Thursday October 12, 2023.
The settler colonial occupation had unleashed its infrastructure of violence over the Palestinian people over a period of five days.
Gaza was being indiscriminately bombarded, with mass civilian casualties that Amnesty International noted "must be investigated as war crimes."
At 3:32 p.m., my office phone rang. I was occupied and the call went to the voicemail.
"Dutta, you are a murderous, f***ing, racist c***. Go back to where you belong...I will see to your termination in New Zealand."
A couple of hours before that, an email had gone out from the Zionist Dane Giraud to the email listserv of the Free Speech Union, performed as a supposed apology for attacking my academic freedom. In the email, Giraud referred to my earlier blog post on the interlinkages between far-right Zionism, attacks on academic freedom, and the free speech union, noting how he had been enraged by the following statement on my blog:
"I was therefore not surprised to wake up today in the backdrop of what would be described as a powerful exemplar of decolonising resistance and my expression of solidarity to it to angry and racist tweets by Giraud."
Giraud selectively picks the phrase "powerful exemplar of decolonising resistance" as the reason for his rage and to mobilize grievance. He writes:
"His words, not mine: this man was calling mass murder a powerful model for decolonizing resistance and was expressing his support for it. Remember, this is a state-funded academic writing this, paid for by you and me, expressing full-throated support, and glee, for brutal antisemitic violence, in a very public blog."
It would be a problem indeed if I was calling for mass murder. Except that Giraud's phantasmic concoction is far removed from what I actually expressed in the blog. In my description of decolonising resistance, I left little room for interpretive distortions, knowing fully well that such distortions form the communicative tools of white supremacists, far-right Zionists and Hindutva propagandists.
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.
Here's a brief excerpt from that description of decolonising resistance on the original blogpost elucidating the concept of decolonisation as:
"the agency of the colonised in critiquing and challenging the violence rooted in colonialism, drawing upon diverse decolonising traditions."
What I noted as a scholar of the culture-centered approach was the strong presence of voice infrastructures emergent from Palestine and in solidarity with Palestine that were disrupting and breaking through the violent erasure and silencing perpetuated by Western media over the past seven decades. Over the past three weeks, we have continued to witness the power of these voice infrastructures emergent from Palestine, rendering visible the violent excesses of Israeli settler colonialism.
To elucidate this point further, the very next paragraph after the sentence selectively picked by Giraud quotes an Amnesty International statement pointing to Israeli settler colonial violence as the key driver of the violence in the region.
"The root causes of these repeated cycles of violence must be addressed as a matter of urgency. This requires upholding international law and ending Israel’s 16-year-long illegal blockade on Gaza, and all other aspects of Israel’s system of apartheid imposed on all Palestinians. The Israeli government must refrain from inciting violence and tensions in the occupied West Bank, including East Jerusalem, especially around religious sites. Amnesty International calls on the international community to urgently intervene to protect civilians and prevent further suffering."
Earlier on October 9, Giraud had tagged my employer Massey University, and tweeted,
"Hey, @MasseyUni. This is one of your lecturers (Mohan Dutta) admitting to solidarity with the butchering of Jewish families in their homes - 700 now and counting. This inhuman creep is literally celebrating a pogrom. How can you allow for this? Why are we funding this evil man?"
Figure 1: Screenshot of the Tweet by Dane Giraud tagging my employer
Once again, critical to note here are the expansive logic leaps that go from my expression of solidarity with decolonising resistance to my supposed support for "brutal antisemitic violence" to my supposed solidarity with the "butchering of Jewish families in their homes - 700 now and counting." To do so, Giraud strategically erases my statement on the blogpost that "fundamentally critiques violence in any form carried out on civilian lives, and any attack on civilian lives is terror."
Further note the racist dehumanising language and rhetorical excess at work here, labeling me an "inhuman creep," and claiming I am "celebrating a pogrom." and then turning to ask the University, "How can you allow for this? Why are we funding this evil man?" Giraud doesn't even hide his violent rhetoric, calling me an "evil man." That Giraud's hateful rhetoric mobilizes the hate messages on my email and office phone is no surprise. The literature documents ample evidence of the mobilizing effects of online hate (Note the similarity between Giraud's rhetoric and the hate message on my voicemail).
The same propaganda is peddled by the Israel Institute of New Zealand, taking a screenshot of the same sentence from the blogpost. Picking up the same phrase, tagging my employer and me, wrote the handle of the Israel Institute:
"@MasseyUni academic, @mjdutt considers the murder, mutilation, and kidnapping of civilians a "powerful exemplar of decolonising resistance" and expresses solidarity with it."
Attend once again to the leap from my articulation of decolonising resistance to "the murder, mutilation, and kidnapping of civilians."
Here's another Zionist proponent in Aotearoa, Juliet Moses,
"Prof Dutta thinks raping and mutilating young women and parading them in Gaza, holding children hostage and filming them being taunted, mowing down 250+ music festival-goers, and forcing people to watch the execution of family, is a “powerful exemplar of decolonising resistance”.
Figure 2: Screenshot of the tweet by Juliet Moses
Moses quote tweets a post from the Israel Institute of NZ under a hashtag #theysupportevil, stating "@MasseyUni Prof Dutta expressed solidarity with the horrific acts, and presumably wants Maori to follow Hamas' lead to 'decolonise' Aotearoa."
Critical to observe here is the white supremacy-aligned messaging designed to stoke fear and anger at decolonisation struggles, articulating these fears and mobilising them in the context of Māori decolonisation struggles. Note furthermore the deployment of the dehumanising language of evil.
Moses further plays out this fear-based propaganda targeting Māori:
Figure 3: Twitter comment by Juliet Moses in response to comments on her thread
The Israel Institute further goes on to reproduce the tactic I had examined before in my analysis of the intersections of far-right Zionism, cancel culture, and attacks on free speech, writing directly to the Vice Chancellor of Massey University in a tweet (the tweet is addressed to the Vice Chancellor Professor Jan Thomas),
The settler colonial occupation had unleashed its infrastructure of violence over the Palestinian people over a period of five days.
Gaza was being indiscriminately bombarded, with mass civilian casualties that Amnesty International noted "must be investigated as war crimes."
At 3:32 p.m., my office phone rang. I was occupied and the call went to the voicemail.
"Dutta, you are a murderous, f***ing, racist c***. Go back to where you belong...I will see to your termination in New Zealand."
A couple of hours before that, an email had gone out from the Zionist Dane Giraud to the email listserv of the Free Speech Union, performed as a supposed apology for attacking my academic freedom. In the email, Giraud referred to my earlier blog post on the interlinkages between far-right Zionism, attacks on academic freedom, and the free speech union, noting how he had been enraged by the following statement on my blog:
"I was therefore not surprised to wake up today in the backdrop of what would be described as a powerful exemplar of decolonising resistance and my expression of solidarity to it to angry and racist tweets by Giraud."
Giraud selectively picks the phrase "powerful exemplar of decolonising resistance" as the reason for his rage and to mobilize grievance. He writes:
"His words, not mine: this man was calling mass murder a powerful model for decolonizing resistance and was expressing his support for it. Remember, this is a state-funded academic writing this, paid for by you and me, expressing full-throated support, and glee, for brutal antisemitic violence, in a very public blog."
It would be a problem indeed if I was calling for mass murder. Except that Giraud's phantasmic concoction is far removed from what I actually expressed in the blog. In my description of decolonising resistance, I left little room for interpretive distortions, knowing fully well that such distortions form the communicative tools of white supremacists, far-right Zionists and Hindutva propagandists.
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.
Here's a brief excerpt from that description of decolonising resistance on the original blogpost elucidating the concept of decolonisation as:
"the agency of the colonised in critiquing and challenging the violence rooted in colonialism, drawing upon diverse decolonising traditions."
What I noted as a scholar of the culture-centered approach was the strong presence of voice infrastructures emergent from Palestine and in solidarity with Palestine that were disrupting and breaking through the violent erasure and silencing perpetuated by Western media over the past seven decades. Over the past three weeks, we have continued to witness the power of these voice infrastructures emergent from Palestine, rendering visible the violent excesses of Israeli settler colonialism.
To elucidate this point further, the very next paragraph after the sentence selectively picked by Giraud quotes an Amnesty International statement pointing to Israeli settler colonial violence as the key driver of the violence in the region.
"The root causes of these repeated cycles of violence must be addressed as a matter of urgency. This requires upholding international law and ending Israel’s 16-year-long illegal blockade on Gaza, and all other aspects of Israel’s system of apartheid imposed on all Palestinians. The Israeli government must refrain from inciting violence and tensions in the occupied West Bank, including East Jerusalem, especially around religious sites. Amnesty International calls on the international community to urgently intervene to protect civilians and prevent further suffering."
Earlier on October 9, Giraud had tagged my employer Massey University, and tweeted,
"Hey, @MasseyUni. This is one of your lecturers (Mohan Dutta) admitting to solidarity with the butchering of Jewish families in their homes - 700 now and counting. This inhuman creep is literally celebrating a pogrom. How can you allow for this? Why are we funding this evil man?"
Figure 1: Screenshot of the Tweet by Dane Giraud tagging my employer
Once again, critical to note here are the expansive logic leaps that go from my expression of solidarity with decolonising resistance to my supposed support for "brutal antisemitic violence" to my supposed solidarity with the "butchering of Jewish families in their homes - 700 now and counting." To do so, Giraud strategically erases my statement on the blogpost that "fundamentally critiques violence in any form carried out on civilian lives, and any attack on civilian lives is terror."
Further note the racist dehumanising language and rhetorical excess at work here, labeling me an "inhuman creep," and claiming I am "celebrating a pogrom." and then turning to ask the University, "How can you allow for this? Why are we funding this evil man?" Giraud doesn't even hide his violent rhetoric, calling me an "evil man." That Giraud's hateful rhetoric mobilizes the hate messages on my email and office phone is no surprise. The literature documents ample evidence of the mobilizing effects of online hate (Note the similarity between Giraud's rhetoric and the hate message on my voicemail).
The same propaganda is peddled by the Israel Institute of New Zealand, taking a screenshot of the same sentence from the blogpost. Picking up the same phrase, tagging my employer and me, wrote the handle of the Israel Institute:
"@MasseyUni academic, @mjdutt considers the murder, mutilation, and kidnapping of civilians a "powerful exemplar of decolonising resistance" and expresses solidarity with it."
Attend once again to the leap from my articulation of decolonising resistance to "the murder, mutilation, and kidnapping of civilians."
Here's another Zionist proponent in Aotearoa, Juliet Moses,
"Prof Dutta thinks raping and mutilating young women and parading them in Gaza, holding children hostage and filming them being taunted, mowing down 250+ music festival-goers, and forcing people to watch the execution of family, is a “powerful exemplar of decolonising resistance”.
Figure 2: Screenshot of the tweet by Juliet Moses
Moses quote tweets a post from the Israel Institute of NZ under a hashtag #theysupportevil, stating "@MasseyUni Prof Dutta expressed solidarity with the horrific acts, and presumably wants Maori to follow Hamas' lead to 'decolonise' Aotearoa."
Critical to observe here is the white supremacy-aligned messaging designed to stoke fear and anger at decolonisation struggles, articulating these fears and mobilising them in the context of Māori decolonisation struggles. Note furthermore the deployment of the dehumanising language of evil.
Moses further plays out this fear-based propaganda targeting Māori:
Figure 3: Twitter comment by Juliet Moses in response to comments on her thread
The Israel Institute further goes on to reproduce the tactic I had examined before in my analysis of the intersections of far-right Zionism, cancel culture, and attacks on free speech, writing directly to the Vice Chancellor of Massey University in a tweet (the tweet is addressed to the Vice Chancellor Professor Jan Thomas),
"Dear Prof Jan Thomas (@MasseyUni VC). You banned @DonBrashNZ from your campus for fear he might emotionally harm staff and students by talking about his career. Do you have any comment at all about Prof Dutta's support for the acts of Hamas, which have included rape, slaughter, decapitating babies, and kidnapping families?"
Figure 4: Israel Institute tweet to Professor Jan Thomas
Critical in this propaganda infrastructure is the deployment of disinformation.
Consider here the trope of "decapitated babies" that had not been borne out by evidence at the time the tweet was posted. At the time of writing this first draft of the blog on October 25, 2023, the leading fact-checking organisation Factchcek.org, a project of the Annenberg Public Policy Center notes there is no evidence of beheading babies.
Note also the deep-seated racist Islamophobic orientalism of the trope "decapitating babies" without evidence. In fact, this trope, magnified through mainstream Western media and legitimized by US President Joe Biden, played a key role in the mobilization around the Israeli response.
At the core of the demonisation of calls for decolonisation is the production of caricatures. Consider the communicative exaggeration in insinuating that my blogpost is calling for mobilising Māori in Aotearoa to adopt violence as a method for decolonisation. This exaggeration communicatively inverts the articulation on the blogpost of peaceful resistance as a foundational principle of decolonisation struggles,
"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."
You would think that Giraud, the Israel Institute and Juliet Moses were reading some entirely different commentary if you didn't understand how Zionist propaganda works. It is critical to observe the networked structure of the propaganda, selectively picking and exaggerating a piece of disinformation to drive up targeted hate, ultimate directed at silencing voices witnessing the atrocities perpetrated by the settler colonial, apartheid state of Israel. Consider how this strategy has been at work in targeting the United Nations secretary general for his reference to the settler colonial violence or in the targeting of the Green Party Member of Parliament Marama Davidson for her call to examine the violence deployed by the Israeli Defense Force.
The response of the Zionist infrastructure to my original blogpost about the Zionist cancel culture further reiterates my argument about the fundamental hypocrisy of Zionists seemingly representing the Free Speech Union in different roles (this was the point of my original blog post that Giraud distracted from through his selective misrepresentation of a sentence but never really addressed the original arguments raised in the blogpost).
Whereas according to these Zionist proponents of free speech, it seems that David Cumin (both with Israel Institute and FSU) ought to have his personal freedom to libellously mislabel academics across NZ universities critical of Israel as extremists (based on disinformation and hyperbole) without his employer (University of Auckland) having to take responsibility and/or declare public statements about Mr. Cumin's posts, the Israel Institute's advocacy demands Massey University to take responsibility and make statements on my post on a blog (Note here that the blog doesn't claim to be attached to Massey University. Also, the blog doesn't claim my affiliation with Massey University).
In the strange universe Cumin concocts, his freedom of expression ought to have the unfettered opportunity to perpetuate racist attacks on academic colleagues without University pressures, while academics critical of Israeli settler colonialism and apartheid ought to be circumscribed by Universities needing to issue statements on personal social media posts and blogs.
The disinformation and anti-Māori hate crafted by the Zionist network is picked up by the far-right disinformation platform, BFD, operated by Cameron Slater.
Figure 5: Disinformation-based piece targeting academics and activists on Slater's BFD
Returning to Giraud and his supposed apologia (which is written to the FSU audience, not to me or Massey University), the email then is positioned as bringing to light my supposed deplorable views. In doing so, Giraud constructs himself as the victim of my speech, writing "Pretty soon, I was feeling ashamed and mad at myself that this man had made me compromise my values."
Worth interrogating is the backgrounding of his agency, with the suggestion that my speech made him compromise on his so-called value of free speech (note here how he humanizes his attack on my speech by depicting it as a slip, one that happened at an affectively charged moment for him [the sheer scale of violence on Palestinians carried out by Israel doesn't matter] brought about by my speech).
Giraud turns himself as the victim while I am the stereotypical terror-supporting brown perpetrator.
Figure 6: Giraud's posts about amplification
Consider here the trope of "decapitated babies" that had not been borne out by evidence at the time the tweet was posted. At the time of writing this first draft of the blog on October 25, 2023, the leading fact-checking organisation Factchcek.org, a project of the Annenberg Public Policy Center notes there is no evidence of beheading babies.
Note also the deep-seated racist Islamophobic orientalism of the trope "decapitating babies" without evidence. In fact, this trope, magnified through mainstream Western media and legitimized by US President Joe Biden, played a key role in the mobilization around the Israeli response.
At the core of the demonisation of calls for decolonisation is the production of caricatures. Consider the communicative exaggeration in insinuating that my blogpost is calling for mobilising Māori in Aotearoa to adopt violence as a method for decolonisation. This exaggeration communicatively inverts the articulation on the blogpost of peaceful resistance as a foundational principle of decolonisation struggles,
"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."
You would think that Giraud, the Israel Institute and Juliet Moses were reading some entirely different commentary if you didn't understand how Zionist propaganda works. It is critical to observe the networked structure of the propaganda, selectively picking and exaggerating a piece of disinformation to drive up targeted hate, ultimate directed at silencing voices witnessing the atrocities perpetrated by the settler colonial, apartheid state of Israel. Consider how this strategy has been at work in targeting the United Nations secretary general for his reference to the settler colonial violence or in the targeting of the Green Party Member of Parliament Marama Davidson for her call to examine the violence deployed by the Israeli Defense Force.
The response of the Zionist infrastructure to my original blogpost about the Zionist cancel culture further reiterates my argument about the fundamental hypocrisy of Zionists seemingly representing the Free Speech Union in different roles (this was the point of my original blog post that Giraud distracted from through his selective misrepresentation of a sentence but never really addressed the original arguments raised in the blogpost).
Whereas according to these Zionist proponents of free speech, it seems that David Cumin (both with Israel Institute and FSU) ought to have his personal freedom to libellously mislabel academics across NZ universities critical of Israel as extremists (based on disinformation and hyperbole) without his employer (University of Auckland) having to take responsibility and/or declare public statements about Mr. Cumin's posts, the Israel Institute's advocacy demands Massey University to take responsibility and make statements on my post on a blog (Note here that the blog doesn't claim to be attached to Massey University. Also, the blog doesn't claim my affiliation with Massey University).
In the strange universe Cumin concocts, his freedom of expression ought to have the unfettered opportunity to perpetuate racist attacks on academic colleagues without University pressures, while academics critical of Israeli settler colonialism and apartheid ought to be circumscribed by Universities needing to issue statements on personal social media posts and blogs.
The disinformation and anti-Māori hate crafted by the Zionist network is picked up by the far-right disinformation platform, BFD, operated by Cameron Slater.
Figure 5: Disinformation-based piece targeting academics and activists on Slater's BFD
Returning to Giraud and his supposed apologia (which is written to the FSU audience, not to me or Massey University), the email then is positioned as bringing to light my supposed deplorable views. In doing so, Giraud constructs himself as the victim of my speech, writing "Pretty soon, I was feeling ashamed and mad at myself that this man had made me compromise my values."
Worth interrogating is the backgrounding of his agency, with the suggestion that my speech made him compromise on his so-called value of free speech (note here how he humanizes his attack on my speech by depicting it as a slip, one that happened at an affectively charged moment for him [the sheer scale of violence on Palestinians carried out by Israel doesn't matter] brought about by my speech).
Giraud turns himself as the victim while I am the stereotypical terror-supporting brown perpetrator.
Figure 6: Giraud's posts about amplification
Giraud's notion of amplification becomes clear from his Twitter posts.
Amplification, or dragging "the worm into the sunlight" is based on disinformation, charged with affective registers (referring to me in dehumanising language such as cancer, worm etc.), and mobilised then to propagate hate. This is evident in the types of responses that are produced by his Tweets and his email to the Free Speech Union membership (the effect noted in the opening of this blog in a hate voicemail threatening to terminate me).
Figure 7: Tweets in response to Giraud
Figure 8: Email in response to Giraud's FSU email to listserv
Amplification is a powerful strategy for mobilising far-right cancel culture, with the source of the disinformation claiming their support for free speech and simply drawing a speaker to light for their supposed monstrous ideas. The armies of trolls are then mobilised around the disinformation and affective register to call for cancellation (from letters/tweets demanding firing to threatening deportation to death threats).
Far-right Zionism (much like far-right white supremacy and Hindutva) thrives on cancel culture.
This grammar of cancel culture operates to violently erase articulations of the violence of settler colonialism (turn off the lights while the violence is carried out) while actively working through free speech instruments to platform the Islamophobic anti-migrant far-right (Islamophobic white supremacist extremists Lauren Southern and Stefan Molyneux).
In the face of these violent attacks on voice infrastructures mobilizing around decolonisation, Palestinians continue to speak up, documenting the scale of the violence being carried out by Israel targeting civilians. These acts of witnessing powerfully demonstrate the concept of decolonizing resistance my original blogpost was articulating.
In a follow-up blog, I will demonstrate the systemic efforts of Zionists here in Aotearoa to copy the far-right infrastructure of the Zionist Campus Watch in the US that aggressively targets academic freedom.
Amplification, or dragging "the worm into the sunlight" is based on disinformation, charged with affective registers (referring to me in dehumanising language such as cancer, worm etc.), and mobilised then to propagate hate. This is evident in the types of responses that are produced by his Tweets and his email to the Free Speech Union membership (the effect noted in the opening of this blog in a hate voicemail threatening to terminate me).
Figure 7: Tweets in response to Giraud
Figure 8: Email in response to Giraud's FSU email to listserv
Amplification is a powerful strategy for mobilising far-right cancel culture, with the source of the disinformation claiming their support for free speech and simply drawing a speaker to light for their supposed monstrous ideas. The armies of trolls are then mobilised around the disinformation and affective register to call for cancellation (from letters/tweets demanding firing to threatening deportation to death threats).
Far-right Zionism (much like far-right white supremacy and Hindutva) thrives on cancel culture.
This grammar of cancel culture operates to violently erase articulations of the violence of settler colonialism (turn off the lights while the violence is carried out) while actively working through free speech instruments to platform the Islamophobic anti-migrant far-right (Islamophobic white supremacist extremists Lauren Southern and Stefan Molyneux).
In the face of these violent attacks on voice infrastructures mobilizing around decolonisation, Palestinians continue to speak up, documenting the scale of the violence being carried out by Israel targeting civilians. These acts of witnessing powerfully demonstrate the concept of decolonizing resistance my original blogpost was articulating.
In a follow-up blog, I will demonstrate the systemic efforts of Zionists here in Aotearoa to copy the far-right infrastructure of the Zionist Campus Watch in the US that aggressively targets academic freedom.