KPFK: Threats to Academic Freedom
A podcast from KPFK on the threats to academic freedom emanating from the Israel lobby, including comments from Laurie Brand (chair of the Committee on Academic Freedom at the Middle East Studies Association); and a firsthand account of what happened to Desmond Tutu at the University of St. Thomas.
If you have your own blog, it would be a service if someone would type out a transcript of the segment concerning Tutu and post it. Please don't send me transcripts, since a general appeal like this to thousands of people will produce too many responses. But I'll link to the first URL I get with a transcript.
Richard Silverstein in The Guardian on "preemptive censorship" in the US of public comment critical of Israeli policies toward the Palestinians.
Silverstein's Blog is here.
See also Mitchell Plitnick and Cecilie Surasky, "A Disservice to Jews,", which also corrects the disinformation in the Zionist Organization of America's misrepresentation of what Tutu said about the Israeli occupation of the Palestinians.
For more on the smear issue see Suraski here.
A kind reader writes:
'A transcript of the Desmond Tutu speech which caused his invitation to speak to be be rescinded by the University of St. Thomas is available in document format here.
An html version from a Google archive is here.
The Associated Press writeup of the University of St. Thomas incident is online at the International Herald Tribune site here. '
I know about the smear technique myself. When I was being considered for a job at Yale, John Fund of the Wall Street Journal charged that I had called Israel "the most dangerous country in the Middle East." I had never said anything like that. And how would you convince people that the WSJ was just making things up?
Labels: Israel/Palestine
posted by Juan Cole @ 10/10/2007 12:15:00 AM
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3 Comments:
If top presidential candidates use the internet, why don't you guys setup facilities for webinars (Internet seminars) and debate. The Internet can not be silenced.
The people you are complaining to are "on the game" themselves, and letters of complaints give the corrupt US establishment an air of fairness and democracy they do not deserve.
ref : “the Israeli lobby...”
fwiw, an uncommonly rational review of Mearsheimer and Walt's hot topic book, "The Israeli Lobby..." by Daniel Levy can be found at HAARETZ.com :
“Two authors from the elite of American academia... The book has generally elicited three types of response since its release. The first: Ignore it. Controversy, after all, breeds attention, debate and even sales, all of which, for some, are undesirable. Second: Take it seriously and deal with the substance, something this review will do in a moment. But before that, one must note the third type of response: To vilify, delegitimize and discredit the book and its authors...
..."Anti-Jewish bias" (Jeff Robbins, Wall Street Journal); "inspired by the Nuremburg Laws" (Tim Rutten, Los Angeles Times); "a bigoted attack" (Alan Dershowitz) - these are just a few of the Pavlovian responses to the book.”
“Finally, while the right was busy investing in building allies and alliances in the U.S., the left was asleep or intimidated or both. A small number of center-left Israeli politicians display an active interest in events stateside, but very few display sufficient courage and conviction to challenge the self-defeating orthodoxy of the current mainstream Israel lobby. It is an absence sorely felt. Walt and Mearsheimer suggest that "it is time to treat Israel like a normal country." Presumably unintentionally, they echo the classical Zionist goal of creating a normal country. The two are linked. Absent a different discussion with the U.S. and our friends there, Israel is unlikely to become normal. Perhaps this difficult book can help advance that discussion.”
MonsieurGonzo,
I read the article last night and it was excellent. I find that the contributions of the religious Christian right are understated in the " Jewish Lobby" commentaries. Not only that but the "jihad watch" adherents. My concern is that if you look at academic freedom and the ME issue, and global warming, you see some tending. Alternative " scientific" analysis that does not quite meet scientific standards. Smear campaigns, although, the ME academics receive much worse. Same Internet channels, and if you look at adherents, the same base philosophical base. It makes you think that there is something to the neocon argument Levy presents.
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