{"id":72330,"date":"2019-08-12T17:00:44","date_gmt":"2019-08-12T15:00:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/?p=72330"},"modified":"2019-08-08T14:16:52","modified_gmt":"2019-08-08T12:16:52","slug":"12-00-38","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/?p=72330","title":{"rendered":"Boycott of Israel During \u2018Academic Freedom\u2019 Lecture in South Africa"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>Anti-Zionist Former Academic Ditched by US University Urges Boycott of Israel During \u2018Academic Freedom\u2019 Lecture in South Africa<\/a><\/strong><\/span><\/h5>\n

Ben Cohen<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

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The main plaza at the University of Cape Town in South Africa. Photo: Reuters \/ Mike Hutchings.<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

An American anti-Zionist academic who lost a tenured university position over his graphically-antisemitic outbursts on Twitter surfaced at the University of Cape Town (UCT) in South Africa on Wednesday, where he delivered a fierce attack on the \u201ccorporate university\u201d and depicted Israel as the supine tool of an international \u201cruling class.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Steven Salaita \u2014 whose inflammatory comments on social media during Israel\u2019s Operation Protective Edge in Gaza in 2014 led to the\u00a0University of Illinois-Urbana Champaign (UIUC)\u00a0revoking a tenured job offer<\/strong><\/span><\/a>\u00a0it had made to him \u2014 delivered the 2019 T.B. Davie Memorial Academic Freedom lecture on what he called \u201cthe inhumanity of academic freedom.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Deploying a mixture of simplified Marxist economics with progressive identity politics, Salaita told the audience in Cape Town that academic freedom meant little in an \u201ceconomy structured around obedience.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Assailing the concept of \u201cacademic freedom\u201d as a ruse that distracted from the cause of genuine social freedom, Salaita insisted that Israel was a major beneficiary of the \u201cstructural forces, often unseen, always beneficial to an elite\u201d who \u201cdetermine what gets heard,\u201d according to a summary of his remarks tweeted by the Palestine Solidarity Forum at UCT.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cWhy does Israel, such a small country, enjoy such promi<\/span>nence on campuses?\u201d Salaita asked. \u201cBecause Israel humors the ruling class.\u201d<\/p>\n

Salaita praised South Africa as the \u201cglobal moral leader in the Palestinian people\u2019s struggle.\u201d He also expressed strong support for the\u00a0campaign<\/strong><\/span><\/a>\u00a0at UCT for an academic boycott of Israel, arguing creatively that \u201cwhen the\u00a0UCT Senate passed a motion against Israeli universities violating human rights, there was a flurry of discontent. Most of them cited academic freedom, and exercised their power to shut down the motion.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Therefore, opponents of an academic boycott of Israel \u201cthemselves, in so doing, violate academic freedom,\u201d Salaita claimed.<\/span><\/p>\n

By the standards of Salaita\u2019s previous outpourings, Wednesday\u2019s lecture in South Africa was comparatively restrained. In his 2014 tweets \u2014 posted when he was a professor of English at Virginia Tech \u2014 Salaita displayed a disturbing affinity for terrorist violence, declaring, \u201cYou may be too refined to say it, but I\u2019m not: I wish all the f***ing West Bank settlers would go missing,\u201d after Hamas operatives kidnapped three Jewish teenagers from a Gush Etzion hitchhiking post and murdered them.<\/span><\/p>\n

Other hyperbolic tweets from Salaita included the claim that there was a \u201csexual\u2026Zionist pleasure w\/ #Israel\u2019s aggression,\u201d and that Zionism had transformed antisemitism from \u201csomething horrible into something honorable since 1948,\u201d the year of Israel\u2019s creation.<\/span><\/p>\n

Salaita\u2019s presence in South Africa this week did not pass without criticism. In an article for local website\u00a0PoliticsWeb\u00a0<\/em>published on Monday, South African scholar David Benatar questioned whether the invitation to Salaita would have been extended had his slurs against Jews been aimed at another minority group.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cConsider the case of an American academic whose tweets include the following,\u201d Prof. Benatar\u00a0wrote<\/strong><\/span><\/a>. \u201c\u2018You may be too refined to say it, but I\u2019m not: I wish all the f***ing Mexicans would go missing\u2026\u2019 \u2018African nationalists in South Africa: transforming racism from something horrible into something honorable since 1994.’\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Wrote Benatar: \u201cThe UCT Academic Freedom Committee; has invited Dr Steven Salaita to deliver the 2019 Academic Freedom lecture named in memory of Dr Thomas Benjamin Davie, former UCT Principal who fought the imposition of Apartheid on UCT in the 1950s\u2026[whatever he says]\u00a0no matter how vile, he has a right to say it and I would oppose any call for him to be disinvited, heckled, or otherwise silenced.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Benatar added that he was \u201cnot aware of any such calls.\u201d Still, he continued, it did not follow that Salaita \u201cwas a fitting invitee to deliver an academic freedom lecture in memory of Dr Davie, or that anybody should go listen to him.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

A separate online\u00a0petition<\/a><\/strong><\/span>\u00a0addressed to UCT urged the university authorities to organize \u201calternative programming to ensure that opposing views are heard. Salaita\u2019s lecture can be used as a teachable moment to educate the community about the consequences of following his advice.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

The petition, which gathered over 60,000 signatures, noted: \u201cIt is particularly critical to do so because Cape Town is presently considering a proposal to support an academic boycott of Israeli universities. It would be unwise and unprofessional to make that decision without a full airing of competing views.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Written by Prof. Cary Nelson \u2014 a former head of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) \u2014 the petition also underlined that Salaita\u2019s anti-Zionism had \u201cled him to cross a particularly dangerous line into anti-Semitism: he urged that Zionists be cast out of progressive organizations and campaigns.\u00a0The effect on a campus or community would be abhorrent.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Nelson asserted that there was \u201cmore than one painful irony at stake in selecting Salaita as a spokesperson for academic freedom.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Salaita\u2019s \u201clong term support for an academic boycott of Israeli universities puts him in conflict with the fundamental values that define the academy, foremost among those being the principle that faculty members worldwide be free to communicate their research and analysis with one another without restraint or inhibition,\u201d Nelson wrote.<\/span><\/p>\n

Jewish organizations in South Africa also leveled criticism at UCT for its invitation to Salaita.<\/span><\/p>\n

In a statement emailed to\u00a0The Algemeiner<\/em>, the head of the South African Zionist Federation charged that UCT\u2019s Academic Freedom Committee \u2014 which hosts the annual lecture \u2014 had \u201cnow simply become a vehicle to steamroll a boycott of Israeli academia at the expense of UCT\u2019s reputation and international standing.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

The committee had \u201cweaponized the concept of academic freedom in order to bash the one and only Jewish State,\u201d the federation\u2019s national chairman, Rowan Polovin, wrote.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cWe call on the University of Cape Town to disband the current committee and demonstrate its commitment to academic freedom at the University,\u201d Polovin concluded.<\/span><\/p>\n

After the University of Illinois-Urbana Champaign (UIUC) rescinded the tenured job offer\u00a0made to him in 2014, Salaita was subsequently hired by the American University of Beirut in Lebanon. That institution decided not to renew his contract after he taught there for one academic year.<\/span><\/p>\n

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Anti-Zionist Former Academic Ditched by US University Urges Boycott of Israel During \u2018Academic Freedom\u2019 Lecture in South Africa Ben Cohen The main plaza at the University of Cape Town in South Africa. Photo: Reuters \/ Mike Hutchings. An American anti-Zionist academic who lost a tenured university position over his graphically-antisemitic outbursts on Twitter surfaced at […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[3],"tags":[26,24],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/72330"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=72330"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/72330\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":72349,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/72330\/revisions\/72349"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=72330"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=72330"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=72330"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}