NYU to Open Satellite Campus in United Arab Emirates Dictatorship

The real UAE: Workers on sit-down
strike, surrounded by stormtroopers

NYU management has rolled out another product from their new consumer line. They have announced the intention to open a campus in the United Arab Emirates. John Sexton calls the places where these campuses are opening up, like Singapore and Tel Aviv, "idea capitals". People more accustomed to the truth call them cash machines for NYU.

According to the WSN article, "NYU officials have emphasized the 'academic freedom' students will have at NYUAD: the university has been given carte blanche control of the campus' operations". Presumably with a straight face, the vice chancellor of the NYU campus at Abu Dhabi said NYU received a "special royally decreed academic freedom zone". Sexton added, "All the various prohibitions on various discriminations that we observe happily here will be observed in the campus in Abu Dhabi". In the internal campus email, Sexton droned, "there is an enormous commitment by Abu Dhabi to make itself a cultural and intellectual center in the region, amply demonstrated by the important world institutions that are establishing themselves there".

In recent months, NYU announced the opening of a satellite campus in Tel Aviv. We've been passing out a flier that addresses this hypocrisy. But it's no accident that within months of each other, management has announced glowing support for these two regimes. It says a lot about that "commitment" NYU management tells us they have over and over again in public relations articles and internal campus emails to all those catch phrases like "academic freedom", "excellence", "dialogue", "democratic ideals", and "community". The commercials just keep rolling.

So what is this "cultural and intellectual center"?

The United Arab Emirates is a federation of city states, each run by a different family. A British colonial creation and now a U.S. protectorate, it is probably the closest thing in the world that comes to a modern slave state. There are no freedoms and no democracy. Unions are illegal, sex slavery is rampant, and homosexuality outlawed.

NYU CEO Sexton

The vast majority of the population is primarily South Asian and, to a lesser extent, Southeast Asian working people. They work as indentured migrant laborers who can't have citizenship, live in shanty towns and work camps under curfew, and have much of their wages stolen or, sometimes, not paid at all. A series of strikes have been organized this year. As NYU finished making its announcement, strikes were breaking out again against low pay, abuse, and theft of wages. Police stormtroopers attacked the strikers, who courageously fought back, but 4,000 have been deported in the couple of weeks or so.

The UAE ruling class have built their power on the basis of the oil economy, discovered from the late 1950s to the early 1970s. The oil boom allowed them to begin to differentiate its economy and, because of its strategic location for imperialism, has become a hub for finance, IT, real estate, and transport--the most parasitic but most profitable sectors of the neo-liberal economy.

It has become the playground for the regional and international elite--their utopian society--lovingly covered in sentimental articles in the New York Times about once a month. It is a consumer paradise of the rich; a simulated experience; a society and government completely run as a giant corporation. In short, it's a NYU management fantasy.

In the United States and Europe, imperialism has held up the Gulf states as examples of good, "enlightened" Arab societies. Supporting "good" Muslims versus "bad" Muslims is important ideologically to justify imperialism for American official institutions. But this isn't just pure cynical propaganda. The Gulf states and Saudi Arabia continue to play their assigned role in helping to attack all democratic movements, not only in their own societies, but elsewhere, in Lebanon, Palestine-Israel and Iraq. Yet the glowing support for such regimes tells us more about the political and social values of western imperialism and the global elite than about the realities of the Middle East.

The UAE is a perfect example of how capitalism is a bitter enemy of democracy. Without the history of popular movements for democracy around the world we would not even enjoy the basic freedoms we see today. Without any history of such movements in the UAE, not only is there no democracy, but capitalism has developed a caste system where the vast majority of the population has little to no rights at all.

But that's of course how the UAE works. The majority of its population is literally looted, kept permanently at a bare minimum existence, and the profit from this pocketed by the elites. It is an example of the global capitalist system on steroids. This process is something that working people in America have been experiencing for thirty years, but still have residual institutions--diminishing unions for example and, ultimately, still citizenship rights--that slow down the advance of this mass looting. From its CEO-presidents, and the management bureaucracy, to the professional schools, to the Economics, Political Science and history departments,it is exactly what the American university establishment advocates--NYU among the best. From the classroom to coveted relationships with the corporate and political elite, the university advocates and justifies an ongoing class and racist offensive against working people in this country and abroad, that has resulted in falling wages, destruction of independent political organization, collapsing social infrastructure like health care and education, massive rates of imprisonment, and imperialist state terror. As one author has put it, it's socialism for the elites and capitalism for everyone else.

Those "royally decreed zones" NYU management spoke so highly of are the way this all happens. Prostitution, sex slavery, alcohol and drugs, near-naked beaches, and even "free speech" take their place in such zones that the "royals" have decreed, alongside Salafist, sharia law and capitalist indentured labor. The new NYU campus will not be the antithesis of these integrated sides of this "idea capital". Instead, it will be one more expression. The "freedoms" or the decadence of the elite are erected over the necessity of super-exploiting the majority to make this decadence profitable.

The appearance of the institutions of learning supposedly committed to a democratic culture justifies the realities that underpin the logic of this mass looting of millions of people. It exactly parallels the rhetorical appeals NYU has made to slogans of "a private institution in the public interest" as it has risen to the top of New York City's neo-liberal economy of mass displacement and police terror of working and poor people and the mass concentration of wealth into the hands of the few.

No wonder Sexton can shake the hand of Israeli apartheid with the announcement of the Tel Aviv campus and turn around and do the same with the Abu Dhabi campus. Colonial fascism and capitalist dictatorship go hand in hand. The struggles of Palestinians and the South and Southeast Asian working people in the UAE represent the democratic antithesis to the strategies of profit and political rule that the ruling classes, supported by US imperialism and NYU management values, have developed in response to these movements.

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What if it was Jewofascism or Blackfascism Week?

David Horowitz: Proto-Fascist

A couple weeks ago, an event called Islamofascism Awareness Week occurred at almost 100 college campuses across the United States. Organized by David Horowitz's Freedom Center, this speakers’ series featured such nationally prominent conservative speakers as Daniel Pipes, Robert Spencer, Ann Coulter, and David Horowitz, and was intended, in the organizers’ own words, to “alert Americans to the threat from Islamo-Fascism and focus attention on the violent oppression of Muslim women in Iran, Saudi Arabia, the Sudan, and other Islamic states.”

A simple survey of modern Middle Eastern history will show that Muslim women have been bombed, shot, arrested, and tortured by colonial and imperial authorities for centuries. The number of Muslim women languishing under the Arab dictatorships propped up by the American government, under the Israeli apartheid regime that corals Palestinians into the open air prisons called Gaza and the West Bank, under the US occupation of Iraq, are in the tens of millions. In Iraq alone – a country that was for decades tyrannized by the American-backed dictatorship of former CIA agent, Saddam Hussein, and which now is utterly destroyed by the American occupation – civilian casualties as a result of the war, and the US-led sanctions that preceded it, are now over one million. Yet, white racists like Horowitz, who have no interest in the liberation of the Middle East, repeatedly whine about the veil and the lack of freedom in Muslim societies. This should give us pause. Simple math shows that the number of Muslim women dead due to American foreign policy is more than the most egregious Muslim patriarchs could ever hope to accomplish with all the stones in the Middle East. The Horowitz-led diatribe against “Islamofascism” is not a good faith attempt at solidarity with Muslim women suffering under patriarchy, but a shallow, opportunistic demonization of an entire religion and culture, all for the ultimate purpose of justifying American imperialism in the Middle East. These people do not feel anything for the women of Islam. They preach from a pulpit of bones.

This recent event by the Horowitz Freedom Center needs to be seen in the broader political context of two different yet related historical developments. The first is colonial ideology. The second is the rising tide of fascist and white supremacist forces currently gaining sway in the United States.

Horowitz’ denigration of Islam is not a new attack but actually a classic tradition of justifying colonial and racist violence, one which has a long, tired history in the annals of Western imperialism. During French colonialism in Algeria, scores of French political and cultural organizations, as well as the French government itself, justified the violence and totalitarianism of their settler society by claiming that Islamic culture was backwards and patriarchal, and that the French empire was a force of enlightenment and civilization. During the Vietnam War, American government spokesmen claimed that Buddhist culture was backwards, citing the Buddhist religious detachment from desire and earthly suffering as proof that Vietnamese Buddhists do not value human life. This ostensibly made them feel better about all that napalm and all those millions of Vietnamese dead, but rational people recognize that occupation and carpet bombing have nothing to do with democracy, cultural values, or women’s liberation. Western women’s rights groups have been trying to pierce the Muslim veil for almost a century, providing ideological cover for Western imperialism by dehumanizing the culture of their conquered subjects. The United States and the David Horowitz Freedom Center are no exception.

Islamofascism Awareness Week (and not to mention the MSA establishment) has also attempted to create a separation between “good” (moderate) Muslims and “bad” (extremist) ones. Good Muslims are Muslims who endorse the so-called war on terror, apologizing for “their people’s” terrorism, and endorse the American imperial project in the Middle East. Bad Muslims are those Muslims who use Islam to inform an anti-colonial politics and resistance to US empire in the Middle East. Thus, Horowitz conflates right-wing authoritarian political Islamic organizations such as the Wahhabists and Al Qaeda, with popular-based anti-colonial ones such as Hizbullah. The ultimate goal is the demonization of any Muslims who attempt to use Islam to forge an identity and ideology that can defend everyday Muslims against US empire in the Middle East.

Horowitz himself represents a growing and unique political tendency in the United States that needs to be put into context if it is to be understood. An ex-Stalinist and fellow-traveler of the Black Panthers, David Horowitz, like some other white radicals of the 1960s, abandoned his Marxist and Black nationalist friends when Stalinist theories did not pan out, turning instead to radical neo-conservative and white nationalist ideas. Horowitz claims to oppose fascism in his “Islamofascism Awareness Week,” but a brief survey of his political record shows that he has openly associated with fascist and white supremacist forces in the United States and abroad since the late 1980s. A supporter of the Pinochet dictatorship in Chile, the Contra fascists in Nicaragua, apartheid South Africa and apartheid Israel, and the dictatorship of Saudi Arabia, David Horowitz has posted articles on his website frontpagemag.org by Jared Taylor and James Lublinskus, key leaders of the white supremacist group American Renaissance. He has also expressed critical support for David Duke, former member of the Klu Kux Klan. David Horowitz is a central organizer of a growing and insurgent right wing movement in the United States, and Islamofascism Awareness Week was designed to recruit and consolidate this movement’s campus youth forces. The threat that he poses to communities of color in this country, as well as to all Americans’ basic democratic rights, should not be underestimated or misunderstood.

In the wake of the popular opposition that Islamofascism Awareness Week met last week on many college campuses, many liberals have asserted that this resistance was somehow a violation of university principles, out of step with the spirit of civil dialogue and academic discourse. This is a grave misunderstanding of what Horowitz’s forces represent, and is emblematic of a profound political apathy that values assembly hall etiquette above human, anti-racist solidarity. Because a question arises. If universities across America were to host a “Blackofascism Awareness Week” or a “Jewofascism Awareness Week,” would this be acceptable university speech? Would we tolerate it? Would we engage it in the spirit of “civil dialogue,” treating it like so many normalized, academic discourses? Or would we confront it, choosing to take a stand against anti-Arab and Muslim bigotry, choosing to challenge what is becoming the most invisible racism of our generation? Frantz Fanon once said that it is the duty of every generation to discover its mission, and to either fulfill it or betray it. Arab and Muslim people are under daily attack in this country, and all people of good faith need to stand up and stand with the Arab and Muslim communities in this country, fighting for a truly democratic and multiracial America.

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