Zionism, the promotion of white supremacist terror as free speech, and the silencing of critiques of Israeli state terror
One of the key architects of the FSU is the Zionist Dane Giraud, along with David Cumin of Israel Institute of New Zealand.
In response to my persistent show of solidarity with the Palestinian struggle that is emergent from my personal, political, and academic commitments to decolonization and building Global South knowledge systems, Giraud has launched a campaign to label me a terror sympathizer. This is quite consistent with the attacks by Zionists directed at academics critiquing Israeli state terror and violence.
Dane Giraud’s attack on me, my scholarship, and my right to academic freedom is a performance in bad faith. His latest essay on the "anxious fig leaf of academia," cloaked in the rhetoric of liberal concern, trades in distortion, selective outrage, and a dangerous conflation of critique with extremism. Far from defending free speech, his intervention functions as an attempt to silence dissent, to police who gets to speak and on what terms. And in doing so, he reveals the deeper authoritarian impulse at work in far-right Zionist discourses and their local enablers: shrink the boundaries of legitimate debate, smear those who resist Israeli settler colonialism, and manufacture moral panics about academic freedom while simultaneously seeking to destroy it.
Misrepresenting My Position on the events of October 7th
Giraud’s entire polemic leans on a willful misrepresentation of my October 8th, 2023 post on my blog, where I described the communicative registers that emerged as “powerful exemplar of decolonizing resistance” in the context of the settler colonial erasure of decolonizing registers. He translates this into an “ecstatic” celebration of violence.
I debunked Giraud's use of disinformation to prop up racist propaganda in a follow-up analysis.
Figure 1: Giraud's tweets with the disinformation, tagging Massey University. Note further that not only does Giraud tag Massey (with the intent that my employer take action, he also retweets a tweet labeling me a terrorist and stating there is "no place for such scum in NZ")
This is a grotesque distortion that strips my words from the scholarship in which they are situated.
My work, built through field-based research with Indigenous and marginalized communities, situates resistance as a structural response to systemic oppression—settler colonialism, racial capitalism, imperialism, and apartheid. To collapse this into “support for pogroms” is not only dishonest; it denies the political, historical, and legal frameworks that shape Palestinian resistance. It erases the realities of occupation and apartheid, realities documented by the United Nations, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and B’Tselem.
The very blogpost Giraud cherry picks from offers the following context in depth, explicitly challenging violence while calling for a structural analysis.
"The concept of decolonising resistance outlined here attends to the agency of the colonised in critiquing and challenging the violence rooted in colonialism, drawing upon diverse decolonising traditions. It fundamentally critiques violence in any form carried out on civilian lives, and any attack on civilian lives is terror, noting that the terror is disproportionately perpetrated by the coloniser. It attends to the violent impact of settler colonialism on the health of the colonised. Decolonising traditions have historically taught us, as in the example of the Gandhian movement, the power of peaceful non-violent resistance offered through decolonising knowledge systems in countering the violence of colonial apparatus. Decolonising pedagogy offers a consistent critique of the violence that results in the loss of civilian life, and locates this terrorising effect of violence on the settler colonial occupation, arguing that colonialism is the root cause of violence. While the hegemonic narrative constructed by the coloniser seeks to place the onus of the violence on the colonised, constructing the colonised as a monster as a justification for the perpetuation of extreme violence on the colonised, carried out through the erasure of the voices of the colonised, decolonising resistance consistently co-creates voice infrastructures with the colonised, listening to the voices of the colonised."In a follow-up blogpost, I further wrote:
"My statement of solidarity with what I describe as decolonising resistance, described as the voices of the colonised to articulate the actual drivers of violence in settler colonial formations, is grotesquely turned by Giraud as my expression of "full-throated support, and glee, for brutal antisemitic violence." To perform this logic leap that then props up the racist, orientalizing discourse of the primitive terror-supporting brown body, Giraud has to strategically erase an entire paragraph in the original blog that describes what I actually mean by decolonisation, decolonisation as the fundamental critique offered by the colonised of the violence that lies at the core of colonisation."Giraud also ignores what I have consistently stated: I oppose violence against civilians, whether it comes from Hamas or the Israeli state. Yet he refuses to acknowledge the equally important fact that international law recognizes the legitimacy of struggles against colonial occupation, as affirmed by UN General Assembly Resolution 37/43.
Giraud continues recycling the disinformation in spite of multiple instances of my documentation that he is peddling disinformation. Repetition turns a lie into fact, a core technique of communicative inversion that shapes the violent structures of settler colonialism and imperialism.
His caricature of me is not about engaging ideas; it is about engineering outrage to justify calls for my silencing and removal from Aotearoa New Zealand.
Once he has engineered the outrage through tweets that selectively deploy disinformation to serve a communicative infrastructure of propaganda, he deletes the tweets, reiterates the most egregious forms of the narrative in other platforms (such as his blog or the FSU newsletter).
Zionism, White Supremacy, and the Far-Right
Giraud, along with David Cumin, was a key advocate for the platforming of the Islamophobic white supremacists Lauren Southern and Stefan Molyneux in Aotearoa New Zealand. The Great Replacement conspiracy promoted by Southern was the key driver of the Islamophobic terrorism witnessed in the largest domestic terror attack in Aotearoa New Zealand. This is what Giraud had then written:
Ironically, Giraud’s latest fury over my critique of his rhetorical strategies as reflections of the white supremacist structure of Zionism continues to propel the propaganda around my celebration of terror. In taking objections to my colleague Dr. Sean Phelan's excellent critical analysis of the New Zealand policy response on Israeli violence published on my blog, Giraud repeats the lie he has manufactured:
Figure 4: Excerpt from Giraud's blog
In addition to the lie which he counts on sticking by virtue of repetition, note the dehumanizing language in Giraud's post, replete with its concocted portrayal of my support for terror and violence alongside the erasure of my expertise, a tactic that lies at the core of white supremacist constructions of racial hierarchy.
After all, White supremacy maintains its racialized power and control through both the dehumanization of the communities it targets and the erasure of the knowledge generating capacities of these communities.
Noting this racist hierarchy that forms the intersecting infrastructures of Zionism and white supremacy, I tweeted, "Zionists are white supremacists. If the disgusting racism of the IDF doesn't make it clear enough, we have our own version in Aotearoa. Here's the racism of Dane Giraud targeting me with lies again because ---- (tagging Dr. Phelan's X handle) published his excellent article on my blog."
Zionism as a structure of white supremacy rests on an old, cynical trick: collapse critique of ideology into hatred of identity. But Zionism is a political project. Like other settler-colonial projects, it is tied to racial hierarchies, to dispossession, to imperial patronage.
This is not my invention; it is well established in the scholarship of Edward Said, Ilan Pappé, Noura Erakat, and many others. At the end of this essay, I will include citations to this literature
To label this critique antisemitic is to abuse the concept of antisemitism itself, a strategy that forms the core of Zionist propaganda. It shields Israel’s ongoing violence—including the UN-documented killing of more than 34,000 Palestinians in Gaza in 2024—from scrutiny. It erases Palestinian humanity while immunizing Israeli state practices from critique. And it instrumentalizes Jewish identity as a shield for power, thereby cheapening the fight against real antisemitism.
That Giraud performs this rhetorical sleight-of-hand while claiming liberal credentials reveals the incoherence of his position, with the ongoing recycling of lies to uphold the propaganda. He cannot admit that his own rhetoric echoes far-right Zionist propaganda networks, because to do so would expose his project for what it is: authoritarian policing of discourse under the mask of “liberal concern.”
The silencing of the critique of the structures of settler colonialism, white supremacy and imperialism, the root sources of global terror, while upholding Islamophobic white supremacy
Academic Freedom and the Manufactured Crisis
Elsewhere, I have argued that the Free Speech Union manufactures a crisis of academic freedom, through a concocted, poorly designed survey, to target tertiary education institutions.
Here is where Giraud’s hypocrisy becomes clearest. He claims to defend “free speech” yet draws a line between “serious” peer-reviewed scholarship and “reckless” social media commentary (He goes on to spell this out in a follow up blog piece titled "The Anxious Fig Leaf of Academia" where he argues why my speech on Israeli settler colonialism and genocide on digital spaces is not academic speech).
According to him, I illegitimately invoke academic freedom to protect what he dismisses as “conspiracy.” But his distinction is opportunistic.
Giraud's position here seems to be that my observation on X labelling Zionism as white supremacy (along with other concocted lies packaged together) are not evidence-led, are ideological slogans, and is "activism masquerading as research."
Giraud goes through a complex trapeze to outline why my online commentary is not scholarship, leading into his claim about the inappropriateness of my appointment to He Whenua Taurikura.
Yet, the Free Speech Union (FSU), with which Giraud is closely aligned, thrives on precisely this obfuscation. Their survey of academic freedom in Aotearoa New Zealand projects a crisis narrative, suggesting that academics feel chilled from critiquing Kaupapa Māori knowledge (KM) and Vision Mātauranga (VM). Yet the survey does not disclose whether those surveyed are even experts in these fields. The effect is a manufactured moral panic: position KM as an “untouchable orthodoxy,” then cast academics who are aggrieved by KM as silenced truth-tellers. Consider similarly the strong advocacy position on academic freedom that the FSU led on around the Listener 7 letter and subsequent events, rallying around the right of academics to critique KM and VM. Note here that none of the letter writers are experts in KM.
The production of crisis around KM is in fact an excellent example of intellectual dishonesty masquerading as advocacy. The FSU conflates social media opinion, personal discomfort, and ideological grievance with academic freedom itself. In doing so, they trivialize the actual threats to academic freedom—threats like smear campaigns, harassment, and institutional pressure directed at scholars who study colonial violence, racial capitalism, and settler colonialism.
In my case, unlike the anonymous figures the FSU platform in its survey, my expertise is precisely in decolonization, settler-colonial violence, colonial extremism, and terror. These are areas I do research and publish on, and regularly speak about in public forums. My commentary is not a casual opinion from the sidelines. It emerges from the very heart of my scholarly expertise.
For Giraud to call this “conspiracy” is not only baseless—it is a calculated attempt to delegitimize an entire body of research (of course, for his propaganda campaign, his cursory search doesn't find evidence of my scholarly expertise in the area of decolonization).
FSU, Islamophobia and The Hypocrisy of Free Speech Advocacy
This is the central contradiction: the same movement that rails about the unfreedom of white supremacists to promote white supremacist terror and manufactures a crisis around academics being silenced for critiquing Kaupapa Māori knowledge now demands my exclusion from research spaces because I critique Zionism, Zionist terror, its investments in the production of Islamophobia and racism.
Giraud relies on the manufactured lie about my support for terror to mobilize around my exclusion from research on extremist violence in a center that was created in Aotearoa New Zealand after the worst global incidence of extremist violence that emerged from Islamophobia and white supremacy (also, the most violent incidence of terrorism on New Zealand soil).
This is the same Giraud that downplayed the terrorism promoted by the white supremacists Lauren Southern and Stefan Molyneux, advocating for them to promote white supremacist terror.
Free speech for me, but not for thee: This is the fundamental slogan of the FSU. More worryingly, what is the objective of advocacy that seeks to erase critical decolonizing accounts of terror and extremism while promoting discursive spaces for white supremacist terrorism?
For Giraud, the misframing of my academically informed theorizing of racism, Islamophobia, white supremacy and Zionism as support for terror is a critical node in silencing my research on Islamophobia and the role it played in informing the work of He Whenua Taurikura, the center that was created specifically to address the Islamophobic extremism that led to the Christchurch terror attack.
This silencing is particularly critical to leave unchallenged the discursive infrastructure of Islamophobia, the study of the role of Zionism in this infrastructure, and the development of public policy to address the Zionist threads of Islamophobic extremism.
Consider the weaponization of the narrative of antisemitic conspiracy to silence the act of calling out the disinformation campaign that was strategically built to target me, even while mobilizing for my erasure from the research center. Note the mobilization around the disinformation among influential Zionist networks that are regularly platformed in mainstream media and policy spaces.
Yet, as an exemplar of communicative inversion, Giraud not only denies that there was a campaign to get me removed from He Whenua Taurikura, but also suggests that the communicative act of bringing this up is promoting antisemitic conspiracy theory. To bring up that Giraud's extremist rhetoric was part of an organized Zionist campaign is to promote antisemitism. Also note the sleight of hand at work that communicatively inverts the critique of Zionism as an ideology as criticism of Jewish identity.
Giraud’s claim that I weaponize academic freedom collapses under the weight of his own actions: tagging my employer on X to endanger my livelihood, calling for institutional sanctions, branding me an extremist, and calling for my removal from He Whenua Taurikura.
His practice, much like the global Zionist infrastructure, is not about protecting free speech. It is about punishing dissent, punishing speech that speaks in solidarity with decolonization struggles against settler colonial extremism and terror. This is the wider game: leverage free speech rhetoric to defend settler power , promote white supremacist extremism and delegitimize Indigenous, postcolonial and decolonizing knowledge, while denying the same freedoms to those who critique Zionism and empire. It is a double standard so stark it exposes itself.
It is also worryingly the necessary strategy for the promotion of extremism and terror.
Conclusion: Defending the Principle
Dane Giraud’s critique is not a defense of free speech, nor is it an honest intellectual disagreement. It is a performance designed to silence, smear, and discipline. It is part of a larger Free Speech Union strategy: manufacture a crisis around free speech and academic freedom (around selected topics such as Kaupapa Māori and decolonizing knowledge) while attacking scholars whose expertise challenges settler colonial violence.
Academic freedom cannot be selectively applied.
It cannot be weaponized to protect Pākehā fragility and discomfort with Kaupapa Māori while being denied to those who critique Zionism and white supremacist terror. It cannot be reduced to peer-reviewed journals for one group while dismissing public scholarship for another.
The stakes are bigger than me.
The question is whether universities in Aotearoa will defend academic freedom as a principle—protecting the right to dissent, to challenge, to unsettle—or whether they will cave in to smear campaigns masquerading as liberal concern.
For me, the answer is clear: I will not be silenced. And I will continue to defend the principle of academic freedom, not just for myself, but for all who resist authoritarian attempts to police knowledge, erase Indigenous voices, and silence critique of power. Here in Aotearoa and globally, academics are speaking out about the empirical evidence documenting Israeli state terror amidst an ongoing genocide. This collective register is a critical resource at this juncture of global history.
References (some starting points for those wanting to learn about the linkage)
Erakat, N. (2015). Whiteness as property in Israel: Revival, rehabilitation, and removal. Harv. J. Racial & Ethnic Just., 31, 69.Jackson, R. (2008). The ghosts of state terror: Knowledge, politics and terrorism studies. Critical Studies on Terrorism, 1(3), 377-392.
