- FrontPage Magazine - http://www.frontpagemag.com -
Will NY Times Support Jewish Prof Persecuted for Opposing BDS the Way it Supported Prof Who Called for Murder of Israelis?
Posted By Daniel Greenfield On October 16, 2014 @ 9:04 am In The Point | 12 Comments
Somehow I don’t think the New York Times will start clamoring about academic freedom in this case the way that it did for mass murder enthusiast Steven Salaita.
In those tweets, as RealClearPolitics editor Carl Cannon explains, “Salaita reveals himself to be a foul-mouthed fanatic whose antipathy for Israel is so thorough that he calls for the country’s destruction, fantasizes about the mass murder of Jewish settlers [and] blames Jews themselves for anti-Semitism … .”
Ever nasty, Salaita also suggested that a pro-Israel reporter’s story “should have ended at the pointy end of a shiv.”
The New York Times and multiple other media outlets came to the defense of Salaita’s mass murder fantasies. But in this case I think they will go on playing the silent game.
After all it’s a Jewish professor being persecuted for being pro-Israel.
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.”…
It was this stand that led Fordham’s Title IX officer to launch the proceedings. During an emotional meeting convened to discuss the appropriate response to the measure, I stated that should Fordham’s program fail to distance itself from the boycott, I will resign from the program and fight against it until it took a firm stand against bigotry. The program’s director, Michelle McGee, in turn filed a complaint against me with the Title IX office, charging that I threatened to destroy the program. (As if I could? And what does this have to do with Title IX?) This spurious complaint (the meeting’s minutes demonstrated that I did not make such a threat) ushered me into a bruising summer that taught me much about my colleagues, the university, and the price I must be willing to pay for taking on the rising tide of anti-Zionism on American campuses.
Coleman never asked to meet me, and I assumed that the attempt to muzzle my opposition to the boycott died down. In late July, however, I received Coleman’s report in which she cleared me of the charge of religious discrimination. It was the first time that I learned what I was actually accused of doing, so I’m still not sure how opposing anti-Semitism amounts to religious discrimination…
It was a sobering summer. I have had to defend my reputation against baseless, ever-evolving charges, ranging from sex discrimination to religious discrimination. I went through a Kafkaesque process in which I was never told exactly what I supposedly did wrong, nor was I ever shown anything in writing. Eventually I learned that the charge was religious discrimination born of my opposition to anti-Semitism. The implication is that anti-Semitism needs to be tolerated at Fordham, and that those who dare to fight it run afoul of university rules.
BDSers love to play victim even as they engage in constant and ruthless aggression. It’s academic freedom when they lose a job that they didn’t have for spewing hate on Twitter. But it’s safe spaces when they want to muzzle Jewish professors on campus.
Article printed from FrontPage Magazine: http://www.frontpagemag.com
URL to article: http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/will-ny-times-support-jewish-prof-persecuted-for-opposing-bds-the-way-it-supported-prof-who-called-for-murder-of-israelis/
Click here to print.
Copyright © 2009 FrontPage Magazine. All rights reserved.