Conservatives conflate opposition to Israel with antisemitism and have used political power to punish pro-Palestinian voices even as the First Amendment and academic freedom mandate the protection of all speech
Joseph R McCarthy was an obscure Republican Senator until he began using dubious means to prosecute government employees after publicly accusing them of disloyalty. In February 1950, he claimed to have a list of 205 card-carrying Communists in the United States (US) State Department. What followed were witch hunts that gained McCarthy notoriety.
McCarthy held hearings on Communist subversion as the Senate Permanent Investigation Subcommittee chairman and probe ‘Communist infiltration’ of the armed forces. His witch hunts coincided with heightened paranoia about Communism. The obsession came to be known as the Red Scare amid the Cold War—the rivalry between the capitalist US, the Marxist-Communist state of the Soviet Union, and their allies that brought the world to the brink of nuclear war.
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McCarthy died in May 1957 three years after the US Senate censured him. But the terms McCarthyism and McCarthy’s tactics entered the political lexicon to describe witch hunts involving public accusations of disloyalty or subversion without sufficient proof and unfair methods of probe to suppress opposition.
McCarthyism gained fresh currency when President Donald Trump took office in 2017. Trumpism, or ‘hysterical intolerance‘, as the City University of New York Professor Peter Beinart described it in The Atlantic, drew parallels with McCarthyism as the former US president built his political career ‘on demagoguery, intimidation, and a cult of personality—not tangible achievements or coherent ideas.’
New McCarthyism
McCarthyism is back in the spotlight against the backdrop of Israel’s assault on the besieged Gaza Strip. Pro-Palestinian voices have been muzzled in the US by conflating opposition to total Israeli disregard of international humanitarian law with antisemitism. In a Guardian piece, Shadi Hamid, a research professor of Islamic studies at Fuller Seminary, wrote well before the Israel-Gaza war broke out, a new McCarthyism was already widespread on American college campuses. He cited The Canceling of the American Mind co-author Greg Lukianoff and wrote about 100 professors were fired for supposed communist sympathies during the Red Scare
Hamid wrote the number fired for their political beliefs—primarily for conservative or ‘anti-woke’ positions on race and gender—over the past 10 years is almost double. He warned it was only going to get worse. Hamid wrote it was time to sound the alarm as conservatives were using their political power to punish pro-Palestinian voices even as the First Amendment and academic freedom mandate protection of all speech.
Yousef Munayyer, who heads the Palestine/Israel program at the Arab Center in Washington DC, wrote in The Guardian that ginned-up hysteria aimed at silencing, intimidating, and interrogating people and institutions for not being sufficiently pro-Israel has gripped the US Congress, Ivy League universities, and other centers of power.
He added that absurd allegations had been thrown around. Munayyer noted they include the performative outrage and cynical grandstanding of Congresswoman Elise Stefanik, who berated the heads of Ivy League schools for ostensibly tolerating antisemitism on their campuses. Munayyer wrote this will surely generate analogies to McCarthyism and the Second Red Scare:
…intensifying repression against Palestine advocacy isn’t limited to the US but is happening in Canada and across Europe as well. That’s because this hysteria is not a reaction to the debate on American college campuses but rather the product of a calculated and global transnational strategy backed by the Israeli government since 2015.
Yousef Munayyer, head, Palestine/Israel program, Arab Center, Washington DC
Munayyer wrote the Israeli government has realized that it was failing to deal with growing dissent in global civil society over Israel’s oppression of Palestinians. He added it has opted for a securitized policy response that would go on the offensive. This includes a strategy of working with like-minded partners to exact repressive outcomes in countries in Europe and North America that included the passage of laws against Palestinian-led promotion of boycotts, divestments, and economic sanctions against Israel, etc.
Munayyer cited laws, lawsuits aimed at NGOs, smear campaigns, and the proliferation of speech codes in the guise of combating antisemitism and added Israel realized that its vision of apartheid was not going to win the debate so instead sought to shut the debate down entirely.
Decades earlier McCarthy brought down quantum physicist J Robert Oppenheimer, a celebrated Jewish hero of science who headed the research and development of the atomic bomb amid fears that Hitler’s Nazi Germany would do it first during the Second World War. Oppenheimer was suspected of being a Soviet spy as the Soviets were feared to have made strides in atomic weaponry.
Kangaroo Court
Oppenheimer defended himself at a secret hearing against charges of being a security risk and became a victim of the McCarthy witch-hunts and his kangaroo court. He was publicly humiliated in 1954. The Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) deemed Oppenheimer to be a security risk as he spoke out against a nuclear arms race. Oppenheimer earned the ire of the American national security establishment when he called the atomic bomb a weapon for aggressors and criticized the building of a ‘super’ hydrogen bomb.
The AEC revoked Oppenheimer’s security clearance in 1954 after secret hearings. This blocked his access to atomic secrets and ended his career. Oppenheimer died 13 years later, in 1967, at 62. His resistance to early work on the hydrogen bomb was cited as a key element in the case, but no evidence came to light to back the spy charge.
The 1954 revocation of Oppenheimer’s security clearance was eventually nullified in December 2022. Oppenheimer was cleared of the charges which were found to be the result of a ‘flawed process’ violating regulations. Evidence showed the process was biased and unfair while affirming Oppenheimer’s loyalty and patriotism.
Oppenheimer’s early views on the hydrogen bomb were found to have hurt the recruitment of scientists and the progress of the scientific effort. However, material declassified in 2014 suggested Oppenheimer opposed the hydrogen bomb project based on technical and military grounds. The opposition had nothing to do with Oppenheimer’s Soviet sympathies.
Oppenheimer was cleared of the allegations of spying months before the movie on him was released. Kai Bird, the co-author of the 2005 Pulitzer Prize-winning biography American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J Robert Oppenheimer on which the movie is based, wrote in The New York Times that Oppenheimer’s life story remains relevant. Bird called the witch-hunters of the 1950s direct ancestors of current American political actors of a paranoid style.
Bird referred to Roy Cohn, McCarthy’s chief counsel who tried to subpoena Oppenheimer in 1954. He noted Cohn taught Trump his ‘brash, wholly deranged style of politics‘ while recalling the former president’s fact-challenged comments. Bird called the worldview represented by the likes of Trump, who is expected to get a second term, proudly scornful of science. Bird wrote what happened to Oppenheimer also damaged American ability as a society to debate honestly about scientific theory — the very foundation of the modern world.
Sameer Arshad Khatlani is a journalist and the author of the Penguin Random House book The Other Side of the Divide
