BDSers are proud of using violence to stifle free speech

From JTA last week:

Pro-Palestinian protesters injured a university employee while demonstrating against a lecture speaker who heads the Brazilian chapter of a pro-Israel advocacy group.

Andre Lajst, the director of StandWithUs Brazil, was speaking about ways that Israeli technologies could help develop the Amazon region at the Federal University of Amazonas in Manaus on Thursday when protesters clashed with security and other university employees outside the lecture auditorium.

According to news reports, the advisor to the university’s rector left the scene with a broken nose after attempting to safeguard her daughter. Several students entering the lecture were also harassed, and police officers escorted Lajst into and out of the venue. One protester was reportedly arrested for pushing a police officer but later released.  

Here's video at the scene:

Andre Lajst completed his lecture and had to be escorted out by police for his safety from the violent mob.

But BDS-aligned media are bragging (and lying) that they managed to shut down his speech with their thuggish mob!

Pro-Palestine Brazilians demonstrated at a university in the Brazilian city of Manaus against the organization of a pro-Israeli-occupation event on campus.

Despite the high-security measures against them, the protesters managed to stop the meeting in support of the Israeli occupation, which is entitled “Cooperation with Israel”.

André Lajst, director of the Brazilian branch of StandWithUs, a pro-Israeli-occupation group in Brazil, spoke at the event about supporting the occupation and normalization with it.

Video clips showed the large number of anti-Israel-occupation demonstrators, known as BDS Mob, who confronted the Brazilian police and attempted to shut down the event by force, forcing Lajst and his companions to leave the place quickly.

These protests are a part of the international BDS activities against all forms of normalization with the Israeli occupation, especially educational normalization.

Among themselves, BDSers don't even pretend to be "non-violent." They are happy and proud to threaten and attack people.

And then they claim in mainstream media  articles that they are doing it in the name of "academic freedom."

 

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"If you love Israel, it is your obligation to hate Israel"

The Forward has an op-ed by David Enoch, a professor of philosophy and law at Hebrew University:

If you want to support Israel, boycott its new government

....Even if the justification of boycotts has in the past been questionable, I think that American Jews owe it to Israel, and to Israelis like myself, to promote such measures now. After the disproportionate Israeli military incursion into Jenin, and the predictably tragic cycle of violence it engendered the next day in Jerusalem, Israel’s far-right government is using this as an opportunity to further their own political goals. We cannot allow this kind of illiberalism to continue.

Yes, boycott Israel out of love!

As you can tell from this paragraph, Enoch has no love of Israel. 

And Enoch's desire to boycott Israel includes an academic boycott.

Im Tirtzu summarizes David Enoch's supposed love of Israel:

Signed a petition calling on EU member states to boycott “organizations and companies if they are active, directly or indirectly, in the occupied territories.”[1]

Draft-dodger.[2]

Compared the IDF’s activities during Operation Protective Edge to that of Hamas.[3]

Signed a petition in support of the Islamic Movement.[4]

Participated in a protest against the drafting of Christians to the IDF.[5]

Signed a petition in “support and appreciation” of students and lecturers who illegally refused to do IDF service in Judea and Samaria.[6]

Signed a petition advocating for the release of terrorist supporter Dareen Tatour, who was arrested and convicted for inciting violence and supporting a terrorist organization.[7]

Signed a petition in support of the anti-Zionist organization “Breaking the Silence.”[8]

Threatened to take legal measures against students who came in army uniform in support of an IDF officer who was reprimanded by a lecturer for arriving to class in uniform.[9]

Somehow, all these things happened before the current government was (democratically) elected. 

Enoch wants, along with many others, to use the excuse of the current Israeli government to push their hate that existed beforehand. 

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Academic freedom? Harvard Crimson op-ed calls to reject Israelis from positions at the university

An op-ed at the Harvard Crimson attempts to turn the Ken Roth episode into an excuse to block Israelis from teaching there.

Because of academic freedom, of course.

Josh Wilcox, organizer for Harvard College Palestine Solidarity Committee, writes:

It seems a couple points were absent from Dean Elmendorf’s announcement. At no point did he address the elephant in the room: what scholars like Cornel R. West ’74 have alleged as Harvard’s complicity in silencing voices that call for Palestinian freedom.

Similarly, HKS’s track record of offering positions should make us skeptical of the sincerity of its mission statement.

HKS has proudly lended [sic] its name to Amos Yadlin, a former general in the Israeli Air Force who participated in the brutal war on Lebanon in 1982. ...

Yadlin is only one of several questionable characters. As Harvard students, we cannot continue to let our University welcome agents of colonial violence while denying those who reject U.S.-backed Israeli apartheid.

Who, exactly, has Harvard denied a position to because of their pro-Israel positions? The article mentions this as a fact three times - and the links show us that there is exactly one episode that they can point to.

And that episode is a lie.

In 2021, Cornel West went on a campaign much like Ken Roth's in 2023. He went on multiple  interviews claiming claimed that Harvard denied him tenure, and that the only reason he could think of was his anti-Israel position. 

He had no proof.

But he lied about the entire episode. His position was not a tenure track position to begin with! 

During his normal 5-year review, the faculty committee offered him a raise and a 10 year contract, which for a 67-year old man is as good as tenure. But he refused, insisting that they change his position itself into a tenured position - something that this review board couldn't do. As the Boston Globe reported, "The faculty committee was only in charge of reviewing his reappointment and does not have authority to conduct a review for tenure, [Harvard's] spokesman said."

Now, it is obvious why he wasn't granted tenure - he did not have a tenure-eligible job and one cannot make that change at the drop of a hat. West asked for the job to be changed, which is quite a different matter than being denied tenure!

West was the proto-Roth - making baseless accusations about a Zionist cabal at Harvard, blaming powerful Jews (see update to my post linked above)  that were mindlessly repeated by people who share his antisemitism.

But now, Harvard's Israel haters are pretending that the Cornel West case proves that Harvard has a history of mistreating anti-Israel academics. And their proposed solution?

Deny any Israelis becoming Harvard fellows!

The people falsely claiming that Harvard denies academic freedom are the first ones to publicly call for Harvard to deny academic freedom.

Why would we expect anything else?

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The new insane meme that academia is anti-Palestinian

In the wake of the Ken Roth Harvard fellowship episode, the anti-Israel crowd - led by Roth himself - has been pushing the meme that academia is anti-Palestinian and that pro-Palestinian academics must worry that their viewpoints will harm their careers.

And if anything that absurd lie has accelerated since Harvard caved!

Roth doubled down on the lie that Harvard originally caved to evil Zionist forces:

Omar Shakir, the former BDS activist who is now a Human Rights Watch researcher, tweeted:

Palestine Legal said:

Is there even a shred of evidence that "pro-Palestinian" academics are being silenced?

The Middle East Scholar Barometer has serious methodological problems, but it is a decent measure of self-selecting academics who have strong opinions on the Middle East - and it shows that they are overwhelmingly anti-Israel. They support efforts to boycott Israel. 90% describe Israel even within the Green Line as "a democratic state with deep structural inequality (61%)" or "A state akin to apartheid (29%)." 

Far more of them support holding academic workshops in Qatar (80%) than in Israel (48%), and the reason they opposed holding workshops in Israel was overwhelmingly "principled or ethical concerns." Meaning far more consider Israel illegitimate but hardly any say that about terrorist-supporting Qatar.

Middle East academia is strongly anti-Israel. And academia, at least in the social sciences, in general tends to share the same political opinions as the rabid anti-Israel crowd. 

What Roth and Shakir and Palestine Legal are really saying is that the <1% of Middle East academics who answered the question saying that Arab citizens in Israel have the same rights as Jews is still too many for them. To them, a single pro-Israel academic is too many, and evidence of anti-Palestinian bias because a university hired them. 

Here's a question that I'd love to see answered in a future survey: Ask how many academics oppose a Palestinian state that defines itself as Arab, and how many oppose an Israel that defines itself as Jewish. That will tell you everything you need to know about this fictional "Palestine exception to academic freedom."

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Cartoon of the Day: Academic Freedom

Based on the Ken Roth debacle, where Harvard reversed course after complaints about "academic freedom,"....

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01/17 Links Pt2: Even the PLO knows the Jews are indigenous to Israel; The NYTs and the PLO are made for each other; The real reasons Ken Roth was bounced by Harvard’s Kennedy School

From Ian:

A New Study Shows That the U.S. Has More Anti-Semites Than Jews

According to a recent survey conducted by the Antidefamation League (ADL), disturbingly large numbers of Americans answered “yes” when asked if they believe Jews “go out of their way to hire other Jews” or “are more loyal to Israel than to America,” and to other similar questions. Kevin Williamson reflects on these results, and what they say about the persistence of this “strange prejudice.”
About 3 percent of Americans agreed that all of the anti-Semitic tropes in the ADL survey are “mostly or somewhat true,” suggesting that there are millions more anti-Semites in the United States than there are Jews. This is not entirely surprising, given the small size of the Jewish population.

Anti-black racism has of course been the most consequential prejudice in American history, but anti-Semitism remains strangely vital. Like its cousin, anti-Catholicism, anti-Semitism is more than a prejudice and more than a visceral hatred—it is, in its most extreme form, a kind of “theory of everything” in politics. Anti-black racism may exist with or without an attendant conspiracy theory, but anti-Semitism is almost without exception rooted in a conspiratorial view of the world. The fact that anti-Semitic incidents are on the rise on college campuses is entirely predictable in that campus culture is as much conspiracy-driven as talk-radio culture or Fox News culture, with different villains and a slightly more refined rhetoric: not “Jews” pulling the strings from the shadows, but “Zionists.”

Williamson also notes the confusion, and the bad faith arguments, that have emerged from the term “anti-Semitism.”
The Semitic languages famously include both Hebrew and Arabic, but also Amharic, Tigrinya, Tigre, Aramaic, and Maltese. But when T. S. Eliot wrote, “But this or such was Bleistein’s way:/ A saggy bending of the knees/ And elbows, with the palms turned out,/ Chicago Semite Viennese,” he wasn’t talking about the Catholics down in sunny Malta.

The real reasons Ken Roth was bounced by Harvard’s Kennedy School

The claim that Jewish influence and money can force non-Jews to serve the selfish interests of the Jews is, of course, a classic antisemitic trope. In the modern context, this trope usually claims that these Jewish conspirators are doing their dirty work to benefit Israel.

Roth also claimed that Elmendorf’s decision was “a shocking violation of academic freedom.” Anthony Romero, the executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), agreed, saying, “If Harvard’s decision was based on HRW’s advocacy under Ken’s leadership, this is profoundly troubling from both a human rights and an academic freedom standpoint.”

It appears that Roth and Romero do not understand the nature of academic freedom. An applicant for a fellowship or faculty position does not enjoy academic freedom at the institution—in this case, Harvard—where they wish to work. They have freedom of speech to express their ideology and beliefs like all other citizens, but Roth would not have enjoyed the protection of academic freedom, which would allow him to express his views, no matter how corrosive or biased, until he became part of the Harvard community. Obviously, this never took place.

Moreover, hiring committees normally vet applicants during the application process. It appears that in the initial stages of Roth’s application, the committee inadvertently, or perhaps purposely, ignored Roth’s hostility to Israel. So, it is very likely that when the choice of Roth was made public, Harvard stakeholders had the opportunity to inform the dean about the darker aspects of Roth’s career. Dean Elmendorf then did what the hiring committee at the Carr Center should have done in the first place: Examine HRW’s and Roth’s defective scholarship and singular focus on Israel, objectively.

One particularly grotesque example of Roth’s shoddy scholarship and tendency toward outright falsehoods was a 2021 HRW report titled, “A Threshold Crossed: Israeli Authorities and the Crimes of Apartheid and Persecution,” the title of which makes its content clear.

No apartheid exists in Israel, but that did not prevent HRW from presenting the 217-page report as fact, effectively redefining apartheid to make their case. The Israel-based watchdog organization NGO Monitor, however, produced a report of its own that eviscerated HRW’s libels. NGO Monitor concluded that “the HRW publication is fundamentally flawed, using lies, distortions, omissions and blatant double standards to construct a fraudulent and libelous narrative demonizing Israel.”

“A careful examination of the text shows that HRW conducted almost no primary research,” NGO Monitor noted. “Rather, the text is bloated with cut-and-paste phrases, and quotes and conclusions taken from third-party sources—notably, other political NGOs participating in the same ‘apartheid’ campaign against Israel.”

“The omissions are even more egregious than the errors and misrepresentations, rendering HRW’s report as nothing more than propaganda,” the watchdog group asserted.

Even the PLO knows the Jews are indigenous to Israel - opinion

To deal with the inconvenient historical fact that Jews are the indigenous population of Israel, the drafters of the PLO charter created an arbitrary dividing line to determine who would be considered a Palestinian. First, the PLO charter deems any Arab who had lived in the entirety of what is now modern Israel prior to the re-establishment of the Jewish homeland to automatically be Palestinian, without regard to whether they were residents in the land. Further, the PLO charter deemed any Arab (but not Jews) born after 1947 to a Palestinian father to be a Palestinian.

Jews, on the other hand, were excised from their own national identity under the PLO charter. Only Jews who had resided in what is now modern Israel prior to “the Zionist invasion” would be considered Palestinian. And what did the PLO even mean when they called it “the Zionist invasion,” 1948 or the 1800s? The latter, of course.

Jews were forcibly removed from Israel after the destruction of the Second Temple and dispersed across the globe, making Palestine, as conceived by the PLO charter, a nearly Jew-free land before the Zionist movement was ever founded.

Imagine if, at the time of the founding of modern Israel, Jews had made a similar declaration with regard to Arabs. To wit, Israel would only recognize those “Arab Palestinians” who resided in the land and identified as “Palestinian” prior to the time of Abraham. This would obviously be an impossibility since the term “Palestinian” was created by the Romans after the Bar Kokhba revolt in around 130 C.E., while Abraham arrived in the Land of Israel approximately 2,000 years before the first use of the term Palestine.

Recently, antisemitic activists have escalated their attacks on Jews, claiming we are “settler-colonists” of a land they call Palestine. In my latest new law review article, I examine the question of colonialism and Israel. Part of my research involved tracing the history of the Jewish presence in Israel and comparing it to the waves of actual settler-colonists, ending with Palestinian Arabs, who displaced the indigenous Jewish population.

The only way that anti-Israel activists can strip Jews of our status as the indigenous people of the land and eliminate Jewish self-determination is to do as the PLO charter did: ignore history and designate a time when Jews had been ethnically cleansed from our own homeland as the point in time when Jewish history in Israel starts.

There are settler-colonists in Israel, and they are Palestinian Arabs. Nonetheless, Israel welcomes these settler-colonists and provides them with rights that no other country would provide to invaders and occupiers. It’s time for Palestinian Arab activists and their supporters to accept history and thank Israel for the gracious hospitality extended to newcomers.

Based on a true story. Israel has never occupied another people’s land in all her 4,000-Year recorded history; Israel is the world’s most accused country of illegally occupying another peoples’ land.
Ten Deceptions: https://t.co/4qiCALoxOJ #israel #palestine

— Joseph Shellim (@PhotoshopTruth) January 17, 2023

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Meanwhile,. Arab states send billions to US universities. Who believes they aren't trying to influence academia?

While Ken Roth and The Nation are trying to stoke outrage that Roth was not hired for a fellowship at Harvard University, blaming rich Jewish donors for the decision without any actual evidence, foreign money pours into US universities with the obvious intention of influencing academia - and more.

Here's a long forgotten incident. In 1989, then-governor Bill Clinton lobbied Saudis to donate to the University of Arkansas. He even met with the Saudi ambassador to the US in 1991. But the Saudis didn't give any money to the university - until Clinton became the Democratic nominee for President in 1992.  And only weeks after he became president, the Saudis gave the university $20 million to establish the King Fahd Middle East Studies Center.

Early efforts by oil-rich Arab kingdoms to donate to prestigious universities in the US were heavy handed, and most universities rejected them because of their demands that the money be used in specific, illegal ways. Over time, they moderated their demands - but the attempt to influence is still quite obvious. As Mitchell Bard writes in a detailed article on the topic:

In 1975, Saudi Arabia was asked to finance a $5.5 million teacher-training program, but several schools, including Harvard, would not participate after the Saudis banned Jewish faculty from participating. MIT also lost a $2 million contract to train Saudi teachers because it insisted that Jewish faculty be allowed to participate.

Georgetown and Harvard accepted $20 million gifts in 2005 from Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, whose offer of money to victims of 9/11 was rejected by then mayor Giuliani because of the prince’s suggestion that America rethink its support of Israel. Georgetown’s funding was used to support a center for Muslim-Christian understanding, which was subsequently renamed the Prince Alwaleed bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding (the center was originally created in 1993 with $6.5 million from a foundation of Arab businessmen led by an Arab Christian, Hasib Sabbagh).As I noted in The Arab Lobby, “Prospective Jewish donors to Georgetown might ask why it is not a center for Muslim-Christian-Jewish understanding, but Jews aside, other donors might wonder why a Jesuit university is accepting funding for such a center from a government that does not allow the practice of Christianity.”

Rep. Frank Wolf (R-VA) asked in February 2008 whether “the center has produced any analysis critical of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, for example in the fields of human rights, religious freedom, freedom of expression, women’s rights, minority rights, protection for foreign workers, due process and the rule of law.”...

Georgetown president John DeGioia responded by extolling the virtues of Prince Talal as “a global business leader and philanthropist.” Without answering Wolf’s questions directly, DeGioia simply pointed out that the center had experts who had written about the extremism of Wahhabism and human rights issues. He also lauded the center’s director, John Esposito, the man who had said before 9/11, “Bin Laden is the best thing to come along, if you are an intelligence officer, if you are an authoritarian regime, or if you want to paint Islamist activism as a threat.”

To bolster the credibility of the center, DeGioia revealed the real reason for the Saudis’ interest in Georgetown, and the ultimate threat it poses: “Our scholars have been called upon not only by the State Department, as you note, but also by Defense, Homeland Security and FBI officials as well as governments and their agencies in Europe and Asia. In fact, several high-ranking U.S. military officials, prior to assuming roles with the Multi-National Force in Iraq, have sought out faculty with the Center for their expertise on the region.”

In its investigation of institutional compliance with reporting requirements, the DoE noted that “Prince Alwaleed’s agreement with Georgetown exemplifies how foreign money can advance a particular country’s worldview within U.S. academic institutions.”

The Department of Education began to crack down on universities not properly reporting their foreign donations in 2020, under the Trump administration. It created a website where universities must report the country sources of such donations, although it doesn't publicize the specific donors due to privacy issues. 

Although it is unclear now what percentage of total donations have been reported (many retroactively to the early 2000s), the website currently lists these donation totals to Harvard alone:

Egypt - $44M
Iran(!) - $22K
Jordan - $622K
Kuwait - $22M
Lebanon - $2.5M
Malaysia - $21M
Morocco - $335K
Oman - $1.7M
Pakistan - $1.5M
"State of Palestine"[!] - $1.6M
Qatar - $16M
Saudi Arabia - $61M
Tunisia - $700K
Turkey - $28M
UAE - $80M

The database details some $10 billion in donations from Arab Gulf countries to US universities, many of them earmarked for specific projects. And, as the article I quoted above details, there is plenty that is not reported here.

Harvard, Yale, Georgetown and other schools are awash in Arab funds. The DoE database lists that Qatari donors alone gave Cornell nearly $1.8 billion!

Who can even pretend that the purpose of these funds is not to influence the universities, their faculties, their students and politicians that have these institutions in their districts?

To be fair, much of the Arab money is earmarked to departments with no political focus, with much being spent for science nd medicine. But a significant amount does go towards Arab studies which are almost reflexively anti-Israel. And sometimes the Arab money is not used to create an anti-Israel chair or department, but to lavishly fund an existing anti-Israel department - after all, there are plenty of anti-Israel academics who don't need Arab money to fund their hate, but they welcome that money to promote it further.

The people screaming about "academic freedom" to force a university to hire a specific person known for his bias seem very unconcerned about the billions that are being sent to universities with the obvious intent to influence the academic direction of the university.

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Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism  today at Amazon! Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424.  Read all about it here!

 

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