Why Israel bombs Iranian universities and silences American ones

Why Israel bombs Iranian universities and silences American ones Submitted by Hamid Dabashi on Tue, 05/12/2026 - 17:34 The campaign against higher education - what many scholars now call scholasticide - reflects a deeper history of Israeli hatred of any academic culture it cannot dominate Journalists film outside a damaged mosque following strikes on Sharif University of Technology in Tehran on 7 April, 2026 (AFP) On "Iranians Condemn Strike on a Top University." By the time The New York Times comes out to report on a vicious Israeli attack on Iranian universities, you know, as we say in Persian, "the soup is so salty even the cook must admit to it". But as always, the point is not for the so-called "paper of record" to report the truth about the terror perpetrated by The Times's favourite settler colony. It is to massage and manage the facts whenever the barbarism of Israel generates bad publicity. "Government officials," the Times reports, "and anti-government activists alike denounced the attacks on the Sharif University of Technology in Tehran, the latest Iranian center for higher education to be targeted." This is, of course, malicious phrasing. The destruction of a major institution of higher learning is not a matter to be filtered through the familiar pro- versus anti-government binary the Times habitually imposes on Iran. Bombing a university campus - in Iran, Palestine or Lebanon - is an act of barbarism regardless of political divisions within a country. Far more serious journalism than anything the US corporate media can claim has documented what is happening on Iranian campuses far more accurately. "Some 30 universities came under fire", one reliable report noted, "in what Iranian ac...

Original source: Middle East Eye