Responding to the terrorist attacks in Israel, President Joe Biden told the world that the murders and hostage-taking perpetrated by Hamas were “an act of sheer evil.” He described “stomach-turning” reports of “parents butchered…babies being killed…entire families slain” and “women raped, assaulted and paraded as trophies.” The elderly and children have been taken as hostages.
It is hard for most of us to watch or read the news and encounter graphic photo and video depictions of these atrocities, many posted by Hamas. We have witnessed the worst single-day mass murder of Jews since the Holocaust.
Many leaders of American higher education have issued strong statements in response to these terrorist attacks. The President of Touro University, Alan Kadish, M.D., wrote, “Now is the time for all decent people everywhere to unite against evil and terror; to unite in faith in the goodness of humanity, and to unite in our collective ability to overcome adversity. Touro University is proud to stand with the people of Israel.”
The President of the University of Florida, Ben Sasse, Ph.D., condemned equivocation and wrote, “Many people in elite academia have been so weakened by their moral confusion that, when they see videos of raped women, or… learn of a grandmother murdered in her home, the first reaction of some is to ‘provide context’ and try to blame the raped women, [dead] baby, or the murdered grandmother.”
There have, however, been distressing examples of pro-Hamas statements from a list of student groups at Harvard University, the president of a New York University law student organization, allegations of equivocation by many university leaders and a very public pushback by prominent university donors, including at the University of Pennsylvania and Harvard University, about what they perceive as an anti-Israel and anti-Semitic bias in some academic circles.
An example of a chronic anti-Israel bias is found at the Duke University Press. In 2017, it published, The Right to Maim. Reading through the book, one encounters page-after-page of pure fabrication. “Israel brings Palestinians into biopolitical being by designating them available for injury,” the author writes. The book contains claims, without a shred of proof that would pass muster of peer-review in our scholarly disciplines, that Israeli troops are instructed to shoot “to maim and not to kill” for the purpose of disabling people.
“Was anyone at Duke University Press fact-checking this book?” we wondered. The prose reminded us of Truman Capote’s critique of Jack Kerouac, a leader of the “Beat Generation”: “This isn’t writing. This is typing.” A typical sentence by the author, discussing her book, reads: “It might be helpful to disarticulate ‘assemblage’ from its Deleuzian philosophical associations and look instead to its deployment in critical race studies, queer theory, and disability studies.” Several of us became tenured professors at Duke decades ago. It was a rigorous process with strict scrutiny of our publications on multiple levels. The fact that this author’s writing got past any university committee strikes us as a de facto failure of institutional academic due diligence.
Duke University Press followed The Right to Maim with other books, such as Visual Occupation which concerns itself with “Israeli occupation of Palestine…Israel [erases] the history and [denies] the existence of Palestinians.” Oh really? That would be the same Israel that has free parliamentary elections with multiple Arab parties participating and electing members of its Parliament - called the Knesset?
Then there is Duke University Press’s Invited to Witness, which “explores the significance of contemporary solidarity tourism across occupied Palestine,” and Palestine is throwing a party and the whole world is invited, which asserts that “investment-based [economic] policies maintained the status quo of occupation.” One of us was an undergraduate economics major at The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. They taught students that investment-based economic policies, which created jobs, help raise the standard-of-living. Perhaps the economics faculty didn’t have any textbooks published by Duke University Press and was misinformed?
Several current and retired members of the Duke faculty met with the leadership of the Duke University Press 18 months ago to open a dialogue about the Press’s one-sided approach to Israel, its standards for academic review and its willingness to consider alternative points-of-view. The first meeting was constructive. We were assured that there would be follow-up meetings to discuss concrete action steps. Every subsequent attempt to continue this initial discussion was rebuffed. Our letters requesting additional meetings have been ignored.
Terrorists are terrorists. Murderers are murderers. Kidnappers are kidnappers. Slaughterers of children are “sheer evil.” The Duke University Press, in its hundreds of published book pages, has treated amoral individuals as something they’re not. The kleptocratic dictators of the 'West Bank' and Gaza Strip are treated as legitimate governments. They are not. Diverting money which should have gone to humanitarian aid into the slaughter we have just witnessed is shameful.
The “elite academia” authors of the Duke University Press have aided and abetted the attack against the Jewish people. Murdering Jews is the end result of publishing a chorus of anti-Semitic prose. It is a dark stain on the Duke University Press and the university which hosts it.
For those universities whose leadership cannot find the moral clarity to denounce sheer evil, the time has come for financial supporters of the university, the parents of prospective students, and prospective employers of those graduates who post despicable material on social media to ask themselves, as the old song goes, “Which side are you on?”
Edward C. Halperin, M.D., M.A., is a professor of the history of medicine and chancellor/CEO at New York Medical College.
Stanley R.J. Robboy, M.D., was the vice chairman of pathology;
Robert A. Gutman, M.D., is consulting professor of medicine;
Amy Rosenthal, M.D., is a former member of the Department of Medicine at Duke.
This essay represents their opinions and not those of their respective organizations.