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	<title>FrontPage Magazine &#187; Asaf Romirowsky</title>
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		<title>Professors for Jew-Hate</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/asaf-romirowsky/professors-for-jew-hate/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=professors-for-jew-hate</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/asaf-romirowsky/professors-for-jew-hate/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Mon, 04 Nov 2013 04:35:06 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Asaf Romirowsky]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[aaup]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Academic Freedom]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Anti-Semitism]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[BDS]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Left]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=209523</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The American Association of University Professors gives extremists a platform to promote racism. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/omar.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-209532" alt="omar" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/omar.jpg" width="258" height="209" /></a><strong>Reprinted from <a href="http://www.romirowsky.com/">Romirowsky.com</a>.</strong></p>
<p>In 1915, John Dewey of Columbia University and Arthur Lovejoy of Johns Hopkins University came together with other educators to establish the American Association of University Professors, an organization designed to preserve academic freedom and professional values.</p>
<p>The association&#8217;s 1915 Declaration of Principles set the guidelines for the foundation of what academic freedom should be stating that, &#8220;the freedom of the academic teacher entail[s] certain correlative obligations &#8230; . The university teacher &#8230; should, if he is fit for his position, be a person of a fair and judicial mind; he should, in dealing with such subjects, set forth justly, without suppression or innuendo, the divergent opinions of other investigators &#8230; and he should, above all, remember that his business is not to provide his students with ready-made conclusions, but to train them to think for themselves.&#8221;</p>
<p>Today, however, academic freedom is incorrectly equated with unrestricted faculty free speech and the &#8220;correlative obligations&#8221; or presenting &#8220;divergent opinions&#8221; have been swept away. As the late Gary Tobin put it, &#8220;Academic freedom has evolved from protection against political influence to job security &#8212; an employment contract rather than an intellectual contract.&#8221;</p>
<p>Nowhere is this more true than in the case of the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement against Israel and Israeli academics.</p>
<p>Here academics have taken the lead in attempting to condemn and restrict access to an entire country through vilification, through lies and exaggeration, and by efforts to restrict the free speech of others.</p>
<p>The latest edition of the Journal of Academic Freedom &#8212; the AAUP&#8217;s flagship journal &#8212; edited by Ashley Dawson, who takes this to fairly Orwellian new heights with an entire issue devoted to the BDS campaign against Israel. This is hardly mitigated by a passing statement from the journal&#8217;s editor that, &#8220;in view of the association&#8217;s longstanding commitment to the free exchange of ideas, we oppose academic boycotts.&#8221;</p>
<p>Dawson is no stranger to such overt pronouncements as someone who personally endorsed the U.S. Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel. All in all, Dawson gives space to six pro-BDS pieces out of the nine pieces for the sake of &#8220;balance.&#8221; Dawson includes one meek piece defending the AAUP&#8217;s position among the seven essays.</p>
<p>The icing on this cake is the contribution of BDS movement founder Omar Barghouti, an individual who has built his entire career on demonization of Israel.</p>
<p>For years, Barghouti has called for Israeli universities and academics to be boycotted but hypocritically claims his studies at an Israeli university are a &#8220;personal matter.&#8221;</p>
<p>But for someone who holds degrees from Israeli universities, Barghouti&#8217;s condemnation of them, and Israeli society as a whole, is total. His argument:</p>
<blockquote><p>&#8220;Unlike the South African academic boycott, the Palestinian call for an academic boycott of Israel is institutional in nature; it specifically targets Israeli academic institutions because of their complicity, to varying degrees, in planning, implementing, justifying, or whitewashing Israel&#8217;s occupation, racial discrimination, and denial of refugee rights. This collusion takes various forms, from systematically providing the military-intelligence establishment with indispensable research &#8212; on demography, geography, hydrology, and psychology, among other disciplines &#8212; that directly benefits the occupation apparatus to tolerating and often rewarding racist speech, theories and &#8220;scientific&#8221; research; institutionalizing discrimination against Palestinian Arab citizens; suppressing Israeli academic research on the Nakba, the catastrophe of dispossession and ethnic cleansing of more than 750,000 Palestinians, and the destruction of more than 400 villages during the creation of Israel; and directly committing acts that contravene international law, such as the construction of campuses or dormitories in the occupied Palestinian territory, as Hebrew University has done, for instance.&#8221;</p></blockquote>
<p>This is vilification at its most total, which is undone by a calm examination of how higher education works in every country. His tone also reflects fairly unhinged hatred; Barghouti is unwilling to list a single attribute of Israel that is tolerable, even his own university education. Anything except total agreement with him about the Arab-Palestinian conflict is automatically whitewash, a denial, institutionalized discrimination and so on.</p>
<p>He ignores the fact &#8212; evident from any Israeli newspaper much less a passing acquaintance with Israeli universities &#8212; that the issues he raises, such as discrimination and &#8220;occupation,&#8221; are constantly discussed. These are among the voices he wishes to be shut out.</p>
<p>The stated aims of the BDS movement are nothing short than the dissolution of Israel and its replacement with a bi-national, majority Palestinian, entity.</p>
<p>That the BDS movement and its supporters, now tacitly endorsed by the AAUP, have been given a platform to single out Israel as absolutely the worst society on Earth is distressing and is nothing less than a &#8220;ready-made conclusion&#8221; of the most extreme sort.</p>
<p>The AAUP should stand up against such polemists; instead it legitimizes them by offering them a platform to promote racism.</p>
<p>We can only imagine the response had the organization published articles calling for Palestinians to be boycotted on the basis of their racist, homophobic and misogynist society, or Syria, because of its murderous totalitarianism, or Turkey for its century-long repression of Kurds and unacknowledged extermination of Armenians.</p>
<p>Such calls would have been rightly condemned as utterly intolerant, overly broad and sweeping, and completely in opposition to a peaceful settlement of disputes.</p>
<p>In the case of Israel, however, such characterizations are acceptable, as are calls for its destruction.</p>
<p>Boycotts don&#8217;t engender peace, especially not in the Middle East. They act as a vehicle to deflect from the real obstacles to peace and the real opportunities, many of which are provided precisely by academia. The AAUP should focus on promoting balanced scholarship regarding the Middle East and not extremist views.</p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>.   </b></p>
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		<item>
		<title>Being Palestinian Means Never Having to Say You’re Sorry</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/asaf-romirowsky/being-palestinian-means-never-having-to-say-you%e2%80%99re-sorry/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=being-palestinian-means-never-having-to-say-you%25e2%2580%2599re-sorry</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/asaf-romirowsky/being-palestinian-means-never-having-to-say-you%e2%80%99re-sorry/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Tue, 08 Jun 2010 04:01:05 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Asaf Romirowsky]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[acts of terrorism]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[basis]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Benjamin Netanyahu]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[country]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[democratic country]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[exchange]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[flotilla]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Gaza]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[halo effect]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[Israel]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[kangaroo courts]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[land]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[minister benjamin netanyahu]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[nuclear bomb]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[nuclear bombs]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Peace]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[peace activists]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[prime minister benjamin]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[resolution]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[right]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[un resolution 242]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[World]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=62278</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[When will the international community demand an apology from Hamas?]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><strong> </strong></p>
<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/hamas1.jpg"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-62365" title="hamas" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/hamas1.jpg" alt="" width="400" height="507" /></a></p>
<p>It is predominately understood that Israel was in the right in her actions during the latest operation against the Gaza flotilla. Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was on the mark when he unequivocally stated that Israel “will never apologize for defending itself.”  The problem is not always being right but also being strategic which is Israel’s biggest challenge.</p>
<p>Consequently, the world was “outraged” the UN was “shocked” and once again we can see how Israel is held to a double standard that no other country in the world is held to. Israel is expected to <em>always </em>behave morally and treat the Palestinians with silk gloves in order not to hurt or offend them in any shape or form. The Palestinians, meanwhile, can do no wrong even when they openly engage in acts of terrorism.</p>
<p>Moreover, it is the hyper-sensitive focus on Israel by the global media outlets that draws attention to every flaw Israel has. Israel by no means is perfect but it is the only democratic country in the region which actually abides by a rule of law. The same freedoms we hold dear as Americans <em>can only be found in Israel</em>. Yet it is Israel that brings the U.N. Security Council together for more commissions and inquires than any other nation and holds anti-Israel kangaroo courts on a regular basis.  The stark contrast relates of course to the real threat – a nuclear Iran, which just a few days ago announced that it now has enough uranium for two nuclear bombs. And yet, somehow it is much easier for the world to focus on the “peace activists” of the flotilla.</p>
<p>The halo effect generated by Israel’s actions against Palestinians spawns the sympathy Palestinians want and yearn for as it depicts them “helpless” and illustrates how Israel is the true obstacle for peace. In fact, this is why the Palestinians and the Arab world at large love to quote UN resolution 242 whenever they have an opportunity. 242 has become the foundation for the land for peace formula drafted after the Six Day War, and a superficial reading seemingly places Palestinian/Arab brokers of peace in a position of strength. For Arabs, this “legal” prerequisite emphasizes the give and take aspect: if Israel valued peace, it would return land; if Arabs wanted land, they would give peace.</p>
<p>The reason Arabs love to quote 242 is that it is a deceptively simple equation; on the one hand it talks about the exchange of land-for-peace with Israel, meaning that there is room to negotiate peace. On the other hand, although we naively believe that it also calls for recognition of Israel as the Jewish state, that is not the case.</p>
<p>In theory they can say they really want peace but in practice it is very far from the truth. The resolution calls for “Withdrawal of Israeli armed forces from territories occupied in the recent conflict.” It deliberately does not call for withdrawal from “all” or “any” because the resolution’s authors knew that such demands were unreasonable. As far as “peace” goes the resolution lays on the bureaucratic boilerplate and calls for “Termination of all claims or states of belligerency and respect for and acknowledgement of the sovereignty, territorial integrity and political independence of every State in the area and their right to live in peace within secure and recognized boundaries free from threats or acts of force.”</p>
<p>The UN Resolution demands that Israel gives up some land in exchange for some, still unspecified, peace. Israel is still waiting. In the context of when the resolution was passed (November 1967) the Arab response was clear. 242 remains the best smokescreen for Palestinians and Arabs, since they say they want peace based on 242 but in the same breath, usually in Arabic, they reassure one another that they are committed to the “3 no’s of Khartum.” And indeed this position has not changed much over the past forty plus years: no peace with Israel, no recognition of Israel, and no negotiations with Israel is still what motivates many Palestinians in their yearning for Israel’s death.</p>
<p>Today, under the Hamas-led Palestinian Authority, “land-for-peace” automatically translates into “land-for-talk” because to most generous Americans and Europeans, talk – not peace – is all that Israel should expect, and possibly deserve, in exchange for territorial concessions. This is the motivation which drove Hizbullah to attack Israel in 2006 and Israel to act against Hamas in Gaza in 2009.</p>
<p>Talk is cheap. Land and lives are expensive. If the Palestinians really want to talk about Resolution 242 as the basis for anything, they should first get their own territories under control, stop firing rockets at Israeli towns, and start creating a decent civil society. Until then Israelis have learned a hard lesson that until the other side stops wanting to wipe Israel off the map, resolutions like 242 really aren’t worth the paper they’re written on and Israel will need to continue combating “peace activists” who work towards violence rather than true peace.</p>
<p><em> </em></p>
<p><em><a href="http://www.romirowsky.com/">Asaf Romirowsky</a> is a Senior Fellow at <a href="http://www.emetonline.org/about.html">EMET</a> and an associate fellow at the </em><em>Middle East</em><em> Forum.</em></p>
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