Princeton President Defends Teaching of Blood Libel Book As Academic Freedom

Rep. Josh Gottheimer (D-NJ) has issued a scathing denunciation of Princeton University after the school’s president, Christopher Eisgruber, appeared to defend a decision by Professor Satyel Larson to use a book in her course that accuses the Israel Defense Forces of harvesting the organs of Palestinians. More on this scandalous affair can be found here: “‘Promoting Hateful Lies’: US Lawmaker Targets Princeton University for Defending Use of ‘Blood Libel’ Book,” by Dion J. Pierre, Algemeiner, September 19, 2023:

…“I’m in Congress. I’m all for debate. But there is a fine line between sharing ideas and spreading hate, and [this book] crosses it,” Gottheimer told The Algemeiner on Monday. “No university should be promoting anyone or any material that pushes hateful lies. This is about fighting back against antisemitic hate speech masquerading as scholarship.”

The book in question is Rutgers University professor Jasbir Puar’s The Right to Maim, which is assigned to students taking a course entitled “The Healing Humanities: Decolonizing Trauma Studies from the Global South,” taught by Princeton professor Satyel Larson. The course is under Princeton’s Department of Near Eastern Studies. Professor Larson describes herself as “nonbinary.” Her preferred pronouns are her/they. And she is writing a book about “how European secular colonial ideas of calculability underlie the postcolonial governance of reproduction and reproductive female bodies in contemporary Morocco.” Can’t wait to get my copy.

I won’t try to figure out what that course subtitle — “Decolonizing Trauma Studies From the Global South” — could possibly mean; I’ve long been inured to such nonsense, and even posted samples of similar stuff o in my “The Graves of Academe” series. But the book, Jasbir Puar’s The Right to Maim, is crystal clear: the diabolical Jews of Israel, Puar claims, harvest organs from dead Palestinians, with the clear implication that they are being deliberately killed by the IDF so that their organs can be harvested. In choosing to assign such a monstrous text, Satyel Larson is endorsing it.

Academics have accused The Right to Maim of being “pseudo-scholarship” for trafficking in antisemitic blood libels rooted in medieval conspiracies charging that Jews murdered Christian children and drank their blood [the blood libel more often referred to the claim that Jews used the blood of Christian children in making matzos] during the holiday of Passover.

Where is the proof that Israel has been “harvesting the organs” of Palestinians? There is none. But it is a disturbing echo of the medieval blood-libel. Think of the massacres of Jews that followed the discoveries of the bodies of William of Norwich and Hugh of Lincoln, and so many others, deemed murdered by the perfidious Jews. Those crazed charges about Jews using the blood of Christian children in preparing matzos and other Passover fare had consequences in the Middle Ages — the murder of innocent Jews. In the 21st century, Jasbir Puar’s The Right to Maim will no doubt be translated into Arabic, Persian, and Urdu, and make a deep impression on credulous Muslims prepared to believe the worst of “the Jews.” Think of the book’s effect, too, on the impressionable undergraduates at Princeton who sign up for the course — a self-selected group of students who apparently were attracted by the anti-Israel animus of the course, as gleaned from the main text to be used; they will lap up Puar’s book. The Right to Maim will be presented to them by Satyel Larson as an authoritative text, which is why she chose to assign it to be read in full. It was at this point, in August, before the Fall Term began, when news of this scandalous course and that text first surfaced, that Princeton President Christopher Eisgruber ought to have stepped in, while there was still time, and canceled the course. He would do so, I assume, if the course texts were “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion” and copies of Henry Ford’s “The Dearborn Independent.” Why then did he refuse to do anything about the use in a course at Princeton of an antisemitic book that accuses Jews of murdering Palestinians and harvesting their organs? How does that charge differ in any way from the blood libel charges made against the Jews in the Middle Ages?

Jasbir Puar has a history of criticizing Israel. In February 2016, she said at Vassar College that “young Palestinian men … were mined for organs for scientific research.” At the same event, she accused the Jewish state of committing “genocide in slow motion.” During a panel at Dartmouth College later that year, Puar said Israel uses “maiming” as a deliberate biopolitical tactic” to enforce settler-colonialism. Puar describes herself as a “queer theorist.” A very queer theorist indeed!…

The IDF does not “use maiming” to “enforce settler-colonialism.” When Palestinians engage in violent rioting, as they did, for example, during the Great March of Return, throwing rocks, Molotov cocktails, fireworks, and even grenades, at IDF soldiers guarding the security fence on the Gaza-Israel border, the IDF uses non-lethal means — tear gas, stun grenades, and water cannons — to prevent Palestinians from breaching security fences and posing a danger to the IDF troops. But if those measures don’t work, then the IDF is authorized to shoot at the legs of threatening rioters to stop their movement. That “maiming” — a less tendentious word would be “wounding” — is done by the IDF in order to avoid having to resort to lethal force against those who are trying to assault and kill them.

“It has unfortunately become common for university faculty members here and elsewhere to become the target of viral social media storms focused on controversial materials that they assign or teach,” Eisgruber said during the faculty meeting. “That has sometimes extended to demands that the university should ban or condemn a book, cancel a course, or discipline a professor.”

He continued, “We, of course, will not do that. Academic freedom protects your right to decide what to teach and how to teach it. That right, like the right to free speech on campus, is very broad indeed, and we will protect it.”…

Does Eisgruber believe that no texts should ever be banned? When demands are made for a university to “ban or condemn a book, cancel a course, or discipline a professor,” are these demands always and everywhere to be rejected? How does he feel about banning a course relying, for its main text, on Madison Grant’s The Passing of the Great Race, that argues that the darker, “inferior” races are in danger of outbreeding the superior white race? Or would he countenance a course at Princeton based on such works — intended to be taken seriously, and taught respectfully, not held up for criticism or ridicule — as The Protocols of the Elders of Zion or Mein Kampf, and including a guest lecture by David Duke? Would Eisbrguber be willing to discipline a professor, or cancel a course in which that professor proposed to teach the “inequality of the races” based on IQ scores? Or is he a free speech absolutist, for whom “all is permitted”?

At Princeton, they are several weeks into the Fall Term. There’s no possibility now of cancelling the course this term, but it can be streng verboten in the future. What might now be done? Auditors could attend meetings of the course, monitoring, and recording, what Larson conveys in her lectures, what the class discussions are like, what nonsense and lies are presented as fact. Their presence may have a usefully chilling effect on this atrocious course offering. If auditors are then forbidden by Larson to attend, that will be correctly interpreted as “she has something to hide,” which will only increase pressure on her fellow faculty, and on President Eisgruber, to examine the course more critically.

At the same time, the contents of The Right to Maim ought to be made widely available, perhaps even being made the subject of a Teach-In so that faculty, staff, and students can understand the full horror and absurdity of Jasbir Puar’s charges, and why that book is unfit for serious use. Perhaps the sensible members of the faculty can at this point step in, and sign a collective letter to President Eisgruber, urging him to make sure that Puar’s book is not again used as a course text, and that Larson’s course — “The Healing Humanities: Decolonizing Trauma Studies from the Global South” — which apparently blames the advanced West for all the troubles the “Global South” experiences, should be held up for skeptical examination before it is allowed to be taught again. Then we’d be getting somewhere.