Pessin
Affair Exposes Connecticut College Anti-Semitism
by Noah Beck
Special to IPT News
January 20, 2016
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 A pro-Israel
professor won't be on campus at Connecticut College when classes start
Monday, missing the second straight semester since his 2014 Facebook post
criticizing Hamas led to death threats and ostracism.
Andrew Pessin "requested and received a sabbatical for the Spring
semester to continue his studies in Jewish philosophy and Israel
studies," Connecticut College spokeswoman Pamela Serfes said in an
email last week. "He has been and continues to be a valued member of
the Connecticut College faculty."
The vague and misleading response glosses over the intensity of the
campaign against Pessin – he first took a medical leave last spring as a
smear campaign against him was at full throat. The controversy exposed an
administration unwilling to enforce its own honor code to protect a
professor against anti-Israel activists and a student journalist
responsible for covering the very controversy she had joined.
It started with an August 2014 Facebook post written as Israel and Hamas
fought their latest war, in which Pessin referred to "a rabid pit bull
chained in a cage, regularly making mass efforts to escape."
It wasn't until March that the comment suddenly resurfaced to ignite a
campus firestorm. On March 2, three editorials condemning Pessin were published in
the print and online editions of Connecticut College's student newspaper, College
Voice. The op-eds, which started on the front page and covered all of
page three and part of page four, accused Pessin of racism and comparing
Palestinians to rabid dogs.
Not so, the professor insisted. He was referring to the Hamas terrorists
who govern the territory, but the Voice reportedly didn't bother to give him a chance to
present his side.
Pessin, a heretofore popular philosophy professor, stood accused of
peddling "hate speech."
"I feel unsafe," Lamiya Khandaker wrote, not really explaining how a Facebook post from
the previous summer that originally went unnoticed suddenly threatened her
security. She did note that she contacted Pessin, who repeatedly tried to
explain that she misunderstood his comments.
Khandaker is an activist with Students for Justice in Palestine, an aggressively anti-Israel organization active on
campuses nationwide.
Two other students, Michael Fratt and Katilyn Garbe, co-authored an article falsely alleging that
"Pessin directly condoned the extermination of a people."
Ayla Zuraw-Friedland, the Voice's editor-in-chief, reportedly authored an anti-Pessin petition, thereby
actively participating in the very controversy covered by her newspaper.
The College Voice also posted anti-Semitic reader comments, which
still can be seen. For example, one commenter wrote: "your universities and
colleges are owned by Aipac..the zionists who control America and its
foreign policy, apart from its banks, media and movie business." Another wrote that "student senators have been
bullied by Zionist ideologues and moneychangers" and calls Pessin
"an unapologetically racist bigot who likes the perks of being buddies
with Israeli colonists who torture, maim and kill unarmed Palestinianns
(sic) with impunity."
In April, George Mason University law professor David Bernstein
uncovered evidence that Pessin's Facebook post had clearly referred to
Hamas all along and wrote in the Washington Post that "the
whole controversy [looked like it had been] ginned up to score anti-Israel
political points."
Pessin's isolation and vulnerability were undoubtedly intensified by the
school's small size: only about 1,900 students attend this private, liberal
arts college located in New London.
Pessin declined to comment for this story. His wife Gabriella Rothman,
however, expressed the frustration of seeing a witch hunt waged against her
husband, and the disappointment in the lack of support from colleagues and
the university community.
As the controversy erupted, school officials "pressured him not to
speak or tell anyone that his post was being misunderstood out of
context," she said. "I believe because it was trying to appease
the students." A bias complaint filed against him remained active, but
officials wouldn't tell Pessin what consequences he might face from it.
"He was worried his job was on the line," she said. "So
he did what they told him to do."
The couple contacted the FBI and local law enforcement about the death
threats, "and for two months we literally felt under siege,"
Rothman said.
Making matters worse, some of Pessin's "closest friends at the
college joined the mob of condemnations in a heartbeat, even though they
knew that the post was about Hamas. Not one of them stood up and said to
the mob, wait a minute, this post is not racist or hate speech. Not one
stood up and said, let's not rush to judgment, let's wait to hear his side
of the story."
Pessin went on medical leave before the Spring semester ended. He has
not taught since.
Exacerbating the harm to Pessin, the administration chose to host
statements from scores of academic departments, school officials, student
associations, and other college affiliates, condemning Pessin on the official Connecticut College
website. As of Wednesday, no other issue or speech in the university
community is similarly scrutinized or condemned on the school's official
web site. Such selective outrage highlights the anti-Semitic climate on
campus – in this case, directly enabled by the administration – and the
dangers of the ironically mistitled "Office of the Dean of
Institutional Equity and Inclusion," which hosts the anti-Pessin
statements.
The administration has apparently taken no disciplinary action against
any of the students who, in their efforts to defame Pessin, likely violated
Connecticut College's Honor Code, which requires students to act "with
integrity, civility, and the utmost respect for the dignity of all human
beings."
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a composite of images
from Khandaker's LinkedIn profile.
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Instead, the administration appears to have awarded the "Scholar
Activist Award" to none other than Lamiya Khandaker – the driving
force behind the campaign against Pessin and one of the most vocal
anti-Israel activists on campus. This fact was discovered from Lamiya
Khandaker's LinkedIn profile.
Apparently, the school chose to honor a student who (as originally reported by Daniel Greenfield) "accused
Israel of 'genocide," scoffed at anti-Semitism "and even claimed that 'Starbucks supports occupation and
Apartheid,'" and whose anti-Pessin writing arguably violated the
school's honor code.
School officials refused to confirm or deny granting the award. What are
they hiding? Maybe it's time for the administration to admit the basic
policy underlying their conduct throughout the Pessin affair: anti-Israel
voices are to be encouraged, while pro-Israel voices are to be condemned
and silenced. They seem to have won: Pessin is silent and nobody knows when
he'll be back on campus.
Noah Beck is the author of The Last Israelis, an apocalyptic novel about
Iranian nukes and other geopolitical issues in the Middle East.
Related Topics: Noah
Beck, Andrew
Pessin, Connecticut
College, Hamas,
Students
for Justice in Palestine, Pamela
Serfes, Lamiya
Khandaker, Ayla
Zuraw-Friedland, Michael
Fratt, Katilyn
Garbe, David
Bernstein, Gabriella
Rothman
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