At Cal State Northridge the Activists Don't Give up

I have recently posted on the effort by some professors and students at California State University at Northridge to stop a program for students to study in Israel. Prof. David Klein has gathered a bunch of activists with time on their hands to sign a new letter to CSU Chancellor Charles Reed after Reed announced the Israel study program will continue.

Below is a letter from Professor Tammi Rossman-Benjamin of UC Santa Cruz and the AMCHA Initiative asking for support to counter the anti-Israel activists' effort to pressure Reed. I have signed the letter and urge my readers to do the same. It is time to stand up to the bullies among university faculty and students.
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"Dear Friends,

We need your help.In response to our letter to California State University Chancellor Charles Reed, urging him to remove Professor David Klein's anti-Semitic web pages from the CSU Northridge server, the U.S. Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (USACBI) has initiated their OWN petition to Chancellor Reed, urging him to protect Klein's "academic freedom" to post web pages advocating the boycott of Israel and the termination of the CSU Israel Abroad program. USACBI has put out the following call to their supporters:

"The US Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel urges all supporters of Palestinian rights, the BDS movement, and academic freedom not only to sign this petition, but also to build upon David's work, by starting campaigns to educate about the reality of Study Abroad in Israel and holding events and activities on academic and cultural boycott on March 30, 2012 at their own colleges and universities."

The USACBI petition has collected over 900 signatures. Although we have collected about 1,700 signatures, we would like many more before submitting it to Chancellor Reed in the coming week.

We believe the battle over Klein's web pages is an enormously important one, with extremely serious implications. If Klein and USACBI prevail, faculty on all 23 CSU campuses will have the green light to freely use tax-payer funded university resources to promote their campaign to harm Israel and the Jewish people, and nothing can be done to stop them.

Please help us by circulating the following URL on your blog, email list, Facebook page, etc., and encouraging as many people as you can to sign and circulate the AMCHA Initiative petition:

http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/letter_to_csu_chancellor


Many thanks,

Tammi"
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Below is what Discover the Networks has to say about this organization called USACBI.

http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/groupProfile.asp?grpid=7710

As you can see, USACBI is a who's who of academic quacks including the recently-retired Sondra Hale of UCLA, of whom I have previously written. (Did you see Bill Ayres' name?)


Mr Klein, of course, is entitled to voice his opposition to Israel from any soapbox he chooses. The question is whether he should be putting up all his propaganda on a university server. When that happens, it appears that the university is putting its imprimatur on whatever the professor says. In checking, I note that this group has the below URL for their petition against Israel

http://www.csun.edu/~vcmth00m/boycott.html


Please note that"csun" stands for California State University Northridge. The above propaganda page is on a CSUN site. Would some infer that this page reflects the official position of CSUN? In contrast, my humble blog is not located on a UC-Irvine server. I use a private server (Blogspot). I do not try to give the impression that my views reflect UC Irvine's position.


Far from it.