The smearing of student activists is what enables their brutalization.

President Biden's participation in the degradation is a moral stain on our national character

With the word ‘Hamas’, as with ‘anti-semitic’, it’s important to look at how the word itself is being used, instead of allowing one’s first reaction be to its denotative or connotative meaning. At this moment, it’s vital that we examine the tactical and strategic deployment of these terms instead of simply reacting to them upon encountering them.

Ivan Pavlov described words as “the signal of signals.” When scrutinizing how a word works, one can’t allow oneself to react to it or to stay in that reaction. Propagandists, however, count on a Pavlovian response upon contact with that signal of signals.

‘Hamas’, ‘terrorist’, etc., are used to dehumanize. ‘Anti-semitic’ (in bad-faith situations) is deployed to elicit a call-and-response, a shun-and-dismiss reaction toward the person or information targeted; it’s a particularly pernicious way of saying, “This is taboo.”

(The vast majority of instances where ‘anti-semite’ or ‘anti-semitic’ is employed do not fall into this category of spurious use or cynical attack. As I said in a previous essay, “[A]nti-Semitism is a real thing and it really happens. Anti-Semitism is understood as hostility to or prejudice against Jewish people, on the mere grounds of their being Jewish, their background. Much like racism, sexism, homophobia and other scourges of prejudice, it is an attitude that often informs a person’s practice [that is, it turns into active discrimination]. This can have devastating effects on the person on the receiving end of the bigotry. And we’ve seen the results of this view of the Other when taken to extremes. This is something we should all fight against.” Here, however, I am addressing this current environment of slander and misrepresentation, where bad-faith uses of the term abound and threaten to become endemic.)

With regards to ‘anti-semite’ being deployed in the current environment of Israel committing genocide, those who are invested in Israel seeing their genocidal campaign through to the end know that they don’t really have a defense for Israel’s actions. More and more people are becoming (or are already fully) aware of what Israel is doing. The student protests threaten to expand that awareness even further. 

So what Israel apologists are doing is deploying ‘anti-semite’ — this includes the President of the United States participating in such slur slinging — so as to attack from a position. This position ultimately becomes unassailable, by dint of the nature of the attack itself.

Kate Abramson, in “Turning Up the Lights on Gaslighting” (2014), provides a bit of explanation:

“[T]he gaslighter’s aim . . . is to aim at producing a situation in which, one way or another, that person [targeted] does not occupy a standpoint from which challenges might be issued.”¹

The slur is a complete invalidation.

Because ‘anti-semite’ is being deployed as a slur, and because it’s being used in this gaslighting context, the term becomes dehumanizing in two different degrees, which very well may compound each other. This may make it even more of a dehumanizing term than many other slurs.

It’s the trifecta: terrorist, anti-semite, Nazi.

These are all the things students protesting the genocide in Gaza are being called. And make no mistake: they are being so labeled from storied heights in our society, from the current President to a former one, by members of both parties in both chambers of Congress, by media figures who have banked a store of trust, by owners of social media platforms — the entire array of societal power has turned to the power of epithets to tar an entire social movement.

The three epithets I listed that are being applied to these students reinforce each other. ‘Terrorist’ + ‘anti-semite’ = ‘Nazi’, and all three of these archetypes are ultra-villainous. Assembled together, they create a synergy of dehumanization. A person so labeled is so beyond the pale that the person can be considered outside the bounds of moral consideration.

David Moshman, in “Us and Them” (2007), writes:

The language of dehumanization is extensive. Members of dehumanized groups have been variously portrayed and seen as weeds, rats, vermin, dogs, cows, viruses, maggots, microbes, parasites, plague, pests, snakes, spiders, lice, locusts, cockroaches, cancerous cells, and malignant tumors. Less biologically, they have been portrayed and seen as heretics, heathens, infidels, barbarians, savages, subversives, or terrorists. And then there are the many specialized dehumanizing labels and stereotypes for specific groups around the world.

What all of these conceptualizations have in common is that they restrict the moral universe to “us.” “We” are moral individuals who acknowledge and respect our obligations to each other. “They” are not just different but are not fully persons at all and thus not among those to whom our moral obligations extend[.]²

Thus we see the ease in gaining public assent for the bonecrushing response of militarized police tactics against a peaceful and physically vulnerable group. The students, sitting in encampments, are truly sitting ducks. That there hasn’t been more outcry over their clear brutalization by the police is testimony to the level of dehumanization these students have suffered in three short weeks.

Dehumanization is considered the sine qua non of genocide. That the United States is intricately involved in Israel’s genocide — indeed, to the point of allowing Israeli propagandists expansive access to American airwaves, as well as aiding and abetting — means that the dehumanization of the Palestinians so rampant in Israeli society has now been transferred to the students in this country.

Because these students who are protesting have identified with the Palestinian civilians, they’re getting the Palestinian treatment. 

We saw this past March on Columbia’s campus that student activists were doused with a chemical agent known as “Skunk”, a noxious substance manufactured by the state of Israel and used by the IDF against Palestinians as a form of crowd control and deterrence. It’s not available in the U.S. The person who deployed it on campus has been described as someone who had previously served in the IDF. He likely saw the protesters in the same light as he’d seen Palestinians, and he treated them accordingly.

In the same vein, we see the undercurrent of Islamophobia being cast against the student protesters. There is a strain of stereotype against Muslims that those who believe in Islam are “presumptively anti-semitic”; such a stereotype is “the Islamophobic belief that Palestinians (who are presumed to all be Muslims) are motivated not by their own interests in freedom and dignity but by a hatred for Jews that renders them inherently untrustworthy.”³ This is a translucent trope here in the United States, often subliminal but still detected. The belief is much more openly bandied in other areas of the world, particularly in Israel.

So we see here that this stereotype is being transferred, too: these student activists, sticking up for the right of Palestinians to live, are tarred as presumptively anti-semitic by the very virtue of their advocacy for a despised, dehumanized group.

It’s to the point where critics of Israel are called “pro-Hamas” in order to imply that they are anti-semitic! In that way, we have come full circle.

The moral panic piggybacks onto the latent stereotypical attitudes that exist in the general culture, creating a maelström of distrust and diminishment. When this happens, humanity is lost, both in the people being slurred as well as in those who accept the slur on face value, for to dehumanize others one must first dehumanize oneself.

We begin to combat this by calling it out, not only for what it is — gaslighting — but also for how it creates its effects. It’s the manipulation of emotion, and emotion’s precisely what a propagandist loves to sculpt.

This needs to be addressed more urgently at just this moment, because if the proposed anti-semitism bill to enshrine the IHRA definition in U.S. law passes the Senate (it’s already passed the House), that could erode the very foundation of our freedoms of expression and speech.⁴ Dissolve the bedrock of democracy and the whole edifice will crumble.

1. Kate Abramson, “Turning Up the Lights on Gaslighting,” Philosophical Perspectives (2014), Vol. 28, No. 1, p. 16.

2. David Moshman, “Us and Them: Identity and Genocide,” Identity: An International Journal of Theory and Research (2007), Vol. 7, No. 2, pp. 122-123. Paragraph space added for clarity of reading.

3. Rutgers University Law School, “Presumptively Antisemitic: Islamophobic Tropes in the Palestine-Israel Discourse” (November 2023), p. 49.

4. Read more about the IHRA (International Holocaust Remembrance Association) definition of anti-semitism here. Additionally, view what the lead drafter of the definition, Kenneth Stern, said in warning of its adoption: “He helped define antisemitism; Now He Says the Term Is Being Weaponized | Amanpour & Company” (PBS, May 1, 2024)