No Debate Allowed at Anti-Israel UCLA 'Debate'

No Debate Allowed at Anti-Israel UCLA ‘Debate’

Gabriel Piterberg

UCLA’s Center for Near Eastern Studies (CNES) has for years sponsored biased, anti-American, anti-Isael research and lectures. As Eric Golub reports today in a CW-sponsored article for FrontPage Magazine, a recent conference there that featured UCLA’s Gabriel Piterberg, among others, continuted this lamentable tradition:

Outside of the United Nations, few institutions are as dedicated to anti-Israel rants as the University of California, Los Angeles Center for Near Eastern Studies (CNES). A recent CNES conference titled “The Settler Colonial Paradigm: Debating Gershon Shafir’s ‘Land, Labor and the Origins of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict’ on its 25th Anniversary,” was a case in point.

The mouthful of a title refers to University of California, San Diego sociology professor and director of the human rights minor Gershon Shafir’s 1995 book, Land, Labor and the Origins of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict. Ignoring 3,000 years of archeological evidence connecting Jews to what is now the land of Israel, Shafir’s unoriginal thesis was that carpet bagging Zionists bought up land and displaced indigenous Palestinians. Calling the conference a “debate” was a misnomer, for that typically requires at least two opposing views. In this case, the Israeli Gershon Shafir offered the Palestinian point of view and none of the speakers’ contested him.

To read the rest of this report, please click here.

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University of California, Los Angeles Brown University

Winfield Myers

Winfield Myers is managing editor of the Middle East Forum and director of its Campus Watch project, which reviews and critiques Middle East studies in North American universities. He has taught world history and other topics at the University of Michigan, the University of Georgia, Tulane, and Xavier University of Louisiana. He was previously managing editor of The American Enterprise magazine and CEO of Democracy Project, Inc., which he co-founded. Mr. Myers has served as senior editor and communications director at the Intercollegiate Studies Institute and is principal author and editor of a college guide, Choosing the Right College (1998, 2001). He was educated at the University of Georgia, Tulane, and the University of Michigan.