to UNICEF, one child has died every hour in Gaza. These are not the accidents of war. They are acts calculated to bring about the destruction of a people.
Establishing genocide requires not only the act but also the intent. Here, too, the evidence is clear. Senior Israeli leaders, including the president, the prime minister and the former defense minister, have dehumanized Palestinians. Yoav Gallant, the defense minister at the time of the Oct. 7 attacks, said, “We are fighting human animals,” while President Isaac Herzog proclaimed that the entire Palestinian nation was responsible. Their words have been matched by deeds: indiscriminate bombardment making Gaza uninhabitable, the blocking of humanitarian aid, sexual and gender-based violence and a siege we concluded was designed to starve the population to death. Together these constitute a pattern that demonstrates genocidal intent.
None of this is new, of course. The Commission's findings, updated with careful and exhaustive research and deliberations, closely track the preliminary judgment of the International Court of Justice. It aligns with the determinations of Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, B'Tselem, and virtually every independent organization or expert who has examined the case. A large and passionate student movement tried last year to speak out about it and try to prevent it from continuing. But as I wrote a few weeks ago, this expert consensus and social mobilization that would in other cases fuel moral outrage and prompt strong calls for action today has been normalized and will not likely lead to any meaningful action. Far more effort will go into punishing individuals and institutions who protest it, and trying to impose conformity with an official party line through state power – all in the name of "free speech".
The unprecedented application of repressive power by governments, institutions, the media and elites to silence and punish anyone who attempted to name it or to demand action against genocide laid the groundwork for today’s full scale assault on democracy. There is a direct line from the enthusiasm of elite institutions to punish anyone who spoke out about Gaza last year and today's full-scale right wing assault on freedom of speech. Far too many of those writers, politicians, and leaders who today recoil in horror at threats to punish anyone who fails to sufficiently mourn Kirk’s martydom were blisteringly enthusiastic to punish anyone who spoke out about the horrors in Gaza. Those were "controversial topics" and "divisive issues" which deserved a full and fair hearing from speakers on all sides. But apparently they weren't the right topics or issues.
I find it impossible to stomach college or university presidents who today emerge to take institutional positions over Kirk after refusing to take any institutional position over Israel and Palestine. I can hardly believe they dare show their faces today to speak out in favor of hosting “controversial” speakers on campus after spending the last two years shutting down speakers and panels about Gaza. You can’t pick and choose and expect to be taken seriously.
Last spring's campus protest movement calling for action to prevent what is now officially acknowledged to be genocide triggered a ferocious bipartisan backlash which has never stopped unfolding. Students and faculty were doxxed, slandered by social media campaigns, lacerated in the media, reported to their deans and presidents. Faculty were fired and students expelled for alleged antisemitism. Donors withheld gifts, trustees pressured administrations, Congressional committees carried out witch hunts, external advocacy groups fanned the flames and demanded ever more brutal crackdowns. Most colleges and universities couldn’t capitulate fast enough, often racing ahead of external demands to punish their own students and faculty. If that sounds familiar today, it should — it is precisely the model being applied today over Kirk, and very much the model of discourse championed by Kirk and his notorious Professor Watchlist.
The Trump administration is doing appalling things to free speech and higher education, things which even a few years ago would have been instantly seen as unconstitutional and roundly dismissed. But Trump built on the foundations Biden and much of liberal establishment had laid down to crack down on the Gaza protests. Trump had a head start when he froze federal funding in the name of combating alleged antisemitism, demanding exorbinate financial payoffs and intrusive control over hiring, programming, curricula, research and teaching. His administration drew on existing “watchlists” from right wing groups like Canary Mission and Betar when it arrested, detained, and attempted to deport international students over their involvement in campus activism – or, in other cases, for just publishing an oped or posting on social media. It wasn't just about antisemitism, of course – that was always part of a broader engineered moral panic around transgender students and the disgraceful criminalization of DEI as the wedge used to impose state control over higher education and to inflict as much pain as possible on institutions viewed as bastions of liberal politics (ironically enough, given how enthusiastically they crushed the Gaza protests and rushed to eliminate DEI offices).
Middle East Studies faculty and students could only feel an aching familiarity with the crackdown on free speech following Kirk’s murder. The methods employed by the right wing activist networks to punish anyone accused of celebrating his killing are same as those used to attack those accused of being anti-Israel. Journalists, faculty, and many others now being fired for refusing to sanitize Kirk's long history of extreme right wing statements look very much like those sanctioned for presenting the longer history of Israeli-Palestinian relations. The Trump administration vows to fully weaponize the federal government to dismantle left wing foundations, institutions and networks simply expand what’s already been done to Middle East Studies.
The extreme authoritarian crackdown in Kirk's name is the same extreme authoritarian crackdown launched over the Gaza protests. It uses the same methods - social media mobs attacking individuals from below, the federal government pushing from above. It is so far beyond irony to no longer be ironic that the vehicle for the current dismantling of free speech ran a "Professor Watchlist" explicitly mimicking the efforts of the Canary Mission and Campus Watch to produce lists of allegedly anti-Israel faculty, with the same horrific impacts on so many lives.
If elite institutions and ostensible liberals had been a bit more willing to defend the rights of students and faculty to protest a now officially-recognized genocide, a bit more willing to push back on right wing attacks from below and state repression from above, then we might not be where we are today. It’s high time for some lessons to be learned, but I fear that once again they will be the wrong ones.
