Intéressante analyse de Nadia Abu El Hajj, à propos des campus américains, sur la manière dont sont instruites les plaintes et accusations d’#antisémitisme. Lorsque des étudiants (juifs) indiquent qu’ils perçoivent les manifestations claires d’un #antisionnisme mais qu’ils ne confondent pas avec de l’antisémitisme, on ne les écoute pas et on dit qu’ils font de la politique. Lorsque des étudiants pro-israéliens disent se sentir en insécurité parce qu’ils sont juifs, cela devient une « expérience » digne d’être considérée et qui est qualifié de preuve de l’existence d’un antisémitisme.
C’est exactement ce qui se passent ces jours-ci à Sciences Po - et ceci sans nier qu’il puisse y avoir de vrais actes d’antisémitisme, mais autant qu’on puisse le savoir en nombre très limité. Elle le dit très clairement dans le cas de Columbia :
Let me be clear: I’ve heard of some incidents on campus of antisemitic name-calling. I also know that someone drew a swastika in the School of International and Public Affairs building. I don’t doubt that there are instances of antisemitism.
Ce signalement et ce commentaire sont un rebond sur la chronique des événements à Sciences Po documentée là : ▻https://seenthis.net/messages/1052178#message1052293
Storm Over Columbia | Nadia Abu El-Haj | The New York Review of Books
▻https://www.nybooks.com/online/2024/04/27/storm-over-columbia-nadia-abu-el-haj
In your article from this past December you made the prescient argument that the administration was relying on slippery uses of the concept of “safety” to justify suppressing pro-Palestine speech. How have you seen that rhetoric of safety play out in recent weeks?
It’s how we got here. The rhetoric of safety—and very specifically the safety of “Jewish students”—has been driving the crackdown. Shafik has never met with the students in Jewish Voice for Peace and Students for Justice in Palestine. The administration simply suspended the organizations. They keep punishing them. The Task Force on Antisemitism has been operating without a definition of the word itself, which means, first of all, that any report of antisemitism is taken at face value. My guess is that the vast majority of the alleged incidents of antisemitism are simply pro-Palestinian demonstrations and speech. In reality we have no idea how widespread antisemitism is on campus, since no one has actually tried to parse the incidents that students, based on how they feel, have labeled antisemitic.
Let me be clear: I’ve heard of some incidents on campus of antisemitic name-calling. I also know that someone drew a swastika in the School of International and Public Affairs building. I don’t doubt that there are instances of antisemitism. I’ve also heard many reports of Muslim students having their hijabs pulled off, or of students wearing keffiyehs being called terrorists, and anti-Zionist Jewish students being cursed at and called kapos by their fellow Jewish students. This stuff is going to go on around the edges. But it’s essential to recognize that harassment is not happening to Jewish students alone, and that it’s not as rampant on campus as press coverage suggests.
To return to the question of what does and doesn’t count as evidence of antisemitism: the Task Force has held “listening sessions” with students, inviting them to discuss their experiences of antisemitism on campus. In several instances Jewish students have gone in, argued that they are not experiencing antisemitism, and asked the committee to distinguish between antisemitism and anti-Zionism, only for members of the Task Force to shut them down. The response has been, in effect: We are not interested in your politics. We’re interested in your experience. These students were saying, “but this is my experience; I’m telling you, I don’t think this is antisemitism,” and their feelings, their experiences, have been dismissed.
David Schizer, who cochairs the Task Force, suggested during the congressional hearings that there was a problem of “consistency.” Whereas conservative students are urged not to “articulate a particular position because it makes others feel uncomfortable,” when discomfort is expressed by Jewish students, “that kind of language has not been applied.” But if it’s only a matter of consistency, why has there been no significant response to the harassment and, at times, actual dangers that Muslim and Palestinian students have reported? I have a student who was threatened in her apartment by someone who found her address, and we could barely get a response from the same administration that claims to care about everyone’s safety.
Schizer and others suggest that in every other instance of potentially hateful speech, what students feel has been the determining factor. The inconsistency is that this has not been the case for Jewish students. I think that misrepresents the situation in two ways. First, until now, nobody was simply taken at their word. Certainly, there have been conversations in the past about rhetoric and how it makes certain students feel. But ordinarily, if a student feels unsafe or discriminated against or harassed, they go to the Equal Opportunity and Affirmative Action office, which then investigates the report. There has to be evidence. You don’t take anybody’s report at face value, whether it’s sexual harassment under Title IX or racial discrimination and harassment under Title VI. I spent two years on a committee at Barnard trying to figure out how we were going to think about free speech and academic freedom in relation to this challenge, and we were unanimous that how students feel is not the criterion. It can be investigated, but it is not evidence of harassment or discrimination prima facie.
Second, the institution’s current response to charges of antisemitism around pro-Palestine protest is far more serious than any of its responses to other charges of systematic racism have been over the years. When have they ever put so many resources into investigating alleged racism? There has never been a task force on anti-Black racism at Columbia, for example. That doesn’t mean there isn’t antisemitism. It means that Black students have never been able to galvanize an institutional response anywhere near this scale, nor have Palestinian or Arab or Muslim students, or any other racial or religious minority. Contrary to what Schizer suggests, then, the university’s response to charges of antisemitism is far more robust, at an institutional level, than anything we have ever seen before, at least during my twenty-plus years as a professor here.
