The failed boycott campaign against Israel

[Valin]

National Post:

Rex Murphy

January 4, 2014

 

 

When university professors, stewards of knowledge for the next generation of thinkers, propose to fence off all contact, all mental commerce, with others of their kind, they lose the right to be called professors. When they selectively embrace a boycott of a single countrys academics and institutions, they reveal themselves as activists. Not professors but propagandists.

 

No scholar with any intellectual integrity would support freezing all contact, or seeking to isolate other scholars and researchers, simply because of their national origin, ethnicity or religion. The very idea of an intellectual boycott is a betrayal of a scholars mission.

 

Such a betrayal is contained in the American Studies Associations recently endorsed resolution targeting Israeli universities, whose text begins as follows: Whereas the American Studies Association is committed to the pursuit of social justice, to the struggle against all forms of racism, including anti-semitism, discrimination, and xenophobia, and to solidarity with aggrieved peoples in the United States and in the world; Whereas the United States plays a significant role in enabling the Israeli occupation of Palestine and the expansion of illegal settlements and the Wall in violation of international law, as well as in supporting the systematic discrimination against Palestinians, which has had documented devastating impact on the overall well-being, the exercise of political and human rights, the freedom of movement, and the educational opportunities of Palestinians

 

 

It goes on like that for several more paragraphs. To summarize, its predictable anti-Israeli boilerplate aimed at the Middle East from the safe confines of Americas collective faculty club.