Scholars for Peace in the Middle East Newsletter

I am cross-posting a news letter from Scholars for Peace in the Middle East, an organization of academics who support Israel and desire a peaceful settlement in the Middle East. It is also an organization I belong to. The letter gives an update on the past year, which the author, Executive Director Sam Edelman describes as "awful" in terms of Western lack of support for Israel as well as disturbing trends on North American university campuses. (What else is new?)
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Dear SPME Faculty Forum Subscriber:

Your colleagues, students and Israel need your help.

From where we sit as faculty members, last academic year was awful.

Anti-Israel violence erupted on campuses in Canada, the US, Europe, and Latin America; boycott initiatives sprung up in California, New York, Canada and Great Britain; and anti-Semitic and anti-Israeli diatribes were sponsored by Middle East Studies departments from UCLA to Columbia to York and Concordia Universities.

Accusations that Israel is a genocide state, was involved in apartheid and was illegitimate were hurled at UC Irvine, images of the Holocaust juxtaposed with images of Israeli soldiers were sent out by a sociology professor at UC Santa Barbara, an Israeli consul general was hounded off the stage by anti-Israel protestors at San Jose State, and Carleton University employed an alleged synagogue bomber. All of this was going one while in the UK there were continued calls for boycotts of Israeli academics and academic institution with a 'silent' boycott. All that happened during the spring semester alone. As the fall semester begins we have already confronted the issue of calls for TIAA-CREF to divest from Israel.

While this may seem overwhelming, Scholars for Peace in the Middle East (SPME) has been at the forefront mobilizing faculty to counter all of these events in an increasingly impacting way while moving forward our own agenda of bringing fair and balanced discussion on to campuses globally with regard to Israel and the Middle East conflict.

Since February we have been involved in the resolution of the Hampshire College anti-Israel divestiture problem and are building a strong presence on that campus with a new SPME chapter being formed. We have been working hard with our Canadian chapters and other organizations to stop the boycott effort in Canada and to end the violence such as we witnessed at York and Concordia Universities. We are leading the way to stop boycott proposals in California and in Great Britain. We worked closely with our chapter at San Jose State and got the president of the university to apologize to the Israeli consul general and find ways to stop off-campus agitators from infringing on speakers' freedom of speech. And we filed briefs with the academic senate of UC Santa Barbara in the case of the sociology professor.

But we are not just reacting; we are also taking initiative:

From Nov 8-10, 2009, we are holding an international academic conference on Iran with published proceedings entitled, "The Islamic Republic of Iran: Multidisciplinary Analyses of Its Theocracy, Nationalism, and Assertion of Power in Cleveland, under the auspices of Case Western Reserve University at the Cleveland Marriott.

We created a legal task force under the direction of Ken Marcus, a new board member, who will begin to look for legal remedies to issues on campus.

New chapters are opening in California, Texas, Philadelphia, New York, and Great Britain.

We co-sponsored and participated in the Association of Jewish Lawyers and Jurists Counter Durban II conference held at the Law School of Fordham University.

We are working with colleagues in ASME, CAFI, the UK StopTheBoycott, the European StopTheBomb Movement (dealing with Iran) and CIRJ and will have a presence at the Global Forum to Combat Anti-Semitism in Jerusalem

Just recently we led a major successful effort of faculty to voice opposition for calls for divestiture from Israeli investments in TIAA-CREF, the largest retirement program for academics in North America.

All of this has been done on a shoestring budget of less than $180,000. We need your help. So much more needs to be done but we cannot take on any more efforts without your help. You already made a significant commitment when you signed our petitions and joined the SPME Faculty Forum subscribers list. Many of you have gone even further and actively participate in SPME events on your campus.

Now we are asking for your monetary support. We must fund the legal task force, provide local campuses with cash to run programs and events, support our publications and conferences, send faculty to Israel for summer study trips, and bring you together to meet each other and discuss ways to organize more effectively on campus.

With your money we can advance our movement and change the face of campus discourse. We have connected with over 44,000 faculty advocates for Israel and our subscriber network numbers 28,000 academics, but that number is only a force if translated into action. Please act and act now by contributing immediately to SPME so that we can jump into the academic year 2009-2010 with strength --the strength to move forward on campuses across the world with a positive and balanced approach.

You may make your donation to SPME at

http://www.spme.net/donation.html.

You may send your contributions to SPME c/o Susquehanna Institute, 624 Sandra Avenue, Harrisburg, PA 17109 USA.

Donations at $75.00 or above will get a free year's subscription to the Journal, Azure. For larger donations we will soon have a chart of the gifts at our donation web site.

May peace be with you.

Respectfully yours,

Dr. Sam Edelman Executive Director, SPME

Visit Scholars For Peace in the Middle East website http://spme.net