1,700 Sociology Professors Sign Letter Accusing Israel of ‘Genocide’
“we call on all of our colleagues to stand in solidarity with Palestinians and against settler colonialism, imperialism, and genocide”
Sociology professors from around the country have signed a letter accusing Israel of ‘genocide’ and arguing that the Hamas terror attacks on Israel earlier this month must be seen with context.
NEW: 1,700 sociology professors sign a letter accusing Israel of "genocide" and arguing that Hamas terror must be "contextualize[d]" as a response to "75 years of settler colonial occupation and European empire."
Our professors are seething with hatred against the West. pic.twitter.com/4lxaftaepz
— Christopher F. Rufo ⚔️ (@realchrisrufo) October 23, 2023
The letter drips with all of the progressive buzzwords we have been hearing from the academic left for two weeks.
This comes after Hamas raped, dismembered, burned, and murdered at least 1,400 Israelis, including children, women, and the elderly—people dragged from their homes and cars.
From the letter:
Sociologists in Solidarity with Gaza and the Palestinian People
Sociology as a discipline is rooted in a recognition of relationships of power and inequality. As sociologists and human beings, we unreservedly condemn the latest violence against the Palestinian people in Gaza and the West Bank at the hands of the Israeli regime.
Over the past seven days, the government of Israel has undertaken, in its own words, a “complete siege” of Gaza—the second most densely populated place on the planet, home to 2.1 million residents, of which 1.7 million are refugees. While claiming its actions are a justifiable response to recent Hamas violence against Israeli civilians, it has targeted the civilian Palestinian population of Gaza, while exhibiting little regard for the loss of human life. Using racist and dehumanizing language, Israel’s Defence Minister, Yoav Gallant, remarked, “We are fighting human animals and we act accordingly.”
In just ten days, Israel has dropped over 6,000 bombs on Gaza, hit the Rafah crossing on the border to Egypt several times, targeted hospitals and ambulances, members of the press, universities, United Nations’ schools and relief offices, and used white phosphorus, a highly flammable munition that the United Nations has banned for use in dense civilian areas. Israeli forces have also cut off water, food, electricity, and medical supplies, which has pushed hospitals to a breaking point. This is an act of collective punishment, in contravention of international law, which threatens the lives of over two million people, half of whom are children, with unimaginable violence and displacement. As of writing, over 4,385 Palestinians have been murdered, including a staggering 1,756 children, and over 13,561 injured…
We cannot sit back and witness the continuation of this genocidal war. We demand that our governments push for an immediate ceasefire. This stance follows in the tradition of the civil rights movement, anti-war and anti-apartheid protests of decades past. Aligning ourselves with these freedom struggles, we call on all of our colleagues to stand in solidarity with Palestinians and against settler colonialism, imperialism, and genocide.
Read the whole thing and see the signatories here.
Here are some Twitter reactions:
The issue we face is how to protect society from the 'academy' https://t.co/3FFhA2Rf7a
— William A. Jacobson (@wajacobson) October 24, 2023
Legitimately fire all of these people. Hell, end the whole field (#lbks).
Made up prey morality aside, it's just……stupid for a country to teach its own citizens to hate that country and its allies. https://t.co/DOQS9Zirls
— Wilfred Reilly (@wil_da_beast630) October 24, 2023
“The next time some academics tell you how important diversity is, ask how many Republicans there are in their sociology department.”
—Thomas Sowell https://t.co/LZm9CJQixn— Ian McKelvey (@ian_mckelvey) October 24, 2023
When you see the nonsense coming from college professors at elite institutions, it’s pretty easy see why college students are as bad as they are https://t.co/mvQrzndgzL
— Ian Miller (@ianmSC) October 23, 2023
Al-Qa’ida makes this same argument. https://t.co/Au4QGB3koG
— BDW (@BryanDeanWright) October 23, 2023
The last two weeks have exposed a side of the academic left that many people outside of the education field didn’t even know existed.
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Comments
So killing Jews by the thousands can be “contextualized” but the Jews defending themselves is genocide. weird. crazy.
This is what decades of Kool-Aid drinking gets you.
I remember as a high schooler the John Birch group putting up signs to get the UN out of the USA.
Prof Jacobson nailed it earlier, leftish Jewish folks are finding out hitler never went out of fashion for their supposed friends.
————————————————-
Journalist Bari Weiss, a Jewish liberal who quit the New York Times over its anti-Semitism, writes:
”As a Democrat who has been left homeless, who is now definitely in the center but probably leaning increasingly right, I am left yet again with an appreciation, despite the messenger, of the message of the Trump administration because what those guys did was pretty incredible in hindsight.”
“So much of the work that happened in that [Trump] administration turns out to have been right. And that’s what is so frustrating for me. The work on the border wall? We didn’t like the messenger, so we killed the message. Turned out it was right. Issuing long-term debt to refinance when rates were at zero? We didn’t like the messenger, so we killed the message. A structural peace in the Middle East? We didn’t like the messenger, so we killed the message.”
“When are we gonna stop shooting ourselves in the foot? And when are we going to actually see and take the time to look past who is saying things and actually listen to them word for word?”
“If it’s clear that the last two weeks have been a wake-up call, the next question is: Why?”
“Part of the answer is the sheer depravity of Hamas’s terrorism. That depravity has made the justification and celebration of their acts by those who police pronouns that much starker. The contradictions and moral bankruptcy of a worldview that spends years worrying about microaggressions and tone policing, but can’t decide what side it is on after the beheading of babies, aren’t exactly difficult to spot.”
Fire them all.
Get the UN Genral Secretary to sign.
Jews don’t matter to so many speaking as moralists who only care when Jew haters suffer, and the proof is more evident every day.
I now say the left doesn’t hate Hitler because of the Holocaust, but because he turned on Stalin.
The only people who were surprised about the NY Times coverage of the Gaza hospital are those who have never heard of Walter Duranty.
May he rot in hell.
Yep. The USA was lucky that by the time it entered the war Hitler had already broken up with Stalin, whereupon the previously anti-war communists turned on a dime and became rabidly pro-war. From June 1941 they had been demanding that the USA enter the war, and when it did in December they were all in on helping. That’s a big contrast to how they behaved in those countries who entered the war in September 1939, where the communists and their unions did all they could to sabotage the war effort.
Sociology professors said it? Well, I’m convinced.
Sociologists: a group of educated dolts who couldn’t get a real job if their lives depended upon it.
The academy is a joke. The only reason to go to college is for STEM, law, or medicine.
All freshmen should be required to take one year of Latin and one year of calculus. If they fail either, boot them out.
Erronius
For STEM is it really the cost of lab equipment that makes it necessary. I would have trouble buying my own NMR or electron microscope or such.
“I would have trouble buying my own NMR or electron microscope or such.”
Too bad Heathkit (r) is a thing of the past
Heathkit? Radio Frikkin Shack!
You are correct that lab equipment is very expensive for physics/engineering.
However, thermodynamics in particular requires professorial teaching, unless you are an auto-didact. We cannot maintain a power grid without a good number of engineers that have a solid understanding of thermodynamics.
Erronius
Except when the academics such as the one at the Oregon Dept of Education say
“According to the teaching materials, too much focus on asking students to get the “right” answer when solving math problems is connected to white supremacy, as is working independently. The course favors group math work for students.”
So let’s all get the wrong answer collectively, and every thing will work fine! /Sarc
“So let’s all get the wrong answer collectively, and every thing will work fine!”
Well, the NYT is still making money.
I shed no tears when I heard about the Washington Post layoffs. Fortunately, all of our local sports teams are miserable, so I don’t even have a desire to read their sports section.
That almost sounds like the Ford EV strategy. Let’s lose thousands of dollars on each vehicle we sell, but make up the difference in volume.
Wait until the purchase mandates are announced by the Democrats.
so·ci·ol·o·gy
/ˌsōsēˈäləjē/
noun
the study of the development, structure, and functioning of human society.
the study of social problems. Kind of ironic.
Read sociologist Erving Goffman, who works by irony. Excellent reads, starting with Asylums.
I suppose I should have been more impressed when I was cheating on this professor’s exams a billion years ago. It was like having Yoda as a professor, but without the cool lightsaber stuff.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vytautas_Kavolis
Genocide is a political term and means whatever the person wants to achieve with it. There’s narrowly and broadly taken. Eliminating Jews vs targeting Jews.
Jesus, H, Christ! Jews are literally the indigenous people of the area!!
If anyone is an evil coloniser it’s the Muslim, who arrived nearly a thousand years AFTER Judaism had established itself in the region.
A colonizer is someone who has little prior history in a new place and an existing homeland they are coming from. Neither fits the Jews but certainly all those 1,700 sociology people, whose ancestors helped colonize America. They could set an example and leave.
Not that there’s anything wrong with that. But yes.
A colonizer migrates to an area with the intent of imposing their base culture onto that area.
An immigrant migrates to an area with the intent to assimilate into the local culture.
A refugee migrates to an area to escape dangerous conditions in their home culture
An invader enters an area with the intent to subjugate, and eliminate the local culture.
Just goes to show you how worthless Sociology is. I took an intro course in it. The professor made no secret that he was a communist.
He emphasized was that sociology wasn’t just a science (he claimed it was a science) but that it was intended from the very beginning to change society.
If you want academia to become serious rather than insane, you must start by doing away with all “studies” fields and sociology.
A large part is actually phenomenology, recognizing what you’ve never put into words that somebody finally does put into words:
“A further illustration of the difference between ritual concerns and substantive ones comes from occasions of accident in which the carelessness of one individual is seen as causing injury or death to another. Here there may be no way at all to compensate the offended, and no punishment may be prescribed. All that the offend[er] can do is say he is sorry. And this expression itself may be relatively little open to gradation. The fact – at least in our society – is that a very limited set of ritual enactments are available for contrite offenders. Whether one runs over another’s sentence, time, dog, or body, one is more or less reduced to saying some variant of “I’m sorry.” The variation in degree of anguish expressed by the apologizer seems a poor reflection of the variation in loss possible to the offended. In any case, while the original infraction may be quite substantive in its consequence, the remedial work, however vociferous, is in these cases still largely expressive. And there is a logic to this. After an offense has occurred, the job of the offender is to show that it was not a fair expression of his attitude, or, when it evidently was, to show that he has changed his attitude to the rule that was violated. In the latter case, his job is to show that whatever happened before, he now has a right relationship – a pious attitude – to the rule in question, _and this is a matter of indicating a relationship, not compensating a loss_”
_Relations in Public_ “Remedial Interchanges” p.117-118
The correct answer for a grade of 100 is:
“Huh?”
I understood the whole thing.
Of course, I lived through all the Nixon aides who simultaneously “found Jesus” in prison.
Not, “Nonsense!”?
No doubt these ‘sociologists’ will be voting Democrat.
2 or 3 times.
I was going to say well if there wasn’t a Communist on the ballot then yes and then thought silly me…if there is a Democrat on the ballot what’s the difference really
The difference may seem insignificant to you, but to them it’s massive, and in many cases too great to overcome. That is how the left works.
1,700 Socialist Professors outed themselves as Cultural Marxists
Wow, for “educators”, they seem pretty uneducated.
Well, duh. They’re educators, not educatees!
““The next time some academics tell you how important diversity is, ask how many Republicans there are in their sociology department.”
—Thomas Sowell”
How many of those with the mindset to be Republicans would go into a glorified “studies” field like sociology in the first place?
Maybe those professors could go to Gaza and lend a hand to the oppressed Hamas. I’m sure they’d be welcomed, in fact, they could wave their petition at the IDF.
Save the list for future action….
That was the first I thought of, a useful list.
Having been forced to take a selection of sociology courses as core courses at one of our elite institutions, I can say, without qualms or fear of correction that sociology was, by far, the most painfully easy classes I have ever taken in college. I mean easy to the point of never studying and passing the course with straight “A’s.” Those classes were a joke, and utter joke.
They don’t call them soft “sciences” for nothing.
As such, the type of people that major in this, or worse, try to teach it as a legitimate subject, are not the “cream of the crop” academically.
Now, apparently, they have proven themselves to be as politically inept as they are academically inept. They are as easily influenced as three year old children. And as mature.
They are pathetic representatives for everything that is palpably wrong with academia today. And it is ALL controlled by the left.
I never took sociology but have read all of Erving Goffman. It’s all about stuff you do that you don’t know you do, rules nobody articulates and that are hard to notice. Either it’s interesting to you or not, I guess, but it’s far removed from academic sociology as you encounter it.
Nevertheless it’s sociology.
I get your point about Erving Goffman, for whom I have considerable respect. But, you’re right, the kind of work he did won’t interest most who comment here.
How many of today’s academic sociologists belong in the same room with Goffman?
Well, can we get the list of names?
Let’s make them (in)famous!
It’s THEIR rules after all.
The link to the letter and the signatories doesn’t work because the Internet archive is down again. Has been down off and on for months.
Wow, 1,700 sociology professors! What collective enlightenment. They carry some real weight.
They would make a VERY enlightened doorstop!!
Covid revealed how bad elementary, Middle and high school teachers/education are.,, now the Hamas attack has shown that universities are 10x as bad
So much for that discvipline. And I use the word discipline loosely.
‘Moral Blindness’: Israeli, Allied Academics Respond After Sociologists Express ‘Solidarity With Gaza’
https://www.algemeiner.com/2023/10/24/moral-blindness-israeli-allied-academics-respond-after-sociologists-express-solidarity-with-gaza/
Indeed!
There are 46 signatories to this letter who say they’re from UCal Berkeley.
The vast majority are graduate students.
29 identify as from the City University of New York. Again, most are grad students.
The letter speaks makes today’s sociology professors look bad. It makes tomorrow’s professors look far worse.
According to a Twitchy post yesterday, Adolph Hitler, Heydrich, Himmler, Biden and Trump (2x) signed it, as did Phillup McCrack from Anus, France and Shitana Pagoda from Huflung Pu University in Beijing.
In general, it’s a bad idea to announce that 1700 professors signed something when large numbers of the signatories are not professors.
I noticed that Professor Jacobson did not refer to professors as those from whom the rest of us need protection.
Christopher Rufo did refer to the 1700 as professors. As a trustee of a university, he has to know what grad students are…
1700 sociology professors need to learn what genocide is.
Stand in solidarity with Palestinians and against settler colonialism, imperialism, and genocide?
You mean stand with the invading Muslim Arab’s descendants against the native people of Palestine i.e. the Jews, also known as the Israelites. And if you oppose genocide then how can you possibly support Hamas’ goal of driving the Jews into the sea?
These sociology professors use a lot of buzzwords, but at the end of the day they’re sick little Nazi sympathisers.
The thing about most sociologists and anthropologists is that the former aren’t very sociable and the latter are pretty misanthropic.
There are few things more worthless than sociology professors. Firing 1700 of them is a good start.
And they provide the evidence, themselves, as to how worthless their field is.
Sociology. Worthless. It was worthless when I observed them in grad school in the 90s and I can only imagine it’s far worse now.
Of course they’re sociologists—the turds in the punch bowl of tertiary education—the excrement (along with Education, psychology, and psychology) of any institution’s faculty and of research and scholarship in general. “Social science” and scholarship (mayhaps economics might not be inclusive in that grouping) are mutually exclusive terms. Economics is the “dismal science”, but at least has some grounding in applied mathematics. Education? Nah—just a large group retirement plan for burnt-out aging ex-Yippies….
These so called professors should be fired These useful idiots are an academic Hamas sleeper cell
Here’s what you get when you put out an open Google doc.
https://twitchy.com/coucy/2023/10/24/sociologists-open-letter-n2388936
They should all have their degrees revoked for not being able to understand the meaning of “genocide”.