Posted on 07/06/2002 6:42:41 PM PDT by dighton
A British academic has sparked worldwide protests after sacking two scholars from her highly respected international journals because they are Israeli.
Mona Baker, a professor at the University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology (UMIST), admitted yesterday that she had dismissed Dr Miriam Shlesinger and Prof Gideon Toury because of their nationality.
Despite a storm of complaints raised by her action, Prof Baker stood by her decision, telling The Telegraph: “I deplore the Israeli state. Miriam knew that was how I felt and that they would have to go because of the current situation.”
Prof Baker asked Dr Shlesinger and Prof Toury to resign from the boards of two academic journals she owns, after signing a website petition last month calling for academics to boycott Israel. When they refused to resign she sacked them.
The dismissals raised no public opposition from within British universities. International academics, however, led by Prof Stephen Greenblatt, a world-renowned Shakespeare scholar at Harvard University, have now condemned the decision and called on British academics to stand up for intellectual freedom.
Prof Greenblatt, who flew to England last night to collect an honorary degree from London University, said that Prof Baker’s actions were “repellent”, “dangerous” and “intellectually and morally bankrupt”.
He described any policy of singling out a group for collective punishment as “grotesque”. He added: “Excluding scholars because of the passports that they carry or because of their skin colour, religion or political party, corrupts the integrity of intellectual work.”
Both of the sacked scholars had worked for the periodicals for three years. Dr Shlesinger, who enjoyed a friendship with Prof Baker and was even a guest at her house in Manchester, worked for the editorial board of The Translator. Prof Toury, who teaches at Tel Aviv University, held an honorary advisory role at Translation Studies Abstracts.
Dr Shlesinger, a respected American-born academic at the Bar-Ilan University near Tel Aviv, is also a former chairman of Amnesty International in Israel and has criticised her country’s policies in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.
Prof Baker, who is the director of the centre for translation and intercultural studies at UMIST, was unrepentant, however. Although the boards of the journals remained split over the dismissals, Prof Baker said: “I am not against Israeli nationals per se; it is Israeli institutions as part of the Israeli state which I absolutely deplore.
She said that her actions were “my interpretation of what a boycott of Israel means”. Prof Baker added: “Many people in Europe have signed a boycott against Israel. Israel has gone beyond just war crimes.
It is horrific what is going on there. Many of us would like to talk about it as some kind of Holocaust which the world will eventually wake up to, much too late, of course, as they did with the last one.”
She conceded, however, that the pair would not have been sacked had they lived in Britain and severed their ties with Israeli institutions.
The petition that Prof Baker signed claims that Israel should be boycotted because it is “racist.” Prof Baker, who refused to disclose where she was born, claimed that her actions were supported by a growing number of academics across Britain and in Germany. She alleged that since the sackings she had been the victim of a hate campaign.
“My husband and I receive hate mail every day, up to 50 [letters] a day, some of it extremely obscene,” she said. “I can’t read it out it is so obscene and very threatening. It is also sent to my university, to my vice-chancellor and to some of my colleagues, and they threaten people who want to stay on the board. The Americans are the worst offenders.
“There is a large intimidation machine out there which is waiting to intimidate anyone that it doesn’t approve of.”
In an open letter to Prof Baker, however, Prof Greenblatt, the president of the Modern Language Association of America, described the “chilling shadow” cast by her actions. “An attack on cultural co-operation, with a particular group singled out for collective punishment violates the essential spirit of scholarly freedom and the pursuit of truth,” he wrote.
“The pursuit of knowledge does not suddenly come to a halt at national borders. This does not mean that serious scholars must be indifferent to the world’s murderous struggles, but it does mean that they are committed to an ongoing, frank conversation . . . [that] often includes passionate disagreement.”
The letter is understood to have the backing of other senior academics at Harvard. Following calls from The Telegraph, a number of leading academics in Britain lent their voice to Prof Greenblatt’s condemnation.
Francis Robinson, a professor of history at London University, said: “Whatever anyone feels about Israel, this is absolutely appalling. Certainly there are strong feelings, not often spoken but nevertheless strongly felt, shared by the majority of British liberal intellectuals about the problems with Israel. Nonetheless, this sounds dreadful. It runs counter to the very principles of academic freedom.”
Prof Greenblatt’s intervention was welcomed by Lord Janner, the chairman of the Holocaust Educational Trust. He said that the sackings set a worrying precedent: “This is disgraceful and dangerous. You should no more sack an Israeli academic for his nationality than you should a Palestinian in the same situation.
“I do not buy this argument that, just because there are more fee-paying Arab students at UMIST and elsewhere, their views should prevail. In every university in the UK today there are problems between the two groups. They must try to insulate themselves from what is happening in the Middle East or else you are going to get the most terrible conflicts seeping into our university campuses.”
Prof John Garside, the vice-chancellor of UMIST, distanced himself from the debate. Even though Prof Baker uses UMIST’s logo in her promotional material for the journals, he said: “The position of UMIST is that the two journals Prof Baker is involved with have nothing to do with UMIST.
“These are activities that she is involved with in her own time. What happens on those journals and the editorial policy on those journals are entirely a matter for those journals. It’s an issue that we are dealing with internally and not something I want to make any public statement about at this stage.”
A spokesman for the Israeli embassy said: “We think the Palestinian cause is not helped in any way by people trying to shut down those who communicate across boundaries through dialogue and the exchange of ideas. It’s the rejection of the legitimacy of the state of Israel itself which lies at the core of the Israeli-Arab conflict.”
• Additional reporting by Tony Freinberg and James Pope
© Copyright of Telegraph Group Limited 2002.
You mean like what you're doing on a routine basis? Like in these threads (if you want more, just say the word. It wouldn't surprise me to find your loonytunes firmly embedded in a recipe thread).
Islam will eat their athesist occult nation alive.
Nature detests vacumns and there is a real Judeo/Christian gap ....Islam is racing in to fill it with the moon god
Do you wonder how it will look as an Islamic country? Will the Queens hands be chopped off for stealing from the people?
Europe has not changed since WW II...
There are not 6 million Israelis in America.
There are many Hindus, Buddhists and people from India here.Some of them follow the war in Sri Lanka. But that is not the criteria anyway. It is an interesting conflict.So is the Maoist insurgency in Nepal. Several people follow that closely on FR.
Tell us why freepers should not know Israel is selling military equipment to Mugabe. Tell us what is "loonytunes" about posting information not found readily in the American media. American taxpayers will be called on to bail Zimbabwe out. Our businesses cannot sell arms to Mugabe. We have sanctions on the country. So does the EU. But Israel just received from Mugabe a $105 million down payment on armored vehicles. And Israelis are in country training his thugs how to use them.
Btw...the man who wrote the article above and his editor have been arrested by Mugabe. Like you, Mugabe doesn't want anyone to know Israel is supplying him with arms.
You must love those old Nazi propaganda films. You are a sorry character.
Lol. Did anyone ever tell you how much you sound like Kudzu/Astonished? Were you her handler by any chance, and if so, is she back here?
Should I go back and find some more, Mr. Lied? Tell you the truth, I'm kinda curious myself as to how odd you can get :).
And so it begins -- now the academic left finds it OK to sack those who do not agree with their "sensitivities." We have already seen an overall censorship of the right on college campuses globally; when we are allowed to speak on campus, we have to have an opposing or balancing viewpoint to appear on the same program to counterbalance our "radical" or "extreme" viewpoint. And as for black conservatives on black college campuses? Forget it. It won't happen. Not as long as the race warlords in black academia run the show.
We are being made out to be the new pariahs. And this will continue to happen globally. You will start to hear of Israelis run off of college campuses everywhere. You will then start to hear of right-wingers being thrust bodily off campuses.
You know the old adage - to paraphrase: "First they came for the Israelis..."
Figures.
You're brilliant. The posters excoriated the sacking simply because these guys were Israelis. You laud the sacking because they're leftists and "deserve it" (oh yes the "irony of it all"). Who is for the principle of free speech here?
Leave it to Larry to figure out some way to explain "they had it coming" whenever a Jew is attacked for being Jewish. If some Hasid gets beat up on the streets of Brussels (as a loved one of mine was a few months ago), Larry will lecture us on how "Jewish" Communists worked for the KGB 60 years ago. What does that have to do with this Hasid?
...Don't forget the yellow Stars of David on the packaging of Israeli products in some grocery stores in Norway. I THINK the 'boycott' is in Norway.
It IS ironic that a Palestinian-sympathizing, hard-core left-wing Israeli who condemns her own people's policy toward terrorists was sacked by a Palestinian-sympathizing, hard-core left-wing EGYPTIAN who apparently AGREES with the opinion of the woman she sacked....but sacked her for BEING an Israeli.
That's why so many of us have made those "appeasement doesn't work" quips. However, it's be not only stupid but dangerous for us to sit back and watch the left eat each other, because we're going to get damaged in the process.
A pity that your research does not extend to the Egyptian woman in this article.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.