Amid Gaza protests, female Muslim and Palestinian students walk in danger

After seven months of protesting against Israel's genocidal attacks in Gaza, with no response from their democratically elected Western governments, grassroots organisers are taking a new approach.

In the face of an abdication of responsibility by state and cultural institutions, university students have set up encampments on many college campuses, demanding that their universities disclose their investments in the Israeli state and divest from the genocidal machine.

Observers of the American university cannot have failed to notice that women have been prominent in the student movement against Israel's ongoing atrocities.

Just this week, a young woman in a headscarf was cursed at and aggressively harassed by a counter-protester at a Palestine solidarity rally on campus at Arizona State University (ASU).

"You’re disrespecting my religious boundaries," the woman told the man, who has been identified as Jonathan Yudelman, an ASU professor, according to viral video of the incident.

Yudelman and another counter-protester then corners the woman near a tree, saying "You disrespect my sense of humanity, b*tch, get the f*ck out of here." The academic has since been placed on leave pending an investigation, the university said.

As harassment, especially of Muslim women, increases on US campuses, universities need to be doing more to protect them.

Overreaction

Just last month, Malak Afaneh was mistreated at a Berkeley Law school dinner held at the private home of Dean Erwin Chemerinsky and his wife, Professor Catherine Fisk.

Afaneh, who is president of her school's Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) chapter, took the microphone at the dinner, and had only greeted the guests with an Islamic greeting and said "Ramadan Mubarak" when her hosts started shouting at her.

Presumably fearing she'd say something about Gaza, Fisk aggressively put her hands and arms around Afaneh's neck, tugging at the microphone, and attempting to grab her mobile phone.

This overreaction, targeting students who express solidarity for Palestinians, especially Muslim women, is just one of many around the country.

Demonising students

Over the past few weeks, American university administrators and political classes have rushed to demonise students campaigning against genocide, caricaturing them as anti-Semitic, inappropriate, obnoxious, brain-washed, pro-terrorism and a threat to safety.

Liberal pundits like Jill Filipovic criticised Malak Afaneh for speaking up. Thousands of online trolls have called for her expulsion and demonised her, engaging in anti-Muslim and anti-Palestinian racism, calling for such students to be physically removed and to be professionally harmed , inciting violence against her, justifying violence against her and other Palestinian students who dare to engage in such behavior, yet no campus administrators or faculty stepped forward to defend her right to protest or to protect her.

Also in California, another Muslim pro-Palestinian woman, biomedical engineering major Asna Tabassum, was scheduled to speak at her University of Southern California graduation as valedictorian.

As with Malak Afaneh, Asna Tabassum's pro-Palestinian views were public, and the university moved to silence her even before the ceremony. In an unprecedented move, the university announced that due to safety concerns, Tabassum would not be permitted to speak at her graduation.

She was assumed "guilty" of pro-Palestinian speech before even writing her address. Not long after, USC cancelled the main commencement ceremony simply to avoid protests.

One has only to scroll through the online comments regarding Afaneh, Tabassum, and other Muslim students who express solidarity with Gaza, to recoil in horror at the visceral hatred expressed against female, brown Muslim and pro-Palestinian university students.

University authorities, by pushing hard publicly against their own students, have represented these young women as hostiles, and have painted targets upon the backs of Asna Tabassum, Malak Afaneh, and many other pro-Palestinian female students - simply for advocating against genocide.

These women walk in danger. Yet social media does not flag incitement to violence when it involves them. Neither their own universities nor government officials have taken any action at all against the highly public gendered Islamophobia that Afaneh and Tabassum have experienced.

In fact, at Arizona State University, campus police removed the hijabs of four female Muslim protestors in late April. New York police also removed the hijabs of Muslim students in jail. Zionists, including academic employees, have harassed Muslim women in public spaces as well.

India flashback

The nasty, spiteful, dehumanising language of gendered Islamophobia reminded me of another macabre campaign against Muslim women students: In India, in the wake of anti-Muslim attacks, laws, restrictions and statements.

In 2022, the Indian government punished Afreen Fatima, a university student, for criticising state-sponsored Islamophobia. Not only was Fatima's father jailed as a political prisoner for over a year, but their family home was demolished.

Well before this extreme action against political mobilisation, Muslim women have been a special target of Hindu fundamentalists in India, of Zionists on US campuses, and of Israeli forces in Gaza. Derogatory language about the women of Gaza is a whole genre in Israeli occupation forces online content.

This pattern of gendered Islamophobia is no accident. The United States mints, circulates and legitimises gendered Islamophobic tropes that it uses for imperial purposes.

These tropes include for example the helpless Afghan woman in the blue burqa who must be rescued by military intervention. The oppressed Muslim woman trope has a long history in Western canon, further legitimised in the context of the War on Terror - to be used by Zionists in Occupied Palestinian Territory and Hindutvadis in India and India-administered Kashmir, and beyond.

I cannot emphasise enough the dire and imminent risk facing Muslim and pro-Palestinian female students, especially those visibly identifiable through their hijabs, keffiyehs, speech, or racial/ethnic appearance.

Faculty protection

I call upon professors, whose employers have maliciously thrown lambs to the wolves, to do their jobs by reaching out to Palestinian and Muslim students, as well as those who stand in solidarity with Gaza. They require protection.

Faculty can change the campus climate with their advocacy, teaching, advising, and involvement in co-curricular activities. It is time to publicly and repeatedly name and address gendered Islamophobia.

Muslim women are at the vanguard of anti-genocide speech and activism. This comes with a heavy price. Faculty and administrators have power: by doing very little - with a word, with an email, with a class lecture - they can do a lot to protect and shield their students.

The West has a history of pathological hatred and contempt for Muslim women. My book, Muslim American Women on Campus, addresses gendered Islamophobia as it is revealed in social encounters on college campuses long before October 2023.

University staff are responsible for the real physical, social, and emotional harm that hundreds, likely thousands of anti-genocide students have received for the past seven months (and before).

Administrators and faculty who have put Muslim and pro-Palestinian students but especially female students in danger must be held to account. There must be a reckoning.