Aslı Peker

@aslipeker.bsky.social

NYU prof, teaching and research in comparative and regional politics, statecraft, Middle East pols, critical security studies.

BREAKING 🚨 🚨 🚨 US added to international watchlist for rapid decline in civic freedoms Civicus, an international non-profit, puts country alongside Democratic Republic of Congo, Italy, Pakistan and Serbia www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025...

US added to international watchlist for rapid decline in civic freedoms

Civicus, an international non-profit, puts country alongside Democratic Republic of Congo, Italy, Pakistan and Serbia

theguardian.com

DOJ’s antisemitism task force led by ex-Fox News Leo Terrell begins its witch-hunt against pro-Palestine student activists with a tour of 10 campuses. “We are going to put these people in jail—not for 24 hours, but for years,” Terrell has said in a recent interview. www.justice.gov/opa/pr/feder...

Federal Task Force to Combat Antisemitism Announces Visits to 10 College Campuses that Experienced Incidents of Antisemitism

The Federal Task Force to Combat Anti-Semitism announced that it will be visiting 10 university campuses that have experienced antisemitic incidents since October 2023. Created pursuant to President T...

justice.gov

Out of the 12,000 civil rights complaints the Education Department has put on hold since Trump took office: • 6,000 relate to mistreatment of disabled students • 1,000 are specific to sexual harassment/violence • 3,200 pertain to racial discrimination

“We’ve Been Essentially Muzzled”: Department of Education Halts Thousands of Civil Rights Investigations Under Trump

Since Inauguration Day, the Office for Civil Rights has only opened about 20 investigations focused on Trump’s priorities, placing more than 10,000 student complaints related to disability access and…

propub.li

Elon Musk's DOGE team of misfits have fired everybody at the Federal Aviation Administration ✈️ who is a probationary employee Thinking they have got rid of all the new hires It turns out many of these were experienced technicians, recently promoted and were on probation for their new senior role

Dear Senator
I am writing as a constituent, former FAA air traffic controller (26 years) and current Airline Transport rated commercial pilot. On Friday, hundreds of FAA technicians and engineers were terminated. These technicians and engineers maintain every piece of equipment that keeps flying safe, from the radars to the ILS, to ATC automation. They were identified as "probationary" and there is a reasonable speculation that Al was used to "find" probationary employees, assuming that meant that they were new hires. That is not an accurate assumption. A newly hired federal employee is probationary and may be subject to at will termination, but the term
"probationary" is also applied to promotions, to describe not that you are a probationary employee, but if the promotion or transfer is not successful, the employee would return to the pre-promotion position. That allows the government to retain needed expertise.
However, even that is not the case in these positions as workers were indeed succeeding in their new roles.

🚨BREAKING. From a program officer at the National Science Foundation, a list of keywords that can cause a grant to be pulled. I will be sharing screenshots of these keywords along with a decision tree. Please share widely. This is a crisis for academic freedom & science.

list of banned keywords

This is the group that posted 100s of hateful messages under a book award I got, not bc they knew my politics, but bc of my Arab face. The reporter who wrote about it then told a good-people-on-both-sides story. Glad they’re exposed for the hate group that they are theintercept.com/2025/01/31/n...

A Well-Connected NYU Parent Is Trying to Get Students Deported

The founder of Mothers Against College Antisemitism says her 62,000-member Facebook group is influencing NYU policy.

theintercept.com

It is utterly shocking how a scholar of her standing and reputation was silenced and hounded out by her home institution for the temerity to speak out about the genocide in Gaza. Academic freedom in the US is in severe crisis. Join your local AAUP and any other unions you can.

Joseph Howley@illdottore.bsky.social · 2y ago

Here is a statement by my colleague Katherine Franke about the end of her time teaching at Columbia. Please read it. drive.google.com/file/d/1i4cO...

NYU suspends students for an entire year for “significant and coordinated disruption” in the library, which refers to some students in keffiyehs studying quietly in the lobby, others sitting on the admin. floor asking for a meeting, a few holding banners, and some flyers dropped from an upper level…

NYU Faculty & Staff for Justice in Palestine@nyufsjp.bsky.social · 2y ago

🚨 FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE 🚨- NEW YORK, January 8, 2025. Press Release: New York University Launches Unprecedented Campaign of Collective Punishment Against Students Protesting Genocide facultyforpalestine.education/2025/01/08/j... 🧵

When one student’s Sunday night anxiety over an incomplete grade inadvertently shatters the university’s unshaken record of keeping its entire faculty from talking to each other, and an infinite loop of ‘remove me from this thread’ with an occasional ‘free Palestine’ and ‘let’s unionize’ ensues…

Laine Nooney @ 🔥🗑️🔥@lainenooney.bsky.social · 2y ago

omg a student somehow accidentally wrote an email addressed to a faculty-wide NYU listserv and my inbox is now a master class on who understands the difference between a listserv and an email chain

Here’s the AAUP statement on the insane full metal jacket crackdown on peaceful protestors asking for investment transparency and divestment from genocide in Gaza yesterday. I am one of the faculty members who was labeled persona non grata (PNG), banned from university buildings.

AAUP Condemns Faculty Arrests Amidst Protest Crackdown at NYU

The AAUP condemns the reported arrests of two faculty members and three designations of faculty as "persona non grata" at New York University. As the AAUP has maintained since 1940, faculty should be ...

aaup.org

“By almost every metric, the harm to civilians from the first month of the Israeli campaign in Gaza is incomparable with any 21st century air campaign. It is by far the most intense, destructive, and fatal conflict for civilians that Airwars has ever documented.“

Airwars@airwars.bsky.social · 2y ago

NEW: How does the scale of harm in Gaza compare to other conflicts? Our new report presents a unique analysis of where and how thousands of civilians were killed in the first 25 days in Gaza - and how these patterns are unprecedented in modern warfare. gaza-patterns-harm.airwars.org