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eretzyisrael · 20 days ago

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by Dion J. Pierre

The author, PhD candidate Prahlad Iyengar, continued, “One year into a horrific genocide, it is time for the movement to begin wreaking havoc, or else, as we’ve seen, business will indeed go on as usual … As people of conscience in the world, we have a duty to Palestine and to all the globally oppressed. We have a mandate to exact a cost from the institutions that have contributed to the growth and proliferation of colonialism, racism, and all oppressive systems. We have a duty to escalate for Palestine, and as I hope I’ve argued, the traditional pacifist strategies aren’t working because they are ‘designed into’ the system we fight against.”

In a statement distributed by the CAA, Iyengar accused MIT of weaponizing the disciplinary system to persecute him.

“On Friday, MIT administration informed me that as a result of this article, I have been banned from campus without due process and that I face potential expulsion or suspension,” he said. “These extraordinary actions should concern everyone on campus. My article attempts a historical review of the type of tactics used by protest movements throughout history, from the civil rights movement to the struggle to the fight [sic] against South African Apartheid here on MIT campus.”

MIT has not responded to The Algemeiner‘s inquiry regarding Iyengar’s punishment, but according to excerpts of its letter to Iyengar, the administration told him the article “makes several troubling statements” and could be perceived as “a call for more violent or destructive forms of protest at MIT.” In retaliation, CAA is calling on students to harass David Randall, an associate dean, until he relents and revokes Iyengar’s punishment and Written Revolution‘s temporary suspension.

“On Pacifism” is not the first time that elite college students have endorsed violence in the name of opposing Israel and furthering the Palestinian cause.

In September, during Columbia University’s convocation ceremony, Columbia University Apartheid Divest (CUAD), a group which recently split due to racial tensions between Arabs and non-Arabs, distributed literature calling on students to join the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas’s movement to destroy Israel.

“This booklet is part of a coordinated and intentional effort to uphold the principles of the thawabit and the Palestinian resistance movement overall by transmitting the words of the resistance directly,” said the pamphlet distributed by CUAD, a Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) spinoff, to incoming freshmen. “This material aims to build popular support for the Palestinian war of national liberation, a war which is waged through armed struggle.”

Other sections of the pamphlet were explicitly Islamist, invoking the name of “Allah, the most gracious” and referring to Hamas as the “Islamic Resistance Movement.” Proclaiming, “Glory to Gaza that gave hope to the oppressed, that humiliated the ‘invincible’ Zionist army,” it said its purpose was to build an army of Muslims worldwide.

#mit #on pacifism #prahlad iyengar #violence against jews #columbia university #hamas #gaza

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moonriserworld · 1 year ago

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reading r.f. kuang’s babel right now and after skimming through some locked reddit threads i am so disappointed by the reception.

spoilers ahead, and disclaimer that i am only on chapter 21, but i went looking for a discussion about how their plan to cover up after lovell was a little lacking, and what i found instead were hundreds of disappointed (apparently) white readers tone policing the author. calling her a bad writer, unsophisticated, and overly simplistic. Arguments that are so profoundly rich with irony as these are nameless white readers discussing the qualifications of an asian cambridge/oxford/yale graduate, but i digress. i can easily enough dismiss these criticisms as inane and incomprehensible to anyone who values non-western intellect.

Wthe criticism i have seen over and over again though, which infuriates me to the point of hysterics is that the book is too “preachy”. again and again and again dozens of people posted and hundreds of people upvoted that kuang’s book about the evils of colonialism wasn’t subtle enough. that it’s too in your face, the characters are too aware of “modern” discussions and opinions of colonialism, and that her heavy handed, over-articulated critique shows her youth and inexperience.

i could scream.

because why should colonialism be subtle? why must people of color assuage our indignation to accommodate the feelings of our oppressor’s descendants? why must the cruel, ceaseless destruction of hundreds of world cultures be boiled down to a beautiful metaphor? why is it that books about the evils of capitalism and discrimination can be so easily understood in the fantastical dark academia pieces of white authors, but the second the discussion shifts to imperialism and white supremacy, we must speak in similes and hushed whispers?

does reading about western missionaries intentionally devastating the lives and cultures of people of color for dominance and profit feel like preaching to you? imagine how the natives feel. for monolingual, white intellectuals who base their intellect purely off of western morality and philosophy, this book may certainly feel like a lecture, but for the marginalized communities who to this day speak the languages of their colonizers, this is just reality. a reality that in upper academia is still discussed in stilted, awkward tones because it would require considering where their endowments comes from. and kuang would know that, as someone who graduated from such institutions thrice.

for those that say her character’s speak with too much modern disdain and comprehension of colonialism, these opinions are not modern. the novel takes place in the 1830s, slavery, indentured servitude, and genocide were common practices of the western empires, and i can promise you none of their victims would be upset by admitting so. to say that the cantonese protagonist, with his indian muslim and haitian best friends, the three of whom were torn from their colonized home countries and now make up 75% of the incoming class of oxford’s most prestigious college, should not hold beliefs of anti-imperialism and should not have the vocabulary to express such, is so completely absurd and insulting I can’t even dignify it a response.

make no mistake, it is not that i cannot believe the outrage, because it is so very believable, but i cannot fathom how someone can deign to call themselves a reader and so flagrantly despise learning the experiences of others.

something that was particularly fascinating to watch was when someone mentioned achebe’s things fall apart, lauding it as the faithful brother to babel’s prodigal son. in an interesting reversal of roles, this black author’s novel was presented as the model to which minority writers should aspire to. subtlety, intrigue, mysticism, a delicate string of scenes and plot points to allow the reader to internalize the profound pains of cultural oppression without pointing too many fingers at whose doing the oppressing. because it is simply ‘more powerful’ to draw a beautifully direct parallel to a rhetorical issue than to point at the true source of our real world, ongoing crisis. not only is this a deeply mischaracterized description of achebe’s novel, but is precisely the rhetoric that both novels aimed to critique.

no novel is perfect. i still have yet to finish babel, and some comments I’ve seen about dialogue and characterization choices, with which i often disagree, i see the merit and validity of such arguments. however listening to the mindless degradation of this work by self-proclaimed white academics, who offer nothing of note besides overly-intellectualized statements of cultural insecurity, frustrates me on a level i struggle to put to words in any language.

anyways back to reading! i don’t imagine my thoughts are of much note, but if i have anything interesting to say, i’ll give an impassioned key smash when i finish

#babel #babel an arcane history #r.f. kuang #books and literature #rambles #god this was so much longer than i intended it to be #and yet this is not even half of what i wanted to touch on #i literally do not pose here at all what am i even doing #booktok #colonialism #philosophy #dark academia #dark academic aesthetic #light academia #is this enough tags yet?#babel spoilers

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solarpunkwitchcraft · 2 years ago

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On Wednesday January 4th, Sayed Arif Faisal, a member of the Bangladeshi community, was murdered by Cambridge Police in Massachusetts. He was 20 years old, a college student, the only child of his family, and in clear distress. Please help us in demanding Justice for Arif! Help us spread this story so we can put pressure on the CPD, support his family and community and make changes so that these horrific murders do not continue.

His family has set up a GoFundMe for funeral and legal expenses. Please donate if you can: https://www.gofundme.com/f/Support-Sayed-Arif-Faisals-Family

If you are in the Boston, MA area and want to keep in touch, the Muslim Justice League has been working with the family and organizing for justice for Arif: https://www.facebook.com/MuslimJusticeLeague/

These murders have to stop. No family should have to deal with a tragedy like this.

#acab #justice for arif #justice for faisal #defund the police #tw: police brutality

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news4dzhozhar · 2 years ago

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For Former Friend of Boston Marathon Bomber, a Burden of Shame and Betrayal

**Of all the names of friends from back then, does anyone remember ever hearing this guys name before? I don't.**

BOSTON — Last year, nearly a decade after the bombing at the Boston Marathon, Youssef Eddafali wrote a letter. It had been years in the making, and he agonized over every word, but the hardest thing to figure out was the salutation.

Mr. Eddafali, 29, still was not sure who he was writing to. Was it the friend he had once thought of as a brother, whose journey as a young Muslim immigrant had seemed to mirror his own? Or the calculating killer who revealed himself on April 15, 2013, when he murdered and maimed innocent people in the name of the faith they both shared?

In the end, Mr. Eddafali concluded it was both, so he split his missive into two parts. The first he wrote to “the old Jahar,” the boy he had known. The second letter was written to a stranger. He addressed it to “The Monster.”

“Your betrayal broke me,” Mr. Eddafali wrote to Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, his former friend, who was sentenced to death in 2015 for orchestrating the bombing at the marathon finish line with his older brother, Tamerlan. Tamerlan Tsarnaev died in a gun battle with police four days later; Dzhokhar Tsarnaev remains on death row.

Three people were killed by the bombs loaded with nails and ball bearings that the brothers had made: Lingzi Lu, 23, a graduate student from China; Krystle Campbell, 29, a restaurant manager from Medford, Mass.; and Martin Richard, an 8-year-old from Boston. Seventeen lost limbs and more than 250 were injured in the bombing, which led to a dramatic four-day manhunt that shut down the city; the brothers also shot and killed a campus police officer. An unknown number of spectators, runners and emergency responders still experience emotional trauma from that day.

Another group of people, Mr. Eddafali among them, were affected in a different way: They had known Dzhokhar Tsarnaev and considered him a friend. Many were young people in high school or college, on the cusp of adulthood, when the bombing abruptly turned the world they knew into a frightening and unfamiliar place.

Ten years later, as a changed city pauses to honor those who died and reflect on the passage of time, some of those who knew the Tsarnaev brothers still struggle to define how the experience changed them. A decade after they were plunged into guilt, anger, betrayal and shame, they know one thing: There will be no reconciling their before and after, no understanding how or why.

It is a dissonance felt in the wake of every mass shooting, by those who discover to their horror that they know the killer.

“I watch what people say every time it happens — that they had no idea — and I recognize it, because I’ve been there, too,” said Larry Aaronson, 82, who lived on the same street as the Tsarnaev family and taught history at Cambridge Rindge and Latin High School, where Mr. Eddafali and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, known as “Jahar,” graduated.

There is little research examining the psychic toll on people who had been close to those who kill. The marginality of their position — close to tragedy but connected to its source — can be alienating, stranding them on the outside as their communities gather to heal, and making it feel unsafe or insensitive to discuss their own baffling experience. A dozen people who knew Dzhokhar Tsarnaev declined to speak to a reporter even a decade later, or did not respond to requests for interviews.

“There’s an element of guilt by association, and a weird dichotomy, because the person they knew doesn’t exist anymore,” said Jaclyn Schildkraut, a researcher who has studied mass shootings and is executive director of the Regional Gun Violence Research Consortium at the Rockefeller Institute of Government.

The experience “is like being knocked into a parallel universe,” she added, “and you can’t get back.”

For friends who were also Muslim immigrants, the consequences have been even more jarring.

Mr. Eddafali and his family had immigrated to the United States from Morocco in 1999, when he was 6, and he spent years reconciling his Muslim faith with his emerging American identity. A standout basketball player in high school, the boy who had endured ethnic slurs and playground bullying after the Sept. 11 attacks now proudly heard classmates chant his name at games. He found he could navigate fluidly among students of different races and backgrounds, an interlude that felt magical.

“When you found the pocket,” he said of that time, “it was bliss.”

Beside him in the pocket was his friend Jahar, the sociable wrestling team captain who had come to the United States with his family from Kyrgyzstan in 2002, when he was 8, and also knew the challenge and the triumph of acceptance. They had met in middle school, when both were becoming chameleons, Mr. Eddafali said, honoring their families’ Muslim faith at home while maintaining separate lives as fully American teenagers.

They trained as lifeguards together, worked together at the Harvard pool, partied with their “boys” beside the Charles River. Both were well-liked, athletic, bound for college, examples of the immigrant success story that progressive, multicultural Cambridge loves to tell.

Until all at once, one of them wasn’t.

So unfathomable was Dzhokhar Tsarnaev’s violent turn that many of his friends did not believe it, even when photos of the brothers flooded the media a few days after the bombing.

Small moments in their shared history made the news seem inconceivable. The lunches he bought classmates who were short on cash. The pep talks he gave teammates when they hit the wall. Even in college, where he failed classes and sold drugs, Jahar still encouraged friends, they said, urging one to develop her talent for drawing in art school.

For Mr. Eddafali, seeing his friend’s face on TV felt like “10,000 volts of electricity coursing through my body,” he later wrote. He felt unmoored by thoughts of the dead and wounded, and, as the truth sank in, by thoughts of Jahar packing a backpack with explosives and dropping it discreetly on a sidewalk packed with families.

“My trust in other people was shattered,” Mr. Eddafali said, “and I couldn’t trust myself, for allowing a sociopath to get so close.”

In Cambridge, where the diverse, ambitious public high school fuels countless American dreams, residents recoiled from the revelation of homegrown terrorism. After Mr. Aaronson, still in shock, spoke to reporters about the seemingly sweet-natured teenager he had known, the retired teacher said he felt stung by a disapproving backlash and feared he had sacrificed his reputation.

“I felt like a pariah,” he said. “People wanted to repress it and forget it, and I thought we needed to talk about it. I had such a deep sense of betrayal.”

If much of the city could choose to set aside its tie to the brothers, Mr. Eddafali did not have that luxury. The F.B.I. soon came to interrogate the stunned 19-year-old about his knowledge of the bombing. His phone was tapped and his movements tracked, he said. Across Boston and Cambridge, other Muslims also faced renewed suspicion and scrutiny, and continuing surveillance, according to advocates.

Mr. Eddafali resumed his studies at Bentley University, outside Boston, in the fall of 2013, but federal investigators came to question him again in November. He appealed to his professors for empathy and flexibility, he said, but failed his exams when neither was granted. His G.P.A. plummeted, and he dropped out of college, amplifying his feelings of shame.

Back at home he spiraled lower, plagued by depression, anxiety, insomnia, stomach ulcers. Constantly worried that others might find him suspicious or threatening, he stopped wearing backpacks and baseball caps, worn by the Tsarnaevs on the day of the bombing, to minimize any resemblance. He felt just as lost as he had at 7, when he could not find a path to self-acceptance after 9/11.

“The separation between me and the rest of the world was chasmic,” he said.

Years later, he expressed his anger at that damage in his letter to the imprisoned Tsarnaev: “Your actions scorched the blooming trust between Muslims and non-Muslims a decade after 9/11,” he wrote. “You grabbed a branding iron and scarred each and every one of us again.”

Mr. Eddafali said he considered suicide, but in time, sought help instead, finding solace in therapy, prayer and meditation, and in taking better care of himself. Someone suggested he try keeping a journal.

“Your betrayal broke me,” Mr. Eddafali wrote to the convicted killer he once considered a brother.

As soon as he began to write, in 2015, he had glimpses of clarity, he said, moments when his feelings did not overwhelm him. It was as if he had been “walking around with an immense weight, and I didn’t know how to put it down.” He filled dozens of pages, energized by a new goal: to tell a different story about being Muslim, in hopes of rebuilding empathy and trust.

“When I put it outside of me, I could observe it in nuanced ways,” he said. “I could release it and go on with my life.”

Others have been moved by a similar impulse. John “Derf” Backderf, a graphic novelist who wrote a book about his high school friendship with Jeffrey Dahmer, who became a notorious serial killer, said he felt driven to explain the staggering impact the revelation of Dahmer’s crimes had on him.

“With the snap of a finger, my entire personal history was rewritten. You can’t imagine how disorienting that was,” Mr. Backderf wrote in an email. “What had been a silly and (mostly) fun high school experience was now dark and disturbing.”

Now staying with friends in southeast Asia while finishing the final chapters of his memoir, Mr. Eddafali has a title, a cover and a Kickstarter campaign to fund its production.

Finally looking ahead after a decade, he said he wants to go back to college, finish his degree and pursue a career as a filmmaker. “I had to get back to the person I was,” he said. “But now I’m ready, because now I have a voice.”

He mailed his letter to his former friend last year as another step in his own healing, with no hope of receiving a reply. The convicted bomber has been held since 2015 at a “supermax” federal prison near Florence, Colo., and is currently appealing his death sentence for a second time.

Asked if he would have become a writer if he had never known Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, Mr. Eddafali grew animated. “No, no, no; hell, no,” he said, eyes wide. “I wouldn’t wish that on my worst enemy.”

Like Mr. Backderf, who said he still switches between his original high school memories and the darker “rewritten history,” Mr. Eddafali has come to terms with his own parallel realities.

Tracey Gordon, a teacher in Cambridge who remembers Dzhokhar Tsarnaev as a model student in her fifth- and sixth-grade classrooms, put it simply.

“Both things are true,” she said. “We want everything to make sense, and it just can’t.”

#jahar tsarnaev #dzhokhar tsarnaev #tamerlan tsarnaev #seektruth #bmb #true crime #abolish the death penalty #abolish capital punishment #end capital punishment #end the death penalty #florence supermax

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sunaleisocial · 5 months ago

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Fotini Christia named director of the Institute for Data, Systems, and Society

New Post has been published on https://sunalei.org/news/fotini-christia-named-director-of-the-institute-for-data-systems-and-society/

Fotini Christia named director of the Institute for Data, Systems, and Society

Fotini Christia, the Ford International Professor of Social Sciences in the Department of Political Science, has been named the new director of the Institute for Data, Systems, and Society (IDSS), effective July 1.

“Fotini is well-positioned to guide IDSS into the next chapter. With her tenure as the director of the Sociotechnical Systems Research Center and as an associate director of IDSS since 2020, she has actively forged connections between the social sciences, data science, and computation,” says Daniel Huttenlocher, dean of the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing and the Henry Ellis Warren Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. “I eagerly anticipate the ways in which she will advance and champion IDSS in alignment with the spirit and mission of the Schwarzman College of Computing.”

“Fotini’s profound expertise as a social scientist and her adept use of data science, computational tools, and novel methodologies to grasp the dynamics of societal evolution across diverse fields, makes her a natural fit to lead IDSS,” says Asu Ozdaglar, deputy dean of the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing and head of the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

Christia’s research has focused on issues of conflict and cooperation in the Muslim world, for which she has conducted fieldwork in Afghanistan, Bosnia, Iraq, the Palestinian Territories, and Yemen, among others. More recently, her research has been directed at examining how to effectively integrate artificial intelligence tools in public policy.

She was appointed the director of the Sociotechnical Systems Research Center (SSRC) and an associate director of IDSS in October 2020. SSRC, an interdisciplinary center housed within IDSS in the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing, focuses on the study of high-impact, complex societal challenges that shape our world.

As part of IDSS, she is co-organizer of a cross-disciplinary research effort, the Initiative on Combatting Systemic Racism. Bringing together faculty and researchers from all of MIT’s five schools and the college, the initiative builds on extensive social science literature on systemic racism and uses big data to develop and harness computational tools that can help effect structural and normative change toward racial equity across housing, health care, policing, and social media. Christia is also chair of IDSS’s doctoral program in Social and Engineering Systems.

Christia is the author of “Alliance Formation in Civil War” (Cambridge University Press, 2012), which was awarded the Luebbert Award for Best Book in Comparative Politics, the Lepgold Prize for Best Book in International Relations, and a Distinguished Book Award from the International Studies Association. She is co-editor with Graeme Blair (University of California, Los Angeles) and Jeremy Weinstein (incoming dean at Harvard Kennedy School) of “Crime, Insecurity, and Community Policing: Experiments on Building Trust,” forthcoming in August 2024 with Cambridge University Press.

Her research has also appeared in Science, Nature Human Behavior, Review of Economic Studies, American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, NeurIPs, Communications Medicine, IEEE Transactions on Network Science and Engineering, American Political Science Review, and Annual Review of Political Science, among other journals. Her opinion pieces have been published in Foreign Affairs, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Boston Globe, among other outlets.

A native of Greece, where she grew up in the port city of Salonika, Christia moved to the United States to attend college at Columbia University. She graduated magna cum laude in 2001 with a joint BA in economics–operations research and an MA in international affairs. She joined the MIT faculty in 2008 after receiving her PhD in public policy from Harvard University.

Christia succeeds Noelle Selin, a professor in IDSS and the Department of Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences. Selin has led IDSS as interim director for the 2023-24 academic year since July 2023, following Professor Martin Wainwright.

“I am incredibly grateful to Noelle for serving as interim director this year. Her contributions in this role, as well as her time leading the Technology and Policy Program, have been invaluable. I’m delighted she will remain part of the IDSS community as a faculty member,” says Huttenlocher.

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jcmarchi · 5 months ago

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Fotini Christia named director of the Institute for Data, Systems, and Society

New Post has been published on https://thedigitalinsider.com/fotini-christia-named-director-of-the-institute-for-data-systems-and-society/

Fotini Christia named director of the Institute for Data, Systems, and Society

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