Halt Abuses of Academic Freedom [Liberal Elite Academia censures Jews & praise Arab terror]

Israel National News ^ | 10/22/02 | Uri Dromi

[1bigdictator]

Halt Abuses of Academic Freedom Uri Dromi 22 October 2002 Email this story Print this story

My youngest son, Shai, has just started his first year at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. He has moved to an apartment with a friend but comes home for the Saturday lunch -- a tradition he won´t miss. Excited, he told us about the fuss of the first days on campus. His main worry was where to park his car.

As I looked at him, I realized that my concerns were of a different kind. Not parking, not if he chose the right direction in his studies. Nothing of the sort. All I could think of was the terrible event that shook his campus not long ago, when Palestinian terrorists put a bomb in the cafeteria, killing students and university staff. These terrorists would stop at nothing. Of course, if my son were going to a university in the United States, he would have been physically safer. However, other troubles might have come his way: anti-Israel and anti-Jewish propaganda, for example. Although he is not the type to pick a fight, and generally he stays away from politics, I´m sure he would have been offended. If, for example, he went to San Francisco State University, where pro-Palestinian demonstrators recently confronted supporters of Israel with signs reading ´´Jews = Nazis´´ and chants of ´´Hitler should have finished the job,´´ I know he would have taken it to heart. Or if he happened to study at the University of South Florida and bumped into Dr. Sami Al-Arian, who once said, ´´Let us damn America, let us damn Israel, let us damn them and their allies until death.´´ I guess my son would have wondered what difference there was between this professor and Osama bin Laden.

I know that Al Arian has been fired for abusing his position at the university and ´´using academic freedom as a shield to cover improper activities,´´ in the words of USF President Judy Genshaft (she probably referred to Al-Arian´s fundraising letter following a suicide bomber from the Islamic Jihad killed 21 Israeli soldiers, in which he encouraged contributors ``to try to extend true support to the jihad effort in Palestine so that operations such as these can continue.´´) Yet, in the guise of academic freedom, many strange things happen on U.S. campuses.

Take, for example, the divestment campaign going on in several campuses, demanding that Israel be treated as a pariah and that American universities shouldn´t own stock in companies that do business here. It is modeled on the anti-apartheid movement of the 1970s and 1980s, assuming that there is no moral difference between Israel -- a free and tolerant democracy at war with dictatorial enemies bent on genocide -- and the former white-ruled South Africa. If my son were attending the University of Michigan, he would have been appalled to know that, in the name of academic freedom, his university had allowed last weekend a divestment conference, featuring such speakers as (surprise!) Al-Amin and Hatem Bazian, who had promised an inflamed audience that ``the Day of Judgement will not happen until the trees and stones will say: O Muslim, there is a Jew hiding behind me. Come and kill him.´´

Thank God, there are sane people in academia, who will not let this anti-Semitic and anti-Israeli disease grow. Harvard President Lawrence Summers said loud and clear: ``Some here at Harvard and some at universities across the country, have called for the university to single out Israel among all nations as the lone country where it is inappropriate for any part of the university´s endowment to be invested. I hasten to say the university has categorically rejected this suggestion.´´

The fact that Summers is Jewish shouldn´t matter; any decent person should speak up against the use of academic freedom -- not for opposing the policies of the Israeli government, which is legitimate, but for support of terrorism, anti-Semitic propaganda, and the bashing of Israel -- the only democracy in an ocean of tyranny. ------------------------------------------------------------- Uri Dromi is publications director at the Israel Democracy Institute in Jerusalem.

Dromi@idi.org.il

[Righty1]

South East Michigan is a muslim hotbed and UM is one of those places that worship diversity above all else.

[Malesherbes]

The "liberal" regimes that control American universities bear an increasingly strong resemblance to the universities of the Third Reich: imposed ideology, silenced disent, and (increasingly) open anti-Semitism.