Darin Barney: In Defense of Judith Butler

What has been so disappointing in these denunciations of Professor Butler and McGill's decision to honour her is the willful lack of intelligence with which they have been expressed. As reported by the Montreal Gazette, the letter from Hillel McGill and McGill Students for Israel accuses Professor Butler of advancing a "pro-terror" position, an allegation that is extremely inflammatory. Butler has spent her entire academic career exposing and criticizing various forms of violence and terror routinely inflicted upon racialized, sexualized and gendered subjects.

With regard to Israel and Palestine, she has explicitly and repeatedly repudiated both state violence and violent resistance. The basis for the malicious claim that Butler is "pro-terror" would seem to be that she endorses the non-violent tactics of the BDS campaign and that, in an impromptu response to a question following a speech a few years ago, she pointed to the complex political roles played by Hamas and Hezbollah in the Middle East rather than simply denouncing them as nothing more than terrorist organizations. Butler herself has repeatedly asserted, "I have never taken a stand on either organization." For some, apparently, this is enough to establish that she in fact supports Hamas and Hezbollah and that she is, therefore, "pro-terror."

What is so discouraging about all this is that it is doubtful those who have denounced Butler so aggressively, and have protested against her honorary McGill degree so vehemently, have ever read a single piece of her scholarly work, or heard or read any of the published material in which she actually discusses her views on BDS and Israel. Instead, they are content to malign her, and to undermine serious consideration of the difficult issues her scholarship and activism raise, by recycling tired allegations based on willful misconstruals of two isolated sentences ripped from the context in which they might actually have meant something. And all of this simply to police and bully those who might contemplate criticizing the actions of the state of Israel or acting on those criticisms.

While we might be inclined to forgive exuberant undergraduates and thoughtless journalists for engaging in this sort of anti-intellectual and depoliticizing behaviour, we should expect better from a McGill professor. When my colleague, Professor Gil Troy, whose attack also seems to be based entirely on the aforementioned two sentences, accuses Butler of "moral obtuseness and intellectual sloppiness," describes her as "someone who epitomizes...cowardice" and implies that she is an anti-Semite and a bigot, this can only be taken as a confession that he, too, has never actually read her books, or the texts of her speeches on Israel and Palestine, and that he in fact knows nothing about her other than what he turned up by Googling the words "Butler, Hezbollah and Hamas." Either that or he means to assert that moral clarity and courage are established solely on the basis of whether a person categorically denounces these organizations and BDS, and refrains from criticizing the state of Israel.

via www.huffingtonpost.ca