* This information was passed on to me today in a comment which I inadvertently deleted, but for which I am grateful. I am cross-posting the story on this by my friend Donald Douglas at American Power, who is a professor at Long Beach City College. I invite my lost commenter to add to this.
http://americanpowerblog.blogspot.com/2011/04/ucsd-professors-slam-anti-israel.html
I also read an account in Prospect Journal Blog of UCSD, which has some sort of affiliation with Students for Justice in Palestine. It pointed out that students held several events regarding the revolutions in the Middle East. It thus, criticized the letter, and in the comments section, I found this:
"Look at the departments with which the signatories of the letter are affiliated.Why are there no professors from History, Ethnic Studies, Sociology, Literature, or Communication on that letter? It might be because, for the most part, professors who teach in the social sciences and humanities have a more nuanced and historically grounded perspective on the the kinds of arguments that these student groups are making. It’s shameful that the professors and administrators who published this letter in the Guardian would label these students’ reasoned and informed critiques of Israel (a state, not a religion) as “anti-Semitic.” Shame on them."
To which I added my own (signed) comment.
"Actually, it is because the Humanities on most university campuses are stuffed with far-left professors who hate Israel and try to indoctrinate their students rather than educate them."
(With two typos, damn it!)
I can see the point on both sides. Certainly, many campuses have seen hastily-arranged discussions of the turmoil that has broken out in the Middle East. I doubt that the despotic regimes involved enjoy much support on campus. However, the important point is not only what has specifically been said about these regimes during these events, but what has been said about Israel and the US as well. Without having attended any, I can hardly imagine that the US and Israel did not come in for condemnation as well. That is always....
De rigueur, n'est pas?
The point still begs; why don't the pro-Palestinian supporters in the Muslim Student Association and Students for Justice in Palestine et al, devote more time to the problems within the Arab societies rather than constantly attack Israel?
(Rhetorical question)
4 comments:
Social sciences are, at the least, more a matter of opinion and less a matter of hard empirics. One mole of carbon weighs 12 grams. There is no getting around that, if you want your research to produce a predictable result, useable for military or industrial purposes. Ideology is irrelevant - although the central committee of the USSR did make a foolish attempt to establish a party line on the mechanism of evolutionary biology with their endorsement of Lysenko.
History? Dates and events are hard to bend or deny, but there are so many contexts to put them in, and so many adjectives to employ. A perfectly valid review of Mel Gibson's movie, The Patriot, mentioned all the happy black folk who worked on the plantation owned by the leading character for free as volunteers. But, just because Gibson made a bad movie, doesn't mean the entire American Revolution was useless discourse.
The conflicts between Jews of the Zionist persuasion and various Arabic-speaking demographies over the former British mandate of Palestine are rife for bias, prejudice and hypocrisy, because in essence, the whole conflict shows that two rights make a wrong. This provides plenty of fodder for everyone's propaganda mill.
It is pretty clear that when the MSU at UC Irvine invite people like Malik Ali to speak on the campus, they are interested in demonizing Israel. They aren’t merely being critical of Israel.
By inviting guys like him to speak on the campus, the discussion shifts from what can Muslim and Jewish students do to work together to understand the grievances and towards a peaceful resolution of the conflict to a discussion of the legitimacy of Israel that goes nowhere. It shifts the discussion back to the 1947 partion plan.
Israel exists and it isn’t going anywhere so this goes nowhere.
I do not see the Jewish pro-Israel students behaving in a like way. The president of Anteaters for Israel for the two years before this year (I don’t know who the president is this year) has been very open about his position. He wanted to be friends with the MSU. He promoted dialogue. He supports the two state solution.
Dialogue (and the Olive Tree Initiative) have really worked wonders, haven't they. Had they been effective, there would have been no disruption of Oren's speech, Malik Ali would no longer be invited to UCI. Malik Ali has no interest in diagogue nor a two state solution.
Yes Gary, and by rejecting dialog entirely, you hand a victory to the likes of Malik Ali, again and again. Dialog has to be pressed IN THE FACE OF the fanatics. Otherwise, one fanatic or another is always going to rule.
We don't need to dialog with Ali. We need to dialog with those who might othewise follow him. This is not unlike the mistake Barack Obama made, trying to dialog with Republicans in congress, when his real strength was to dialog over their heads with the constituencies who have been hoodwinked into voting for the lying hypocrites.
(I'm giving the Republicans in congress the benefit of the doubt; otherwise I'd use stronger language).
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