|
Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...
|
[Want even more content from FPM? Sign up for FPM+ to unlock exclusive series, virtual town-halls with our authors, and more—now for just $3.99/month. Click here to sign up.]
It’s not only the students shouting “from the river to the sea/Palestine shall be free” (a call for Israel’s destruction and its replacement by a 23rd Arab state) and “globalize the Intifada” (which is a call for killing Jews everywhere) on college campuses who spread antisemitic hate; there are also, sad to say, professors. And at MIT, famous for its Infinite Corridor, and its students who once measured the length of the Mass. Ave. bridge using smoots (for which see here), and for a sign on a warehouse wall to your left as you drive from MIT to Central Square that reads “Storage Warehouse, Fire Proof” but all the driver sees, from a certain vantage point, with the left letters hidden, is “Rage Warehouse, Ire Proof” which of course contradicts itself, and never fails to amuse — well, me.
Now one of those academic antisemites, MIT Professor of Linguistics Michel DeGraff, has carried on a campaign of slander and harassment against two MIT graduate students that has upended their lives. One lives in fear for his family’s safety; the other has left both MIT, and an academic career, forever. More on their torment, and their tormentor, can be found here: “Two Jewish students sue MIT, tenured professor for antisemitic harassment, doxing,” by Mathilda Heller, Jerusalem Post, June
Two Jewish students have sued the Massachusetts Institute of Technology due to antisemitic discrimination they allegedly suffered at the hands of both the university itself as well as a tenured professor.
The Sussman v. MIT suit was filed on Wednesday, June 25, by the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law, which is acting on behalf of the two.
The 71-page suit – viewed by The Jerusalem Post – claims that linguistics professor Michel DeGraff violated Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, including via harassment on social media and in mass emails. The rest of the suit addresses antisemitic incidents involving other students.
Here’s a bit more about Michel DeGraff: He’s Haitian by origin, the head of the MIT-Haiti program, and a “Haitian creolist.” He tells us that his “scholarship focuses on Creole studies and the role of language and linguistics for decolonization and liberation. He has advocated for the recognition of Haitian Creole as a full-fledged language.” Need I say more?
One of the two students in the suit is Lior Alon, an IDF veteran and postdoctoral student at MIT. Alon said that, in 2024, he was publicly doxxed by DeGraff, who posted his name and photo on social media and tagged Al Jazeera.
DeGraff then penned an article in the French paper Le Monde in which he named Alon and said, “like many other Zionist counter-protesters, [Alon] participates in well-rehearsed propaganda that erases anti-Zionist Jewish students.”
The two doxxing incidents resulted in Alon being harassed by strangers in public, including at his child’s daycare, the suit continued.
Following the incidents, Alon formally contacted MIT President Sally Kornbluth to tell her he was frightened for himself and his family’s safety and asked for the posts to be deleted. The email said, “I have been subjected to antisemitic harassment and defamation by a professor, including online doxxing, which has made me and my family fear for our safety.” Kornbluth never responded to the message, the suit said.
“Not only did President Kornbluth’s silence and MIT’s inaction cause harm to Alon, but MIT’s failure to act also emboldened Prof. DeGraff, and his harassment of Jews escalated as a result.”…
Could It be that Sally Kornbluth, still struggling Laocoon-like in the coils of DEI, didn’t want to tangle with a Haitian professor? She could already imagine the charges of “racism” that would be hurled at her if she were to do her job properly and sanction, or dismiss, that Caliban on the Charles, Michel DeGraff. So she didn’t answer Lior Alon’s anguished cry for something to be done. She kept silent.
Michel DeGraff, like most antisemites, is obsessed with Israel. A professor of linguistics, he nonetheless has concocted a course that has little to do with linguistics and a lot to do with his extreme hatred for the people who live in what he knows is the colonial-settler ethnic cleansing, genocidal state of Israel, that little Sparta built on land stolen from the Arabs, a land where apartheid is practiced, and so on, and so bloody forth.
The second Jewish student, William Sussman, who was working towards his PhD, complained about the hateful rhetoric, following which the professor sent a series of mass emails to the department – copying in Kornbluth – accusing Sussman of being a real-life example of a Jewish “mind infection.”
What is “mind infection”? Is it a trick of the diabolically clever Jews, to “infect” the minds of others with lies about the Middle East and the persecuted Palestinians? Isn’t this charge akin to those made about Jews who “control all the media/banks/businesses” in the world? Perhaps Professor DeGraff could provide us more details about this sinister Jewish-spread “mind infection.” After all, if it is as dangerous as he apparently believes, he ought to be sharing his evidence with all of us.
And what will happen to Professor DeGraff, the Haitian creolist, who on social media and in emails sent campus-wide conducted a relentless campaign of harassment and hate directed at Lior Alon and William Sussman? Will he be dismissed for having carried on this vilification against two students that led one of them to leave MIT, and end forever his academic career, and another to fear, with reason, for his family’s safety? Will tenure be allowed to protect him, or will the MIT administrators discharge him as they ought, in decency, to do?
Nothing will happen to him. He will
Prosper and never be held accountable. I see future grants and awards.
Perhaps the DOJ needs to investigate.
This unqualified affirmative action (n°__•®) ‘professor’ won’t face discipline.
Jews should firebomb his class.
Murder Inc. would have taken a pause from business and stood up. The Hollywood of those days would have mocked and defeated MIT on screen.
So he is afraid of 7 million Americans with the religion of Jewish.
He has been play-acting. The solution is to make him afraid for realm
… … for real.
“Will the MIT administrators discharge him as they ought, in decency, to do?”
Well… call it a woman’s intuition or experience of Academe as you will, I am guessing not. Not unless the politics do one of their sudden U-turns and it becomes safe to do so.
This reminds me of the case of a teacher who protested – in a polite letter – the teaching of the book Maus in the Catholic Training College where he worked. The much lauded and applauded book depicts all Catholic Poles as “pigs/swine”. He objected to that.
The result of his polite letter of protest? He lost both job and academic career. Though I believe that politics still obliges me to add that it-was-a-complete-coincidence-and-nothing-at-all-to-do-with-his-letter. Or it obliges me to add that until it does yet another of its U-turns and us Poles/Polonians are suddenly moved from the “unter” to the “uber” page.
And, by the way, can’t the free pass that the world of Academe apparently hands out to some groups be withdrawn as quickly as it was given? In shining contrast, if we serve our loving Creator, the God of Abraham, who has one standard for all, and follow the Golden Rule, which is to treat everyone with the kindness and respect we would want for ourselves, we know how to behave and do not have to follow the vagaries of academic politics.
The “free pass” is transactional to the Marxists. Their double edged alliance with favored groups is subject to change on both sides.
Who was it said that “the revolution always eats its children”?
Where are the officers and members of the MIT Corporation in this fiasco? Mark Gorenberg is the chair (and Kornbluth is also an officer as president of MIT). This unacceptable anti-Semitic behavior by a MIT faculty member and the MIT administration which has enabled it. The damage to students, post-docs, and the reputation of the Institute should have been addressed long ago. It is just one in a string of anti-Semitic behaviors at MIT that have accelerated since the Hamas Oct 7 attack on Israel.
This blatant Jew hatred and radicalism is a permanent stain on MIT and should prompt a review of its accreditation and federal funding. If the MIT leadership continues to demonstrate that it has no capacity for self-correction and persists in doubling down on its support for anti-Semitic behaviors and sympathies for hard left and terrorist organizations, then Federal agencies should drop the hammer and withdraw funding and accreditation. Kornbluth, DeGraff, and all administrators and faculty who have enabled or directly supported this anti-Semitic behavior should be expelled with loss of pension.
I believe Kornbluth and Gorenberg are Jewish. Shame on them.
He’ll be fine. On the other hand, this (from Guelph, near Toronto, Canada) is what happens to those who challenge the lies this “academic” propagates:
https://www.freedomtoffend.com/p/fired-sacked-terminated-deplatformed
“from the river to the sea/Palestine shall be free”
Regardless of the origins, when I visualize “from River to Sea”, I see the just correction of a moral and historical injustice, with or without Jews, better with, their choice.
For me, and I don’t really have a dog in this fight, except as a Crusader for Humanity, I could care less where any Jew makes his/her home, in Palestine between the River and Sea, or next door in my small Nova Scotia home, so long as it is not at the expense of any vulnerable people.
Most examples of settler colonialism come at the expense of an indigenous/native people, including Canada, where I was born and raised, but we are some way down the path to reconciliation. But not Apartheid Zionist Israel, their victimization of the Palestinian People, Christian and other non-Jews, is now at the point of alleged/accused Genocide and starving children and their mothers.
In 70 BC the Romans conquered Israel which was founded in 1000 BC by King David. The Romans named the land Palestina. During WW2 the Palestinian Brigade made up of Jews from around the world fought Hitler. When the British took over the area in the 1920s they kept the name Palestine. So since the Jews in the area were known as Palestinians until 1948 when they became a Jewish State they are the true Palestinians. The Jewish Calander is 5785 years old. The Christian calendar is 2025 years old and the Islamic calendar only 1445 years old. Zion is Hebrew for Israel. During the late 1800s/early1900s the Zionists went to the European nations asking for support for a Jewish State of their .own. Israel was the outcome in 1948.
When an outcome comes at the expense of a (other) vulnerable people, that is the moral/historical red line, Jew or no Jew. It is as though Jews started where they left off millennia ago, including the ethics of war and humanity. It is obvious, now, as it should have been in ’48, that Jews as a people should NEVER have been allowed to rule another vulnerable people. That moral/historical error should be corrected, by dismantling the Apartheid, Zionist State, as was Apartheid South Africa in the day.
The Ottomans, who conquered and owned it, sold land grants to Jewish settlers in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The subjects they had previously granted it to were mostly absentee landlords who did nothing with it, so it was sparsely populated, mostly fallow, and wasn’t generating revenue for the empire. It came at their expense, and Jews living in a muslim empire were the “vulnerable’ people.” If the fakestinians were really “vulnerable,” they wouldn’t be constantly attacking and mass murdering Israelis.
What is it about linguistics professors? That was Chomsky’s thing, too.
DEI lives at MIT
Trump has eliminated DEI in all the federal agencies. Time to stop sending federal money to MIT.
And this will be the hill that The Tute dies on.
the J’s playing the “A” card again. When will these self dellusional “victims” grow the heck up? They never will as their $5 billion per year free money from the US taxpayer depends on it.
‘Credit’ jimmy carter and the Camp David accords, and while you’re at it, whine a little about the $5 billion we give to the Arabs in those accords, just to be fair.. It’s telling that y’all never bitch and moan about that.