The Barbaric Assault on Higher Education in Gaza and North America

The physical destruction of all twelve universities in Gaza is an expression of cultural, spiritual, and intellectual genocide. The destruction is also an expression of an impoverished Zionist ethos.

The effort to annihilate higher education in Gaza forms a part of the obscenities being committed by the Armed Forces of the Genocidal State of Israel. The Israeli fanatics have blasted to smithereens all twelve universities in Gaza. About a hundred professors along with many of their family members have been targeted and killed.

This attack on the higher learning of native Palestinians is becoming an emblem of the ethnocentric obsessions harboured by violent Zionist bigots. Glaring is the Israel government’s zeal to wipe out, evict, and permanently cripple the sophisticated heritage of culture and learning cultivated by the Indigenous people. It presents a window into the xenophobic psychology of newcomers to Palestine who seek to exercise total hegemony over their mean settler colony.

This subject was sensitively covered by Chris Hedges in his conversation with Prof. Ahmed Al Hussain, Vice President of Israa University in Gaza. Prof. Hussain gives a detailed account of the development of one of Gaza’s educational gems. This esteemed institution is now a pile of rubble amidst the larger mountains of rubble. This mark of a beast has been left behind by the Israeli campaign to destroy all of Gaza’s life support systems including those institutions that feed the spiritual and intellectual life of civilized people.

The genocidal hostility directed by the majority of Israeli Jews at the people, culture, and learning of the Palestinian people is striking. The spectacle of Palestinian institutions of higher learning being blown up reminds me of the aggression of the Israel Lobby throughout the Western world. There is a large body of literature describing the efforts of Zionist partisans of Israel to shut down healthy debate on the Middle East and any topic casting an informative light on the plight of the Palestinians, but especially when they resist Israeli occupation.

Obstacles are immediately put in place to stop needed discussion about the dominant role in the governments of our own NATO countries by aggressive political organizations like AIPAC, ADL or, in Canada, the Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs (CIJA) as well as B’nai Brith Canada. As I have discussed elsewhere, I have had a good deal of first-hand experience with the intensity of the Israel Lobby in seeking to shut down academic conferences, stop publications and silence scholars not to their liking.

In the story above I document the intervention of CIJA CEO Shimon Koffler Fogel in congratulating the University of Lethbridge administration for violating its collective agreement with the faculty association. A union buster, Fogel advised U of L President Mike Mahon in his attack on the institution of academic tenure. The goal was to diminish and constrain academic freedom in Canadian universities. In 2016-17 Fogel helped fulfill the promise made in 2014 under the watchful eye of Rebel News’ Ezra Levant. Was Levant the Zionist activist that appointed me “poster boy” for the end of academic freedom?

Now Fogel is advancing the CIJA campaign encouraging the people and government of Canada to become outright complicit in the Israeli genocide of Gaza. Fogel tries to persuade Canadians to show contempt for the rule of law by denouncing as “bogus” the genocide ruling of the International Court of Justice.

Canada is becoming complicit in the Israeli genocide because the Trudeau government has withdrawn funding from the United Nations Refugee and Works Agency (UNRWA), the primary facility in place to provide humanitarian relief to ease the immense suffering and dying of the Palestinians. One component of this many-faceted assault on Palestinian civilians is the Israeli-inflicted genocidal famine. This famine results from Israel’s campaign to destroy UNRWA even as it goes for the Palestinian jugular with the objective of completing the ethnic cleansing of Gaza by evicting the Indigenous survivors.

The Canadian government is also becoming complicit with the Israeli genocide because many Canadian companies are exporting weaponry to Israel, weaponry that is being used, including in F-35 bombers, in the genocidal onslaughts.

From Amnesty International

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/2/12/court-orders-netherlands-to-halt-delivery-of-fighter-jet-parts-to-israel

It would be no small thing if Canada was to become ensnared as a defendant in a complicity in genocide proceeding at the International Court of Justice. Already in the Netherlands a court has made a very significant domestic ruling. This court has ordered a halt in exports to Israel of weapons manufacturers in Holland. This ruling is having catalytic effects throughout the international community

Part of the high-level assault on higher education in the United States is occurring in Ivy League institutions. In schools like Penn State, Harvard and Columbia, rich Zionist donors are exercising the power to kick academic freedom into oblivion. This shit kicking is forcing on student, faculty and administrators a prohibition on overt expression of support for Palestinian resistance to the incursions of the Israeli genocidaires. This kind of check book enforcement of prohibitions on free and open debate is quite clearly a factor in the sabotage of higher education in Canada, including in my own unresolved case.

Cartoon by Bob Moran