Anti-Semitism or an Academic Stunt, It Doesn’t Matter, Oberlin Professor Keeps Her Job
In what is either anti-semitism or an academic stunt — or an attempt to find an excuse for anti-semitism she now regrets — a junior professor at Oberlin College has upset the campus and gathered national attention for a series of tweets and Facebook postings. In one item, rhetoric professor Joy Karega claimed that ISIS was actually run by the CIA and the Israeli secret service Mossad and in another that Mossad had orchestrated the attacks on the French magazine Charlie Hebdo. In a third, she mentioned international Jewish bankers.
Oberlin, ranked by U.S. News and World Report as the nation’s 23rd best college, costs a little over $50,000 a year in tuition and fees. Founded by abolitionists in 1833, it was the first college in America to admit people of all races. Karega, an assistant professor of rhetoric and communication, finished her doctorate in 2014 and then began teaching at the college.
ISIS, the CIA and Mossad
Karega has not explained what she was doing, though she did make the controversial Facebook items private. Last November, Karega “wrote that ISIS is really part of Mossad, an Israeli intelligence unit, and the U.S. CIA,” reported the trade journal Inside Higher Ed (the article was reprinted by Slate). “It’s troubling that in this day and age, where there is all this access to information,” she wrote,
most of the general public doesn’t know who and what ISIS really is. I promise you, ISIS is not a jihadist, Islamic terrorist organization. It’s a CIA and Mossad operation and there’s too much information out there for the general public not to know this.
“Karega also last year posted that Israel was responsible for the downing of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17, which has widely been attributed to Russian-backed separatists in Ukraine,” Inside Higher Ed continued.
In another post, she wrote that Netanyahu visited Paris after the Charlie Hebdo massacre ‘just in case the message wasn’t received via Mossad and the ‘attacks’ they orchestrated on Paris.’ (Netanyahu was in Paris after the attacks but to visit Jewish people in France who were attacked.) Karega shared a video from Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan suggesting that Zionists and Israeli Jews were behind 9/11, and wrote that he was ‘truth-telling,’ as well.
Another item invoked the alleged conspiracy of international Jewish bankers, with a picture of Jacob Rothschild and the caption “We own your news, the media, your oil and your government.” She accused the Rothschilds of a “false flag” operation in downing a Malaysian airliner 17 over Ukraine. “With this false flag, the Rothschild-led banksters, exposed and hated and out of economic options to stave off the coming global deflationary depression, are implementing the World War III option.”
Screen shots of some of Karega’s Facebook items, which she’s since made private, can be found on the Tower.
Possibly a Stunt
Suggesting that the postings might have been an academic stunt to gather material for her book — a study of “conspiratorial political literacies” — were Karega’s Facebook items posted after the controversy began. In one, she said she sometimes wanted to say to those who were responding “for malicious, intimidation, and/or silencing purposes: ‘Folks, you all are making my work too easy; handing my research right to me.’”
Another, reported by the Chronicle-Telegram, a local newspaper, told her followers that “when I come up out of my Unbothered state of being,” she’ll address
the kinds of intimidation and silencing tactics that are rhetorically enacted in digital spaces, through email, through telephone communication, and propagandized editorial articles, masquerading as ‘journalism,’ and how common it is for Black women, who are early in their career on the tenure track as part of the professoriate, to be prime targets for these kinds of activities and practices. And … I’m going to talk about why it is so important to resist these intimidation and silencing tactics and not coil under pressure. But for now, still unbothered.
The president of Oberlin wouldn’t say which of the postings were anti-Semitic or research but insisted Karega’s words were covered by academic freedom. Writing in his column for a weekly campus email — and without naming Karega — Marvin Krislov, who noted that he was a practicing Jew and that members of his family had been murdered in the Holocaust, declared academic freedom “the very practices that ensure we can develop meaningful responses to prejudice.”
Authorized Anti-Semitism
“The disturbing argument at work behind all the impressive academic verbiage is that a conspiracy theory, and more specifically an anti-Semitic conspiracy theory, is a legitimate social discourse that should not be silenced or controlled by ‘relations of power’ that authorize accusations of anti-Semitism,” argues Matthew Grindin, writing in the Jewish Web magazine Forward. “In other words, Karega wants to study how Jews silence anti-Semites. For those dulled to such language, how would it sound if we substituted ‘how Muslims silence Islamophobes’ or ‘how African Americans silence White Supremacists’?”
Writing in the Israeli daily newspaper Haaretz, columnist Bradley Burston criticized American left’s silence on such speech. He suggested a new acronym of leftists who wouldn’t denounce anti-Semitic statements like Karega’s: “PEAS — Progressive Except For Anti-Semitism.”
Karega claims that what she calls “anti-Semitism call-out culture” carries “anti-Blackness rhetorics,” Gindin notes. The effect is to condemn the rejection of anti-Semitism.
So when Jews defend themselves against racism and hate speech they are 1) engaging in a kind of rhetoric based not in morality but in power dynamics, and 2) they are themselves guilty, in an as yet undisclosed manner, of anti-black rhetoric.
Not surprisingly, Karega wrote in a Facebook item posted in March of last year (one of those on Tower‘s site) that “I see ALL religions, spiritualities, and faith systems as forms of indoctrination and mind control.”
