What Are You Afraid Of?

Jews and Muslim dissidents have real reasons to be afraid. The rest of us mostly have friends and careers to lose.

What exactly are people afraid of when they stay silent about what they really think of the Gaza war, and about Israel more generally? The Romanian-Swedish MEP Alice Teodorescu asked that question rhetorically at a conference in Brussels last month, after I had spoken about the academic colleagues and friends who discreetly email me to express their support but would never do so in public. (Alice herself is completely fearless.)

Physical threats

If you are Jewish yourself, of course you have plenty to be afraid of. I hope I don’t need to remind you of the draconian safety measures Jews now have to take all across Europe. This was already the case long before 7 October, but it has intensified since. Jewish schools, synagogues and kindergartens look like military fortresses.

Jews are being pushed out of academia and civic life unless they prostrate themselves before the activist mob and ritually denounce Israel — the one country that can realistically protect them against exactly this sort of antisemitism. Many Jewish academics have been boycotted or hounded off campus, or have left academia altogether in a mixture of despair and disgust.

All across the West, as Hana Raviyt Schank wrote in Future of Jewish, Jews are being “pushed out of civic life” — taking their surnames off mailboxes, changing their names on delivery apps, removing the mezuzah from the doorpost. If even a tenth of this were happening to Muslim minorities, you’d never hear the end of it. But since it is only Jews, hardly anyone cares.

Muslim and Arab dissidents are another group that is physically targeted. I recently met Nora Bussigny (pictured in the middle), a French-Moroccan journalist who infiltrated the anti-Israel movement at great personal risk and exposed its hatred and violence.

We were interviewed together by Wendy Sachs and Nimrod Erez (also in the picture) for a documentary about rising antisemitism and anti-Zionism, a sequel to their shocking October 8.

Because her mother is a Moroccan Muslim, Nora is considered a traitor who dishonors the community. She now requires police protection whenever she speaks in public. You can read her remarkable story in her gripping book Les Nouveaux Antisémites, hopefully to be translated soon, or in this excerpt in The Free Press.

I Went Undercover in France’s Anti-Israel Movement

Social consequences

But what are regular—goyim—academics and public intellectuals afraid of? No secret police is going to drag them out of bed in the middle of the night, and nobody is going to slip polonium into their tea. I have never felt physically threatened because of my strong views on the conflict — with one or two exceptions, such as the time I had to push through a crowd of pro-Palestinian protesters in Brussels and worried that someone might recognize me.

As far as I can recall, I have needed police protection only once, when I gave a talk on Islamic fundamentalism around 2015–2016, during a period of heightened terrorism alert across the country. And as I rarely speak in public about geopolitics, I haven’t needed it since October 7. That doesn’t mean my academic colleagues have nothing to fear, though — as the anonymous testimonies I collected for The Jewish Chronicle make clear. The punishment is not so much physical as social and professional.

Just to give you an idea, here is a sample of what I have experienced personally over the past two and a half years:

• A friend I once helped with one of his own books now writes a steady stream of public posts about what a far-right, xenophobic, Arab-hating, Nazi-adjacent bigot I am.

• An academic colleague who kindly blurbed one of my earlier books emailed my rector behind my back to demand that disciplinary action be taken against me for my “Zionist-tinged views”.

• A friend whose book I once blurbed successfully had me cancelled at an organization we are both associated with, and also tried to get me fired at UGent (no worries — I had already left of my own accord).

• A good friend of some twenty years became a father without my knowing, because he had cut off all contact.

• Someone called my mother (!) to sternly demand an explanation for her son’s behavior.

• A cordial colleague I had once had dinner with threw me out of his philosophical discussion group, blocked me on every social media platform, and ignored my polite emails asking for clarification.

• I have been deplatformed twice in academia — a talk and a debate — over my “Zionist views”.

• A talk in my hometown of Ghent was cancelled when people caught wind of my views on Gaza, even though the talk itself was completely unrelated. (Luckily they had signed a contract with my speaker’s agency, so they had to pay compensation.)

• Asked about the limits of academic freedom, and about my case in particular, the rector of my university said that any researcher who questions the Gaza genocide is "crossing a line that must not be crossed".

• The president of an organization I worked with smeared me as being “paid by the Zionist lobby”, then blocked my Facebook account and my emails when I asked for a retraction.

• I have had to promise my girlfriend that I won’t talk about Israel on television anymore, because she fears for my physical safety. (She needn’t worry: no TV program would be insane enough to invite me on that topic anyway.)

Yes, some of these sting. But don’t worry, I still have plenty of good friends left. Even these loyal friends are now under pressure from their own friends to disown me and break off contact — that is how the cascade of cowardice works. Perhaps I should also be grateful for having discovered that the others were never really friends in the first place. Besides, I have made plenty of new ones over the past two years, often people with similar (or worse) stories of social ostracism.

Needless to say, I have also pretty much ruined my career prospects in academia. But that’s fine. On the plus side, I no longer have to put up with the bureaucratic bullshit and the daily hostility. And I still write the occasional academic paper as a self-employed writer — in fact, I had a commentary in PNAS about AI evolution the other day.

The meta-lie

What irks me even more than the lies about “genocide” and “apartheid” in academia is the meta-lie that parroting those lies is somehow an act of courage — that our universities and our media are controlled by an all-powerful “Zionist lobby”. (If that’s true, Jews are as incompetent at lobbying as they are at genocide.) Seriously: if you are an academic, railing against Israel is about the safest and least courageous position you can take. You will be lavished with applause, social approval, even honorary doctorates.

If you genuinely believe that Israel is a settler-colonial state committing genocide, then by all means express and defend those views. But please spare us the persecution complex and the self-congratulation about “speaking truth to power”. As Michael Huemer recently put it: “Leftists do not speak truth to power. They speak power to truth, [using] raw social power to advance false narratives and silence dissent.”

Still, I can only repeat my call to my anonymous friends and colleagues: step forward and speak out. If you are neither Jewish nor a Muslim dissident, it really is not that bad. The same, I believe, goes for other contentious topics in academia — transgender ideology, migration and Islam, climate policy. There is strength in numbers. Every person who speaks out lowers the social cost of dissent for the next in line, and the illusion of consensus holds only as long as everyone holds their tongue.

And now I’ll get back to writing my book. I’m almost halfway through, and I have just finished the chapters on decolonization and anti-Westernism. Stay tuned — I’ll publish more excerpts here soon.