Prahlad Iyengar Archives - Dr. Rich Swier

The morally obtuse, the dimwits, the historically ignorant, the antisemites are all out in force again this fall on campuses from sea to shining sea. But there are signs of university administrators becoming fed up, and determined to crack down on those who actually harass and physically attack Jewish students, vandalize university buildings, and call for the destruction of the only Jewish state and the expulsion, or killing, of its Jewish population. One of the students who has been firmly dealt with is one Prahlad Iyengar, a doctoral student at MIT who published a manifesto calling for “violence” by anti-Israel demonstrators. For his pains, he has been banned from the campus. That could lead to his expulsion. More on his case, and on other campus follies, can be found here: “‘Time to Begin Wreaking Havoc’: MIT Student Calls for Violence to Oppose Israel, ‘Escalate for Palestine,’” by Dion J. Pierre, Algemeiner, November 6, 2024:

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) has reportedly banished from campus a student who penned an article which argued that violence is a legitimate method of effecting political change and, moreover, advancing the pro-Palestinian movement.

First reported on Tuesday by the MIT Coalition Against Apartheid (CAA), an anti-Israel group associated with National Students for Justice in Palestine (NSJP), the school’s decision — as of yet unconfirmed by MIT officials — stands to reverse an impression that MIT lacks the resolve to punish students who use the campus to break university rules while holding raucous demonstrations against the world’s lone Jewish state.

Titled “On Pacifism,” the article — published in the MIT student publication Written Revolution and flanked by images of members of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), an internationally designated terrorist group — argued that activists have failed to stop Israel’s war against Hamas and sunder the US-Israel relationship because of “our own decision to embrace nonviolence as our primary vehicle of change.”

All those chants calling for an end to the Jewish state, all those takeovers and vandalizing of university buildings, all the bullying of Jewish students, have not been enough to change policy in Washington. What is required to have an impact, this MIT student says, is real “violence.” We’ve “achieved nothing” because that “genocidal war in Gaza” goes on. Only when we use violence — only when we start to beat up Jewish students, pro-Israel faculty, and campus police — will we get results. He doesn’t explain exactly how such violence will convince others to go along with a pro-Hamas policy. We are left to guess.

The author, PhD candidate Prahlad Iyengar, continued, “One year into a horrific genocide, it is time for the movement to begin wreaking havoc, or else, as we’ve seen, business will indeed go on as usual … As people of conscience in the world, we have a duty to Palestine and to all the globally oppressed. We have a mandate to exact a cost from the institutions that have contributed to the growth and proliferation of colonialism, racism, and all oppressive systems. We have a duty to escalate for Palestine, and as I hope I’ve argued, the traditional pacifist strategies aren’t working because they are ‘designed into’ the system we fight against.”

In a statement distributed by the CAA, Iyengar accused MIT of weaponizing the disciplinary system to persecute him….

“Weaponizing the disciplinary system” just “to persecute him”? What a blend of conceit and persecution complex. MIT has only decided that someone who calls for violence on campus is a physical threat to both students and faculty, and the university has a perfect right to remove him from that campus. Nothing has been “weaponized.” Nor is Prahlad Iyengar being selected for “persecution.’”

Apparently Prahlad Iyengar also thinks that history teaches that “protest movements throughout history” have only succeeded when they abandoned nonviolence as a tactic. What can he be thinking of? Not Mahatma Gandhi’s peaceful protests against the British rulers of India that won that country’s independence. Not the civil rights movement in America led by Martin Luther King, that insisted on nonviolence. Not Nelson Mandela’s campaign to end apartheid in South Africa. Does Iyengar not realize how it was precisely the tactic of non-violence that was responsible for the success of all of those movements?

The pro-Hamas student group Coalition Against Apartheid (CAA) is now calling on students to harass David Randall, an associate dean, until he “relents and revokes” Iyengar’s punishment. There is the threat. There is the violence. By calling so pointedly for Randall to be targeted for harassment — you can use your imagine as to what that harassment could include, from threatening phone calls day and night, hacking of his computer, garbage strewn on his lawn, vandalizing his walls with slogans about “Free Palestine” and “Stop the Genocide,” even screaming at him whenever he appears on campus outside his office — his life can be made most unpleasant. One hopes that because it called for harassing an associate dean for performing his duties, the CAA at MIT will be permanently shut down.

In September, during Columbia University’s convocation ceremony, Columbia University Apartheid Divest (CUAD), a group which recently split due to racial tensions between Arabs and non-Arabs, distributed literature calling on students to join the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas’s movement to destroy Israel.

How amusing it was to see Palestinian students feeling discriminated against by their “non-Arab brothers,” who apparently would not let them arrogate to themselves all the leadership roles in the pro-Hamas protests at Columbia University.

University administrators who until now have been doing far too little, and sometimes nothing, about the pro-Hamas bullyboys who last year storm-trooped their way across campuses, yelling at, surrounding and holding briefly captive, and even assaulting, Jewish students, vandalizing university buildings, scribbling their antisemitic slogans on walls, calling for “violence” as the only way to get their messages across, are now encountering a new atmosphere, an unwillingness by those in Washington who supply universities with so much support to tolerate their inaction. The MIT doctoral student Prahlad Iyengar has now been banned from campus — a harbinger, one hopes, of punishments to come. Let’s hope that his banning is followed up by his permanent expulsion from MIT. And may other pro-Hamas students, and not only at MIT, begin to worry that with Trump’s return to office, and with the massive and devastating report on antisemitism on campuses that has been compiled by the House Committee on Education and the Workforce and just been released, there will be no more tolerance for those who spread their hatred of Jews and of Israel on campuses. Pull down your tent encampments, put away your bullhorns, roll up your Palestinian flags, and return to your studies, all you Hamas supporters — that is, if you care to graduate.

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