Maura Finkelstein never hid her support for Palestinian liberation during her nine years working as a professor of anthropology at Muhlenberg College, a small liberal arts school in Allentown, Pennsylvania.
“I have always had an ethical practice of making sure that I include Palestine in my teaching,” Finkelstein told me. “It was never outside the bounds of what I do.” For Finkelstein, who is Jewish, this was not always easy. More than 30 percent of Muhlenberg’s 2,200 students are Jewish, many of them vocal supporters of Israel.
In late May, however, Muhlenberg told Finkelstein that she was fired. The reason? She had shared, on her personal Instagram account, in a temporary story slide, a post written not by herself but by Palestinian poet Remi Kanazi calling for the shunning of Zionist ideology and its supporters.
“Do not cower to Zionists,” Kanazi wrote on January 16. “Shame them. Do not welcome them in your spaces. Why should these genocide loving fascists be treated any different than any other flat out racist.” At the time, Israel had already killed over 22,000 Palestinians in Gaza, the majority of whom were women and children.
When you’re a college professor, it doesn’t really matter if you’re sharing on your “personal” Instagram page. Saying you’re going to shame your students, make them unwelcome, and treat them like genocide-loving racists, you ought to expect to be fired. There’s a way to get your message across without alienating your own students. In fact, that’s pretty much the entire job description for teaching.
In the latest development of liberals becoming increasingly unhinged as they struggle to ignore the deepening divide between their words and their actual beliefs:
Apparently treating genocide-loving racists like genocide-loving racists is now a breach of the precious double-standard social decorum liberals love so much.
