Written by Jonathan Cook – 6 May 2024
Jonathan Cook @Jonathan_K_Cook
It would obviously be antisemitic to suggest that threats from Jewish donors have influenced US universities in crushing academic freedom and the right to protest on their campuses.
Meanwhile, in other news, 700-plus members of Rutgers Jewish community threatened to bring the university to its knees by pulling ‘donations and financial support’ after Rutgers administrators had peacefully resolved their stand-off with students protesting the university’s complicity in Israel’s genocide in Gaza.
The university had agreed to hold talks with student representatives about its investments in arms firms assisting Israel’s slaughter in Gaza, set up a Palestine studies course (mirroring an existing Jewish studies department), and establish a long-term collaboration with a Palestinian university in the West Bank similar to its relationship with Tel Aviv university in Israel.
A letter from Jewish community leaders to the university accused it of ‘capitulating to the extreme demands of the lawless mob’, one that was supposedly inciting ‘hatred and violence against Jews and the Jewish state’.
The Israeli newspaper Haaretz also reports: ‘The four largest Jewish federations in New Jersey are demanding a state investigation into the “shameful capitulation of Rutgers to the pro-Hamas encampment” and are threatening to lobby for a cut in state funding to the university.’
