Oh… and Islamophobia! with Evelyn Alsultany, Nina Mehta, Nadine Naber, & Amira Jarmakani

Oh… and Islamophobia

Emmaia: Welcome to Unpacking Zionism. I’m Emmaia Gelman, your host and director of the Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism. This week we’re looking at Islamophobia as a keyword for Critical Zionism Studies. But it’s necessarily also about anti-Palestinian racism and DEI — diversity, equity, and inclusion. 

A little background: DEI has its roots in the popular movements of the 1960s, in the recognition that just making new civil rights laws isn’t enough. That institutions built around whiteness and wealth, and built to reinforce white supremacy, have to change their culture and ways of doing things in order to stop reproducing the same systems. But as we’ve seen over the past year especially, the Zionist political movement has used DEI as a way to call for people who do things like protest Israeli genocide, or who talk about the whiteness of European Jews as a feature of Zionism, to be punished. It’s been a way to weaponize antisemitism charges. And in response to protest against that, many institutions — from K-12 school boards to corporations — have said okay, “we’ll throw in Islamophobia too. We’ll have policy that covers Islamophobia.” It’s that use of Islamophobia that we’re going to look at today. 

We have some really brilliant people unpacking this with us. This is a special episode — rather than an interview, we’re bringing you leading thinkers and educators in conversation. We’re joined by Evelyn Alsultany, Nadine Naber, Nina Mehta, and ICSZ collective member Amira Jarmakani. This talk is called “Oh… and Islamophobia!” It was organized by ICSZ as part of the launch of the Coalition to End Zionist Repression, which is at bit.ly/campus-alliance. This talk was recorded on Oct. 16, 2024. 

As always, you’ll find links in the show notes, including a link to the video if you want to have a look at the slides. 

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Amira: Hello everyone. Welcome. My name is Amira Jarmakani. I use she/they pronouns and I am a professor in women’s gender and sexuality studies at San Diego state university. I will be moderating the conversation today. So I wanted to just let you know a little bit about it. Most importantly, it is part of a speaker series hosted by the Coalition to End Zionist Repression.

And the originating member of that coalition is the Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism. Many of us in the past day or so have watched footage, really horrific footage of Shaban al-Dalu engulfed in flames as he burned alive when his displacement tent caught fire from a two ton bomb dropped by Israel on the Al Aqsa hospital in Deir el-Balah. He was a 20 year old software engineering student whose university had also been destroyed in the early bombardments of the genocide. His life just in the past year emphasizes the importance of just some of the unspeakable horrors of the ongoing genocide from scholasticide to starvation campaigns, withholding aid intentionally, bombing hospitals, multiple contexts of displacement for virtually everybody in Gaza, and ultimately an inconceivably horrific death.

We have also at the same time, just past the one year anniversary of heartbreaking example, a horrific example also of anti-Palestinian racism in the US, with Wadea Al-Fayoume, a 6-year-old Palestinian Muslim American who was murdered by his landlord. This is of course, to say nothing of so many other aspects of genocide, including the Bombardments in Lebanon. We’re now at least a quarter of Lebanon is under evacuation orders. We don’t have time, of course, to enumerate or to talk about all of these different ways that we could try to think through what we have been witnessing. And in fact, we could argue that we will never have enough time, that there could never be enough time and space to account for all that we’ve been witnessing this past year. But I start with it just to say that we write and work from these contexts to honor the rage and mourning that live in us, and also to ground us in the fierce dedication to life and liberation that guides a lot of our work. 

So given that context, of course, today, our conversation will be focused on universities. So meanwhile, back on the literal ranch, which is to say, just to sort of gesture to the ways that from genocidal removal of Indigenous peoples in the U.S. to enable land grant universities, historic investments in the institution of racial chattel slavery to the gentrifying land grabs of contemporary universities, our universities have systematically perpetuated settler colonial technologies. And nevertheless, today we’ll be focusing on, given all of that, this question about what have the institutional responses been, how do we think through them, especially those that claim to work from DEI kinds of frameworks. 

So given all of that kind of background, I’ll introduce our three speakers. We’re so honored to have them here and I’ll introduce them in the order in which they will speak right now. So first up will be Dr. Evelyn Alsultany. She’s a professor in the Department of American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California Dornsife College. She’s author of the wonderful book Broken: The Failed Promise of Muslim Inclusion, which will guide so much of our conversation today. It was listed one of the 10 best scholarly books of 2022 by the Chronicle of Higher Education. And she also has authored Arabs and Muslims in the Media: Race and Representation after 9/11. It’s been so important to many of our work and our scholarship. It was listed by the LA Times as one of the best Hollywood books of all time. So Broken includes a chapter on how diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives fail on college campuses when university administrators do not protect student advocates for Palestinian rights. So that’s a key part of what we’ll be talking about today. 

Next we’ll hear from Dr. Nadine Naber. She’s head of the Gender and Women’s studies program at the University of Illinois in Chicago. She’s authored and co edited five books in total, including Arab America: Gender, Cultural Politics, and Activism, which saved a lot of our scholarly lives. Race and Arab Americans and Arab and Arab-American Feminisms, which also has been so incredibly foundational, Evelyn’s also a co-editor on that. Nadine is a lead author of the “Beyond Profiling and Erasure: Cultivating Strong and Vibrant Arab American Communities in Chicagoland,” also super relevant to our conversation today. And she’s currently writing a book called Pedagogies of the Radical Mother. We can’t wait for it to come out from Haymarket. She is an editorial board member of the Journal of Palestine Studies, and she organizes with the Palestinian Feminist Collective, Insight, Palestine Force, Faculty and Staff for Justice in Palestine, and Mamas, and much more, I’m sure. Of course, we can’t say all of what all of you do. 

Finally we’ll hear from Nina Mehta, who is a community educator and co director of PARCEO, a community research resource and education center that partners with a range of groups and institutions to strengthen our collective work for justice. Nina has taught in public schools in New York city and Durham, North Carolina, at NYU Steinhardt and Bordiqua college, and has been part of many alternative and participatory education projects. She works with a wide range of groups on collaborative research, rethinking ethnography, cultural, and media projects. She supports groups as they work through their internal processes and facilitates workshops and large scale events to elevate participatory, creative, and horizontal engagement. She’s from New York City, comes from families that are first generation Bombay Jane immigrants and longtime New York City Jewish educators and social justice advocates. And we’ll be hearing more about PARCEO later, which will be also so critical and important to us and our work collectively. So with that, I will invite Evelyn to give some comments. Thank you all for being here.

Evelyn: Thank you so much. I’m going to share my screen. I want to start by thanking Emmaia Gelman for organizing this panel, and it is an honor and a pleasure to be here with Nina, Amira, and Nadine, and with a group of people here, I recognize some of you, who are here, who stand against genocide. 

I’m going to be talking about the diversity, equity, and inclusion response to October 7 with a focus on universities. As we have been bearing witness to the horrors of Israel’s complete destruction of Palestinian life and livelihood in Gaza, the West Bank, and now Lebanon and the Lebanese people, what has been the diversity, equity, and inclusion response to October 7th on college campuses? The response, one of the responses has been Islamophobia and antisemitism task forces and workshops. I have a few examples here. You’ll notice on this top slide, this is from Harvard. “Dear members of the Harvard community, in January, I announced the establishment of two presidential task forces: one of them to combat anti-Muslim, anti-Arab, and anti-Palestinian bias. Another one to combat antisemitism.” At the University of Connecticut, we see courses launching soon on Islamophobia and antisemitism. University of Washington – task forces on antisemitism and Islamophobia. Dartmouth – workshops to help identify Islamophobia and antisemitism.

So my question is, are these effective approaches to creating inclusive campuses? And I’m going to review four ways that this approach normalizes the Zionist position that’s used to justify atrocities against Palestinian. I will be referring to four ways that this approach obfuscates Israel’s genocide against the Palestinian people.

So here is the first obfuscation disconnected from their context. I’ve looked at a lot of descriptions for antisemitism and Islamophobia workshops and task forces. Most of them, not all of them, tend to not mention a context. They refer to a mysterious rise in Islamophobia and antisemitism. This one here is from Michigan State University. It says “Faculty experts will discuss the history and current manifestations of these prejudices, which occur globally, nationally, and on college campuses.” We don’t have descriptions that say, because of a genocide, because of settler colonialism, because of military occupation, ethnic cleansing, these terms are not used at all to explain the rise. So it seems like this mysterious rise and we don’t know why it’s happening. But why are university administrators omitting the context to this rise in supposedly both antisemitism and Islamophobia and it won’t surprise anyone here, but given that those who are against the genocide are smeared as antisemitic terrorist supporters who are opposed to the safety and security of Jewish people, many university DEI professionals avoid mentioning any context because they don’t want to be targeted or they’re accepting the Zionist position. 

Obfuscation two is that the term Islamophobia tends to erase Palestinians. I’m going to clarify in the next slide that I’m not making the argument that Islamophobia is irrelevant, but rather the argument that I’m making is that in the context of the Israeli war on Gaza, using the term Islamophobia erases Palestinians, it erases Palestinian Christians, it erases that Palestinians are the targeted group, they are the ones facing mass death, displacement, and trauma, and Yes, many of us are impacted as allies, but we are literally seeing 2,000,000 people being wiped off the face of the earth. And so using Islamophobia gives the impression that Muslims around the world are being targeted and they are the secondary, tertiary targets. But it erases the fact that it is Palestinian people who should be at the center of this conversation. It makes the quote unquote “conflict” seem like a religious issue – to say antisemitism and Islamophobia. And ultimately it erases the role of Zionism in producing anti-Palestinian racism. Therefore, using the term Islamophobia to refer to reverberations on college campuses of the Israeli war on Gaza erases Palestinians and shrouds that Zionism is at the root of the problem. 

But I want to be clear that Islamophobia is not entirely inaccurate. It is actually very difficult to disentangle anti-Palestinian racism from anti-Arab racism, from anti-Muslim racism. They have been co-produced. They do share many of the same features. Zionism is central to all three of them. And I have an example, Amirah mentioned Wadea Al-Fayoume, a six year old boy who was killed in Illinois. And the landlord neighbor who murdered him, stated, as he killed him, “You, Muslims, must die.” So that would suggest Islamophobia. But then later when he was talking to the police, he said that he was upset about what was happening in the Middle East. And so we see that there’s a collapsing that often happens. Many people are not aware of the difference between Palestinians, Arabs, Muslims; are all the same. And that’s how these forms of racism have been produced and co-produced, they share the same features, this idea that Arabs and Muslims are terrorists, and as such, you can’t reason with them.

But there are also important distinguishing features. I don’t have the time to go through all of the definitions, but here is a useful definition of anti-Palestinian racism from the website antipalestinianracism.com. And this definition states, “Anti-Palestinian racism is adjacent to Islamophobia and anti-Arab racism, but specifically aims to silence, erase, dehumanize, and defame Palestinians and their allies who publicly advocate for Palestinian human rights.” So we have demonizing anything and everything Palestinian, from symbols such as the keffiyeh to phrases like from the river to the sea, Arabic words like intifada, speech, we are aware of the Palestine exception to free speech. So smearing those who criticize Israeli military occupation, ethnic cleansing, apartheid, settler colonialism, and genocide as terrorist supporters and antisemites, and of course, the people themselves and their allies. So I would recommend using both terms, anti-Palestinian racism and Islamophobia, or anti-Palestinian racism and anti-Muslim racism. They are interrelated, as opposed to only using Islamophobia on its own. 

The third obfuscation that I’d like to point out is this idea that Islamophobia and antisemitism are both equally on the rise, both equivalent forms of discrimination, treating Islamophobia and antisemitism as equivalent in order to give the appearance of parity and fairness obfuscates a deep asymmetry of power and conditions on the ground.

And by problematizing the pairing of antisemitism and Islamophobia at this moment, I’m not suggesting that antisemitism is not a problem, rather I’m suggesting that they are not equivalent forms of discrimination at this moment for two reasons. The first is that we live in a Zionist country. There are no institutional support to suppress support for Israel, as there are institutional efforts to suppress support for Palestinians. This map shows states with bills against BDS, (Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions movements). There are laws in place in the U.S. to prevent sanctions against Israel, regardless of how many people are ethnically planned, militarily occupied, or murdered. Zionism is the normalized stance of the US government. Killing Palestinians is acceptable. Our government supports it. Furthermore, on campuses, there’s no equivalent of Hillel or Chabbat House for Palestinian students or Jewish students who do not identify as Zionists. There is a clear asymmetry in terms of resources on college campuses. And I should mention that some universities don’t bother with the appearance of parity by doing this antisemitism, Islamophobia initiatives. For example, Columbia University announced the establishment of a task force on antisemitism. They were met with criticism for not addressing Islamophobia. Two HBCUs, South Carolina State University and Voorhees University, offered seminars to counter antisemitism, funded by the Academic Engagement Network, the Zionist Organization. And despite all the efforts by some universities, the White House is also addressing Islamophobia and antisemitism equally, yet the House Judiciary Committee held a series of widely televised hearings on college campuses to address specifically antisemitism with no equivalent hearing on Islamophobia or anti-Palestinian racism.

The second reason that antisemitism and Islamophobia are not equivalent forms of discrimination today is that Zionist organizations have weaponized antisemitism by redefining it to include criticisms of the Israeli government. Congress has adopted the IHRA definition, the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition of antisemitism, which results in an inflation of antisemitism and the intensification of anti-Palestinian racism.

And the fourth and final obfuscation is that many of these workshops on Islamophobia treat it as hateful individuals rather than policies. So this is an example from UC Santa Cruz, it receives $500,000 to tackle Islamophobia, antisemitism, and hate speech. Focusing on Islamophobia tends to reinforce the notion that Islamophobia is an interpersonal problem and that it can be eradicated through education. It lets the state, the media, and Zionist organizations off the hook as if the problem is interpersonal, one of individuals hating each other. Efforts to quote unquote “combat hate” allows U.S. universities and politicians to appear as though they care about Muslims and inclusion and equality while allowing them to continue supporting Israel in a genocide against the Palestinian people. I have this example before I close, which you’ll notice here, November 2nd, 2023, the White House announces a national strategy to combat Islamophobia, 1 month later, Biden administration sidesteps Congress again for emergency arms sales to Israel. This one in the amount of $147.5 million. Given that Islamophobia and anti-Palestinian racism are not about individual hate, but about a nexus of meaning produced by U.S. government policies, media reporting, and agendas promoted by Zionist organizations, it is not possible to combat Islamophobia while arming and funding this genocide. It is a complete joke.

In concluding, Islamophobia is the term that we have come to use since approximately 2010 in U.S. society. It has allowed us to name and identify, discuss discrimination and racism against Muslims. It has enabled the inclusion of Arabs and Muslims in DEI initiative. But at this moment, it is being used to obscure the specificity of anti-Palestinian racism.

And I will end from a quote that I read in Stanford’s Arab Muslim and Palestinian communities report. I want to underline, they didn’t use the term Islamophobia for the Arab community. They specifically used Arab, Muslim, and Palestinian communities. There this quote says, “Islamophobia has ironically become the low hanging fruit whereby some institutions, legislative bodies, and politicians are able to easily support Muslims while neglecting anti-Palestinian or anti-Arab bias.” I will end there. Thank you. 

Amira: Thank you so much, Evelyn. Folks, if you have specific questions about Evelyn’s presentation, feel free to drop those in the chat and we will move to Nadine. 

Nadine: Hi, everyone. Yes. Thanks to Emmaia and all the organizers who made this happen. Evelyn, that was just so powerful and clear, thanks for breaking that down. 

I’m gonna focus on interfaith dialogues as one specific project through which Zionists use DEI approaches to Islam and Islamophobia as a cover for colonial and genocidal practices. I’m sure many of us here today, or some of us, have experienced this. You’re a Muslim or Christian professor or community member who organizes around Palestinian liberation. Someone on your campus invites you to join an interfaith dialogue. They hide from you that they are a Zionist with opposing politics and probably wish you didn’t exist. They act nice and friendly, framing the invitation as a call for listening, truly hearing each other, bridge building, friendship, peacemaking, and love. You say, “No thanks, I’m not into dialogue.” And they insist, “Your voice will be heard. This is a space for everyone to speak their truth and truly hear each other.” If you say yes, you become complicit in covering up Zionist violence. If you say no, you get targeted or marginalized as anti-peace, difficult, extremist, and morally bankrupt.

The Zionist interfaith dialogue strategy in collaboration with the Israeli state and major Zionist organizations committed to the colonization of Palestinian land and to genocide has been decades in the making. I hope by discussing it today we can also reflect on related similar strategies. So how does the Zionist interfaith strategy enable Zionism and repress resistance? And what are its implications on our movements and communities? 

First, it’s a cover up. It manipulates relational Muslim, Christian, and Jewish histories that have been Indigenous to the region for centuries to cast a shadow over violent colonial practices. Under the liberal, ahistorical, DEI guise of diversity and bridge-building, groups like the American Jewish Committee or World Zionist Congress promote these dialogues behind the scenes, so that folks present themselves as if these dialogues are merely religious as if there is such a thing. So some of the language would be like, you know, “for the sake of peaceful living together among persons from different religious persuasions.” Some have called it faith-washing, that’s organizations like the USPCR and AMP, American Muslims for Palestine. So as the Israeli state operates through these groups, make no mistake, it is Zionist Jews who always initiate the dialogues.

First red flag. They lure in others with kindness, sympathy, and pampering. The dialogues cover themes adjacent to colonization, like religious conflict, religious intolerance, antisemitism, Islamophobia, or even liberal Zionist post ‘69 claims to be against the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza or the call for ceasefire, but they see anyone critical of the colonial foundations of Israel as terrorist antisemites, but they won’t say that at first. 

If you have explicitly supported BDS, they will not tell you that this is a Zionist-centered event with Zionist speakers or participants. And there’s a reason for that, which I’ll get into, but the reason why is that it, the whole thing is a setup. And in a moment, I’m gonna, first talk about some other kind of similar strategies before I then break down what the setup is and what and why and how it works.

So, I want to pause here and say that now that you kind of know what happens to people, this interfaith dialogue, you might see it in other strategies as well. A similar one like,let’s say a peace building summer camp, you know, in Israel that brings together Palestinian and Israeli kids to learn how to coexist while the Israeli kid is living on a Palestinian family’s kid’s home, living in their home, and the Palestinian kid is living in a refugee camp. They’re supposed to hang out in the summer and become friends. And that showed up, I mean, I was very much being sarcastic and it’s not to this level, but the movie Promises that won an Emmy award is an example of that, or even the feminist film, Refusing to be Enemies, both initiated by liberal Zionists and a quote from that film, someone talking about it, it’s like a Palestinian woman and Jewish women. “You absorb my pain as I absorb your pain.” You know, this group is a way to recognize the trauma in others. 

And let’s talk about a few more extensions of these dialogue strategies. Some people have used the word bothsidesism, which operates in the left or in progressive spaces where, what I want to say about this is we talk a lot about, and I’m sorry, I’m jumping a bit, but I promise it’s all going to come together. We talk a lot about in our movement about how Zionists use a strategy of conflating anti-Zionism and antisemitism, but I am arguing here that we must also recognize bothsidesism and interfaith dialogues as, you know, just as dangerous as the conflation of anti-Zionism with antisemitism.

And sometimes we use the word PEP, like we say “progressive except for Palestine,” but I don’t think we talk about it in terms of how actually dangerous it is. And so, you know, we see that playing out with, say, you know, like if you are on campus and then they say that there’s going to be a Palestinian or Arab speaker. Then, you know, someone intervenes and says, we can’t have this event unless there’s also a Jewish speaker. Right. So that if there’s a committee, a chancellor is going to create on diversity and equity for Arabs and Muslims, then it’s like, we can’t create it or we will create it only if we also create a committee for Jewish diversity and equity. So these are all kind of like extensions of the same thing. And of course, our administrators would just love for us to shut up and join these spaces. K-12 curriculum movement in California got shut down. One of the arguments was about, you know, Israeli or Zionist curriculum must also be there if you’re going to have Palestinian.

So there’s kind of like this organizing, this hyper-vigilant organizing where anything Palestinian or other Arab or Muslim can’t exist without there being a Zionist perspective. You must have a Jewish speaker. Sometimes it’s even, you must have an anti-Zionist Jewish speaker, and our movements participate in that sometimes and sometimes it’s strategic. But what all this does is it reinforces the idea of having to have bothsidesism or having to have a Jewish speaker with an Arab speaker. It reinforces the colonial civilizing mission that Palestinians and other Arabs can’t exist on their own and if they did, they would be too violent. They need to be tamed by civilized white Jewish perspectives. 

The Arab left has been fighting this since at least the 80s. So I just want to give some historical context. This is not new. And it’s also the fight isn’t about, it’s not a liberal fight for visibility, representation, or identity politics. It’s a fight to narrate our own liberation struggles as a decolonial politics, when the Zionist state associates Palestinian and other Arab perspectives with terrorism as a strategy to steal, lay out, displace, and ethnically cleanse, and some SWANA feminists, Palestinian, Iraqi, Lebanese, Egyptian, map this in the essay The Forgotten “-ism,“ which we wrote in 2000 about these strategies that are used to repress resistance.

So this idea that Palestinians and Israelis are just two groups who have been fighting for centuries and never got along, or it’s a religious war. I mean, we’ve all as activists from Arab communities have experienced this our entire lives. And then we also see it in official state politics, and I’m actually going to skip because I think I’m talking for too long because I want to go to the next points. But in short, official state politics, this is everywhere. Democrats and Republicans alike have signed onto legislation against Islamophobia, have stood against Islamophobia. But as long as they remove the language around anything that criticizes Israel. And so this kind of thing that Evelyn was talking about, like you could be against Islamophobia and for Zionist colonization and genocide. And I’m not going to give examples of that but I can later if you want. 

And it’s also similar to DEI projects around training cops. We did a huge study that Amira mentioned in Chicago about racial profiling of Palestinian Arabs and Muslims and had to do trainings. Everyone, you know, learned about it. And then the cops are still asking us to come to the table after they continue to racially profile Palestinians and Arabs on our campus. And we keep being asked to join these dialogues. So, I’m just going to skip back to the main theme of this panel or actually I should also say that a funny, not funny, thing… Dartmouth, many of us know that Dartmouth enacted this extreme police violence on their students and professors. They have said, they have like constructed themselves as one of the only universities that doesn’t have this Palestine problem. Because why? Because of Dartmouth dialogues. Even when there was this grave violence, even when rescinding the job offer of my colleague, Nicole Nguyen, because she supports Palestine and her research is critical of the war on terror, and then 90 plus arrests and beatings, right? They have covered all that up with this idea of Dartmouth dialogues that they’re just so proud of. But hey, if you’re part of the dialogue, you know, you have a cover, you’re, you know, you could say, I’m not anti-Muslim, I’m not anti-Palestinian, I’m part of the dialogue. 

So Zionist-led interfaith and other dialogues are not just a cover, they enable colonial violence. And if we recognize police violence against protesters as not only an arm of the U. S. state, but also of the Israeli state, then, you know, if dialogues are covering up police violence on campus, then dialogues are not only enable colonization, but they’re also genocidal. 

So the second way that dialogues operate is that they position Palestinian and other Arabs and their supporters as terrorist extremists, enabling and calling for harm against them through gaslighting. So they kind of set up, liberal Zionism gets set up as the moral high ground, they are for peace and community-building. So if you refuse, you’re an extremist, a terrorist, an antisemite. So basically the dialogues position the victim as the perpetrator because you refuse it and now you’re against dialogues. So it creates like this political wall where the moral stance is in the middle, the relativist middle, bothsidesism. But if you address asymmetry of power, right, you’re outside the bounds of civility. I don’t want to point out the racist structure here, especially of how this plays out for Palestinian, Arab, and Muslim people and everyone who supports Palestine in this setup can be called a terrorist supporter. There’s a specific racism here when someone Palestinian or other Arab or Muslim refuses the dialogue because there’s this conflation between Palestinian, Arab, Muslim identity with an extremism, terrorism, factionalism. I mean, I can’t tell you how many of us who critique it, people ask us, you know, make these assumptions about fanaticism, you know, these factionalism. So I also want to put out that I hope people will start, uh, you know, practicing the language of how we talk about anti-Palestinian racism when we see it, that all of this is part of it, factionalist, sectarian, political, everything is political. You’re only a political being.  and then you deserve to be punished and put in harm’s way. So then you get put on lists, Canary mission, and then it’s like a call to harm against you. 

So what that does is it undermines organizing, people have to then put all their resources into responding. It becomes a distraction. It distracts from the real work. Or you just get distracted into these useless conversations, liberal discussions about 1968 versus 1948. Do you support Arafat? Right? So you now are part of some irrelevant debate that’s also a distraction and undermines organizing. 

Finally, it divides communities. So, we have to remember that the communities we’re speaking of have been living with a fear of surveillance, of deportation, that anytime they could be picked up, targeted, killed, since the 1960s, not just since September 11th. So, if that’s the community’s kind of positionality, iIt sometimes can be difficult to refuse to participate in a dialogue. Sometimes people do it out of fear because they feel they’d be vulnerable and it might be a strategic choice. Sometimes people might do it to make, you know, political concessions. They might betray their people because they think if they do this, they might get some political clout or resources, and you know, Zionists have a heyday with that idea that we’re living in fear. And so we need to be aware of it and refuse it. Yeah, I think I’ll close with that point. And I hope that was useful. 

Amira: So useful. Thank you so much, Nadine. And I see the question in the chat for you. And we’ll get to that question and many others, hopefully after we hear from Nina. So we’ll transition there now. 

Nina: Thank you. And that was super useful and thank you Emmaia also and others for bringing this together and Amira for grounding us in the context of where we are today amidst genocide and ongoing settler colonialism, and Evelyn, the incredible examples and mechanisms of obfuscation, and Nadine, yeah, thanks for bringing up this really insidious strategy and the dangerous setups of dialogue. 

And I also want to thank and bring in my dear comrade, friend, collaborator, Donna Nevel, who is a co-director with me of PARCEO, our community research resource and education center. And as part of our work, we’ve developed a number of social justice curricula for universities, middle schools, high schools, social justice and community-based organizations, foundations, religious and cultural institutions, among others. And sometimes these are used in DEI spaces. And we understand ways that DEI programs have been used and misused to serve anti-liberatory agendas to enforce repressive standards and discipline. So why would we do this? Well, as part of a PARCenter, we believe in participatory, engaged, liberatory, social, political, and personal transformation. And since we are an independent center, we partner with groups to find cracks and possibilities to make this kind of change. And universities and their DEI programs are one such imperfect space as sites of and for struggle.

If we are engaging with these sites, within these sites, we have to believe that we, through education and organizing, can make change, some kind of intervention, right? Even if this kind of space is problematic. And even if in their inception, they were never about real redistribution of power. And as many scholar activists have pointed out, one of the reasons why we need to problematize DEI is because of the I, right? The inclusion. What does inclusion really mean here? Inclusion into what system and under what conditions? A broken, oppressive, capitalist, racist, imperialist system? When we include people into a dominant system without transforming it, do we include them on equal terms? Are they able to redistribute power and resources upon inclusion?

So asking these questions and others leads us to ask how might we appropriate DEI for more liberatory projects? Those that move beyond mere inclusion to reparative policies and practices, those that really engage in radical redistributive practices. And when we’re asked to bring our PAR framework into DEI programs, staff and faculty and students appreciate how much time we spend challenging the terms of equity and inclusion and deeply thinking through structures of inequity, spending the time to really find the answers to questions about who is part of a process from the beginning. Whose voices are heard and whose are not? Who is creating the knowledge? What determines and who should decide what information is shared? And why is this important? And this obviously relates to the instrumentalization of Islamophobia in many DEI contexts, right?

So if you take the time to find the answers to these questions, then that brings you to a very different orientation towards making change. And if we question the premise of inclusion into a dominant oppressive system, then we also find it important to ask within a DEI context, what makes a DEI effort a success? What definition of success are we working with? Where does that definition come from? Who determines what success is? And like, who’s part of the process and who is excluded? And our process works against the typical ways of establishing DEI goals that are beholden to boards of trustees, administration, funders, et cetera.

We’re advocating for measurements that really respond to different considerations. So, the terrain is important and the consideration about what kinds of change we can make within this kind of system. Can DEI be a site of and for transformation, for inclusion into or the creation of a liberatory system, might a reparative DEI be possible, like Ariana González Stokas asks, among others, are the conditions there so that we can make meaningful change and change the conditions? Maybe, maybe not, but for now, it is still a space within which we can struggle and struggle for accountability. And also a space where we can bring in a different analysis. And that’s one of the reasons we’ve been working on our social justice curricula, which are being used in a number of settings, and again, including DEI programs. 

So I’m just going to bring up three that are relevant to today’s conversation: our Islamophobia curriculum, our Palestinian Nakba curriculum, and antisemitism through a framework of collective liberation. You know, if DEI programs employ definitions about antisemitism that are wrong, if DEI programs do not include Palestinian voices, if Islamophobia and anti-Arab racism is an afterthought, if curricula and programs are not liberatory, even if this is by design, we can challenge and open up spaces for something better.

And our curricula, whether it’s the Nakba, Islamophobia, or antisemitism, is within a framework that allows us to get to some of the deeper issues, to see the relationships between oppression and state sanctioned violence or settler colonialism, for instance. So our curricula is really done through a lens that draws interconnections and allows for our issues to not be taken up in silos, but through building our connections and our solidarities through racial and economic and real social justice commitments.

So for example, our challenging Islamophobia and racism curriculum is rooted in our work with Muslim groups. And it was created to serve as a resource to and to work with groups interested in organizing against Islamophobia and anti-Arab racism, and to be a partner to the broader Muslim-led movement against Islamophobia. And in this, through this curriculum, we understand the context of institutionalized Islamophobia and give some definitions and examples of state-sponsored Islamophobia and also liberal Islamophobia, recognizing that many groups might speak out against anti-Muslim acts of hate, but then support state sanctioned Islamophobia.

We also look at Islamophobia in Israel and anti-Palestinian politics and how they intersect. And we also include a section on organizing against Islamophobia together with other groups. And then, I saw someone put in the chat, so glad that this is useful. 

We’ve partnered with Project 48 to create the Palestinian Nakba curriculum. And this curriculum offers an opportunity to learn about the robust Palestinian society that existed prior to the Nakba, catastrophe, and critical events leading up to, and during 1948, and a prism through which to understand the ongoing nature of the Nakba and its impact on Palestinian lives. So we feel so fortunate to be able to work on this and work with educators to bring this into their schools. Through the work of historians, personal accounts, and unearthing of archives, this curriculum offers really a rare opportunity to learn about the events leading up to 1948 and the forced displacement of over 750,000 Palestinians and to understand how the Nakba is an ongoing process of dispossession and erasure.

And a topic, that’s been also so critical right now, antisemitism through a collective liberation framework, which we created together with educators, historians, and organizers, and this curriculum is devoted to understanding antisemitism, what it is, and what it is not, like what Evelyn shared around the IHRA definition, right? And challenging it, grounded in a deep commitment to justice and dignity for all people. Knowing that the organizing that is taking place today is about the Palestinian people’s right to live in dignity on their land and in their homes and to end the unfathomable violence Palestinians are experiencing at the hands of the Israeli government. It is particularly shameful that seekers of Palestinian justice have been falsely and repeatedly accused of antisemitism. So, in order to resist these false charges, and also to be able to challenge actual antisemitism, it’s especially important to understand what antisemitism is and what it isn’t.

Many groups that universities and DEI programs rely on and bring in, like the ADL, the AJC, and others, have been at the forefront of misdefining what antisemitism is, exceptionalizing it, and also accusing Palestinians and their supporters of antisemitism. What we do is different. And we have really been lucky, to be brought into different schools and programs, so that we can do this differently.

And I think I’ll, I’ll just end there. I think that’s, that’s a good place to maybe bring us all together. Thank you.

Amira: Thank you. Thank you so much to all of you. I realized after I gave the introduction that I never named the title for this. And so I just will remind us that the title is “Oh… and Islamophobia.” So it was about the kinds of efforts on our campuses that we have been seeing since October 7 and the beginning of the genocide, where on many of our campuses task forces all of a sudden appeared and when they did, they were named in terms of Islamophobia. And we’ve heard about some of the problems with that.

I thought I would share a quick anecdote about something that has happened on my campus as a way of just framing and a kind of question to you all, and then, give folks some time to ask more questions in the chat but also just open up for discussion. So I’ll just share that on my campus we had a task force already in place. It was, in fact, originally named SWANA, a SWANA task force. And then, Islamophobia was added to the title. The task force was created in 2021,  but last year, we were already in place and we made many requests to have a meeting with the president and the president refused to meet with us. And over the course of time, people started to notice that there was a task force on antisemitism, against antisemitism on our campus that was labeled as a presidential task force. And ours was labeled as a vice-presidential task force. And it seemed like maybe this was the reason why we weren’t, couldn’t have access to the president.

So as a response, instead of meeting with us, the president said, you know what I’m going to do. I’m going to elevate your task force. So we’ll dissolve it as it is over the summer. Everybody will apply to be on the task force. So we were required to submit applications. This was by the middle of the summer. Part of the application process was, “Let us know a little bit about like why you want to be on it, but also do you have expertise in this area?” So I applied and in fact, I have some expertise in the area. Indeed, it is my main area of research, and having been president of the Arab American Studies Association, I also have experience institutionally and in other forms. We didn’t hear anything back. We inquired. We were told it’s a long process. It takes a long time. Finally, the selections were announced only to the people who were selected. I was not one of them. And it was just a sort of brilliant example of a kind of administrative violence that is like, we’re going to do this to elevate you at the same time that it clearly silences and sidelines and does many other things, right, that we could talk about. So the question that is like embedded in that is, we can talk for days about all the kinds of violences that can be packaged into these institutional forms, at the same time, they exist and sometimes offer resources or means to work from within. And so I think that’s a range of what we have heard today. Is this like the really pressing question that comes out of it is, what do we do with these violent institutional formations that nevertheless are present on our campuses and are things that we have to navigate in some way? And so are there sort of like strategic ways to navigate them would be a super hard question.

And I will note also that in the chat, we had a question which, Nadine, you have answered by giving some links, but I also want to give the space in case some people want to follow up on that question as well. 

Evelyn: I’d like to respond to what you said, Amira, because I think many of us relate that we’re on campuses where we have expertise and our administrators don’t call on us. And, last week I was on Nadine’s campus. And I gave a presentation to some DEI administrators and afterwards, Nadine said, you said things I can’t say. And I thought same thing applies on my campus. It’s not as if I’m being called upon. So your experience resonates. And on my campus, many years ago, there was a committee on Jewish life that was put together in response to a perceived antisemitic incident where a student criticized Israel. And so it was perceived that there was a huge problem with antisemitism and this group was put together. And afterwards, the administrator said, well, if we did a Jewish life one, there has to be parity. So we’re going to create a Muslim life one. And, it was touted as the first committee that a university president has put together on Muslim life. And I was on that committee, and we got together and did what was expected of us. And after October 7, we asked for a committee on Palestinian life, because Muslim life committee didn’t do Palestine and that was turned down.

But in terms of, like, what do you do in these violent institutional formations? I think all of us are surviving by being with like-minded colleagues and doing the work anyway, but we would like for it to be official and in conversation with our administrators. But clearly, you are the expert on your campus, and if they didn’t seize the opportunity, it also reveals a lot about how many of our institutions are interested.

Amira: And the fact that the formations contain, either contain us or contain the conversations like the comment in the chat about Dylan Rodriguez’s comment about task forces being inherently counterinsurgent and reformist strategies along the lines of many other similar ones like community policing efforts. The other one that I mentioned was about asking for more information from you or some resources, Nadine, about the kinds of bothsidesism and the dialogue thing that can happen and thank you for offering those and then we have a comment 

Nadine: I actually would actually love to read more, the panel inspired me to think about this. A lot of it came from personal experience, a lot of what I talked about today, and I quickly researched a little bit before today and found that a few organizations have done this great work like, AMP and USPCR that I put in the chat, but I don’t know of any like longer analysis per se. There might be, if I think of them all, I’ll put them in the chat.

Amira: Yeah. And there’s this follow up question. Is there a way we can reverse the trap of the interfaith dialogue space by using the platform to our advantage? And we could even extend that like to the task forces themselves, right? How are there ways we can use platforms, these platforms to our advantage when we do have access and in what situations is it like more useful to say, “No. We refuse that.” Right? 

Nadine: Yeah, I was thinking of, I mean, I think what a lot of us are struggling with is defensive versus offensive strategies because part of the problem that we’ve been laying out is that these situations are intended to be a distraction, you know, that we get caught in them and then we’re spending all our time responding to the violence we’re experiencing instead of working on divestment, for example. So I think it’s just really important to choose your battles and be really careful about, you know, what we get caught up in, and not respond or react to these administrative strategies if they’re really, you know, not having any major impact, that we need to take seriously examples of what you said, Amira. The example of the cops who kept wanting to have these discussions with us and dialogues. We were able to find a few administrators who believed in restorative justice and they supported us in shifting that.

So instead of the ask on the table being dialogues and police trainings, they became, having a hotline for graffiti versus people calling the cops for graffiti, you know? And so it’s like, thinking of like, what is it that we want to achieve? And then how do we, like you said, pivot from the setup we’re in, but then ask for the thing we want to ask, and that only works if there are people in the administration who we might sort of have a seat at the table with who could support us, because otherwise, you know, we already know that they’re not going to really, they’re going to ignore us.

And some universities folks have that and some don’t, and then I think just again is to say I think counter narrative is important like how we talked about anti-Palestinian racism, that’s not something that even allies feel equipped to talk about. And it goes back to something we’ve been doing in Arab-American studies for decades and decades, and it’s sad that we’re still having this conversation that people say, well, I don’t really know how to respond.

And it’s like, but we know what racism is. We know what colonialism is. So it’s not that complicated to say that’s racist. It’s not just this complicated political thing. And so I think that getting our whole campus on board with these terms like anti-Palestinian racism and anti-Arab racism, anti-Muslim racism, and then I think the last one is like to also just keep doing our work, like to keep, if we’re working on divestment, to remember that like, that’s the building work, you know, that’s the movement building work. That’s the work. That’s the change that we want to see. And so just be really careful to not get caught up in the reaction and the destruction. 

Amira: Yeah, thank you. And speaking of having people at the table that you can talk to, or I forgot exactly how you put it, but people in admin who you may be able to work with, or I just wanted to uplift this question in the chat that says, thank you so much for these talks that are honestly quite brave given the tacit and now more explicit prohibitions. I’m talking about Zionism itself. Do you have thoughts on how to bring DEI staff to the point of talking about power and talking about Zionism. And I wonder if I might bring the question to Nina and to the conversation, because maybe building on what Evelyn said about, like, you said things on another campus that you couldn’t say on your own campus. Is this a strategy that we could think through, bringing in PARCEO, bringing those, you know, this kind of a group and pitching it to our DEI offices. 

Nina: Yeah. In fact, I mean, that’s, I think one of the reasons why a lot of people at universities were excited about working with us and having us create this so that we could be outside experts coming in, right. And we both do the kind of like slow narrative shift work, building different alternative narratives and the education work. So, you know, we found that some universities, we can be brought into classes, we can be brought into administrators, we can be brought into public settings and others we can’t. And so, we start slower and smaller and somebody on the chat, a wonderful student that we worked with for a couple of years at a university, you know, we talked about the ways that even having a class build your network of support and have that build other forms of support so that, you know, kind of wherever you are, you’re able to then like just build. It’s useful to have outsiders coming in sometimes, and we appreciate being a group that can do that for schools, for teachers, for universities, and for other groups. 

Amira: And did you, apologies if you just said this, I was answering a question in the chat. Evelyn have asked if you give presentations beyond universities also to high schools or other schools? 

Nina: Yeah, we do workshops and presentations in high schools as well. And also with community groups and church groups and other community organizations. But yeah, right now we have workshops that are also for high school and middle school age classrooms. And we are working on developing for elementary as well, but kind of, in the process, but for now, in terms of elementary stuff, we’re working with teachers. So that they can work with their students as well. 

Amira: Thank you. Also going back to this super important question about DEI in general, in our current context with DEI being criticized and under threat of elimination by the right. Are there any intersections that we might look to to inform and educate those who support DEI initiatives? 

Evelyn: I can speak to that. Thanks for that question. The chapter of my book that Amira referred to in my bio, speaks to this issue, which, and these are some presentations I’ve been giving lately about DEI, where I try to highlight what universities have done to include Arab and Muslim students and to acknowledge it and celebrate it. So, for example, some universities have graduation to parallel Black graduation and lavender grad graduation for LGBTQ students. Some universities have reflection rooms or prayer spaces for Muslim students to not have to walk across campus 15-20 minutes to do their daily ritual prayers. And so there have been initiatives that have been undertaken by certain universities that do create more inclusive campuses for Arab and Muslim students. So I usually like to highlight what those things are, how they’ve been done, how basically reflects a framework that’s been used for other groups that are then applied. But then the main question is how, when it comes to Palestine organizing, it doesn’t matter if you have a prayer space, if you are being attacked and harassed for your activism. And so one of the main messages I’ve been trying to convey is that for those who care about diversity, equity, inclusion on college campuses, you can’t do one without the other. You can’t do halal food and Ramadan accommodations without addressing the impact on our students when they are involved in Palestine activism, they are attacked and harassed and how important it is for university administrators to protect them to have their back and not to cave into Zionist pressures. So my response to that question is encouraging, understanding how they’re very much interrelated and conveying that to those on our campuses who are committed to creating more inclusive environments. 

Amira: I wonder if also this might be an opening to the other question that was asked about starting conversations with DEI staff about Zionism, because a lot of, you know, many Zionist attacks on us and our work are in fact aligned with right wing attacks on DEI. And so this seems like a clear convergence as well for starting conversations. I wanted to note that I haven’t named any of the people who ask questions in the chat, just because it’s being recorded and I didn’t know if you wanted to be public, but nevertheless, we very much appreciate you as individuals showing up to be here with us and ask these important questions and to share the space, in the interest of time, I am going to thank the panelists again so much for sharing your time and all of your, I don’t want to say knowledge, I mean, it is knowledge, but also it’s just like, so, grounded and embedded in love and liberation. So just thanking you for that. And, so thankful to be in the space. Thanks everyone for being here.

Emmaia: Thanks so much for joining us, please check out the resources in the show notes — including a link to PARCEO’s trainings on these very questions for university and K-12 institutions. Those notes are on our website at criticalzionismstudies.org. Next week we’ll have more one-on-one conversation, join us for that too. Till next time, solidarity from the Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism.