More open and honest than faculty supporting American Studies Association boycott of Israel, but there's no real difference....
Judith Butler helped start an academic boycott war that now is turning against her....
The agenda was stacked with anti-Israel professors. The lunchtime program explicitly was oriented toward organizing anti-Israeli groups on campus, including an appearance by someone from Students for Justice in Palestine.
The conference was controversial not just because of the topic, but the one-sided stacking of the deck by an academic department and the exclusion of non-approved attendees. The event was not even open to all NYU students.
A group of NYU students wrote a letter of protest to NYU's President, which reads in part:
From the beginning, this event has been shrouded in secrecy; Professor Lisa Duggan, the event’s sponsor (in a post that has now been removed) cautioned, “PLEASE DO NOT post or circulate the flyer. We are trying to avoid press, protestors and public attention.”
Diagnosis The 1930s Labor Zionist leader Berl Katznelson asked "Is there another People on Earth so emotionally twisted that they consider everything their nation does despicable and hateful, while every murder, rape, robbery committed by their enemies fill their hearts with admiration and awe?" This is Jew Flu - the virus of Jewish Anti-Semitism, and its Jewish Anti- and Post-Zionist mutations, afflicting a small but inordinately loud minority of Hebrews. Its modern symptoms are a rejection of Israel's identity as a Jewish state and a dismissal of its right to defend itself militarily, while embracing the goals of its nihilistic Arab enemies. Those infected with the virus wildly inflate Israeli sins real or imagined, while excusing or rationalizing Palestinian anti-semitism and outrages against Jews. Those afflicted with Jew Flu often view the notion of Peoplehood as an artifice, which implies a rejection of Jewish national self-determination and acceptance of the 90-year-old Palestinian Arab contention that Jews are not a nation but merely members of a religion, and as such don?t merit a national home of their own.Silber then goes on to describe some historical, sociological and psychological research on the subject, which I have no way of evaluating on medical grounds, but was interesting to read. Regardless of cause, here's his conclusion:
“This weekend’s American Studies Program Annual Conference is an annual academic conference that is organized by graduate students in NYU’s American Studies Program and designed for faculty and students in this and related disciplines,” said Philip Lentz, the university’s director of public affairs. “Given the purpose of the conference and space considerations, it is not open to the general public or the press.”Elder of Ziyon points out:
My talk at Ithaca College in opposition to the academic boycott of Israel...
Tears and screams from anti-Israel BDS movement after stunning defeat....
UF & UMinnesota both passed resolutions expanding ties with Israel & the Bruins defeated divestment. It's a good week @AviMayer @HenMazzig
— Avia Gridi (@AviaGridi) February 26, 2014
Students hug and walk out somberly from Ackerman Grand Ballroom. #UCLAdivest #USAC
— Amanda Schallert (@amandaschallert) February 26, 2014
An important crack in the ASA academic boycott facade....
The Apartheid accusation is false at every level, and was a deliberate propaganda strategy devised at the anti-Semitic Durban NGO conference in 2001.
Here's what the late Congressman Tom Lantos observed at that Durban conference (emphasis added):
Another ring in the Durban circus was the NGO forum, taking place just outside the conference center. Although the NGO proceedings were intended to provide a platform for the wide range of civil society groups interested in the conference’s conciliatory mission, the forum quickly became stacked with Palestinian and fundamentalist Arab groups. Each day, these groups organized anti-Israeli and anti-Semitic rallies around the meetings, attracting thousands. One flyer which was widely distributed showed a photograph of Hitler and the question “What if I had won?” The answer: “There would be NO Israel…” At a press conference held by Jewish NGO’s to discuss their concerns with the direction the conference was taking, an accredited NGO, the Arab Lawyers Union, distributed a booklet filled with anti-Semitic caricatures frighteningly like those seen in the Nazi hate literature printed in the 1930s. Jewish leaders and I who were in Durban were shocked at this blatant display of anti-Semitism. For me, having experienced the horrors of the Holocaust first hand, this was the most sickening and unabashed display of hate for Jews I had seen since the Nazi period. Sadly, but perhaps not surprisingly, the official NGO document that was later adopted by a majority of the 3,000 NGOs in the forum branded Israel a “racist apartheid state” guilty of “genocide” and called for an end to its “racist crimes” against Palestinians…."Israel Apartheid Week" as part of the BDS movement is the direct by-product of the Durban anti-Jewish hatred -- a history few of its participants probably realize. In reality, Israel is nothing like South Africa under Apartheid.
Also don't panic about Israel's economic isolation, as pointed out by Yoram Ettinger (emphasis in original):
1. A record of 5.3 million tourists in Israel in 2013.
2. A record of $83.2BN foreign exchange reserves reflects the strength of Israel's Shekel, at a time when the currencies of the emerging markets plummet.
3. A record of $2.3BN invested in 662 Israeli startups in 2013 (21% above 2012), according to KPMG and IVC (Globes, January 23, 2014).
“He can say anything he wishes, but immoral? Resistance to his immoral policies can never be immoral,” Mr. Barghouti said of Mr. Netanyahu. “The litmus test is are you boycotting a group of people based on their identity, or are you boycotting something — an act, a company, a business — that you disagree with. “We have three reasons,” Mr. Barghouti said, citing the movement’s goals of ending the occupation; ensuring equality for Palestinian citizens of Israel; and promoting the right of return for Palestinian refugees. “End the three reasons and we won’t boycott.”Barghouti, who got a degree from Tel Aviv University is a pretty good example of equality of Israel's minorities. That degree also makes Barghouti a hypocrites as his boycott would affect Tel Aviv University too. Rudoren ignores these inconsistencies. She also remains silent about Barghouti's demand for the right of return. Everyone knows that the point of that "right" is the destruction of Israel. In fact, Barghouti's claim confirms that the the goal of the BDS movement is an assault on Israel's right to exist is correct. Rudoren doesn't appear to grasp this. Oddly, it is columnist Roger Cohen who got things right about BDS. In The B.D.S. Threat, Cohen writes:
No surprise that a Brown U. faculty member who supported the student protesters now supports the American Studies Association Israel boycott...
Yet Princeton will retain its membership in ASA....
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