Hat tip American Thinker And Campus Watch
In the wake of the University of Illinois' withdrawal of a faculty hire to Steven Salaita, his academic colleagues who are active in anti-Israel activism on campus are complaining that their right of free expression is being threatened by those evil conservatives and Zionists.
http://www.campus-watch.org/article/id/13987
First of all, the basic claim is hogwash. It is the anti-Israel lobby that rules the Middle East studies departments and controls the discourse on campus. Pro-Israel speakers run the risk of having their events, few as they are, disrupted. Witness the 2010 appearance of Michael Oren, the then Israeli ambassador to the US At UC Irvine. Jewish and pro-Israel students are routinely mocked in classes by their professors and are subject to intimidation by pro-Palestinian students who respect only their own speech and not that of opposing voices.
Mark LeVine, who is mentioned in the above article, should know better. A few years back he brought a spokesman for the Muslim Brotherhood to his class, a man named Ibrahim El Hudaiby, who told the students one lie after another about his organization, one of the lies being that the MB had no affiliations in the US. When I confronted him with the seized document that was introduced in the Holy Land trial in Dallas, the so-called letter of understanding to the "North American brothers", he denied it. He also repeated several lies in subsequent e-mails to me about "moderates" like Yusuf Al Qaradawi.
http://garyfouse.blogspot.mx/2008/10/muslim-brotherhood-speaker-appears-at.html
These academics should stop shedding tears. They are hardly qualified to be advocates for free speech.
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If the University apprehends that a candidate will spend more of his time on campus exercising his right of free speech than teaching the curriculum he is hired to teach, he is probably the wrong candidate for the job.
I remember many decades ago signing up for an introductory economics course. I was expecting Paul Samuelson, maybe a bit of Milton Friedman. As it happened, the instructor was a one-year hire who began by saying she didn't believe in the capitalist system.
I myself was highly sympathetic to a Marxist point of view, but I didn't register for this course to learn Marxism. There were other courses in the syllabus for which the Marx-Engels Reader was a suitable textbook, and I took some of them. When I registered for a basic introduction to mainstream economics, that's what I expected to get.
Incidentally, if a professor who has done a thorough and effective job of teaching course material is denied tenure because the members of a faculty committee don't like the speech he made during Hate Israel Week, then it would be time to raise the cry that free speech is threatened.
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