Propaganda Promoting Professors

A New Open Letter Defending the College Protests is Drenched in Falsehoods, Selective Reporting and Hypocrisy

Tis the season of open letters, mostly on the Gaza War, campus protests, antisemitism, and Islamaphobia. Many express the cancel culture left’s newfound embrace of free speech.

Whether this new found embrace of free speech by former advocates of cancel culture can be taken seriously is another question entirely. As I shall show, the open letter in question is drenched in “free speech for me (and my allies) but not for thee” hypocrisy.

In this essay, I expose a recent open letter by 213 social and personality psychologists (hence, The 213 or The Letter of the 213) who posture as experts (which they are indeed by the standards of academia), as filled with egregious propaganda, up to and including (but not restricted to) quoting a nonexistent quote from the International Court of Justice supposedly about Israeli genocide. I want to say “concocted” or “fabricated” but maybe it is a mere error, making it merely professionally irresponsible. If it was just that one falsehood, I would not have written this essay. I can’t debunk all of it, it would render this essay too long, but I debunk enough here to give a flavor for how high and deep The Letter of the 213 piled it.

I also present (in the Appendix below) two other letters. The second letter is a direct response to that letter by social psychologist Gilad Hirschberger, printed here with permission.

The third is an open letter from Jewish students at Rutgers (several other such letters are linked herein, though not included in the Appendix). It is not about The 213. It is presented here because it holds a mirror up to The 213, who seem deeply concerned about ensuring pro-Palestinian protest voices are not silenced — and, except to dismiss, are entirely silent about the vast majority of Jewish voices expressing sentiments such as the ones in this letter. As shall be shown, this type of gross hypocrisy pervades the letter.¹

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Propaganda Scholarship

From my recent article (with the great Nate Honeycutt, and listed in the references) titled Psychology as Science and as Propaganda:

Scholarly propaganda involves the manipulation of information, including facts, evidence, citations, arguments, logical fallacies (such as ad hominem attacks and leaping to conclusions), partial truths (via omitting relevant scholarship), and distortions to influence others’ behaviors, beliefs, and attitudes. It includes but is not restricted to politics. It can involve appeals to emotions designed to prevent deep and critical thinking.

Although The Letter of the 213 is not scholarship, as shall be seen, The 213 argue that they should really be believed because they are such accomplished experts in topics they claim are relevant to the Gaza War and campus protests (even though I cannot find a single article, essay, or even tweet by any of them defending free speech or academic freedom or standing against cancel culture or any other threats to free expression besides this letter). I am also unaware of any of them producing scholarship on antisemitism.² Because they claimed particular credibility by virtue of being, according to them, such accomplished experts, it is fair to evaluate their letter by the standards Nate and I articulated for identifying propaganda scholarship.

Propaganda, Demonstrable Falsehoods and Gross Hypocrisy in the Letter from the 213 Social and Personality Psychologists

The 213 declared that they are social and personality psychologists. It is, perhaps, useful to keep in mind that the Society for Personality and Social Psychology (SPSP) claims about 7500 members (and lord knows how many social and personality psychologists are not members of SPSP). So 213 signatories means that something like 10,000 or more social and personality psychologists did not sign this letter. We do not know why ~10,000 or more social and personality psychologists did not sign. Still, maybe my field is not completely lost.

Here is the letter. The Appendix has it reprinted in full.

The 213 Professors quote a nonexistent quote “from” the International Court of Justice (ICJ)

South Africa brought a case to the ICJ accusing Israel of genocide. The court ruled that Gazans have a right to be protected from genocide. Here is a quote:

some of the rights claimed by South Africa and for which it is seeking protection are plausible. This is the case with respect to the right of the Palestinians in Gaza to be protected from acts of genocide

Gazans, like the rest of us, have the right to be protected from genocide. In contrast, this is what the psychologists’ letter stated:

the mass killings of Palestinian civilians—which the International Court of Justice of the United Nations determined “could amount to genocide.”

Note that “could amount to genocide” is presented as if it is a direct quote from the ICJ ruling. It isn’t. There is no such quote from the ICJ, and it made no such determination. This is either an outright lie or egregiously irresponsible. No need to trust me on this: That it is false can easily be seen by anyone for themselves in either of two ways: 1. Click the link in the 213’s letter; it does not go to the ICJ ruling³; 2. If you go to the ICJ ruling and do a search for “could amount to genocide” you end up with … nothing. This is a high order of bullshit.

Police Brutality?

I was also struck by the 213 psychologists’ letter alleging police brutality faced by some of the protests.

In contrast, the broad mischaracterizations of these protests as violent actively endanger our students and colleagues (including our Jewish students and colleagues) who as a result have faced … police brutality,

It linked to one article. Here is that “article,” in its entirety:

There was also about a 2 minute video, including very short snippets of police making arrests.

That is the entire article, the whole enchilada, its all there is, there ain’t no more, it ain’t over till its over but that article ends right there. Note that the source is “Middle East Monitor” (MEMO). The Wikipedia article on MEMO includes this:

MEMO is pro-Palestinian in orientation and supports Islamist causes. MEMO is regarded as an outlet for the Muslim Brotherhood⁴ and its website strongly promotes pro-Hamas related content.

In contrast, one can find more serious reporting at The Dallas Morning News and CBS News, neither of which described any police brutality. The Dallas Morning News reported that the encampment was broken up in about 20 minutes. If there was “police brutality” it must have occurred so fast that no professional reporter noticed.

Regardless, for social and personality psychologists claiming special credibility, the failure to fact-check their dubious and ridiculously superficial source against more serious news outlets is grossly irresponsible.

The 213 did claim this responsibility:

We have a duty and responsibility to protect our students as they extend this training beyond the classroom.

Whether this means much beyond “Yay for our side!” or “we are indoctrinating our students and then sending the little zomboid army out to change the world (long march through the institutions anyone?) and how dare you challenge or criticize them” is entirely unclear, so I fixed it for them so that it actually makes a clear point:

We have a duty and responsibility to not promote bullshit by citing superficial sources and to fact-check controversial claims especially from dubious sources against more credible sources.

The Protests Were Peaceful?

From The 213:

We know, based on extensive reporting (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7), first-person accounts, and our own experiences observing or participating, that student protests on college campuses across the country are peaceful.

Sound familiar? It should. Like a broken record, this “mostly peaceful” rhetoric gets trotted out seemingly no matter how much evidence of violent protests there is. This is from 2020:

Sure, most protests then and now were peaceful, but: 1. Plenty weren’t then; 2. Plenty aren’t now; and 3. The critical issue is whether they were peacefully illegal, peacefully violated legitimate college/university rules, peacefully vandalized property, peacefully blocked, harassed and intimidated other students or counter-protestors, peacefully shouted down speakers and peacefully disrupted campus events, etc. The critical issue is whether they were legitimate, legal, and permitted by university/college rules fairly applied not whether they were peaceful or violent.

The damage and death wrought by the “mostly peaceful” protests of 2020 are compared here to the January 6th Capitol Riot:

A homeless person living in your lab may be peaceful, but it is still illegal (this actually happened to me about 20 years ago). In the 1980s in NYC, at an intersection, you could be peacefully approached by some homeless guy peacefully squeegeeing your windshield, though if you did not cough up some cash for this unrequested and usually undesired “service,” you might get your car hammered and dented by that same squeegee guy (this happened to me, too).

An encampment on your front lawn may be nonviolent, but they have no right to be there. Same for most colleges. It is one thing to protect speech (which deserves maximal protection in my view) and it is quite another to protect trespassing and disruptive behavior even if it stops short of “violence.” Students have a right to chant “Death to all Zionists” but do not have a right to trespass. And if they chant while trespassing, they can be arrested for trespassing even if this also prevents them from chanting where they would like to trespass. To confuse arrest for trespassing with silencing, censorship, or suppressing speech is to be confused indeed.

So “peaceful” is a deflection. But let’s consider it on its merits. How peaceful are the protests? Well certainly, if one counted the minutes of protest, few minutes would be characterized by violence, vandalism, disruptions to campus life, or attempts to intimidate, block, or bully counter-protestors.

2020. Seattle’s mostly peaceful Chaz Zone, an area mostly peacefully taken over by mostly peaceful protests.

Like the social justice protests of 2020, the issue is not “what proportion, out of all protest, included violence, vandalism, disruption or intimidation?” The issue is how much have these things occurred and how much harm, disruption and intimidation have they caused, not their “percentage.” I do not have an answer to this question, but the answer is clearly vastly more than the blanket denialism of the psychologists’ letter. Here are some examples:

• Rutgers President Holloway had to cancel a town hall meeting with students because of protestor disruptions sufficiently severe that he had to terminate the event and be escorted out by police.

Tweet by the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Education and the Workforce

• Rutgers also postponed finals because the administration feared violence erupting among the encampment protest site. Although this is not violence, it is clearly disruption and intimidation. Last, FIRE has a long list of events where attempted disruptions by protestors occurred. On a quick pass, the first several attempted disruptions are all from pro-Palestinian protestors, but I did not do a full analysis. I am pretty sure yelling chants to prevent a speaking event from happening counts as “nonviolent” to the social and personality psychologists writing the letter appearing above. It is still illegitimate. Their right to chant cannot be used to disrupt someone else’s right to speak or listen, especially at a university event (a street argument is a different animal).

• Northwestern President Shill, testifying before a Congressional committee on Thursday, May 23, 2024, on the protests there and the antisemitism they incited:

  “What we were experiencing with the encampment was a huge spike in antisemitic activity… There was a picture of me* with horns and blood, as all of you know that is an antisemitic trope”

  *Shill is Jewish.

• There is A LOT more like this. From the President of the University of Chicago:

Other disruptions include the repeated destruction of an approved installation of Israeli flags, shouting down speakers they disagree with, vandalism and graffiti on historic buildings…and co-opting the university flagpole to fly the Palestinian flag.

• And at Columbia (from The Atlantic):

yesterday just before midnight, word goes out, tent to tent, student protester to student protester—a viral warning: Intruders have entered the “liberated zone,” that swath of manicured grass where hundreds of students and their supporters at what they fancy as the People’s University for Palestine sit around tents and conduct workshops about demilitarizing education and fighting settler colonialism and genocide. In this liberated zone, normally known as South Lawn West on the Columbia University quad, unsympathetic outsiders are treated as a danger.

“Attention, everyone! We have Zionists who have entered the camp!” a protest leader calls out. His head is wrapped in a white-and-black keffiyeh. “We are going to create a human chain where I’m standing so that they do not pass this point and infringe on our privacy.”

So, we have the recycling of the 2020 “most of the protests were peaceful” trope, which is literally true but completely irrelevant to the harassment, trespassing, vandalism and disruption caused by (far more than I can document here) at least some and perhaps many of the protests.

Homework: In the comments, discuss these explanations for The 213’s denialism about the vandalism, disruptive and intermittently aggressive nature of the mostly peaceful protests (and feel free to come up with your own).

a. What denialism? The evidence you provided is merely from a congressional committee, university presidents and a major media outlet. You can’t take such sources seriously.

b. cluelessness

c. radicalization

d. progressive virulent anti-Zionism

e. the effects of living in a political bubble

f. intellectual arrogance

g. b through f are all correct

Free Speech for Our Allies, but Oh How We Love to Censor Those Whose Speech We Disapprove of

The 213 wrote:

To meet student protests with threats of (and actual) violence is counter to academic freedom and freedom of speech, which are basic rights in any democratic society.

and

We maintain that broad characterizations of these protests as antisemitic are false and, moreover, are being leveraged to silence protestors and erase Palestinian suffering.

Call me shocked: when I looked through the signatories, these courageous defenders of free speech and opponents of denouncing the protests for antisemitism as “silencing,” I discovered that many also signed the open letter that triggered the PoPS/Fiedler on the Roof/Racist Mule Fiasco. You remember that letter? The one that made wild accusations of racism and called for suppression of accepted papers? No? Let me remind you. Left, the authoritarian principle. Middle, the authoritarian practice. Right, quotes from the open letter parallel to the authoritarian practice and reflecting the authoritarian principle.

From my article, The New Book Burners, to appear in a collection of chapters in a book, now in press, and edited by Joe Forgas on the Psychology of Collectivism.

So it is, according to these dual letter signatories, ok for them to fling wild charges of racism but it is “silencing” to accuse protestors with slogans like “From the River to the Sea, Palestine will be free!” and “globalize the intifada!” and, even “Are we, anti-Jewish[!!] students not worth protecting?” and their enablers of antisemitism.

It is, according to them, also ok for them to call for retraction of papers duly accepted at the time for “racism,” and for them to ALSO characterize those who accuse some of the protestors of antisemitism as constituting a threat to democracy. I really need a barf meme here, but I will spare you. This works almost as well:

Here are some of the signatories to The 213 Professors Letter who also signed the Fiedler on the Roof denunciation letter. Those in bold italics have at least one publication on “psychological science reform” — you know, the effort to make psychology cleave closer to truth. I did this to make sure the irony of the juxtaposition of this supposed commitment to truth in peer review with the endorsement of propaganda, falsehoods and double standards in the Letter of the 213 is not lost.

• Michael Kraus, Alison Ledgerwood, Johanna Ray Vollhardt, Eric Knowles, Paul Eastwick, Sarah Gaither (an associate editor at Journal of Experimental Social Psychology), Mary Himmelstein, Kim Chaney (read more about her here, she is actually a serial denouncer for “racism”), Roger Giner-Sorolla (former editor Journal of Experimental Social Psychology), Tage Rai (former editor of Science), Jin Goh, Ana Figueiredo, Masi Noor, Steven O. Roberts⁵, Nadia Brashier, Kimberly Quinn, Kate Ratliff (former senior editor at Psychological Science), Kristina Howanski, Iris Mauss, Elizabeth Page-Gould, Sa-Kiera Hudson, Mark Brandt.

The Blinding Certainty of the Letter of the 213

From the psychologists’ letter, Columbia supposedly

meet(s) student protests with threats of (and actual) violence

1. The link is to a court case against Columbia brought by Palestine Legal, a group that advocates for Palestinian rights, that has not been resolved. To treat this as if “actual violence” has been established is more than a little premature. But commitment to due process has never been a strength of social justice advocates (see Table 2 above, from The New Book Burners, on the Fiedler on the Roof open letter).

2. It is also blind and reflects gross hypocrisy. The psychologists’ letter fails to reference any of the many suits against universities, such as those for “unchecked antisemitism” in the California schools, “rampant antisemitism” at Rutgers, “enabling antisemitism” at Harvard, and “antisemitic discrimination” at Carnegie Mellon. These suits are also in progress so one cannot assume they demonstrate pervasive antisemitism on these campuses. But that is not the point here, which is about the blindness and hypocrisy of The Letter of the 213. The psychologists’ letter implicitly holds a double standard of “lawsuits by Palestinian groups should be taken at face value as true; lawsuits by Jews should be ignored.”⁶

So The Letter accepts the suit against Columbia at face value before wrongdoing has been established and then dismisses (via its blanket denial of antisemitism) and ignores the existence of far more suits against universities for antisemitism and then dismiss all allegations of antisemitism as a threat to democracy.

HW assignment 2 for the comments: Which best describes this aspect of The Letter?

a. Heroic and courageous

b. Contemptible

c. Intellectually corrupt

d. Motivated blindness

e. Exquisite propagandizing

f. b through e are all good choices.

213 Social Psychologists Expertise Monger to Promote Propaganda

There is, perhaps, nothing more damning about the value of training in social and personality psychology than the juxtaposition of so much demonstrable bullshit⁷ and propaganda in this letter and the letter-writers’ proclamations of their own expertise:

We are a group of faculty from various demographic, religious, and ethnic backgrounds who are trained in the methods and practice of social and personality psychology.

Our training in social and personality psychology is rooted in understanding the exact processes we see unfolding in this moment concerning violence, dehumanization, oppression, and moral disengagement—but also empathy, solidarity, and collective action.

The self-delegitimization of the academy continues right on schedule. I could go on; there is more bullshit in the letter, but this essay is already long, so let’s turn to Hirschberger’s letter.

The UN Halved its Estimate of Women and Children Casualties?

Hirschberger’s letter goes beyond points I have made here to call hypocrisy on the singular emphasis in the letter on supporting Muslim and Arab students, to the implicit (because it was not mentioned) exclusion of Jewish students. It also provides additional useful context and information about the ICJ ruling.

But it also gets something at least partially wrong. This was the claim made in Hirschberger’s letter:

The accusations of genocide are slowly unfolding as the greatest blood libel in history now that even the UN has halved (!!!) its estimates of women and children causalities in Gaza https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-13413223/UN-slashes-estimate-women-children-killed-Gaza-50-PERCENT.html

This is only partially true and, as such, is misleading. First, the true part. On May 6, 2024, the UN reported that 9500 women and 14,500 children were killed in the Gaza War.

However, one must always read the fine print. The bottom of the page of this figure and the next, include this:

Disclaimer: The UN has so far not been able to produce independent, comprehensive, and verified casualty figures; the current numbers have been provided by the Ministry of Health or the Government Media Office in Gaza and the Israeli authorities and await further verification. Other yet-to-be verified figures are also sourced.

Although it says “and the Israeli authorities” every source I could find says the numbers come directly from the Gaza Ministry of Health (hence “Hamas”), and none (including the UN) identifies a particular Israeli source (e.g., here, here, here). The accuracy of the Hamas-reported figures is beyond the scope of this essay (and is its own controversy; sources saying they are credible can be found here and here; sources saying otherwise can be found here and here). All agree, however, that the Hamas-reported figures do not distinguish between combatants and civilians.

But did they “halve” their report of the number of women and children killed? This next UN report appeared 3 days later, on May 9, and in a narrow technical sense, it shows they did. On May 6, they reported 9500 women and 14,500 children killed; on May 9, they reported 4,959 women and 7,797 children killed.

That’s the partially true part. So why only “partially”? Because Hamas changed the way it reports casualties and this led to corresponding changes in the UN report. This latter report refers to “24,686” casualties as “identified,” a new characterization that did not appear in the earlier report. What, exactly, the other ~10,000 casualties that are “unidentified” means is completely unclear (at least to me). Are there 10,000 bodies yet to be identified that are so mangled that absolutely 0 can be identified as adults or children or men or women? Does 10,000 include “missing and presumed dead”? Are the numbers some sort of credible estimate based on destruction and media reports? Are they concocted out of thin air? Something in between? I have no idea.

Regardless, to get to the original figure of 9500 women would require that, even though only ~20% (~5000 of ~25000) of the identified casualties were women, nearly 50% of the 10,000 “unidentified” would have to be women. To get from the new figure of ~7800 children to the original figure of 14,500 children would require that about 67% of the 10,000 "unidentified” be children. It is impossible for both to be true. If there really are 10,000 additional dead, you can’t have both 6700 be children and 5000 be women. This means that even the Hamas figures are almost certainly lower than they were reported as being on May 6, but probably still higher than the “casualty figures were cut in half” claim in Hirschberger’s letter (and which can be found in some media reports he linked).

It should be unnecessary to state, but it probably is, so here goes: Even the lowest conceivable estimate of casualties in this war is a horror. The Israel Defense Forces estimate the Gaza death toll at 30,000. Even if this figure is accurate, and I have no idea whether it is or not, the death toll is still a horror. (Whether any war, or this war in particular, or the horror unleashed when Hamas broke the ceasefire with its brutal attack on Israeli villages on October 7, 2023 is “justified” for either side is way beyond the scope of this essay).

Conclusions

It really is not that hard to condemn violence and illegitimate protest on one’s own side. When the Rutgers Center for Islamic Life was vandalized⁸ in April:

1. A Jewish group of students issued this statement condemning the vandalism and which begins thus:

We awoke on Wednesday horrified to learn that the Center for Islamic Life at Rutgers University on the College Avenue campus was broken into and vandalized earlier that morning.

We see the defacement and destruction of our Muslim friends' space on campus as an act of intimidation and violence

2. The Rutgers Jewish Faculty, Administrators and Staff organized a donation to the Islamic Center to assist in repairing the damage.

One of the best ways to establish bias is to establish systematic errors. If AI produces Black Vikings, female popes, and declares that it is better for nuclear war to wipe out humanity than to misgender Caitlyn Jenner, we can infer that its been programmed or trained with an absurd social justicey bias.

In a similar manner, the blatant errors (of commission and omission) in The Letter of the 213 are glaring, pervasive and systematic. When psychologists make up a quote from the International Court of Justice, base claims of police brutality on a superficial report from a dubious source, dismiss all claims of violence, disruption and intimidation at the protests when anyone with half a brain can easily find credible sources (including university presidents) reporting it, we can infer absurd bias in their analysis of the protests.⁹

As they say in social justicelandia, the 213 psychologists really need to:

Epilogue

The 213 psychologists were deeply concerned about accusations of antisemitism “silencing” protestors. Given how loud, frequent, and aggressive the campus pro-Hamas (whoops, I mean, “anti-genocide”¹⁰) protests have been, if this is a silencing campaign, it would appear to be the most ineffective silencing campaign ever.

But to be clear: I hope nothing silences these people. Americans need to hear exactly what they think, in exactly their own words. Americans needs to hear it over and over and then, decide for themselves, is this what they want at their state colleges and universities?¹¹ Because that is how democracy works.

There is good news, though. ~10,000 social psychologists have not signed on to this letter.

Harvard/Harris Poll, May, 2024. The protests reflect the views of a small minority of Americans. Even young adults support Israel far more strongly than they support Hamas.

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Further Reading:

The radicalization of the American academy. (my first Unsafe Science essay!).

Propaganda and bullshit, academic style. Another Unsafe Science essay!

Frankfurt, H. G. (2005). On bullshit. Princeton University Press.

Gambrill, E. (2010). Evidence-informed practice: Antidote to propaganda in the helping professions? Research on Social Work Practice, 20(3), 302–320. https://doi.org/10.1177/1049731509347879

Gambrill, E., & Reiman, A. (2011). A propaganda index for reviewing problem framing in articles and manuscripts: An exploratory study. PLoS One, 6(5), e19516.

Jussim, L., & Honeycutt, N. (2023). Psychology as science and as propaganda. Psychology Learning & Teaching, 22(3), 237-244.

Kaufman et al (2021). Erasive antisemitism. Reutgroup. https://www.reutgroup.org/Publications/erasive-anti-semitism

Meyers, H. (2024). Why do academics dislike cops? City Journal.

Stanovich, K. E., & West, R. F. (2007). Natural myside bias is independent of cognitive ability. Thinking & Reasoning, 13(3), 225-247.

Sunshine, S. (2019). Looking left at antisemitism. Journal of Social Justice, 9, 1-67.

Tabarovzky, I. (2023). The cult of antizionism. Tablet Magazine. https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/arts-letters/articles/cult-of-antizionism-icsz

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Footnotes

1. Gross hypocrisy. Charges of hypocrisy do not address the merit of an argument. They do address the deserved credibility of those doing the arguing. However, throughout this essay, I also evaluate the merits of their arguments. They are hypocrites with (mostly) bad arguments.

2. I am not aware of a single prior defense of free speech or academic freedom or serious work on antisemitism, among the 213. They did not defend James Damore, Carole Hooven, Dorian Abbot or any of the over 200 faculty fired in the last 10 years for controversial statements that offended the social justice sensibilities of other academics (such as arguing that sex differences in personality produce gender gaps in STEM, that sex is biological, and criticizing Diversity, Equity and Inclusion), but which fell far short of what many consider genocidal death chants (“From the river to the sea…”) and calls to revolutionary violence (“globalize the intifada!”). I did not do a Google Scholar search on all of the 213. If you know of ANY of them, a single one, who has produced work on either free speech/academic freedom or antisemitism,* please ping me about it in the comments.

*I would not be surprised to learn that a handful have done something superficial, such as administering an antisemitism IAT to some sample in the context of research that does not focus primarily on antisemitism — though I am not aware even of this. Regardless, certainly few have (if any at all). When one expertise mongers, and then attempts to authoritatively state there is no antisemitism in the protests, it behooves one to actually have expertise on antisemitism, which few, if any, do.

For the record, Akeela Careem and I have very publicly defended Rutgers BLM protestors at an event I helped organize! when they were falsely accused of disrupting the event. Akeela and I also have a forthcoming chapter in a book called The Free Inquiry Papers titled “Why Social Justice Needs Free Inquiry” that reviews the historical contributions of protest to social justice in the U.S. and defends it as has having a crucial role in addressing injustices. Protest, when it is legal, is as American as applie pie, constantly under threat by those who oppose the protestors and essential to defend even when one disagrees with the goals of the protestors because if their rights are abridged, it becomes vastly easier to abridge my rights and yours. The problem is with illegitimate, illegal, disruptive protest.

3. The quote does not go to the ICJ. It goes to another UN source. The ICJ is under the UN, but attributing anything any UN official says to the ICJ would be like attributing anything any American Congressman or bureaucrat says to a ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court. Instead, the link goes to a statement by the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights. That statement does include the quote by The 213. As described in Hirschberger’s letter and also articulated herein by quotes from the ICJ, the ICJ made no such statement, so, the High Commissioner, like the 213, is bullshitting. One might say this is an “innocent” error, an “easy confusion to make” on the part of the 213. And someone probably will, but when expertise mongering, you better get who you are quoting right, especially in a situation like this where the meaning of the quote is quite different reflecting the personal opinion of a UN bureaucrat, even a high level one, rather than the ICJ itself.

4. MEMO is in cahoots with the Muslim Brotherhood. If you are not familiar with the Muslim Brotherhood, Wikipedia gives a detailed account via hundreds of sources of their origins, history, activity and beliefs. From that article:

The Brotherhood's English-language website describes its principles as including firstly the introduction of the Islamic Sharia as "the basis for controlling the affairs of state and society" and secondly, working to unify "Islamic countries and states, mainly among the Arab states, and liberate them from foreign imperialism". The Brotherhood is heavily influenced by the early Salafiyya movement and regularly advocates Salafi revivalist themes that address the contemporary challenges faced by Muslims, calling for the establishment of an Islamic state through implementation of the Shari'ah and Jihad against disbelievers.

As such, given the falsely-attributed genocide quote, and the antisemitism denialism, some might conclude that The 213 have embraced Hamas propaganda. Which might explain why it is so easy to debunk many of their statements. Welcome to academia!

5. Steven O. Roberts signed the propaganda letter of the 213! In fairness, he did not sign the open letter to APS in the Fiedler on the Roof Fiasco, but his denunciation triggered the whole fiasco, so I thought he deserves to be listed here.

6. Highlighted Palestinian lawsuits, ignored Jewish lawsuits. Of course, the letter does not state, “Jewish lawsuits should be ignored!” It simply ignores them. They are easy enough to find with a quick Google search. When expertise-mongering, you have abdicated your right to say “Whoops, we didn’t know.” This is why I do believe in some versions of implicit bias: the bias here is clear as day that anyone can see, but it is implied rather than stated.

7. Bullshit. I use this term in the entirely academic sense which is not synonymous with lies but, rather, flagrant disregard for whether a statement is true. See recommended readings for sources.

8. On the vandalizing of the Rutgers Islamic Center. The perpetrator, who was not affiliated with Rutgers, has been charged with a hate crime.

9. I have purposely avoided critiquing the Rutgers students’ letter. I mean, they are students. They deserve a pass that those who expertise-monger do not deserve.

10. Are some of the protests/protestors pro-Hamas? There is ample evidence for this elsewhere, but as I was working on this essay, I received this email from a professor at an urban northeastern university:

The weirdest sign I saw during the "campus encampments" was "Homos for Hamas". Apparently the fact that Hamas wants to kill gay people is a detail that can be ignored, as long as it serves the "good" cause of being anti-Israel. 

11. Is this what people want at their state universities and that is how democracy works. Private schools can do whatever they like (within the law). Of course, the people of the United States of America, and of its constituent states (via their elected representatives) do not need to fund schools (e.g., via grants) that we have deemed hopelessly overrun with political extremists who use their professional positions for activism rather than for teaching or scholarship, or for activist “scholarship.” Who decides whether professors’ activities (including publication in peer reviewed journals) is more political activism than scholarship and should therefore not be supported with public funds? Everyone in the country.

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APPENDIX: THE THREE OPEN LETTERS

213 Social and Personality Psychologists on Student Protests for Justice in Palestine

Social and Personality Psychologists on Student Protests for Justice in Palestine

We are a group of faculty from various demographic, religious, and ethnic backgrounds who are trained in the methods and practice of social and personality psychology. Although there are no doubt many topics on which we disagree, we are united in this call to listen to, engage with, and protect our students as they protest the mass killings of Palestinian civilians—which the International Court of Justice of the United Nations determined “could amount to genocide.”

In this letter, we call on our scholarly organizations to do more to protect students and faculty engaged in peaceful protest, and more broadly to make our collective spaces more welcoming to Arab and Muslim community members and those allied with them. We believe that not enough is being done for our colleagues and that new policies and procedures are critically needed. This should include taking action regarding faculty who harass and endanger students engaging in protest or otherwise expressing their views on Palestine. Moreover, we urge our organizations to enact measures that assist students and faculty experiencing anti-Arab and anti-Muslim prejudice.

We have seen academic colleagues conflate peaceful and legitimate protest on behalf of Palestinians in Gaza with terrorism and observed colleagues and administrators characterize protests as antisemitic—even when those protests are co-organized and heavily attended by Jewish students and hold space for and celebrate Jewish religious rituals. This is not to say that we agree with everything all protestors say or deny individual instances of antisemitism. Nonetheless, we would remind our colleagues of one of social and personality psychology’s central lessons: that an entire group should not be stereotyped or essentialized based on the actions of a very few. We maintain that broad characterizations of these protests as antisemitic are false and, moreover, are being leveraged to silence protestors and erase Palestinian suffering. Disturbingly, some faculty have abdicated their responsibilities and abused their authority by engaging in blatantly anti-Arab and Islamophobic rhetoric, defaming pro-Palestinian students as supporting the atrocities of October 7th, and demeaning Jewish protestors in terms that are both antisemitic and minimize the Holocaust.

As faculty, especially in a field like social and personality psychology that is concerned with discrimination, racism, and collective action, we must be particularly vigilant in protecting our students when they engage in protest against injustice. To meet student protests with threats of (and actual) violence is counter to academic freedom and freedom of speech, which are basic rights in any democratic society. It also denies students something that they frequently tell us benefits their learning: the opportunity to extend and apply classroom lessons about social issues and collective action to the world. Student protests must be met with engagement with their ideas, demands, and questions—not with repression thereof.

We know, based on extensive reporting (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7), first-person accounts, and our own experiences observing or participating, that student protests on college campuses across the country are peaceful. In contrast, the broad mischaracterizations of these protests as violent actively endanger our students and colleagues (including our Jewish students and colleagues) who as a result have been arrested, suspended, evicted from student housing, faced police brutality, doxxed, attacked with chemical substances, or experienced other forms of physical and psychological harm. We urge our professional organizations to sanction any members of our guild who have repeatedly incited violence against our students and other members of our community. Likewise, we are concerned about the continued silence that our professional organizations have shown to our Muslim, Palestinian, and Arab colleagues who have experienced harassment, bigotry, and abuse from members of our discipline (as described here for example), and ask that our professional organizations engage with this ongoing problem.

Our training in social and personality psychology is rooted in understanding the exact processes we see unfolding in this moment concerning violence, dehumanization, oppression, and moral disengagement—but also empathy, solidarity, and collective action. We have a duty and responsibility to protect our students as they extend this training beyond the classroom. To fail in that responsibility, or to actively work against that responsibility, is unacceptable.

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Gilad Hirschberger is a social psychologist who wrote this direct reply to some of the signatories (reprinted here permission).

Direct Response from Gilad Hirschberger

I am writing to you in response to the faculty letter that you recently signed entitled “Social and Personality Psychologists on Student Protests for Justice in Palestine.” In this letter you suggest that more should be done to protect peaceful protesters and urge our professional organizations to assist students and faculty experiencing anti-Arab and anti-Muslim prejudice. I fully agree with this part of your letter.

But then, in the next paragraph, you downplay the antisemitism that is clearly present in many of these protests and suggest that accusations of antisemitism are only used as leverage to silence protestors. You further use the participation of some Jewish students in the protest movement as a fig leaf, suggesting that if Jews are involved there cannot be any antisemitism present (the historical record begs to differ with this conclusion). You even go as far as to make the preposterous claim that to question the motives of the few Jewish students who participate in the protests (clearly a minority in American Jewry) is not just antisemitic but constitutes Holocaust denial!

In direct contrast to your brushing off of antisemitism on campus protests, President Biden in his Holocaust Memorial Day address on May 7th described “a ferocious surge in antisemitism in the US” referring specifically to the pro-Palestine protests on college campuses. A group of 400 Colombia Jewish students recently signed a letter entitled “in our name” https://www.jns.org/in-our-name-a-message-from-jewish-students-at-columbia-university/ that describes the hateful and threatening campus environment that they must endure. An environment that delegitimizes their identity as Jews and Zionists, an environment that demonizes them and rejects their presence as Jews on campus. When one of Colombia’s protest leaders, Khymani James, says that “Zionists don’t deserve to live”, it is surprising and utterly disappointing that over 200 otherwise reasonable social psychologists sign a letter dismissing any accusations of antisemitism on US campuses.

When you rush to the protection of your Arab and Muslim students but dismiss the experience of your Jewish students, you are not promoting social justice, you are not combatting racism and prejudice, you are failing as academic faculty that should provide a safe environment for all students. You are failing, in particular, as social psychologists who of all people should know better.

When you link your support for your pro-Palestinian students with the claim that the ICJ determined that the War on Hamas “could amount to genocide” you are committing a gross error. The ICJ ruled that the Palestinians have the right to be protected against genocide which does not in any way mean that genocide is taking place. Take it from the former President of the ICJ herself https://www.bbc.com/news/av/world-middle-east-68906919. As scientists, you of all people should understand the importance of accuracy, of nuance, and understand your responsibility to uphold the truth even if it is an inconvenient truth. The accusations of genocide are slowly unfolding as the greatest blood libel in history now that even the UN has halved (!!!) its estimates of women and children causalities in Gaza https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-13413223/UN-slashes-estimate-women-children-killed-Gaza-50-PERCENT.html

This adds to several reports showing the improbability of the data coming from the Gaza Ministry of Health https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/how-gaza-health-ministry-fakes-casualty-numbers

 https://www.washingtoninstitute.org/policy-analysis/gaza-fatality-data-has-become-completely-unreliable

It is again both surprising and disappointing that social psychologists, the foremost experts by now on fraudulent data and on how to expose it, have fully accepted accusations of genocide without bothering to check the data.

I have decided to send this letter to you and not to others who have signed the letter because I know some of you personally and respect others as leading figures in our field. I believe that you have signed this letter with the best intentions at heart, and probably without fully considering what this statement actually implies. For this reason, I ask you to reconsider the letter you signed and to consider composing a revised letter that is more inclusive and that recognizes the hostile environment that Arabs, Jews and many others experience on college campuses today. By reaffirming your commitment to the safety and wellbeing of all students and faculty you will not only reassure the larger academic community, but you will also send a message that will reverberate globally and contribute to more cool-headed and compassionate discourse over a conflict that is complex, nuanced, and multifaceted, and that many people on all sides are suffering from.

Thank you for your consideration.

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There have also been several other letters, such as this one from 500+ California faculty to the California Regents and this one by Jewish students at Columbia. And then there is this one by Jewish students at my home institution, Rutgers, also reprinted in full:

A Letter from Jewish Students of Rutgers University

Since October 7th, a great deal has been written about the experiences of Jewish students at Rutgers University. Very little of it has been written by Jewish students at Rutgers. We, the undersigned Jewish students and recent graduates of Rutgers University, would like to share our experiences of the past academic year in the hope of conveying the hurt, pain, and isolation that many of us have suffered and suggesting ways that the entire university community might do better in the future, not just to support its Jewish students, but to create a more tolerant climate for all its members. 

On October 7th we were horrified watching as 1200 of our brothers and sisters were slaughtered by Hamas in southern Israel, with hundreds being taken hostage into Gaza. Later, we learned that these brutal killings and abductions came with the added horror of mass rape. Some of us knew those who were killed or those still being held hostage by Hamas. These horrors recalled the darkest moments in Jewish history. The pogroms of Russia, the Farhud, the Holocaust, all were emulated on October 7th by Hamas. 

Equally shocking was the way in which we were abandoned in the following days and months. People we once considered our friends celebrated Hamas's atrocities. Our peers defended this act of “resistance,” calling it justified and deserved. We should have been prepared for this. All throughout Jewish history our slaughter and persecution have been justified. Whether in the name of “religion,” “ethnic purity,” or (in our case) “decolonization,” the murder of Jews is always given a “reason” that justifies our deaths. And in the year 2023 (and still in 2024) we, the Jews at Rutgers University, were condemned as “colonizers” or “perpetrators of genocide” deserving of these atrocities.

Student groups connected to national organizations quickly mobilized in support of terror, conveying to us that we would not be safe and welcome at the university many of us called home. With chants of “colonizers go home,” “globalize the intifada,” and “from water to water Palestine is Arab,” these groups made abundantly clear to us and the broader university community how they felt. They took over university buildings, shut down university events, and by staging an unauthorized encampment and forcing the delay of thousands' final exams, they forced their way into influencing university policy. In short, they have taken over our university.

These students weren't alone. They had the support of many faculty and staff who guided them in tactics of intimidation and menacing protest, and those faculty and staff members ultimately assisted the students in negotiating their demands with the administration. The actions of these faculty and staff have only added to the isolation experienced by Jewish students. Some of them have allowed for and perpetuated antisemitic behavior in their own classrooms. Jewish students have been forced to leave classes and in some cases change their areas of study altogether. 

We have no objection to pro-Palestinian protests occuring on our campus. To the contrary, we want our administration to permit protests of all kinds, protect free speech, encourage difficult conversations, and foster dialogue. But what we have witnessed over the past seven months has been none of this. Student groups that actively prevented the speech and expression of others have faced no accountability. Yes, we are thankful that President Holloway has justly defended and reaffirmed our relationship with Tel Aviv University. However, if we want to make our campus a better place, it needs to start with the enforcement of the code of conduct. We only ask that the rules outlined by the university be enforced and that the flagrant violators of these rules immediately face consequences.

So, we ask the administration simply to uphold its promise to us of a beloved community, one in which Judaism and the Jewish people's historic connection to Israel are understood, appreciated, and respected. Our desire is nothing more than for our university to once again become a place where all peoples are welcome and treated equally, in a tolerant environment where we can all pursue knowledge in a spirit of peace and empathy for others.