University Chaplains’ Perspective On Campus Protests [Part IV] – The Insidious Israeli Narrative

By Ibrahim Moiz for Muslim Matters

Previous Parts: Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3

After the tumultuous 2023-24 school year, where American students protesting against the Israeli genocide at Gaza were vilified and repressed across the country, MuslimMatters interviewed chaplains Omer Bajwa of Yale University and Abdul-Muhaymin Priester of Grinnell College for their thoughts on these momentous events. In this third part of a five-part interview, the imams discuss the relationship of these events on interfaith relations, the impact that an institutionally approved genocide has left on non-Muslim communities, and the apocalyptic motivations behind much American support for Israel.

Ibrahim Moiz: You both lived through the whole post-September 2001 atmosphere. My impression was that the pressure on Muslims had been receding since the late 2010s [compared to] the sort of pressure there was in the late 2000s or even early 2010s. As chaplains, how have you seen official responses since October 2023, both with the Palestinian attack that was initially portrayed as a sort of antisemitic pogrom, and then the Israeli attack as well? Would you say that there has been any progress from the 2000s in terms of how institutional and official avenues have responded to Muslim grievances?

No Mention of Palestinian Suffering

Omer Bajwa: I’ll give you two or three quick data points, and I’ll work backward from what you were just talking about. Yale has been good, I want to say, generally across the board. Though that’s relative, right?  Now I’m going to make a general point about campuses across the country, they have been horrendous. The responses from college and university presidents or senior administrations, the messaging after 10-7, across the board has been one of – there’s a party line – “this was a horrific, tragic attack on Israeli existence” – you know the line, it’s all there.

The point that I want to make is, it’s almost like they have the same talking points. Every president is saying some version of the same thing.

No mention of Palestinian suffering, of Palestinian life…My point is, it is remarkable, or astonishing perhaps, how the blind spot was, no mention of Palestinian suffering or anything like that, or even worse, the blame, the victim was always Israel, and the blame was always on the Palestinians – collective punishment, collective suffering…I mean I saw statements from, you name it, Columbia, Harvard, [the University of] Chicago, UCLA…I don’t need to belabor the point. That is so disappointing, right?

Bush’s Message After 9-11

(Omer Bajwa continues): And so contrast that to after 9-11, because 9-11 is a physical and psychological attack on the American body and psyche, and there’s [just] collective trauma, well all Americans.

Look, I am anti-anti-anti-Bush, the Bush family – and they’re Yalians, right, literally they came from this place – but my point is this, credit where credit is due. Bush goes on, he has decent enough speechwriters, in the two days after 9-11, he’s in front of Congress, he’s in front of the cameras, he’s like, “We should not attack Muslims. We should not fall prey to Islamophobia. This was an attack by deranged extremists”…Even the Bush people had the aql, they had the intelligence and the good sense to be like, “We are not totalizing and making this broad collective statement against Muslims.”

Yes, there was horrific [violence] – my brother got attacked after 9-11, he got jumped in New York City, and in Boston – there was all sorts of things. Hindus are getting beat up, Mexicans are getting beat up. That’s like the American ignorance of any brown person, “You don’t belong here, go home”, etc. My point is that there was an attempt made, one could argue, after 9-11 to say, “Oh these are bad actors, extremists, that did this. Let’s not condemn all of Islam and Muslims, and the Muslim world.”

Everyone Is Drinking The Kool-Aid

(Omer Bajwa continues): What’s happened now, you’d think in twenty-plus years they would’ve kind of done better, but there was this total ignorance and blind spot – and by default, accusation – towards Palestinians and Arabs. And so there’s deep Arabphobia and anti-Palestinian sentiment in media and politics.

“They are all drinking the Kool Aid.”

The last thing I’ll say is that in some ways – you know, we knew the state went into these horrible things, surveillance, Guantanamo, extra[judicial] rendition, that’s the whole inauguration of the Global War on Terror, etc., I mean, literally entire volumes have been written on this.

What happens now in some ways is even creepier, and I’ll tell you why – because then, you had some people, like, “Okay, America’s fighting this shadow enemy war, we need to stand up for civil liberties”, etc.

Now what’s happening – it’s not just the government, it’s not just the state. Donors, megadonors, people on Wall Street, tech-bros, all these finance people, celebrities, the cultural elite, the political elite, the economic elite, the media elite – they’re all drinking the Kool-Aid. They’re the ones throwing Palestinians under the bus and Muslims under the bus. Which is actually more insidious. It shows you how deep this Zionist sympathy and Israeli narrative has seeped into the American consciousness.

Like Sidi [Abdul-Muhaymin] said, it’s because the average American, if they’re Christian evangelicals, they’re like, “Well, it’s promised in the Bible, it’s their [the Israelis’] land anyway, these people [the Palestinians] are cockroaches, they don’t even belong there.”

Falling In Line With The Narrative

Abdul-Muhaymin Priester: I’m coming from that generation that I come from, my family’s background…I was very interested in politics when I was young, [like] you can give me a scenario and I can pretty much sit down and tell you word for word what a newscast was going to say that evening. Terms and things of that nature, but just the context of what was going to be said, it’s the same across the board, generation to generation. And from what I saw in the responses was a lot of people…was everybody was just falling in line with the narrative.

And it goes back to this unfortunate statement that you even hear from Muslims, “Oh it’s a political situation.” It was never a political situation. It was never a political situation. When their line of reasoning [was that], “God gave us this land and it belongs to us”, it stopped being a political situation, despite the fact that the majority of the people who say that, they don’t believe in God anyway.

That’s the greater irony of the whole situation. “This is our land, God gave it to us, but I don’t believe in God.” That’s probably the most asinine statement a person can ever encounter in human history.

Responding Without Understanding

(Abdul-Muhaymin Priester continues):  Even most of the people who are responding… You don’t even really understand the history of what it is that you’re responding to. You’re just putting, again, you’re giving that stereotypical response that people expect you to say, “Oh, this is a tragedy, Israel has to never be afraid of defending themselves, you shouldn’t have done this.”

Despite the fact that just yesterday you blew a child’s brains out in the middle of the street in broad daylight in front of his mother. You went into this house with this family that’s been here for the last twelve hundred years, their family’s owned this land, and you kick them out, and you say, “This is my land.” How the hell is this your land? A grandmother[‘s family] has been staying here for the last twelve hundred years. How is this your land?

A Political Situation? No, It’s Haqq and Batil

(Abdul-Muhaymin Priester continues):  I don’t like to have that negative type of impression that I give people about the situation, but for me, like I said with some of the students when we were talking about this, and even a young Palestinian student that I had, that said that it’s a political situation. No. This is Haqq and Batil, end of discussion.

Yes, in the general sense, there’s some elements of it, you can see it as a political discussion that some groups of people are having, but this is a situation of Haqq and Batil. Because even as Muslims we can’t separate the reality of our din from the reality of the land. That bifurcation of secular and religious, again, that’s a tangent that I don’t want to draw into right there.

For me, I really have not expected any more than what I’ve seen, and I won’t say I’m surprised, but it’s interesting that they haven’t been as aggressive as they have been [in the past]. Because people think that they’ve been aggressive, with a lot of what we’ve seen, and they have been.

But in terms of the levels of aggression that could be carried against the young people that we’re seeing now…they’ve restrained themselves in a lot of ways in terms of how they dealt with it. Partially because they knew that oppression was coming and wanted to minimize the effects of it. But then again, I mean, I’ve seen them do much worse in the public square, seen much worse.

[Next in Part V: A Situation of Haqq and Batil]

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