\n<\/p>\n
Since Oct.\u00a07, 2023, scholars and members of the broader public have debated whether Israel\u2019s war against Hamas in Gaza actually constitutes a genocide of Palestinians. Fights have erupted over scholarly association resolutions, course descriptions and assignments calling it such.<\/p>\n
Ramsi Woodcock, a University of Kentucky law professor, says it\u2019s a genocide. On his website, antizionist.net, he says that the ongoing genocide\u2014combined with his expectation that Israel would violate any future ceasefire and continue killing\u2014creates a \u201cmoral duty\u201d for the world\u2019s nations.<\/p>\n
That duty, he writes in the \u201cPetition for Military Action Against Israel,\u201d is to wage war on Israel until it \u201chas submitted permanently and unconditionally to the government of Palestine everywhere from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea.\u201d He asks fellow law scholars to sign the petition, adding that Israel is a colony and war is needed to decolonize.<\/p>\n
This month\u2014just after Woodcock says he was promoted to full professor\u2014the university removed him from teaching. In a July\u00a018 message to campus that doesn\u2019t specifically name Woodcock, UK president Eli Capilouto wrote that legal counsel was investigating whether an employee\u2019s \u201cconduct may violate federal and state guidance as well as university policies.\u201d <\/p>\n
\u201cWe have been made aware of allegations of disturbing conduct, including an online petition calling for the destruction of a people based on national origin,\u201d Capilouto wrote. Woodcock told Inside Higher Ed <\/em>that characterization of his petition is \u201cobviously defamatory, creates a hostile environment for me and makes me potentially physically unsafe.\u201d He said he\u2019s considering suing Capilouto and the university for defamation. <\/p>\n Capilouto further wrote that the petition, which the unnamed university employee seemed to be \u201cbroadly\u201d circulating online, \u201ccan be interpreted as antisemitic in accordance with state and federal guidance.\u201d Woodcock responded that \u201cwhat Palestinians resist, and what those who advocate for them resist, is colonization, apartheid and a currently unfolding genocide\u2014they are not opposed to any particular religion or any particular people.\u201d<\/p>\n But Shlomo Litvin, chairman of the Kentucky Jewish Council and rabbi for the Chabad at UK Jewish Student Center, told Inside Higher Ed <\/em>that \u201ccalling for the establishment of a state that is free of Jews in a land that currently has seven\u00a0million Jews is calling for the death of seven\u00a0million Jews,\u201d including \u201cfamilies and relatives of [Woodcock\u2019s] students.\u201d <\/p>\n \u201cWhat he\u2019s calling for is a second Holocaust,\u201d Litvin said, adding that \u201cthis idea that there is a possibility of the Jews coming to some imaginary country and being safe there is a fantasy that not even he believes.\u201d <\/p>\n Woodcock countered, \u201cRabbi Litvin is trying to distract us from an actual second Holocaust that Israel is committing right now in Gaza and which only immediate military intervention will stop.\u201d<\/p>\n Woodcock has become another example of pro-Palestine faculty across the country being investigated for their writing or speech about the conflict while they aren\u2019t teaching. During the Biden era, investigations at other universities led to discipline and terminations. The current Trump administration has stripped universities of federal funding and punished them in other ways for allegedly failing to address campus antisemitism. And Woodcock\u2019s case continues the debate about when denunciations of Israel or Zionism are or aren\u2019t antisemitic.<\/p>\n But why UK began investigating Woodcock now remains unclear. <\/p>\n In a July\u00a018 email obtained by Inside Higher Ed<\/em>, UK\u2019s general counsel, William E. Thro, wrote to Woodcock that \u201crecently, the university became aware of your writings on certain websites, your conduct at academic conferences, and your postings on American Association of Law Schools [sic<\/em>] list serves [sic<\/em>], and other actions.\u201d <\/p>\n \u201cThese activities may create a hostile environment for Jewish members of the university community or otherwise constitute harassment as defined by the Supreme Court,\u201d Thro wrote. \u201cThe university has concerns that your actions may violate Title\u00a0VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the equivalent state laws, and various university policies.\u201d <\/p>\n Title\u00a0VI prohibits discrimination based on shared ancestry, including antisemitism. <\/p>\n But the letter didn\u2019t provide further details, such as what conference conduct or writings the university was concerned about, or how university officials became aware of this expression. A UK spokesperson said, \u201cAt this time, we are not going to comment beyond [Capilouto\u2019s] statement, as there is an active investigation.\u201d <\/p>\n Woodcock said he made a statement about \u201cIsrael\u2019s genocide of Palestinians\u201d at a conference over a year ago. He later shared a link to his antizionist.net site on Association of American Law Schools online discussion forums, triggering \u201creally lively debate about whether Israel has a right to exist.\u201d <\/p>\n \u201cNobody wants to talk about that question, and as soon as you bring it up, you see how hungry people are to debate it,\u201d Woodcock said. <\/p>\n He says he created the antizionist.net website late last year but didn\u2019t share it broadly until the start of this month. It\u2019s a site for what he dubs the Antizionist legal studies movement. <\/p>\n \u201cIsrael is committing genocide against Palestinians in Gaza,\u201d Woodcock wrote on the site in December. \u201cNo genocide in the 20th century ended without armed intervention. For more than a year now, the international community has been in denial about the implication of these two facts.\u201d <\/p>\n He listed various failed international efforts to stop the genocide, ending with \u201cEven the most outspoken international lawyers dare not speak the name of the only thing that history suggests might actually stop Israel. That is, of course, war\u2014by the international community against Israel.\u201d<\/p>\n Woodcock says he wants Israel defeated and replaced with a Palestinian state, and he doesn\u2019t insist the vast majority of Jews be automatically allowed to remain. He says Palestinians should get to decide. His definition of \u201cantizionist legal scholars\u201d includes that they oppose \u201cany right of self-determination for Jewish people as such in Palestine.\u201d He does say that \u201cthe tiny minority of Jewish people whose ancestors lived in Palestine immediately prior to the arrival of the first Zionist colonizers in Palestine in 1882\u00a0\u2026 share in the right of Palestinians to self determination.\u201d <\/p>\n \u201cPalestinian people alone should decide how Palestine should be governed after independence, including the legal status of the colonizer population,\u201d he says. <\/p>\n The Kentucky Jewish Council and State Sen. Lindsey Tichenor, a co-chair of the state General Assembly\u2019s Kentucky-Israel Caucus, praised the decision to remove Woodcock from the classroom. In a statement, Tichenor wrote that the \u201creports coming out of our taxpayer-funded flagship university are incredibly disturbing. A law professor calling for the destruction of Israel and against the right for the Jewish people to have self-determination is not a policy disagreement, but a call to violence.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cThat is not academic discourse. It\u2019s antisemitism and racism and abuse of his power, plain and simple,\u201d Tichenor wrote. She thanked Capilouto \u201cfor his strong and unequivocal condemnation of this hateful message\u201d and for reinforcing \u201cthe importance of moral clarity and swift institutional accountability.\u201d <\/p>\n But Capilouto\u2019s message also hinted at the academic freedom concerns at play. He wrote that the situation \u201ccompels us to address questions other campuses are grappling with as well\u2014chiefly, where and when does conduct and the freedom to express views in a community compromise the safety and well-being of people in that community?\u201d <\/p>\n In a statement to Inside Higher Ed<\/em>, Connor Murnane, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression\u2019s campus advocacy chief of staff, said, \u201cFIRE is actively investigating this case, and we\u2019re concerned that Professor Woodcock may have been punished for protected activities.\u201d <\/p>\n Jennifer Cramer, president of UK\u2019s American Association of University Professors chapter, said that \u201cassuming he did not pose a threat in any meaningful way to our campus, I think that the treatment of this case seems outside of the bounds of the norm.\u201d She said that \u201cwhether we agree with what he says or not shouldn\u2019t matter, because that\u2019s the point of academic freedom.\u201d<\/p>\n Woodcock hasn\u2019t stopped calling for war on Israel, posting on X, \u201cZionists are frustrated that their intimidation campaign hasn\u2019t shut me up.\u201d <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Since Oct.\u00a07, 2023, scholars and members of the broader public have debated whether Israel\u2019s war against Hamas in Gaza actually constitutes a genocide of Palestinians. Fights have erupted over scholarly association resolutions, course descriptions and assignments calling it such. Ramsi Woodcock, a University of Kentucky law professor, says it\u2019s a genocide. On his website, antizionist.net,<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":12843,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[57],"tags":[6266,214,6504,6505,4745,261],"class_list":{"0":"post-12842","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-education","8":"tag-calling","9":"tag-israel","10":"tag-prof","11":"tag-pulled","12":"tag-teaching","13":"tag-war"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12842","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=12842"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12842\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/12843"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=12842"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=12842"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=12842"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\u2018Not Academic Discourse\u2019<\/h2>\n