A Rutgers University associate professor of women’s and gender studies claims Israel is stealing organs from the bodies of Arab terrorists — and she’s threatening to sue anyone who publishes a recording of the lecture at Vassar College in which she made the claim.
Professor Jasbir Puar’s February 3 lecture “was taped without my permission or that of the people who had invited me,” she said. Nevertheless, she slammed a “current Zionist strategy” of what she called “silencing and intimidation tactics” aimed at stifling the “exercise of free speech and academic freedom.”
Moreover, Puar recently canceled a scheduled lecture at Fordham University on the “biopolitics of debility in Gaza” – because the administration insisted on recording the talk and making it publicly available, according to The Tower.
For some odd reason she appears unwilling to see that her unwillingness to share her words with the rest of the world is if anything, a much greater self-censorship – one that raises deep suspicions about the legality of what she said.
In a column written in Jadaliyya, (produced by the Arab Studies Institute, ASI) Puar writes about her Feb. 3 lecture, which she said was delivered to a “welcoming and enthusiastic audience.” ASI has received funding from the Social Science Research Council, and the Open Society Institute, supported by George Soros.
The Jadaliyya publication combines local knowledge, scholarship and advocacy aimed at audiences primarily in the United States and the Middle East. The site currently publishes posts both in Arabic, French, English, and Turkish.
“The fraught history of organ mining practices from both IDF soldiers and Palestinian bodies during the 1990s is well documented. During the second intifada, Palestinian bodies were held at the Abu Kabir Institute of Forensic Medicine for prolonged periods without explanation. Even mainstream Israeli press such as Ha’aretz have reported on the collecting of illegally obtained organs at Abu Kabir,” Puar wrote.
“In my lecture, I made clear that I was not making any empirical claims about current organ mining. Rather, I was conveying a small part of the sheer terror of life in the West Bank since the uprising began in October 2015. I can only surmise that the charges of anti-Semitism and blood libel leveled against me were intended to discredit scholarship about the deleterious effects of the occupation on Palestinian daily life.
“It is as if those engaged in trying to smear me believe that Palestinians have no right to legitimate and very human emotions of grief, anguish, and historical trauma.
“Further, the manufactured controversy surrounding my talk was no doubt intended to derail the momentum of the Vassar BDS resolution, spearheaded by Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voice for Peace. In the wake of this diversion, the Vassar administration threatened to withhold student activity fees from the Vassar Student Association if they voted to pass the BDS resolution—which they passed despite this threat.”
“The talk was taped without my permission or that of the people who had invited me, and the transcript was disseminated to right wing media, inciting hateful responses,” she complained.
“They are desperate to contain the popular movements of students, many of them Jewish Americans, galvanizing around BDS,” she claimed.
