Israel And Boycotting Australian Academics
ANDREW Bolt reports that Australian academics “have singled out just one state for collective punishment”. That state is Israel:
But these academics haven’t just singled out Israel for a demonisation it has spared countries with infinitely worse records of abuses against human rights, including neighbors of Israel who demand and seek its annihilation. They have also signed a petition demanding a collective punishment of all who live within Israel, regardless of their personal views and merits.
Further, the punishment they demand is a crime against reason and the exchange of ideas – a severing of academic ties. They seek thereby to ban the currency of the civilised.
Norm says:
But a policy such as the academic boycott, targeting Israeli academics, and only Israeli academics, for treatment that damages their professional interests, needs the backing of a persuasive argument as to what makes Israel an especially bad case in a world with many other cases at least as bad and some of them much worse, if it is to escape the charge of being anti-Semitic in effect, aimed without justification at the universities and the academic staff of the Jewish state alone. As I’ve argued before, pressed repeatedly to come up with a reason for singling out Israel in this way, the boycotters fail repeatedly to provide one.
Names appear on the Electronic Intifada. And on that site we learn:
Gaza is but the latest incident in a series of ongoing Israeli massacres, from Deir Yassin (1948) to Kafr Kassim (1956) to Jenin (2002) to the wars on Lebanon (from 1980s to 2006). All demonstrate a pattern of violence by a state that will not end its violations of international law and war crimes on its own, without international pressure. We must act now. As academics we wish to focus on campaigns in our universities and in institutions of higher education to advocate for compliance with the academic and cultural boycott, a movement that is growing internationally across all segments of global civil society.
Was Gaza a massacre? And Jenin (via):
A week later, the picture became clearer. In the absence of credible evidence to substantiate insinuations of cold-blooded “massacre” or “summary executions”, the British press changed its tone slightly. Many of the papers carried highly detailed accounts of events in Jenin, which discounted Palestinian claims that a massacre had taken place…
Selective use of details or information and occasional reliance on unsubstantiated accounts inflict considerable damage on the reputation of the entire British press, and more importantly, do a disservice to its readers.
- Israel’s actions in Jenin were “every bit as repellent” as Osama bin Laden’s attack on New York on September 11, wrote Britain’s Guardian in its lead editorial of April 17.
- “We are talking here of massacre, and a cover-up, of genocide,” said a leading columnist for the Evening Standard, London’s main evening newspaper, on April 15.
- “Rarely in more than a decade of war reporting from Bosnia, Chechnya, Sierra Leone, Kosovo, have I seen such deliberate destruction, such disrespect for human life,” reported Janine di Giovanni, the London Times’s correspondent in Jenin, on April 16.
If the desire for war and hatred are to end, then what purpose in ignoring the facts and promoting prejudice? Is it less that the academics want to end violence or that they just support the other side?
Posted: 30th, March 2009 | In: Reviews Comments (2) | TrackBack | Permalink
