A committee at a California university has cleared a professor who sent an e-mail comparing Israel's policies in Gaza to the Holocaust.As I reported then, the media screwed up this story big time.
Officials at the University of California, Santa Barbara, sent a letter Wednesday to sociology professor William I. Robinson saying the committee had closed the matter.
In January, Robinson offended some students and others with an e-mail to his "Sociology of Globalization" class that juxtaposed grisly photos from the Nazi era with a recent Gaza offensive.
Robinson has said his justified criticism of Israel's policies should not be confused as anti-Semitism.
First of all, Robinson sent out an email with 42 pictures juxtaposing Nazi-era pictures with pictures of Israelis and Arabs. While it was characterized as if it was source material for a class, it was nothing of the sort.
Secondly, while the university seems to have been fixated on whether this was anti-semitic or not (and it clearly is,) it ignored that his "facts" were provably wrong. Robinson didn't just tell his students his opinions; he told them lies as if they were factual.
When a university has such a disregard for the truth, it loses all credibility. This episode does not just damn Robinson - it damns the entire University fo California Santa Barbara as a serious institution of higher education.