Middle East studies professors who engage in anti-Israel activism like to fashion themselves the victims of persecution for their views, when, in fact, the opposite is true: academia celebrates such views, while shunning pro-Israel perspectives. In the latest Campus Watch research, Andrew Harrod reports on a recent panel discussion in Washington, DC, in which speakers such as Rashid Khalidi and Steven Salaita engaged in this sort of self-proclaimed victimhood, all the while turning Israel and its supporters into the perpetrators. His article appears today at Jihad Watch:
Israel is a twenty-first century "litmus test of a real commitment to justice," the "Vietnam," the "South Africa," and "moral issue of our time" according to leftwing icon Angela Davis, quoted approvingly by Columbia University professor Rashid Khalidi on November 21 before an audience of about fifty. Khalidi's panel discussion of "The Legal Assault on Palestinian Rights Activism" over a lunch of sandwiches and drinks at the Service Employees International Union's (SEIU) Washington, DC, headquarters twisted anti-Israel hatred and criminality into Israeli persecution of Palestinians.