#scholasticide

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'Scholasticide' refers to the systemic obliteration of education. To deprive a people of education is to deprive a people of a future; it is to deprive a people of the chance to rebuild their society; it is to deprive a people the ability to express and assert themselves. Ultimately, depriving a people of education is to deprive a people's existence.

Source: All universities in Gaza have been destroyed. What does this mean for Palestinians?

With all universities in Gaza destroyed, students are turning online to continue their education. Yes, they are still studying even while surviving through a genocide. After all, education determines their future, and also the future of Palestine.

However, continuing their education online is difficult. With the frequent attacks, students often do not have reliable Internet, and electricity, the necessary equipment, or even the space for them to continue their online studies. And thus, Ihyaa (@ihyaasociety) is born. Ihyaa is a Gazan youth-led initiative that aims to provide a space with Internet, electricity and study equipment to help university students continue their education.

However, Ihyaa needs your help. Without enough funding, Ihyaa cannot electricity and Internet costs to help students access their online lessons, nor can they provide stationary and a place for students to study!

Help students in Gaza continue their education, and with that, you can help them rebuild Gaza's future! Please share and donate if you can.

From Struggle to Strength: Ihyaa’s Mission in Gaza

‏In Gaza, students have not only lost their homes, but their universities, their notebooks, and their safe places to learn. But in the middl

Go to PayPal.Me/ihyaafoundation and enter the amount. It's safer and more secure. Don't have a PayPal account? No problem.

Ihyaa is started by the vetter Mohammed Ayesh (who vets the fundraisers on this list). It has also been promoted by @/gaza-evacuation-funds (also see x, x, x), and promoted by nabulsi

You can enter my necklace raffle (2.0) if you donate to Ihyaa (deadline: 15 July!)

Ihyaa's Instagram: ihyaa.society

[sayruq]

Dont forget Palestinian students

[the-garbanzo-annex-jr]

When anti-Israel groups hijack causes and organizations, they will eventually destroy them

Blogging about Israel and the Arab world since, oh, forever.

We've noted previously that Palestinians and their groupies love to hijack any cause just to turn it into a vehicle to attack Israel. Anti-racism, climate, oceans, women's rights, children's rights...the list goes on. Palestinians join world bodies tackling real problems just so they can make speeches and write papers about how Israel is the enemy of every social movement. 

No doubt this irritates people who are dedicated to their causes.  They are willing to tolerate it because they think that the alternative - being harassed forever - is not worth the hassle.

But one comment about the AHA resolution struck me as being true, and accurate for all of these causes. 

“If this vote succeeds, it will destroy the A.H.A.,” Jeffrey Herf, a professor emeritus of history at the University of Maryland and one of five historians who spoke against the resolution on Sunday, told me. “At that point, public opinion and political actors outside the academy will say that the A.H.A. has become a political organization and they’ll completely lose trust in us. Why should we believe anything they have to say about slavery or the New Deal or anything else?”  

Already the Middle East Studies Association lost several schools as affiliates when they were taken over by Israel haters. A number of others dropped their association with the American Anthropological  Association after their own July 2023 anti-Israel resolution. Alternative academic groups are forming. 

The single-minded obsession with Israel, which is today's flavor of antisemitism. doesn't just hurt Jews. It hurts everyone who adopts its stances. 

Any good that is being done in academia, in the field of social justice, and in international forums to combat problems that transcend national boundaries is endangered by the Jew-haters who try to make every cause about Israel. Unfortunately, those fields and forums themselves are so filled with the modern antisemites that anyone pointing this out would be threatened with expulsion from the group. 

[rebecca-levin-art]

One thing about the genocide against Palestinians that I as a student find particularly heinous is the absolute destruction of the Gazan education system. There are thousands of kids my age who were supposed to go to university this year, but their university was destroyed. How did the international academic community not riot when the first school was bombed? The Zionist entity’s cruelty towards Palestinian young people will never cease to astonish me.

Doesn’t this anger you? If so, let me direct you to a way that can help: @mohammedhaboubsblog ‘s fundraiser here. He and his sister Farah were recently able to evacuate Gaza, and are now trying to pay their university registration fees. The fees were originally due today, but Mohammed messaged me this morning saying that the university gave him a two-day extension.

Mohammed needs to reach 296,438 SEK in that time. He needs 27,893 more SEK, which is the equivalent of only 2,674.41 USD! That’s so easy to reach, y’all.

I will be offering art commissions in exchange for proof of donation to Mohammed's fundraiser. All you have to do is send me that proof, and I will draw you something equal to the value of your donation.

Only two days left! Let’s help combat Israel’s destruction of education by making sure that Mohammed and Farah can go to school.

[watermelllonarchive]

Nour is an attorney and educator who has been teaching children at various camps in Gaza. As she says in the above video, an uneducated population is one of the goals of the occupation. As we have seen in other posts, children have already missed valuable months of schooling.

This method of pop-up travel schools has a long history among oppressed peoples. For example, women's education was forbidden in 1990s (and is still forbidden in 2020s) Afghanistan under the Taliban. Women and girls seek education in secret. Likewise, in 18th century Ireland, English occupation mandated that only Anglican schools were able to operate. Catholic and Presbyterian education was not permitted. From the early 1700s through mid 1800s, Irish "hedge schools" educated children in reading, mathematics, writing, local history and culture, and religious education. (Sources: link 1 link 2)

Knowledge is power and education is resistance!

You can support Nour's education work through her Go Fund Me and follow her on Instagram @ noor._.nassar

Available Go Fund Me campaigns for people whose stories have been shared on watermelllonarchive can be found in the resources post.

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[archive-pl]

[readingsquotes]

America’s Campus Witch Hunts Are Only the Second Worst Thing Happening to Professors Right Now 

Make no mistake: There is an ideological witch hunt happening on college campuses right now, the likes of which has not been seen since Sena

"Make no mistake: There is an ideological witch hunt happening on college campuses right now, the likes of which has not been seen since Senator Joseph McCarthy and the House Un- American Activities Committee tried to ruin people’s reputations in the middle of the last century. Students and professors are being targeted by university administrators, assaulted by police, and investigated for their politics by Congress.

And yet, it is only the second worst thing happening to college students and professors right now. ...

in their book Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of Mass Media, Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman described the kinds of things which have been happening to professors like me as the fourth filter of their “propaganda model,” where flak or enforcers beat people up in the town square (verbally, politically, or even physically). The point of these spectacular floggings? When academics or journalists are seen being punished publicly, others are meant to get the message that they should keep quiet—or else.

One of the most violent forms of university flak has been the withholding of degrees, when students have worked towards diplomas for many years and have them stolen for engaging in moral disobedience about genocide. As postcolonial scholar Priyamvada Gopal observed, when university trustees have done this, it is “immoral blackmail, as is overruling faculty on this matter.”

Jairo Fúnez-Flores, an Assistant Professor of Curriculum Studies and Teacher Education in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction at Texas Tech University, was suspended for 40 days for his outspoken Palestinian support before being reinstated. Sami Schalk, author of the book Black Disability Politics, was hospitalized after being brutally attacked by police at the University of Wisconsin-Madison while trying to protect her students. Cops even broke a hand and nine ribs of Southern University of Illinois Edwardsville professor Steve Tamari while he was peacefully protesting at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri. And Mohamed Abdou, a visiting professor at Columbia University, was inhumanely alerted he was being fired when president Minouche Shafik threw him under the bus on live TV during a congressional hearing; he received no due process and is being forced to leave the United States.

And still, as horrible as this has been for all of us in America, what we are encountering is not the worst thing happening to professors right now.

Far from it. Our Palestinian colleagues have been experiencing far worse.

At least 95 university professors have been killed in Gaza since the genocide began, according to the United Nations.

The UN reports that “more than 80 percent of schools in Gaza” have been “damaged or destroyed,” while the ICJ bluntly says that “Israel has targeted everyone one of Gaza’s universities, “including the Islamic University of Gaza, the oldest higher education institution in the territory, which has trained generations of doctors and engineers, amongst others—destroying campuses for education of future generations of Palestinians in Gaza.”

The UN uses a single, powerful word to describe what is happening to educators and education institutions in Palestine: scholasticide, the willful destruction of a society’s ability to produce knowledge and educate its people. Preventing a population from being able to do research and to teach its citizens literacy, agriculture, medicine, science and culture is an aspect of genocide is to take away the very means of life.