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U. Chicago defeats anti-Israel academic boycott one drop of water at a time

U. Chicago defeats anti-Israel academic boycott one drop of water at a time

Academic boycotters would rather people go thirsty than cooperate with Israeli Universities — think about that.

http://youtu.be/MF8pNDtLb4Q

When talking about the obsessive-compulsive haters of the anti-Israel Boycott, Divest and Sanctions movement, it’s easy to focus on opposing what they do.

In fact, this weekend at the American Historical Association, some BDS activist-professors are trying to get business meeting rules waived so they can introduce a biased and inaccurate anti-Israel resolution.

These efforts need to be opposed, but opposition is not the ultimate answer.

The answer to those who seek to demonize and deligitimize Israel through the BDS movement is to build even more academic and other relationships with Israel.

The University of Chicago is doing just that, cooperating wtih Ben Gurion University on water resource management for desert climates. This is not a political move, but shared scientific research on its own merits. It’s only anti-Israel activists who turn such research to benefit all humanity into a political issue.

The Chicago Tribune reports For water’s sake, Chicago researchers reach across the seas to Israel:

The Arava desert, a salty wasteland dotted with tufts of scrub, gets only about an inch of rain each year. And yet cows lazily low at dairy farms that collectively produce nearly 8 million gallons of milk annually. Orange bell peppers flourish in a long swath of greenhouses that skirts the Jordanian border. Kibbutzim with vineyards somehow manage to churn out shiraz and sauvignon blanc, unfazed by the desert sun.

The clusters of farms and wineries in the Arava are a testament to Israel’s acumen in water technology. One of the most parched places on earth has found a way to beat water woes once so severe that Israel’s national mood rose and fell with the changing level of the Sea of Galilee, one of their most critical water sources.

That expertise helps explain why the University of Chicago sought out Israel’s Ben-Gurion University to help tackle one of the world’s most worrisome problems — water scarcity….

“There are shortages of water from the First World to the Third World,” said Steve Sibener, one of the University of Chicago scientists leading the research. “If you look at California, it has been a particularly dry year, and you can see how the whole West and Southwest can have boom and bust cycles that are likely to get worse. If you move onto the Middle East and Africa, you understand that water is precious — it’s like gold.

“It’s the issue of the day,” Sibener said. “Hundreds of millions of people are at risk of (not) having enough water.”

In laboratories in Chicago and the Israeli desert, scientists are crafting radical new approaches that may one day rejuvenate the world’s water-starved regions….

Every experiment has representation from both the University of Chicago and Ben-Gurion. The University of Chicago brings to the collaboration its expertise in molecular engineering, while Ben-Gurion brings its experience of transforming water research into real-life applications in a water-starved nation.

For both universities, the collaboration represents an opportunity to parlay their top-shelf know-how into potential solutions for one of mankind’s most pressing priorities.

Such cooperation is strictly prohibited under the rules of the academic boycott movement, such as that adopted by the American Studies Association.

Think about that.

BDS would rather people go thirsty than have U.S. universities cooperated with Israeli universities.

BDS destroys, we build.

[Featured Image: U. Michigan Protesters via YouTube]

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Comments

It’s a measure of the toxicity of the BDS movement that they would sacrifice the lives of other people on the alter of their ideology.

    Valerie in reply to jim_m. | January 2, 2015 at 8:10 pm

    It fits completely with the Islamist willingness to murder every Muslim within reach, allegedly for the purpose of committing genocide against the Jews, who are usually not in the area.

You are guilty of sugar-coating the situation.

It’s not that “BDS would rather people go thirsty than have U.S. universities cooperated with Israeli universities. . . . ”

It’s “BDS would rather children die of thirst or starvation, and for people to have impoverished economies from lack of good water, than have US universities learn from Israeli universities. . . . . .”