The Chris Hedges Report With Richard Solomon and Prahlad Iyengar
“You can’t just sit there and build drones and not talk about who it’s serving and who does it help,” says Richard Solomon, PhD student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and member of the Coalition for Palestine at MIT. On this episode of The Chris Hedges Report, Solomon and fellow MIT PhD student Prahlad Iyengar detail their battle against the historic institution’s active participation in the genocide in Gaza. Their story exemplifies the repression students face across the country who dare question how their work and labor are used to advance the illegal and morally reprehensible goals of the Israeli military.
“What this ultimately means is that MIT’s research can enable a genocide and in fact is enabling the ongoing genocide against Palestinians,” Iyengar states plainly. The two students have found themselves in hot water recently following Iynegar’s tepid encounter at a MIT career fair as well as an op-ed authored by the student coalition.
Iyengar’s engagement with Lockheed Martin recruiters—where, after politely waiting in line at a career fair, he expressed his discomfort for their involvement in the genocide and climate crisis—resulted in him being charged with harassment and intimidation of the recruiters. The op-ed called out Daniela Rus, director of the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, for the laboratory’s direct collaboration with the Israeli military. Rus successfully pressured MIT’s paper, The Tech, to retract the article despite it presenting publicly available information and real ties to the Israeli military apparatus.
“By introducing these technologies and by enabling these technologies,” Iyengar tells Hedges, “what is really being enabled by MIT’s research for the Israeli military is the ability for drones to engage in tracking, in facial recognition, in targeting of Palestinians.”
Solomon makes clear that the politicization of academic work is not novel and recently, MIT itself has distanced itself from projects that are tied to genocides or wars. “If MIT did it for the genocide in Darfur in 2008, if they could divest from the Draper labs, if they could, at one point, I think in 2022, they ended their relationships with a Russian university that they’d helped establish—I mean, if they can do those things over political crimes and acts and recognize them as political moves, they can also do the same for the Palestinians,” he says.
Transcript: Chris Hedges
Public universities, private universities, colleges and junior colleges receive billions of dollars in Department of Defense research contracts. But the university that consistently tops the list of Department of Defense research contracts is the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). This research for the war industry focuses on information technology, nanotechnology, biotechnology, robotics and weapons. It is not only designed to enhance the lethality of weapons systems, but to allow the Pentagon and the war industry to frame the questions at universities within the narrow confines of what C. Wright Mills calls the military definition of reality. Thus, the world outside our borders is viewed as a series of threats. It divides nations and groups into enemies and allies. It gives primacy not to diplomacy, democracy or cooperation, but to the use of force and coercion whether through militarized violence, propaganda and censorship or the use of financial measures, including sanctions, to manipulate and force other countries to comply with our demands.
MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), led by Daniela Rus, however, has gone a step further, carrying out research to assist the Israeli army’s genocide in Gaza. Rus directs the project “Coreset Compression Algorithms,” which has received $425,000 in direct sponsorship from the Israel’s Ministry of Defense since 2021, according to MIT’s 2024 Brown Books. The project she oversees develops AI algorithms for applications like “city-scale observation systems” and “surveillance and vigilance”. Many of these lightweight algorithms are ideal for teaching small unmanned vehicles, including drones, to track and pursue targets with increased autonomy. Notably, navigating human environments is central: “a human may provide the global path… and the robots will adapt their configuration automatically.” These quadrotor drones are used extensively by Israel to monitor, injure, and kill Palestinian civilians at close range, along with U.N. workers, journalists and medical staff, including doctors, nurses and medics….
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Hedges: The Age of Self-Delusion
Suman Keshari: The Ghosts of Ararat
Chris Hedges: The Four Horsemen of Gaza’s Apocalypse
Chris Hedges: Letter to the Children of Gaza
Chris Hedges: The Horror, The Horror
Chris Hedges: Palestinians Speak the Language of Violence Israel Taught Them
How With This Rage. BY CHRIS HEDGES (2005)
Arms maker BAE Systems makes record profit amid Ukraine and Israel-Gaza wars
‘There was no mercy, even on children’: trauma in the West Bank after Israeli raids
Serial Criminals Rule Israel. That’s Where the Collapse Begins
The billionaire companies behind Israel’s bombs
HOW ISRAEL COMMODIFIES MASS KILLING THROUGH ITS “PALESTINE LABORATORY”
After the truth-shower 