US professor: I was censored, doxed and fired because of Gaza

After 18 years teaching at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York, I have been fired. The decision to pull my contract was made unilaterally by school president Karol Mason because of pressure she felt from outside of the university. My department chair of Latin American and Latinx studies, my colleagues in the department and I have never seen anything like this and are shocked.

As my coworkers in the Economics Department point out, this heavy-handed action represents a grave threat to academic freedom and the autonomy of university departments to hire and fire their professors.

I have had the honour of teaching thousands of students at John Jay College since the spring of 2007. I was fired because of my outspokenness about the United States and Israel's ongoing genocide of the people of Gaza.

Zionist forces with no relationship to the John Jay College community doxed me, threatened me and ultimately got me fired.

President Karol Mason: Where is my academic freedom?

President Joe Biden: Where is my right to freedom of speech?

I do not believe in Zionism and genocide which have gone hand in hand for three-quarters of a century. Don't I have a constitutional right to say that on my social media and in my activism, both outside of university activity?

The Palestine exception

What is more revolting? The US bombs that rain down on an occupied, colonised people or the successful brainwashing campaign since 1948 that has convinced large swaths of the West that "to be Palestinian is to be a terrorist?"

How is it the Palestinians' fault that they are native to a certain area of the world? As the documentary "History of a Land," my former professor Rashid Khalidi’s The 100 Years War on Palestine and many other scholarly sources show, Muslim, Christian and Jewish Palestinians lived in peace for centuries.

I was aware that I was incurring risks by using my voice and education to speak out. Why would an aspiring or tenured professor stick their neck out for a misunderstood, invisibilized and bullied people who have no access to electricity, internet or water?

Silence, confusion, fear and genocide go hand in hand. No one is getting a raise or a promotion for speaking up for Palestine.

So in no way was I shocked by my dismissal. My case involved the Palestine exception. In US society and across the West, many "leftists" claim to be "progressive," but when it comes to speaking up about the 76-year occupation of Palestine, they are silent.

The US and Israeli mainstream media apparatuses have worked overtime for seven and a half decades to convince us that Palestinians are not native and not human, all the time gaslighting Western societies into believing that they, the colonisers, the Zionists, are the victims.

Mentor and professor Norman Finkelstein calls this misuse of anti-Semitism an "abuse of history." Jewish people have civil rights; Zionists do not.

It was not until the British empire invaded and laid claim to Palestine in July 1922 that Zionism took root. This movement to create and support a Jewish national state in Palestine, which Jewish people consider their ancient homeland, has been an exclusionary, exterminationist ideology since its inception.

Since 1948, when it got its teeth from imperial support, it has meant apartheid, ethnic cleansing, military occupation and genocide for Palestine's native people.

The Global South continues to charge Israel with genocide, of which censorship, dehumanisation and repression are key ingredients. The extermination campaign of indigenous Palestinians did not start with October 7, 2023.

It began in 1948 when the waning British empire and the burgeoning US empire established a massive military base smack dab in the middle of Arab land. The two ruling classes, manipulating the long-suffering, pogramized and holocausted Jews of Europe and their right to peace and self-determination, decided to call their colonial project, Israel.

President Mason is on the wrong side of history because of a targeted repression campaign. She has chosen to stand with white supremacy and settler colonialism. Since I began to study this Middle Eastern history in the 1990’s as a teenager, it has broken my soul in 1,948 pieces.

To all those who seek to clamp down on our freedom of speech and academic freedom: You can take our jobs and attack our public reputations and livelihood, but you cannot take our dignity and thirst for justice.

Not staying silent

This history that is actively repressed every day is why a community leader and professor like me has to be shut down by bullies complicit in genocide. Before many of us were targeted and doxed, I was reaching millions of people through social media.

That is why I received a barrage of threats starting on October 20 for daring to say that Gaza had a right not just to live, but to resist and prosper. I have been harassed incessantly over the past two semesters, and ever since then I have continued to use my voice to advocate for the voiceless.

When my family member and roommate saw the threats against me in October, he moved out within 25 minutes. October 7 changed my relationship with many people around me. Who did I betray? Who had my back? Not once did the administration of Karol Mason make me feel like I had support for doing the right thing.

Ostracisation is the price we pay for speaking truth to genocidal power.

My social media has been censored. Overnight, my capacity to reach millions dwindled to a capacity to reach hundreds or maybe thousands. Can I use my X account again to educate against genocide? Will my shadow ban be lifted?

US society is again revealing its true colours. As Black America reminds us, 2024 is not so different from 1492, when Christopher Columbus landed in the "New World."

Stop the madness

I am not the only one who has faced persecution. CUNY has also fired Professor Lisa Hofman-Kuroda from Hunter College because one Zionist-minded student complained about her social media posts denouncing the genocide.

Meanwhile, Professor Jairo Fúnez-Flores from Texas Tech University (TTU) has been suspended for using his anti-colonial training to speak up and Professor Shellyne Rodriguez. has been fired. The powers that be have long attacked the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions Movement.

Zionist-domination of university and journalistic life in the US means every educator, student and writer is afraid to teach and say what they really think of arguably the greatest injustice since the 1941-1945 Holocaust.

Detractors deny this reality and accuse anti-colonial intellects of anti-Semitic tropes. The genocide has nothing to do with religion and everything to do with colonisation, occupation and who has the right to nationhood.

No one in our movement disputes the right of all of our Jewish sisters and brothers, and all human beings, to live in peace. We do however organise every day against all colonial humiliation and occupations.

I have so many questions for President Mason and others in positions of power across the United States: Are Palestinians human beings? Do Palestinian lives matter? When did you first learn about the British empire and Zionism’s 1948 colonisation of Palestine?

What are your thoughts on the genocide that the mainstream media has been complicit in, still, six months in, hiding reality and calling it the "Israel-Hamas War?"

The racist, colonising Zionists with their US backers have been able to convince large swaths of the West that even the thousands of children dehydrated, starved and buried under rubble are "terrorists."

If another people, who the dominant media do not vilify every hour of every day, were being exterminated and I spoke up, would I have been terminated?

The genocide continues, as do the threats, censorship and my responsibility to educate. My only regret is our collective inability to break the airtight informational and ideological control that exists in this society.

My family, friends and country would not support this if they knew the truth about the 76-year genocide of Palestinians. President Karol Mason cares more about what influential politicians, board of directors and corporations will think of her than the extermination of a silenced, invisible indigenous people of the Middle East.

President Mason and the John Jay administration: Is it 2024 or 1492? Do genocides keep you up at night? Billions of us humans have not slept the same since October 7. That is why I wrote This is Genocide! I carry the Palestinian cause and resistance in my throat, chest and being.

I have no regrets. Bury my heart in Gaza!

I will miss you, my John Jay familia! (even if our college is named after a slave owner). Over the past 18 years, I made 1,000 mistakes but got back up and tried to do it all better 1,001 times. I sought to model humility, an open mind and an open heart. We will fight, just like our ancestors taught us, in the courts, union, media and most importantly where history unfolds, in the streets! See you there! Don’t be late!