I was a guest earlier today on The Craig Silverman Show on 710 KNUS in Denver.
For almost 20 minutes we talked about the use or refusal to use the term “radical Islam,” Obama’s world view and foreign policy, Jesse Watters’ visit to Cornell, and the vote at the American Anthropological Association last night to send an anti-Israel academic boycott resolution to a vote by the full membership in the spring.
If you didn’t hear about the vote, you can read about it at the Times of Israel.
I previously wrote about how over the course of several years anti-Israel professors and graduate students put together misleading and dishonest seminars and publications which presented a completely one-sided view of the conflict. That was compounded by a study commissioned by the AAA in which the authors adopted a settler colonial approach to predetermine the outcome of the study by framing it as Israel being illegitimate, then finding facts to support the narrative while ignoring or diminishing contrary facts.
This series of maps, displayed outside the voting session purporting to show Palestinian loss of land, reflects the type of propaganda used to pass the boycott on to the membership. It’s the false and misleading series of maps that MSNBC apologized for using because it is wrong. Yet it was on full display at AAA.
As with all the academic boycott resolutions so far, it’s symbolic because AAA already has no dealings with Israeli universities. But symbolism counts because it’s part of a strategy to destroy Israel by delegitimizing it, just like the U.N. tried to do in the 1975 Zionism is Racism resolution (since revoked) and as NGOs and U.N. agencies continue to do.
So it matters in that sense. I don’t know if we’ve reached the inflection point yet where American civil society finally pushes back against the propagandists with Ph.D’s in a serious way. Among those ways needs to be to Stop taxpayer subsidies for anti-Israel boycott groups.
Hundreds of millions of Americans support Israel over the Palestinians and that support has grown steadily. Fewer than 2000 left-wing anthropologists versus hundreds of millions of Americans? I like those odds.
But it’s still upsetting how anti-Israel zealots have been able to corrupt once-noble professional organizations through years-long organizational manipulation. They are fighting over the one tiny piece of real estate they can control in a vast nation of pro-Israel sentiment, but they still need to be opposed so that the evil doesn’t spread.
And if you followed the taunting in social media and at the meeting of the AAA members who opposed BDS, you’d know how ugly the situation is going to get. BDS activists not only engage in thuggish behavior on campus, that’s how they treat faculty who oppose them.
But predictably, when the push-back starts, those in the pro-boycott side will be the first to scream that it’s not fair that the boycotters be boycotted.
Here is the text of the portion on the vote from my interview on The Craig SilvermanShow, starting at 17:15 [click on link to jump ahead].
Last night, in Denver, the American Anthropolical Association at their annual Business Meeting for their Annual Meeting, voted to endorse the academic boycott of Israel. It now goes to the membership for a full vote. So it’s not effective yet, but at the business meeting, these radical Israel-haters who are obsessed, voted by something like 88%. And this is only the people in attendance, so it’s not the whole membership, to boycott Israel.Of all of the problems in the world, of all of the horrors that are going on. ISIS rampaging places, the knifing attacks on Jews in Israel, Hamas still occasionally shooting rockets at Israel and abusing their own people, of all of those problems the academics at the American Anthropological Association business meeting in Denver, Colorado, voted to boycott Israel. How sick is that? ….Now it does go to the full membership now, which is 10,000 people, and I’m hopeful that a little bit of sanity will prevail, but there is a true fascism rising in academia and its target is Israel. I hope your listeners understand that. These are vicious, nasty people who have decided to take all their frustrations in the world out on the Jewish state. When there’s so many worse problems, so much less academic freedom elsewhere in the world, they’ve singled out Israel.So if your question to me was do we have to reform the educational system because we’re turning out people who are radicalized, the answer is ‘absolutely,’ and it’s the professors who are the single biggest problem.”
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