Mick Hartley

This is shocking – but, given the state of US universities and their obsession with Israel, absolutely no surprise:

The International Legal Forum (ILF), a nonprofit organization based in Tel Aviv which advocates for equality in Israel and the Middle East, on Sunday asked Princeton University to remove from the syllabus of a Department of Near Eastern Studies course a book that accuses the Israeli Defense Forces of “maiming” Palestinians and harvesting their organs.

Students in the class are assigned Rutgers University professor Jasbir Puar’s The Right to Maim for a course titled “The Healing Humanities: Decolonizing Trauma Studies from the Global South,” which will be taught by Professor Satyel Larson this fall. Right to Maim has been accused by academics of being “pseudo-scholarship” for trafficking in antisemitic blood libels rooted in medieval conspiracies charging that Jews murdered Christian children and drank their blood during Passover.

Puar began making such claims in Feb. 2016, when she said at Vassar College  that “young Palestinian men…were mined for organs for scientific research.” At the same event, she accused Israel of committing “genocide in slow motion.” Later that year, during a panel at Dartmouth College she said Israel uses “maiming as a deliberate biopolitical tactic” to enforce settler-colonialism.

We've come across Jasbir Puar before. Here's Eve Garrard in Fathom, reviewing Cary Nelson's Israel Denial: Anti-Zionism, Anti-Semitism & the Faculty Campaign Against the Jewish State:

Jasbir Puar’s claims are perhaps the most extreme and vitriolic of them all; they also display a methodological inadequacy so profound that it amounts to a corruption of academic standards. She says, without evidence, that Israel has a policy of deliberately maiming Palestinians, that Israel lusts after visibly disabled Palestinian bodies, although it is also driven by the economic motive of profiting from the services it must provide for the disabled. Israeli refusal to kill Palestinians is apparently an act of dehumanisation: in Israeli eyes ‘the Palestinians are not even human enough for death’ (quoted by Nelson on p.228). She alleges further that Israel deliberately stunts Palestinian children by withholding food from them, notwithstanding the complete lack of evidence for, and the readily available evidence against, the existence of such a policy. Indeed there is so much evidence against Puar’s claims that it’s very hard to believe that they arise out of ignorance rather than malice. (Matters are not helped by the astonishing opacity and imprecision of her prose.)

Still good enough for Princeton, apparently.

You perhaps won't be too surprised to hear that Puar's book co-won the National Women’s Studies Association’s 2018 Alison Piepmeier Book Prize.

Seth Mandel, an op-ed editor at The New York Post, said…that Puar received an “award for book-length medieval blood libel because academic anti-Semitism is not just tolerated, but encouraged and rewarded.”

The Amazon description:

In The Right to Maim Jasbir K. Puar brings her pathbreaking work on the liberal state, sexuality, and biopolitics to bear on our understanding of disability. Drawing on a stunning array of theoretical and methodological frameworks, Puar uses the concept of “debility”—bodily injury and social exclusion brought on by economic and political factors—to disrupt the category of disability. She shows how debility, disability, and capacity together constitute an assemblage that states use to control populations. Puar's analysis culminates in an interrogation of Israel's policies toward Palestine, in which she outlines how Israel brings Palestinians into biopolitical being by designating them available for injury. Supplementing its right to kill with what Puar calls the right to maim, the Israeli state relies on liberal frameworks of disability to obscure and enable the mass debilitation of Palestinian bodies. Tracing disability's interaction with debility and capacity, Puar offers a brilliant rethinking of Foucauldian biopolitics while showing how disability functions at the intersection of imperialism and racialized capital.

"A brilliant rethinking of Foucauldian biopolitics". High praise indeed…