Anti-Israel Professor s Firing Sets Very Dangerous Precedent | The Free Press

But in the end, it was what Finkelstein shared on her Instagram Stories account not what she actually said or wrote that led to her termination: a seven-line tweet from January by Palestinian American performance poet Remi Kanazi that bashed Zionists. Why should those genocide loving fascists be treated any different than any other flat out racist, Kanazi wrote. Don t normalize Zionism. Don t normalize Zionists taking up space.

After an anonymous student screenshotted Finkelstein s temporary post, alumni renewed their effort to remove Finkelstein. In January, Muhlenberg suspended her, and in May she was fired. 

It was the first time since Hamas s October 7, 2023, attack on Israel, as The Intercept reported last week, that a tenured professor had been fired for pro-Palestine speech. (Finkelstein has appealed her firing and is still being paid by the college, although she s not teaching.)

The Kanazi tweet was misleading and histrionic: The death and destruction in Gaza, however horrible they may be, do not amount to genocide. Since 1967, when Israel took the strip from Egypt which previously occupied it the population has jumped from 117,000 to 801,000 today. And the multiracial, multiethnic Israelis with a democratically elected Knesset and independent judiciary and media are hardly fascists.  

But that is beside the point. It was a social media post, an opinion, and Finkelstein had every right to broadcast it to her 4,000 or so followers.

Muhlenberg firing her was about controlling speech and shutting down dissent, and it sets a very dangerous precedent, Finkelstein told me when we spoke earlier this week.

via www.thefp.com

It is a dangerous precedent. I wonder if Finkelstein was represented by a lawyer and if so who she was. In any event, she should sue Muhlenberg College if possible. She’s young — 45 — and could secure a substantial settlement.