Jewish Student Sues Leeds University, Alleging She Got Failing Grade for Being Too Sympathetic to Israel
“This is not the first case we’ve come across of students’ being marked down for expressing views sympathetic towards Israel in essays and dissertations”
This just goes to show that the bizarre disdain for Israel in higher education is not limited to the United States.
Algemeiner reports:
Jewish Student Suing Leeds University for Failing Paper Too ‘Sympathetic’ to Israel
A British student has filed suit against Leeds University for discrimination and negligence, alleging that she was blocked from completing undergraduate studies in sociology and pursuing a masters degree because of a term paper that was not sufficiently critical of Israel.
“This is not the first case we’ve come across of students’ being marked down for expressing views sympathetic towards Israel in essays and dissertations,” Jonathan Turner of UK Lawyers for Israel, the lead attorney on the case, told The Algemeiner on Friday. “The amount of distress this has caused is enormous.”
According to court documents, during her senior year in 2021, Danielle Greyman enrolled in a course — “State Crime and Immorality” — for which the only assignment was a 4,500-5,000 essay on its subject. She submitted a paper about how Hamas, in governing the Gaza Strip, has victimized Palestinians and, the complaint said, “benefits from the conflict with Israel and the contribution made by the United Nations to Hamas corruption.”
Greyman alleged that despite confirming the topic and scope of the essay with the course’s professor and tutor, their assistants gave the assignment a low grade of 35, followed by a failing mark for the course, which was the last Greyman needed to graduate.
“The defendant’s staff would not have marked an essay so harshly if it had criticized Israel without criticizing Hamas, or if it has criticized one party to a different international conflict without criticizing another party,” the complaint alleged. “Since a Jewish student would be more likely to write an essay critical of Hamas than a non-Jewish student [the] defendant’s staff thus applied a criterion or practice which puts Jewish persons at a particular disadvantage when compared with persons who are not Jewish.”
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Comments
If she can back up her paper with good citations, she has a case. I doubt the prof told them to specifically write poorly about Israel. If he/she/it did, they she REALLY has a case.
It might be helpful to get some papers from other students who wrote equivalent papers but criticized Israel for a better grade. As they are all graduated, no loss to them.
Stupid lawsuit and makes Jews look like litigious cry babies. Why not sue for something worthy not this.
How so? How is this not a worthy suit? This bigoted professor set her entire career back at least a year if not permanently. That should be worth serious money.
I write too long. This time I will rein it in. When I was young, liberals were pro-Israel. What the hell happened?
What happened was: (1) Israel started winning; the world loves dead Jews, living ones not so much. (2) Israel became identified with the USA, while the USSR adopted the Arab cause.
(2a) Soviet propaganda helped spread the myth of Israel as a “white colonialist entity” oppressing a non-white indigenous population; that makes the Israel/Arab conflict fit in nicely with the racial paradigm that the left has been applying to the world since the late 1960s, to replace the earlier class paradigm. It actually surprises some people when they learn that Israelis are no whiter than “Palestinians”.