About six months after Andrew Pessin posted — on his Facebook profile — a defense of Israel during its 2014 war against Hamas, the once popular Connecticut College philosophy professor was subjected to an academic smear campaign.
Member Writings and Interviews
The Silencing of Pro-Israel Students on Campus
Ismael Khoufaify, Director of Advocacy of the Governance Council of Minority & Marginalized Students at New York University, recently had a rough week. Swastikas had again been discovered in a campus building; someone in the dining halls marked Black History Month by serving watermelon kool-aid; some pro-Israel students expressed polite disagreement at a Jewish Voice for Peace anti-Israel hatefest. Khoufaify wrote on Facebook: “The last few days have sent me spiraling into a deep state of reflection. In the last week our NYU community has gone through hell and back. From swastikas, to kool-aid, to Zionism.” For Mr. Khoufaify, Nazism, racism, and Zionism were equally egregious.
How Partisan Is the Issue of Israel?
Why People Who Oppose BDS Should Oppose Anti-BDS Laws, Too
When UC-Berkeley Lecturer Hatem Bazian was invited to speak at Arizona State University by a group of Muslim students, he found something unexpected in his contract: a clause requiring him to certify he wouldn’t boycott Israel.
Why People Who Oppose BDS Should Oppose Anti-BDS Laws, Too
When UC-Berkeley Lecturer Hatem Bazian was invited to speak at Arizona State University by a group of Muslim students, he found something unexpected in his contract: a clause requiring him to certify he wouldn’t boycott Israel.
Defining Fascism Down
When the left refers to their political opponents as fascists, it’s nothing new. Even in the placid 1990s, I recall, a friend of mine referred to Republicans—milquetoasts by contemporary standards—as fascists and storm-troopers. But, at least in his case, one understood it as a bit of a put-on; a deliberate rhetorical excess. Few seriously imagined that George Herbert Walker Bush or Bob Dole were advance men for Mussolinis and Hitlers. Today, not so much.
BDS, Credibility, and the Challenge to the Academy
In this article Rachel S. Harris and Martin B. Shichtman consider the ways in which the presentation of BDS has undermined traditional expectations of scholarly research—including factual accuracy, knowledge of the regional languages, the reliability of sources, or situating the work within a wider analytical discourse outside of activist writings. In this way it is is destroying the credibility of the Humanities. In addition, we consider the ways in which BDS has fostered public displays of antisemitism and evaluate the long-term harm the movement is causing to the academy.
Free Speech Hypocrites
“Everyone Agrees”: Second Draft on the MSNM’s Contribution to the Arab-Israeli Conflict
I have, over the past year, slowly put together a video using my archive of recordings of BBC Global and CNN International’s news broadcasts. It portrays a mindset among journalism that has them “in the name of the ‘whole world’,” misinforming the whole world by reciting Palestinian war propaganda as news. “Everybody knows it’s Israel’s fault” that there’s no peace settlement.
How A Turf War At Fresno State Turned Into An Anti-Zionist Witch Hunt
Shortly after Jewish Voice for Peace got word of “a truly terrible case of the suppression of Palestinian scholarship,” the coordinator of its Academic Advisory Council fired off an urgent dispatch to scholars around the world. As a prominent organizational supporter of the BDS movement to boycott, divest from and sanction Israel, JVP sounded the alarm that “Pro-Israel advocacy groups” had torpedoed the search for the Edward Said Professorship of Middle East Studies at Fresno State University because all four finalists for the position had focused their research on Palestine. Something had to be done.