Stu Smith “Destroy the Idea of America” The People’s Conference for Palestine put academic radicalism on full display.
https://www.city-journal.org/article/peoples-conference-for-palestine-gaza
Over Labor Day weekend, thousands gathered for the Second Annual People’s Conference for Palestine in Detroit. The conference featured a lineup of speakers who variously called on activists to “destroy the idea of America in Americans’ heads,” identified Palestine as “the vanguard of the second wave of decolonization,” and told attendees to “bring[] the fight back home.” One of America’s most prominent live streamers called for “revolutionary optimism” and increased agitation.
The event drew an array of activists and ideologues. Many youth organizations, such as the Palestinian Youth Movement, Students for Justice in Palestine, and Young Democratic Socialists of America, organized the conference. The speakers included academics, doctors, journalists, politicians, nonprofit leaders, and even a former UFC champion. Often, those most likely to sympathize with lawbreakers and call for direct action were the professors—underscoring the need to root out such extremism in higher education.
The conference’s “guiding principle” was “Gaza is our compass.” UCLA professor Loubna Qutami, a cofounder of the Palestinian Youth Movement and a member of the Palestinian Feminist Collective, expanded on that theme in her speech. “Gaza fuels our moral clarity, our political will, and our sense of responsibility to act with integrity, with vigilance, and with organized discipline,” she said.
Qutami also implicitly praised what leftists call “diversity of tactics”—the strategy of using variously legal and illegal means to achieve a political goal. She highlighted how some pro-Palestinian activists have variously “shut down bridges, flooded streets, organized die-ins and sit-ins, rallies, marches . . . pickets, fundraisers, and conferences,” while others have “doubled down on campaigns for boycott, divestment, and sanctions” or “confronted tech, logistics, media, and other private industries colluding in genocide.”
The event featured radical speakers from California’s public higher education system. One was UC Berkeley’s Hatem Bazian, who presented a six-point plan to make Palestine a permanent focus in higher education. “Don’t allow anyone on the university campus to say, ‘Talking about Gaza make[s] me feel uncomfortable,’” he said. “Genocide should make you feel uncomfortable.”
Bazian co-founded Students for Justice in Palestine and launched its parent organization, American Muslims for Palestine. AMP is being investigated by the House Oversight and Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pension Committees for alleged terrorism ties.
Another California-tied speaker was Rama Ali Kased, associate professor of race and resistance studies at San Francisco State University. Before introducing convicted murderer Mumia Abu-Jamal (who spoke from death row with a recorded message), Kased claimed that “[f]or Palestinians and many oppressed communities, our political prisoners hold the highest regard.” Earlier in the speech, she had called on Palestinians in the West (the so-called “far diaspora”) “to strategize so we may get closer to a world free of oppression, of Zionism, and for a liberated Palestine.”
Other speakers were tied to Ivy League universities. Lameess Mehanna, associate director of undergraduate career development at Columbia and a member of the Palestinian Youth Movement, claimed in her speech that “Gaza has shown us that the choices in this world are between building a just world or sliding into full-scale barbarism.”
Sean Eren, a graduate architecture student at Columbia, pointed to “the Student Intifada” as a model for the “severing of all ties to the Zionist entity.” Eren, who once praised the “ingenuity” of Hamas’s tactics, claims on his personal website that his architectural work is rooted in “an anti-imperialist lens.”
Karameh Hawash-Kuemmerle, an assistant professor of neurology at Harvard Medical School, claimed that she was arrested for saying that she “stand[s] against genocide as a medical professional.” In fact, Hawash-Kuemmerle was detained for disrupting a congressional hearing.
One particularly notable feature of the conference was its multiday children’s educational programming, which centered on “Palestinian history, culture, and resistance.” Organizers brought the children on stage to lead chants. Emcee Taher Dahleh described the kids as future leaders of the radical pro-Palestinian cause: “These children who tomorrow you will see on the front lines of protest . . . . These children who will never be deterred by AIPAC . . . . These children who will play a . . . critical role in building the movement for the liberation of Palestine.”
The conference has already made political waves. Republican congressman Buddy Carter, for example, recently introduced a measure to censure Michigan representative Rashida Tlaib for her participation.
Lawmakers need to focus more closely on universities that encourage illegal protests and activism. That professors affiliated with California’s public universities openly associate with known extremists demands, if nothing else, greater scrutiny.
While the Trump administration negotiates with UCLA over federal research funding, the Department of Justice should broaden its investigation to encompass California’s entire public higher education system. The People’s Conference for Palestine reveals just how desperately these institutions need reform.
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