A group of professors, mostly from the humanities and with a large contingent from Middle East studies, have formed the Ad Hoc Committee to Defend the University. They claim that “outside groups” are “seeking to influence what is taught and who can teach.”
It’s the subject of this story in today’s issue of Inside Higher Ed.
But the professors aren’t concerned with generic complaints; their real target is more specific. Although Campus Watch isn’t mentioned, the Committee clearly alludes to it:
Unfortunately and ironically, many of the most vociferous campaigns targeting universities and their faculty have been launched by groups portraying themselves as defenders of Israel. These groups have targeted scholars who have expressed perspectives on Israeli policies and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict with which they disagree.
Still, it’s notable that their first two complaints deal directly with Israel:
*unfounded insinuations and allegations, in the media and on websites, of anti-Semitism or
sympathy for terrorism or “un-Americanism;"
*efforts to broaden definitions of anti-Semitism to include scholarship and teaching that is critical of U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East and of Israel;
Since so many professors of Middle East studies are signatories, let’s see if the charges made by critics of contemporary academe are in fact “unfounded,” and if the term “anti-Semitism” is in fact tossed around so loosely. Here are just a few examples; judge for yourselves:
Juan Cole of Michigan, writing at his blog on Sunday, Oct. 21:
No one in the US media ever talks about Zionofascism, and the campus groups who yoke the word ‘fascism’ to other religions and peoples are most often trying to divert attention from their own authoritarianism and approval of brutality.
Israel is willing to do anything to convince Palestinians and other Arabs of why it needs and deserves to have the right to be racist. Even at the level of theory, and before it began to realise itself on the ground, the Zionist colonial project sought different means by which it could convince the people whose lands it wanted to steal and against whom it wanted to discriminate to accept as understandable its need to be racist.
All those in the Arab world who deny the Jewish holocaust are in my opinion Zionists.
[Israel’s] demand that its ‘right to exist’ be recognized reflects its own anxiety, not about its existence but about its failure to successfully eliminate the Palestinians’ presence inside their homeland — a failure for which verbal recognition would serve merely a palliative and therapeutic function.
[W]hen Palestinians refer to Jews as ‘descended from apes and swine’ or encourage support for those who ‘kill Jews,’ they do so with the reasonably justifiable self-image of victim and persecuted, not of victimizer and persecutor.
Given what’s happened in Iraq and Palestine, I would be shocked if there wasn’t discontent.
[T]his has to be laid at the doorstep of Bush administration and Israeli government policy, they almost willed this result.
