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Tuesday, January 23, 2018

Stanford Professor Under Fire

Hat tip The College Fix


                                                                                                   David Palumbo-Liu


David Palumbo-Liu is a Stanford University literature professor most noted for being on the A-list of anti-Israel agitators. He regularly speaks on other campuses trashing the state of Israel.

More recently, Palumbo-Liu has come under fire for co-founding (with Purdue Professor Bill Mullen) an organization called Campus Anti-fascist Network, which his critics believe is an attempt to expand Antifa to university campuses. He was recently taken to task on that point when he (unwisely) consented to an interview by the Stanford Review and gave some silly answers in his defense. Now conservative students at Stanford are stating he should resign.


http://www.thecollegefix.com/post/41222/

"He also tackles the Review labeling him as a leader of the Antifa movement, which he says has no leader because that wouldn’t make sense in an anarchist group, and voices his discontent with the Review comparing his organization to Antifa just because they share very similar names."

First of all, the Occupy movement was anarchist and they had organization. The Occupy LA group was headed by Jim Lafferty of the Marxist National Lawyers Guild, for example.

Secondly, it is disingenuous for Palumbo-Liu to claim as some kind of coincidence the use of the term, "anti-fascist" when everyone knows the term has been expropriated by Antifa, an odd contradiction in terms in itself.

This is a man who has a lot of difficulty in defending his positions when challenged. I recall when he came to UC Irvine in January 2016. At that time, he was part of a two-day seminar featuring a menagerie of several other clowns. On this occasion, he stated that the State Department definition of anti-semitism included any criticism of Israel, a highly misleading statement in itself. When angrily confronted by a Jewish UCI professor (in my presence) with his "demonstrably false" statement, he turned tail and darted out of the room like a chicken running from the axe.

Palumbo-Liu should stick to his academic field, which is literature. He doesn't seem to know much about anything else.

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