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Posted by William A. Jacobson on January 15, 2015 10 Comments
The University of Illinois Board of Trustees has just issued a statement that it will not reconsider its decision not to hire controversial anti-Israel activist Steven Salatia. Salaita had a contingent offer of employment, requiring Board approval for the tenured position. That approval was denied in early September, after Salaita's tweets raised questions as to his fitness. An official faculty committee report suggested reconsideration, subject to a fitness evaluation. A second non-official report by five prominent professors rejected reconsideration. The American Association of University Professors is expected to issue a report demanding Salaita's hiring and threatening censure. The Trustees decision effectively preempts the AAUP's expected report. The Board just announced its decision on reconsideration, via Via AP:
University of Illinois trustees say they will not reconsider a September decision to rescind a job offer to a professor over his profane, anti-Israel Twitter messages. The trustees issued a statement Thursday that said the decision was final. A committee of university faculty had recommended that the school reconsider hiring Steven Salaita. Salaita was offered a job teaching Native American Studies at the Urbana-Champaign campus starting last August but the offer was rescinded after he wrote the Twitter messages. Some university donors complained they were anti-Semitic.
http://uofi.uillinois.edu/emailer/newsletter/65730.html The Urbana News-Gazette further reports:

Posted by William A. Jacobson on January 14, 2015 3 Comments
Ronald Reagan's "A Time for Choosing" speech set forth the stark choice facing free societies in the fight against Communism: After the attacks in France and throughout Europe on Jews, often motivated and perpetrated in the name of anti-Zionism, it's no longer possible to sit on the sidelines. It's another time for choosing. Whatever Israel's problems with regard to balancing the fight against terror with preservation of freedom, such problems pale in comparison to what goes on in the rest of the region and most of the world, where balance is not even attempted. We saw it in the intimidation and threats against "journalists" in Gaza during the 2014 summer conflict, where Hamas bullying resulted in refusals to report key facts such as Hamas using schools, hospitals and other civilian infrastructure as rocket firing locations. Some evidence, however, slipped out, particularly after "journalists" left Gaza. That is true also in areas controlled by the Palestinian Authority, where there is no independent journalism except directed at Israel. Israel and Israel alone is under a microscope from hundreds of journalists and Non-Governmental Organizations whose primary job is to wake up every morning and find something wrong that then can be broadcast through Western and Arab media.

Posted by William A. Jacobson on January 10, 2015 1 Comment
In what only can be described as a serious setback for anti-Israel academic boycott activists, the Modern Language Association just voted at its Annual Conference to postpone a boycott resolution vote until 2017. https://twitter.com/roopikarisam/status/554035899953315841 At the 2014 annual meeting a resolution critical of Israel's alleged breach of Palestinian academic freedom barely passed the House of Delegates, but then failed when the resolution was sent to the full membership. There was no boycott resolution to be voted on this year.  Given that even a condemnation of Israel failed last year, hopes to advance the anti-Israel, anti-academic freedom agenda will have to wait for two years. The vote to confirm this delayed timetable was not a surprise. According to one person in the room during discussion of the delay, the boycotters came "off as silly. Especially after events like this weekend." [referring to attacks on Jews in Paris by Islamic terrorists] But pro-boycott faculty formed a working group, led by Stanford Professor David Palumbo-Liu (recently elected to the MLA Executive Board), David Lloyd of UC-Riverside (one of the co-founders of the U.S. boycott movement) and Rebecca Comay of the University of Toronto, who will be organizing for the next two years to push the boycott resolution in 2017.

Posted by William A. Jacobson on January 09, 2015 8 Comments
The attack by radical Islamists at the Paris Hyper Cacher kosher supermarket left four hostages dead, plus one of the gunmen. The Hyper Cacher supermarket attack appears to have been coordinated with the two men who killed 12 at Charlie Hebdo. The specter of widespread anti-Semitism on the streets of Paris is nothing new. It has been fueled not only by centuries-old hatreds, but by the more modern Islamist, "anti-Zionist" and BDS movements whose hatred of Israel is obsessive and dehumanizing. Below are a couple of videos from the assaults on Jewish sections of Paris and a Synagogue during "pro-Palestinian" riots last summer over the Gaza conflict. See also several of my posts (some of the videos in the posts have gone bad):

Posted by Jeffrey Herf on January 06, 2015 1 Comment
[WAJ Intro: University of Maryland Professor Jeffrey Herf helped lead the battle to defeat anti-Israel resolutions at the American Historical Association, as we wrote about on Sunday.  I asked him to submit this Guest Post to recount the events and strategies, in the hope they will inform others facing similar anti-Israel tactics.] --------------- By now readers of this blog probably know that by a vote of 144 to 51 with three abstentions, members of the American Historical Association, at their Business Meeting of annual meeting in New York City on January 4, 2015, decided not to pursue two resolutions that denounced aspects of the policies of the government of Israel. For readers of Legal Insurrection it is important to point out that the defeat of these resolutions was due to procedural issues that were also matters of substance. Details of the events are readily available in the reports by The New York Times, Inside Higher Education, Algemeiner and The Tablet . It is the most decisive defeat that groups supporting resolutions denouncing Israel have suffered since “BDS” (Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions) efforts gathered steam in American universities in recent years. This is a preliminary anatomy of its defeat.

Posted by William A. Jacobson on January 04, 2015 4 Comments
At the American Historical Association annual meeting in New York City, an anti-Israel group called Historians Against the War sought to present two anti-Israel resolutions (here and here). Neither resolution called for a boycott of Israel, because they knew that would not pass (the AHA apparently is not controlled by anti-Israel radical activists, unlike the American Studies Association). So in a strategy we have seen at the Modern Language Association, a resolution condemning alleged Israeli offenses against Palestinian academic freedom was offered. (It failed at MLA, btw.) This is the stepping stone approach -- first get a resolution condemning, then later come back with a boycott resolution. The resolutions were factually inaccurate and engaged in unsubstantiated hyperbole. But the resolution sponsors missed the November 1 deadline for the resolutions to be considered at the business meeting. Only an affirmative vote at the business meeting could send the resolutions to a full membership vote. So the anti-Israel activists sought to have the business meeting rules suspended. That would require at least a 100 person quorum and a two-thirds vote. Based on the Twitter feed, it appears that the motion to suspend the rules met spirited opposition on a variety of grounds, including the lack of good grounds for missing the deadline, the importance of providing adequate time to fact check the resolution, and the merits of the ultimate resolution. The vote at the business meeting was taken just minutes ago.

Posted by William A. Jacobson on January 02, 2015 3 Comments
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....

Posted by William A. Jacobson on December 23, 2014 10 Comments
I have had a Times of Israel column bookmarked since last June. It's a column that spoke to the phenomenon of "progressive" Jews obsessed with proving how much they hate Israel, so much so that hating Israel becomes their every reason for being and their identity. We see that type around campuses, sometimes faculty, sometimes students, sometimes community.  They are the Jews who cannot sleep at night knowing that Sabra hummus -- made in Virginia but partially owned by Pepsi and an Israeli company -- is served in the student dining hall or local supermarket. There is more to it than hummus. It's not about the hummus. Or even the conflict. Now back to that Times of Israel column, Meet the Finklers:
In his acclaimed, Man Booker Prize-winning novel, The Finkler Question, British writer Howard Jacobson named a phenomenon which has become familiar to all of us engaged against the Boycott, Sanctions, and Divestment movement. It is the phenomenon of select Jews speaking out against Israel as “ASHamed Jews,” who seek to distance themselves from Israeli actions against Palestinians and to imagine through their heartfelt public displays that they are participating in the creation of a better, more peaceful, post-occupation world These progressive Jews, in the United States mostly aligned with Jewish Voice for Peace, openly lend themselves to the passage of campus motions to boycott Israel and to efforts in the liberal Protestant churches to enact divestment from companies supplying Israel.... What is the gambit in pressing for boycott and divestment? What do such progressives truly seek? Jacobson wrote knowingly how, for some Jews, Israel is a figure of speech, a pretext for setting loose emotions that may originate somewhere else....

Posted by William A. Jacobson on December 23, 2014 8 Comments
The faculty Committee on Academic Freedom and Tenure (CAFT) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign has issued a Report and recommendations on the refusal of the Board of Trustees to grant tenure to former Virginia Tech Professor Steven Salaita. The Report is being spun by Salaita supporters as a victory, but the details actually should disappoint them and hearten the University Trustees. A full copy of the Report is embedded at the bottom of this post. For one thing, the Committee did not demand "restoration" of Salaita's position, as some of his faculty supporters had expected.  Rather, the Committee, while criticizing the University's conduct, merely recommended formation of another committee of "academic experts" to review the situation. The failure to call for restoration of position was based, in part, on the Committee finding "legitimate concerns questions" [see update] about whether Salaita's anti-Israel (and some say anti-Semitic) tweets reflected on Salaita's professional fitness, competence and care since his scholarship is "almost indistinguishable from a political purpose." That political purpose, of course, is the destruction of Israel. The Committee thus recognizes a reality I have pointed out repeatedly when I discuss academic BDS: The prime movers behind academic BDS have completely blurred any distinction between political advocacy and their professional work; their scholarship and classroom conduct are their political advocacy, and vice versa. What this means, and as the Committee found, notions of academic freedom also have blurred for people like Salaita, who literally wrote the handbook about how faculty should spread academic BDS throughout universities. The result is that anti-Israel, pro-BDS faculty who merge their political advocacy and academic work may not be able to hide behind traditional notions of "academic freedom" to excuse their biased, unprofessional, incompetent and politicized scholarship and conduct. This approach has major implications far beyond the Salaita case. BDS, which itself is anti-academic freedom, may destroy academia before it destroys Israel.

Posted by William A. Jacobson on December 22, 2014 3 Comments
By now most of our readers should be familiar with the anti-Israel Boycott, Divest and Sanctions movement. Scroll through our BDS and American Studies Association tags for a horrifying history of the perversion of academia by obsessive-compulsive Israel (and in some cases, Jew) haters. Recently a UAW affiliate representing graduate student instructors passed a BDS resolution. A paltry 20% of the membership bothered to vote, but as often is the case in these things, the anti-Israel students were more motivated, and the resolution passed. The vote at Berkeley was outsize in favor of BDS (no shock there) and made much of the vote margin. That resolution committed the membership to agitating against Israel in the classrooms, something that violated the U. California rules on classroom conduct. University officials confirmed that position. U California Regents Policy Letter September 8 2014 Dozens of faculty signed a petition in favor of the grad student BDS resolution. A coalition of pro-Israel groups wrote to U.C. officials demanding to know whether the conduct rules also would apply to faculty.

Posted by William A. Jacobson on December 21, 2014 4 Comments
Cary Nelson, Professor Emeritus at the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana, is the Editor of a recent book, The Case Against the Academic Boycotts of Israel. The Case Against Academic Boycotts of Israel cover He also was interviewed on Israeli television recently. He makes some good points, similar to those I have made in many of my speeches and appearances. The faculty Propagandists with Ph.D's are the main problem, they use their leverage over students in the Humanities and Social Sciences to intimidate and control the agenda. Academic BDS is a movement led by evil people, and followed by many more uninformed, misinformed and misguided dupes. Evil can never be ignored. BDS is a pox on academia, and should be treated as such. http://youtu.be/jQOs_lE-YFQ?t=1m1s (Added) I'll use this as a chance to promote my interview with Mark Levin on the topic, in case you missed it:

Posted by William A. Jacobson on December 07, 2014 3 Comments
Hillel is the international organization dedicated to Jewish students on campus and with a pro-Israel policy. Among Hillel's policies is that its space on campus is not open to those who argue for the destruction of Israel or support the anti-Israel Boycott, Divest and Sanctions movement. Hillel does not argue that anti-Israel speakers be barred from campus, just that its specific space and the use of its name not be used to further that anti-Israel agenda. As readers know from the hundreds of posts we have written about the campus BDS movement, there is no shortage of places on campus and sponsoring groups and departments at which anti-Israel messaging takes place.  Hillel often provides the one place on campus at which pro-Israel students can feel at home. Because Hillel provides the home on campus for pro-Israel students, Hillel has come under attack seeking to destroy that role. In the past year or so, some "progressive" Jews at Northeastern liberal arts colleges started an "Open Hillel" movement, refusing to abide by Hillel's pro-Israel guidelines, and demanding that anti-Israel speakers and events be hosted at Hillel. The first group to go "Open Hillel" was at Swarthmore College. The movement held a national conference recently in Boston, at which anti-Israel, pro-boycott (including academic boycott) speakers such as Judith Butler were featured. Open Hillel was viewed by the pro-Israel community as just another attempt to divide and conquer, forcing the most visible pro-Israel group to do what no other private campus group is forced to to -- sponsor speakers and groups hostile to its mission. Much like the viciously anti-Israel "Jewish Voice for Peace," Open Hillel was viewed by the pro-Israel community as a Trojan horse, using a Jewish identity to provide cover for the most vicious anti-Israel (and often anti-Semitic) voices. Now a former Open Hillel insider has blown the whistle on the Open Hillel fraud. Writing in The Times of Israel, Holly Bicerano recounts her experience, Standing athwart lies: Why I left Open Hillel:
Those who lie about themselves are not in a position to judge others.

Posted by William A. Jacobson on November 30, 2014 6 Comments
The anti-Israel movement on campus never sleeps. The latest is that anti-Israel students took over control of the operating council of the United Automobile Workers (UAW) Local 2865, comprised of over 12,000 graduate student employees. They used that control to send to the membership for a vote on December 4 a wide-ranging anti-Israel resolution. What makes this resolution different is that it turns Grad Student union members into activists inside the classroom, calling on them to honor the academic and cultural boycott in their university teaching capacity. This places the union vote far outside any of the other academic boycotts, such as by the American Studies Association, which did not even purport to infringe upon professional responsibilities in the teaching of courses. As in all these efforts, the anti-Israel activists position themselves to control the flow of information to members to filter out contrary viewpoints. Since in the real world few people turn out to vote on such issues other than committed activists, resolutions can pass without a majority of the entire membership agreeing. As reported at Algemeiner:
According to informedgrads.org, a group of union members opposed to the BDS motion, the Joint Council has demonstrated utter contempt for basic democratic procedures. UAW 2865 is, the group says, “already sponsoring BDS and anti-Israel activities without waiting for the vote,” engaging in such activities as attending and endorsing anti-Israel demonstrations, including the violent blockade of Israeli ships docking at the port in Oakland. Additionally, around $50,000 of union money has already been spent on promoting the BDS campaign, prompting informedgrads.org to protest at the  “redirecting of political capital that should be used to push our university administrators to improve our working conditions.” “The UC administration is not required to consider these calls for boycotts and divestment, and they have unequivocally stated that they oppose such actions,” the group adds.
But there are other problems with the resolution. It's almost certainly illegal and violates the UAW's collective bargaining agreement, as announced by the American Center for Law & Justice (ACLJ) on November 24:

Posted by William A. Jacobson on November 29, 2014 5 Comments
We have covered the thinly veiled and sometimes not veiled threatening and violent behavior of anti-Israeli activists on campus so many times, it's hardly possible to sum them up in one post anymore. Just scroll through our BDS Tag. If you read our recent posts about Cornell, you'd know that it can happen anywhere, even on campuses that are not as a whole anti-Israel. Non-student agitators and faculty often are the catalyst for what now euphemistically is called "direct action," the new rallying cry for groups like Students for Justice in Palestine. This video sums up some of what is happening (via Caroline Glick): (Footage courtesy of Crossing the Line by JerusalemU. Go to www.stepupforisrael.com/crossingtheline. The full Crossing the Line film will be released in January 2015) From what I've seen, pro-Israel students are choosing to fight back, not to flee.
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