© Pat Greenhouse / The Boston Globe via Getty ImagesA pro-Palestinian protest of Harvard students and their supporters, ends on the lawn behind Klarman Hall, at Harvard Business School, after starting in the Old Yard by Massachusetts Hall.
It was a scene reminiscent of the Red Scare days, of grainy black-and-white television images of political witch hunts by the old House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). But rather than hunting for disloyal communist sympathizers, committee members at early December's
hearing before the House Committee on Education and the Workforce were instead hunting for university presidents disloyal to Israel. "Are you now, or have you ever been, an anti-Zionist?"
quipped New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg. "You can see the trap."
What is missing from Congress are hearings into the decades of illegal anti-Palestinian espionage, covert action, and blacklisting of Americans within the United States by the Israeli government and its domestic collaborators — actions far more serious and damaging than campus semantics. As noted in my earlier articles for
The Nation, they range from
dispatching a secret agent to interfere in a presidential election on behalf of Donald Trump; to launching a
covert operation within the US targeting academics and others who support a boycott of Israel; to conducting a
massive operation to spy on and "crush" pro-Palestinian students throughout the country; to establishing a secret
Israeli-run troll farm across the US to harass anyone critical of Israel; to
hiring Americans to secretly spy on American students and report back to Israeli intelligence. And then there is Canary Mission, a massive blacklisting and doxxing operation directed from Israel that targets students and professors critical of Israeli policies, and then launches slanderous charges against them — charges designed to embarrass and humiliate them and damage their future employability. All
secretly funded by wealthy Jewish Americans and Jewish American foundations.
Comment: Tucker Carlson had some thoughts on the problem: