Universities are playing an increasingly important role in the hybrid war that is becoming international. Indeed, this war is distinguished by the primacy of ideological operations over armed operations that it legitimizes in advance and justifies a posteriori. Thus, mass terrorist attacks perpetrated by jihadists – immediately disguised as the damned of the earth, atavistic victims of colonialist discrimination. This narrative that transforms aggressors into victims has been theorized in postcolonial studies and has extended to all intersectional disciplines.
We could certainly make fun of these students with fluorescent hair, keffiyeh bandanas, dancing wrapped in Palestinian flags, and shouting I am Gaza! We could be surprised that after having hosted and subsidized activist associations, university authorities are reduced to supplying their barricaded activists with halal and gluten-free food.
Occupations of universities in support of "Palestine", that is to say the Islamists of Hamas[1], seem to have multiplied suddenly and as if spontaneously in most democratic countries. We are surprised by scenes of jubilation from the evening of October 7, 2023, celebrating a "historic victory of the Palestinian Resistance" and congratulating Hamas for its "creativity", to say the least destructive and murderous.
1/ In the USA, one of the main associations, Students for Justice in Palestine, founded in 1993 by Hatem Bazian, an activist and professor of Islamic law at Berkeley, claims to have 350 sections active in the occupations. They organized demonstrations in 12 universities, including in Canada, from October 200.
For a long time, the association had merged into the intersectional program, to stigmatize "homophobia, sexism, racism, bigotry, classism, colonialism, and discrimination of any form"[2].( Thus, on September 7, 2013, its Brooklyn College chapter organized a conference by Judith Butler, an illustrious thinker of the genre, a meeting all the more memorable because students who disagreed with the boycott of Israel were expelled manu militari. All this seems so well forgotten that in France, shortly after October 7, and even though some of its sections such as those at Columbia were being prosecuted, the association was authorized to open an office at Sciences Po Paris, where it distinguished itself by organizing an occupation, soon imitated at the Sorbonne and many other universities. To the cries of Palestine will be free, from the River to the Sea, it was active in the demonstrations in front of the school, displaying anti-Semitic signals, such as the red hands that have symbolized the lynching of Jews for two decades.
The penetration of Islamism into universities is an international phenomenon that took off at the turn of the 1990s. In France, after the founding in 1989 of the Islamic Union of Students of France, renamed in 1996 the Union of Muslim Students of France, various movements campaigned to impose a point of view that was in line with the ideology of the Muslim Brotherhood or complacent with it.[3]Their work was crowned with success during the national demonstration against Islamophobia on November 12, 2019, which recreated in its own way the union of the left: it marched alongside CCIF (now dissolved) chanting Allahou Akbar. Houria Bouteldja, co-founder of the Party of the Indigenous of the Republic, then hailed "the result of thirty years of work."
2/ Louis Althusser once defined universities as "ideological state apparatuses", forgetting in passing their function of developing and transmitting knowledge. From then on, it became permissible to divest the State of these apparatuses, to put them at the service of militant ideologies, which many of his disciples such as Alain Badiou did. However, through Trotskyist groups, post-Marxism gallantly gave way to an intersectional ideology that makes Hamas and Hezbollah authentic "left-wing movements", according to Judith Butler's formula. Patient work of implantation in the social sciences, in particular in disciplines where a vulgarized post-Marxism already reigned, such as sociology, made it possible in the medium term to control recruitment and influence teaching. The supervisory authorities obligingly lent themselves to this in the name of "diversity".
Following the affirmative action policies put in place by JF Kennedy and developed by his successors, international organizations such as the UN, UNESCO and the Council of Europe have made the Diversity, Equality and Inclusion program a sort of universal directive that, in the name of Care, seeks to protect humanity from societal discrimination – and not economic discrimination. In English-speaking universities, this first resulted in the appointment of referents, then in the creation of dedicated positions. In the USA, some universities have two to three hundred diversity commissioners, responsible for denouncing attacks on intersectional ideology. Their power extends to dismissals, as we saw recently in Canada for Frances Widdowson, a professor in Calgary[4].
These commissioners are now the obvious choice for the highest academic positions. Claudine Gay, the president of Harvard, who caused a scandal by downplaying the Holocaust before a parliamentary committee, began her career in this way, and published only a few anecdotal articles marred by plagiarism.
Furthermore, the sale of positions and functions is still ongoing. Tariq Ramadan, an ideologue whose thesis is summed up as a hagiography of his grandfather, founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, transformed himself into a distinguished Islamologist, as soon as Qatar paid Oxford University a sum estimated at 10 million pounds to create his chair.[5].
Venality is established. Among the four donor countries that finance American universities to the tune of more than 6% are Qatar, an emirate acquired by the Muslim Brotherhood, and Saudi Arabia, two feudal petromonarchies. Despite the legendary disinterest of the parties, this benevolence creates links: well-assured soft power is not limited to the purchase of football clubs, and universities become a relay of influence for those who know how to pay the price.
3/ By practicing soft disinformation, "biased" teachings develop ignorance. A history teacher recently asked a colleague: "Why did the Jews go to Palestine in 1947?"[6]. What does it teach?
Holocaust denial is spreading among American youth: 20% of those under 30 believe that the Holocaust is a "myth." This is a sign of the deliberate failure of education.
But ignorance now has a strategic significance: not only does it shelter opponents, whose arguments remain meaningless since they are not understood, but it allows adherence to simplistic explanations of conspiracy theories, particularly anti-Semitic ones.
Largely downplayed by the authorities, the wave of anti-Semitism is now spreading to universities: expulsions of Jewish students from certain lecture halls on the grounds that they are Zionists (as at Sciences Po Paris), blocking of a Hebrew exam in Lille, etc.[7] At the École Normale Supérieure on Rue d'Ulm, among the occupants, the Samidoun association, banned in Germany for anti-Semitism, is spreading its propaganda.[8].
The aggressive policies obviously have an international scope and extend first and foremost to Israel; thus, all the occupation committees, according to a coordinated slogan, demand the end of academic and scientific relations with the universities of this country. The cancel culture becomes an international offensive: Haaretz published on April 12 a list containing hundreds of disinvitations, a posteriori obliterations of Israeli co-authors, refusals to evaluate publications that the nationality of their authors seems to make impure. It does not matter then that the victims of this discrimination are most often fierce opponents of Netanyahu: despite its political pretensions, the so-called anti-Zionism even renounces the cynical calculation that could seek allies in Israel itself, to rely on an anti-Semitic metapolitics. It is no longer the Israeli right, but the Jew who is targeted.
4/ It is obvious enough that the Iranian authorities were keen to show their gratitude. Ayatollah Khamenei, Supreme Leader of the Islamic Revolution, recently published a long letter: “To the awakened youth whose conscience calls them to defend the oppressed children and women of Gaza,” which begins: “Dear students of the United States, this message expresses our solidarity and unity with you. You stand today on the right side of history — a history that is being written before our eyes. / You are now part of the front lines of resistance.” And he uses the same language: “The current genocide of the Zionist apartheid regime is the continuation of decades of brutal oppression.”
Hojatoleslam Ali Reza Pananian heads the Iranian Supreme Leader's "think tank for universities," and in this capacity, six months earlier, he specified the Islamist strategy in a statement on Iranian television on November 8, 2023: "We are waging a war of attrition against the West. We, Hezbollah and Hamas. We will create such anti-Zionism in the hearts of their people that all those who demonstrate today in their streets will be the same ones who will destroy them tomorrow from within."[9].
He thus explains the geopolitical scope of academic anti-Semitism and its current developments within the "resistance front": the pogrom of October 7 was indeed designed to give anti-Semitism a strategic function that unifies the three major components of the camp of the enemies of democracy, Islamists, post-socialists, and intersectionalists.[10].
This strategy is successful and Panahian says: "We have already won." As Abnousse Shalmani, a writer born in Tehran and a refugee in France, points out, "Anti-Semitism is the moral victory of Islamism in the West."[11], and we can add that this moral victory presages a political victory.
Here again, universities are at the forefront. Islamist student organizations, whether Sunni like Students for Justice or Shiite like Samidoun, tolerated and often supported by the faculty and elected leadership, have taken the lead of the movement and developed its slogans, which have been taken up in the street demonstrations.
It is not just about occupations of university buildings, collective conversions (as at Columbia), and calls for boycotts and intifadas. Everywhere in democratic countries, universities are no longer just red, green and black bases: they have also become targets. Indeed, their main function involves preparing demanding exams that lead to diplomas. However, these exams are being called into question, not only by physical blockages, but by the refusal to evaluate them, which results in the promotion of fraud: teachers at the Université Libre de Bruxelles have thus insisted on saying that they authorize it — to allow pro-Hamas activists to no longer worry about their exams.
Graduation ceremonies, particularly at Harvard, Sciences Po Paris and ENS Ulm, have been transformed into pro-Hamas happenings, without the university authorities bothering to enforce the education code.[12]The prize probably goes to the management of the ENS Ulm, which is content to claim not to have applauded, while since November 2023, the same management has hosted and financed, at the request of the local Palestine Committee, a seminar with scientific pretensions on "Palestine" whose guests are obviously "anti-Zionists". [13].
Thus the Islamists have successfully bet on Western universities to integrate them into what Khamenei calls the "Resistance Front." They also manage to make them flout their own educational codes, discredit their degrees and dishonor themselves by renouncing all authority.
5/ Like political science institutes and journalism schools, universities are at the forefront of training in intersectional thinking, a diverse variant of single-track thinking. With the private and elitist nature of the major American universities, under the Victorian exterior of the Ivy League, the model of the modern university inherited from the Enlightenment is now being competed with from within by a model modeled on the management of large companies: the university is becoming a place of life where the client enters without ceremony ("come as you are"), where he is taken care of to ensure a safe space and where he is congratulated for developing his abilities: "Go create; Just do it", etc.
With the help of clientelism, many universities are effectively abandoning their mission of developing and transmitting knowledge, in favor of identity and activist studies. Thus, they favor or even give rise to ideological pressure groups that divide opinion by creating indefinite societal controversies; but these major diversions cannot hide the fact that they systematically choose an alliance with the enemies of democracy and the rule of law, by promoting, like them, a fanatical anti-Semitism.
