Have the Zionists Crushed Free Speech at US Universities?

The University of Wisconsin-Madison poses as a tenacious defender of academic freedom. Its motto, enshrined on a plaque in the heart of campus, boasts of “fearless sifting and winnowing” in search of dangerous truths.

Twenty years ago, during the run-up to the fifth anniversary of 9/11, I was hounded out of UW-Madison by big media (and the oligarchs who own it) for questioning that event. Today, the witch-hunts at the University of Wisconsin continue, as wealthy Jewish-Zionist donors—the same people who wanted to silence me about 9/11—have forced American universities to mount an unprecedented assault on academic freedom.

Pro-Palestine activist Kareem Mayouf joins the Truth Jihad podcast from Beirut, Lebanon to discuss the student movement that arose in 2023 to oppose Israel’s unspeakable daily atrocities. All relevant human rights authorities agree that the deliberate massacres of tens if not hundreds of thousands of women and children in Gaza, and the reduction of that urban enclave to rubble, constitutes clear and undeniable genocide. Yet opposing that genocide makes wealthy Jews uncomfortable, so they threaten to cancel donations to universities—and leverage their power over an Epstein-blackmailed Israeli-controlled pedophile president—to force administrations to all but ban pro-Palestine activism from American campuses.

Kareem Mayouf explains how, after two years of activism that included bringing Jewish anti-genocide scholar and author Norman Finkelstein to speak on campus, he was arrested and jailed because his opinions seemed similar to those expressed in spray-painted anti-genocide slogans. Banned from campus with no due process, no trial, no proof he had done anything illegal—but witch-hunted in the Zionist-dominated media—he moved to Beirut to do graduate work in history.

The good news is that Americans can still have an honest conversation about their Zionist-occupied country. The bad news is that it has to be from Morocco and Lebanon via Zoom!

Kareem Mayouf: When the genocide started, I was an undergraduate student at UW Madison. I was studying history. And so after October 7th happened, I was following a mixture of Western outlets, but also Al Jazeera and some alternative media outlets, and my immediate interpretation was this is an obvious concentration camp uprising. I mean, if you just look at a map of Gaza, it was clearly a concentration camp. And I thought, okay, well, this was long overdue. Israel, the Zionist entity, quote unquote Israel, was smacked very openly and heroically in the raid that Hamas conducted. And so I thought, okay, this is an interesting development.

Members of my family and some friends began sending me articles basically describing how, based on the statements of Israeli leaders—I think one of my aunts basically told me that this is it for the Palestinians. They’re going to use this like a sledgehammer to kill as many people as possible. And they’re going to do whatever they can to buy acquiescence from the West. So immediately after October 7th, we started hearing all these racist lynch mob lies. I noticed that certain sectors the population were really drinking the Kool-Aid, and they were just completely intoxicated on this racist lynch-mob lies about these fake baby beheadings and mass rapes…

Kevin Barrett: Babies in ovens. Don’t forget the babies in the ovens.

Kareem Mayouf: Yeah, babies in ovens. Yeah, exactly. And then, of course, the daily massacres began. I heard the genocide statements. Yoav Galant, Itamar Ben-Gavir, Isaac Herzog, the president, said that “it’s a whole nation that’s responsible. There are no innocents, no food, no water, no electricity. We’re fighting against human animals.” And then the daily massacres…I think first they started leveling entire blocks, apartment buildings coming down, and it was appalling. So I thought, okay, I can’t really shy away from this. I can’t sit this out. This demands full commitment of my time. I had some involvement in Students for Justice in Palestine, but it wasn’t very extensive.

But after October 7th, I really started getting more involved, organizing weekly demonstrations, pamphleting, handing out zines on campus, just walking around with a Palestinian flag on campus, because that was one of the big issues, getting people to understand, break the spell of this lie that completely possessed people for awhile.

Because the Palestinian perspective was completely banned from mainstream media. It was just Hamas war versus Israel, and that’s how this was portrayed. So we protested weekly, and we made ourselves very visible. We weren’t afraid of protesting without masks. We thought, okay, these are peaceful demonstrations, peaceful assemblies. And so for the first year, fall 2023 and then spring 2024, we basically protested nonstop…

(For the full conversation, watch the video, or use the transcript feature, at my Substack)