Intifada Missouri – Anti-Israel activists may push Ferguson over the edge
Anti-Israel activists exploit Ferguson tension as part of propaganda war....
Anti-Israel activists exploit Ferguson tension as part of propaganda war....
Ever since I started covering the anti-Israel academic boycott of the American Studies Association in December 2013, I have interacted with some of its members who are reasonable people concerned about the direction the ASA has taken. But those voices have been drowned out by a shrill and vocal minority.
A little publicized fact is that less than one quarter of the membership voted in favor of the boycott (and depending on which membership numbers you use, perhaps as few as 16%), but it was enough to change the course of the organization due to low overall participation.
Once known as a somewhat obscure but well-regarded organization, ASA now is a pariah (as the NY Times described it) because of the boycott. ASA has become the poster child for how a relatively small group of anti-Israel radicals can take over key committees of a relatively small organization and leverage that power for a political agenda.
In this case, the agenda is the Boycott, Divest and Sanction movement, conceived of and scripted at the anti-Semitic 2001 Durban conference. Part of the Durban script was to have Palestinian civil groups issue a call for a boycott. That took place, and now groups like ASA cite the civil call for a boycott as their justification, ignoring its roots and preplanning.
At a time when the Humanities and Social Sciences are suffering and Ph.D. graduate students in fields like American Studies have few job prospects, the leadership and activists at ASA devote their energies to demonizing and delegitimizing Israel.
During this year's annual meeting, an entire day will be devoted to an offsite program run by ASA's Activism Caucus (yes, there really is such a thing) to teach faculty from around the country how to boycott Israeli universities, faculty, and scholars. ASA in a real sense has become a political activist organization.
The boycott, as applied to ASA's annual meeting, was discriminatory, and the hotel was put on notice that the hotel had potential liability.
Our resolution understands boycott as limited to a refusal on the part of the Association in its official capacities to enter into formal collaborations with Israeli academic institutions, or with scholars who are expressly serving as representatives or ambassadors of those institutions, or on behalf of the Israeli government ....That is a distinction ASA made throughout its public statements and position papers -- if you were a representative of an Israeli institution, or if you had an administrative title, you were boycotted. For example, a form letter ASA distributed to members to be given to university administrators made the same distinction:
The email arrived on the last Friday afternoon of the spring term shortly before 5:00 p.m. Anastasia Coleman, Fordham’s Director of Institutional Equity and Compliance, and its Title IX Coordinator, wanted to meet with me. “It has been alleged,” she wrote, “that you may have acted in an inappropriate way and possibly discriminated against another person at the University.” ... “Did it have anything to do with a student?” I shot back anxiously, hoping to get a sense of my predicament before the director left for the weekend. I was lucky. Coleman responded immediately. “This does not involve students and is about your behavior regarding American Studies.”
Rabbi Angela Buchdahl: "Israel is our motherland. Israel is family...
The depravity of the anti-Israel left on display....
Blaming Israel and Zionism for the Arab world's problems is a distraction from the Barbarians inside the gates....
Israeli scientist Daniel Shechtman won the 2011 Nobel Prize in chemistry on Wednesday for his discovery of quasicrystals, a mosaic-like chemical structure that researchers previously thought was impossible. The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said Shechtman’s discovery in 1982 fundamentally changed the way chemists look at solid matter. It initially faced strong objections from the scientific community, and even got him kicked out of his research group in the United States.Now another, from AFP via Times of Israel, Sweeteners boost diabetes risk, Israeli study finds:
Cohen claims it's all politics, but prosecutors detailed pervasive efforts by Cohen to hide cash transactions....
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