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Ben Gurion University

Ben Gurion University - Jerusalem Post Readers Respond to David Newman's (Dean of Social Sciences) Expected Honor

The brainless scarecrow got a diploma, the heartless tin man got a citation for caring, the cowardly lion got a commendation for courage, and the anti-Israel anti-democratic David Newman...... [talkback "hitzhaki (signed in using yahoo)"]

For more details and to see the full original article, go here

 

Zippergate at Ben Gurion University
BGU President Rivka Carmi Investigates Critic's Forgotten Unzipped Zipper

Carmi trumps up insignificant faux pas into a sexual harassment investigation. She probes unzipped zipper but not much else; ignoring far-leftist faculty members when they issue calls for murder, call for Israel to be annihilated, or cheer on terrorist atrocities against Jews. Legitimate line of investigation or an effort to harass her critic?

Professor David [longtime critic of Carmi and of the politicization and radical indoctrination that has dominated the BGU campus under her reign of error] one day received an email message out of the blue from one of President Rivka Carmi's underlings, saying that he was under investigation for "sexual harassment." …

Israeli universities claim to take sexual harassment seriously, at least when non-leftist faculty are involved. Leftist faculty are another matter. It took years for the Hebrew University to take disciplinary action against the far-leftist professor of sociology Eyal Ben Ari after evidence was presented that he had been raping his own students…

The plaintiff was not a student at all but a middle-aged divorced female departmental engineer in his school... And the basis of her complaint to the authorities was that the good professor had entered her office after he had used the gent's and, Oh the Humanity, he had forgotten to zip up… A forgotten zip code.

BGU's Prez Carmi ordered a commission of investigation more than a year after the "incident" took place. Prof. David insisted it was part of Carmi's campaign of harassment against faculty members who dare to criticize her...

So the leftist Ben Gurion University president who refuses to take action against her own far-leftist faculty members when they issue calls for murder or when they align themselves with neo-nazis and call for Israel to be annihilated or when they cheer on terrorist atrocities against Jews has suddenly discovered her inner Amazon. She has launched a merciless campaign against zippers

For more details and to see the full original article, go here

 

Ben Gurion University - Defeatist Lev Grinberg (Dept of Sociology) Promotes Capitulation to Hamas' Demands as a Means to Stop Gaza Terror

The fundamental problem with Israel is that it is able to think only in terms of force… At best, the problem is identified in time, which leads to negotiations. But usually it takes a strong blow to pave the way to negotiations, or simply to run away.

Israel was willing to negotiate with Egypt only after the 1973 war, which was a military victory but a political defeat. The 1982 Lebanon war was both a political and a military defeat, eventually leading Israel to recognize the Palestinians in the early 1990s, following the First Intifada, when the Chief of Staff declared there was no military but only political solution. Only then did the politicians get the message and begin negotiations.

Operation Pillar of Cloud reveals that Hamas gains the upper hand in any situation, even if an unconditional ceasefire agreement is signed, because it has survived the Israeli attack and will be able to continue arming itself for the next campaign. It is therefore the only partner for preventing violence.

For more details and to see the full original article, go here

 

Ben Gurion University - David Newman (Dean of Social Sciences), who set up a university department in which no non-leftist opinion may be expressed, complains that the Israeli government is "McCarthyist" and Suppresses Pluralism

Newman bemoans the fall of the Left, pines for the periods of Mapai hegemony, and supports the right those who participate in attacks on Israeli soldiers to also participate in the determining the laws of the country.

Leading Israeli government figures, not least former foreign minister Avigdor Liberman and Education Minister Gidon Sa'ar, have demonstrated, time after time, that they do not understand the basic principles of what a true democracy is about. In his attempt to shut down an academic department at a university, Sa'ar has been exposed as an enemy of freedom of speech…

In their boycotting of leading Israeli philosopher Rivka Feldhai, preventing her from taking part in the meeting between Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, German Chancellor Angela Merkel and a group of leading Israeli and German scientists, the government has demonstrated to the world that it does not understand the distinction between legitimate debate and criticism of government policies, and the dangers of a 2012 version of McCarthyism, where dissenting voices are targeted and threatened, or prevented from being heard in important international meetings and conferences.

It is 35 years since the first right-wing government, under Menachem Begin, came to power. Begin and his government set about altering the previous ideological and institutional hegemonies of the Left, which had been controlled by the Mapai party ever since the establishment of the state. During the ensuing 35 years, there have been more right-wing governments than left-wing ones, but this has not prevented these political leaders from continuing to accuse the newspapers, the TV, the universities and the courts of being controlled by the Left, and thus justifying their continued attempts to target as many as possible as they impose their own version of contemporary newspeak.

This oft-repeated mantra flies in the face of reality as one looks at the composition of such bodies as the media agencies (the right-wing Makor Rishon and Israel HaYom instead of the left-wing Davar and Al-Hamishmar), the politicized Council of Higher Education (which under Gidon Sa'ar has become a right-wing watchdog of the country's universities) and increased political intervention in the appointment of High Court judges. And yet they continue to target any form of dissenting opinion as though they, the country's leaders and government, still belong to a minority who continue to be disenfranchised, despite their gradual takeover of the country's institutions in a way unsurpassed even during the periods of Mapai hegemony.

One small glimmer of hope for Israel's democracy in the coming year was Sunday's High Court decision to allow MK Haneen Zoabi to contend in the forthcoming elections, after her candidacy was vetoed by the right-wing-dominated election committee.

The High Court, even with its political appointees under the Netanyahu administration, has sent a clear message to the government about the inherent dangers in the continued erosion of Israel's democratic values. It is to be hoped that this message will not be lost on the next Israeli government which is likely to be even more right-wing than the outgoing administration.

For more details and to see the full original article, go here

 

Ben Gurion University - Yonatan Mendel (Dept of Political Science) Asks a Stupid Question

Acting as a reporter for Walla News, Mendel utilizes his ultra-leftist powers to deem himself more knowledgeable about Iran than a panel of experts on the Iranian Conflict.

The crowd applauded. It isn't every day that Israelis and their American supporters get to hear that they have nothing to do with the instability of the region. The US invasion of Iraq? Israel's forty-year occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip? Israel's continual refusal to reply to the Syrians' proposals for negotiations? All of these are part of the past. Fortunately, a new demon had been found to take everybody's sins on himself: Ahmadinejad.

The professor returned to his seat. I held my pen tight, as if it was my last friend on earth. After a few seconds I started breathing. The crowd was still applauding. I couldn't understand why such a distinguished professor was not willing to lift the fog over Iran by supplying even the most basic facts. Why didn't he mention that Ahmadinejad has no control over Iran's nuclear programme, or its army, or any of its security forces, or any of its strategic plans; and that even if he was both stupid and crazy he would still be unable to make these kinds of decision? Why did Lewis, an expert on the Middle East, not find it appropriate to mention that power over Iran lies entirely in the hands of the supreme leader Ali Khamenei? Was it because such an explanation might put paid to the unity of the panel or stand in the way of the audience's notion that a pre-emptive attack was needed? We wanted a war so much.

I waited a few seconds and said: 'My name is Yoni Mendel and I am from Walla News Israel. I would like to ask Mr Woolsey a question, because it deals with US foreign policy. The four of you represent the same point of view. But there are also other views. Professor David Menashri, the head of the Tel Aviv Iranian Studies Department, and Ephraim Halevy, the former head of Mossad, have argued on various occasions that a dialogue with Iran, or even a secret negotiation channel with the US, could be the solution to the crisis… Well, the question is: don't you think that American policy is not helping to halt the Iranian nuclear programme, but contributes to the exact opposite?'

There was giggling around me. Woolsey didn't hesitate. 'I think that's nonsense,' he said. The crowd applauded: an easy knockout. … [H]e concluded, 'I don't believe that anybody who knows anything about Iran, frankly, believes that serious negotiations are possible.'


I phoned my boss and shamefully reported that among a pro-war audience with pro-war experts in a pro-war country I had asked a stupid question. Rottem told me not to worry too much. I was cheered to think I hadn't lost my job.

The worst of it is that – among the audience, the media, the participants, the politicians, the academics – almost no one felt that something or someone was absent… How can an audience go on clapping their hands at a discussion that is discussion-free? On the eve of a war with Iran, a war with unknown consequences, Israelis refuse even to consider an option that does not involve violence. A country that has lived by the sword refuses to question it, even when its own future is at risk.

For more details and to see the full original article, go here

 

Ben Gurion University - Yonatan Mendel (Dept of Political Science) gets turned while in England

While a PhD student at Cambridge, Mendel's ultra-leftist heart bleeds during Operation Cast Lead, however is hard pressed to find any time to write about the suffering of the children in Sderot.

Since I was a soldier myself ten years ago, I worry I might be called up as a reservist. If I were to refuse now, when Israel is at war, I would be sent to prison. But still, I tell myself, that would be so much easier than being part of what my country is doing…

[B]ear in mind that in Israel every man is a soldier, either in uniform or in reserve, there is no avoiding the conclusion that there are great pressures for it to act as a military society. Not acting is damaging to the IDF's status, budget, masculinity, power and happiness, and not only to the IDF's. This could explain why in Israel the military option is almost never considered second best. It is always the first choice.

I have problems speaking to my closest friends and family these days, because I can no longer bear to hear the security establishment's propaganda coming from their mouths. I cannot bear to hear people justifying the deaths of more than 200 children killed by Israeli soldiers. There is no justification for that, and it's wrong to try to find one. Usually I feel part of society in Israel. I feel that I am on one side of the political map and other people are on the opposite side. But over the last few days, I feel that I am not part of this society any more. I do not call friends who support the war, and they do not call me. The same with my family. It is a hard thing for me to write, but this is how it is.

For more details and to see the full original article, go here

 

Letter Cheering the Imprisoned "Hunger Striking" Arab Terrorist Circulated on the Israel Social Science Chat Forum of Israeli Professors

Anti-Israel "activist," Noam Hoffstater (Ben Gurion University, Israeli Center for Third-Sector) posted the letter below (in Hebrew) endorsing the imprisoned "hunger striking" Arab terrorist Samar Issawi. The letter was distributed on the 'Israeli Social Science Chat List' to the great applause of many professors on the list.

When Roni Shtarkshall from the Hebrew U expressed outrage that it had been posted on an Israeli academic list, he was attacked in numerous emails by the usual tenured Left for expressing his "anti-democratic" objections, including Gal Levy, Julia Chaitin (from Sapir College), and Iris Agnon (who runs the censored leftist-only "public education" forum at Ben Gurion University).

For more details and to see the full original article, go here

 

Ben Gurion University - Yonatan Mendel (Dept of Political Science) Promotes Nakba Awareness

While a PhD student at Cambridge, Mendel also slandered Israeli Democracy and the IDF in unfounded dismissing statements typical of the Ultra-Leftist's Demonization, Double-Standard, and Delegitimization campaigns of Israel.

Tel Aviv University showed the power of its imagination when, in May 2008, the student council decided to hold the fun and enjoyable annual Day of the Student on the exact day that Palestinians commemorate the Naqba. The excuse given by the student council was that 'we were not told of the problematic timing of the celebrations.' This is arguably even more dangerous than saying that it was done on purpose: it makes it plain that for the Jews in the country, even the educated and 'liberal' citizens of Tel Aviv, the Palestinian people are invisible. The bill that would make it illegal for Israeli Jews and Palestinian citizens of Israel to commemorate the Naqba was initially approved by the Ministerial Committee for Legislation in May this year. I don't know if the bill will become law, but the Naqba undoubtedly took place; it is not a day of celebration for many people. A recognition of the Naqba, taking responsibility for the fate of the 700,000 Palestinians who escaped or were expelled in 1947-48, a willingness to try and compensate these refugees, now numbering several million: these gestures, even if symbolic, even if too late, would mean the beginning of the end of Israeli denial. But soon, the bill suggests, anyone who dares to express their feelings on this day will be imprisoned, in the 'only democracy in the Middle East'.

The claim to be the 'only democracy', as well as to have 'the most moral army in the world': these phrases are great examples of the Israeli fantasising project... This 'liberal' terminology acts like a sleeping pill for a society that wishes to dream about being liberal and democratic. Maybe it is time for someone to wake it up.

For more details and to see the full original article, go here

 

Ben Gurion University - "Rabbi" Yonatan Mendel (Dept of Political Science) Complains how Zionism "Hijacked" Judaism

While a PhD student at Cambridge, Mendel surmised that Israel ignore basic tenets of Judaism - moral basis for State policy - in order to satisfy his ultra-Leftist reflexes. Mendel also alludes to Zionism being a racist movement, however, conveniently ignores that the phrases 'Hebrew labour' and 'Hebrew market' were born in a time when the Jews of the Ghettos were denied the right to own land and thus could not be farmers.

This attitude enabled the founders of Zionism and the majority of Israelis today to pull out of the sea of Jewish knowledge religious precepts that support their agenda. Like skilful pearl divers, Israeli society has brought up to the surface only those glowing stones which have Zionist purposes, and kept those which do not (including those in which God himself is mentioned) deep at the bottom of the ocean. Consider some of the more popular Israeli-Jewish 'moral validations' of state policy. These validations, drawn exclusively from Jewish tradition and texts, have become part of the political consensus, and secure the place of religion not just in the 'secular' political debate but in wider Israeli-Jewish society.

Ha-Ba le-Horgekha Hashkem le-Horgo is a teaching of increasing popularity among Israelis. Taken from the Babylonian Talmud, Sanhedrin 72:1, its most precise translation is: 'If someone comes to kill you, get up early to kill him first.' It seems that every online newspaper Comment section will include this sentence when discussing Israeli aggression: the Gaza offensive? 'Kill him first'. The Second Lebanon War? 'Kill him first' again. A Google search for the expression 'kill him first' and 'flotilla' yields more than 4,200 Hebrew results, confirming the centrality of this narrative. This convenient license to kill extends beyond the online community to Israeli decision makers and politicians.

Almost as popular as these two precepts is 'Aniyei 'Irkha Kodmim, loosely translated as 'the poor of your city take precedence over the poor of a different city.' Taken from the Babylonian Talmud, Bava Metzia 71:1, this is used by Israelis to justify the preferential treatment of Jews. It is quoted almost every time human rights organisations highlight the inferior treatment of Palestinian citizens of Israel or the living conditions for Palestinians in the Occupied Territories. The use of this quote has intensified lately due to the debate about the thousands of refugees and migrant workers threatened with deportation. The fact that many of them have children who were born in Israel, or that deporting them would endanger their lives, does not convince large parts of the Israeli public, who cleave to principle of the 'precedence of our poor'… "The poor of your city take precedence"' Six weeks later, the poor people of Gaza had buried 1,400 men and women. These three verses, overused in Israeli-Jewish discourse, exemplify the hijacking of 'Judaism' to suit the Zionist programme.

Zionism's basic separationist aspirations—Hebrew labour, a Hebrew market, a Hebrew state—have been nurtured and protected by the belief that 'the poor of your city take precedence over the poor of a different city'. In contemporary Israel, this verse provides a pseudo-religious justification for racist practice, while in its original context it is closer to our own 'charity begins at home'.

For more details and to see the full original article, go here

 

Ben Gurion University - Yonatan Mendel (Dept of Political Science) Accuses the Government of Israel and the Zionist Movement of Discrimination

This debate is nothing short of astounding. There's the Israeli government sitting on top of private Palestinian land, and negotiating with the Jewish settlers such details as the compensation level, the number of houses that will be built instead for them…

It seems as if the Arabs, the ones who actually own the land, are not a party to the dispute. Nobody offers to build ten buildings in the West Bank to compensate them for any building constructed on their land illegally. Nor has anybody suggested them an even fairer compromise proposal… Not only does Israel never compensate Palestinians for construction it mainly talks to them in the language of destruction. But the absence of such proposals from the Israeli discourse, and the general absence of Arabs in the discussion, indicate that something in Epstein's critique has not faded yet, despite the 105 years that have elapsed. The Zionist movement, and now Israel, still do not see the Arabs. So even in 2012, it still seems to have remained the "hidden question"; it remains and annoying buzz that there is really no need to address.

For more details and to see the full original article, go here

 

Tenured anti-Israel Extremists Produce Headlines from the recent 'Apartheid Conference' held under the Auspices of the Van Leer Institute:

Ben Gurion University - Oren Yiftachel (Dept of Geography) abandons the term 'occupation' for the term 'apartheid'.

For more details and to see the full original article, go here

 

Ben Gurion University - Call for Yair Green's Resignation

Prof. Geoffrey Alderman, British Jewish Historian and Journalist, advises Green to step down, based on the principles of integrity, selflessness, accountability, and honesty, until his name is cleared from illicit Madoff funds.

But the matter that I now bring to your attention reaches far higher up the executive chain of command than a mere academic department. It touches upon BGU's board of governors, and in particular upon the man who currently chairs the executive committee of that board, Israeli lawyer Yair Green and Mr Green's alleged relationship with the infamous American-Jewish financer Bernard Madoff.

But the Madoff scandal is far from over… The American authorities are determined to track down the criminal profits these frauds generated… A court appointed "trustee," Irving Picard, has been authorized to unravel Madoff's schemes.

And in furtherance of his mandate, Picard has indicted Yair Green. Green has been a generous benefactor of Ben Gurion University. The fact that he sits on its board of governors should therefore come as no surprise, nor is this fact of itself troubling. But questions are now being asked about the ultimate source of the moneys he so charitably disbursed. Some months ago Channel Ten aired a disturbing documentary focussed on Green, his friend Madoff and their financial dealings. But he has so far rebuffed every call for him to resign his governorship of BGU. Scarcely less shocking, BGU is supporting him in his obstinacy.

Yair Green is innocent unless and until a court of law finds him guilty. Meanwhile, he should show us all that he is a man of integrity and selflessness and do the decent thing by retiring from BGU so that he can concentrate on preparing his defence.

For more details and to see the full original article, go here

 

Ben Gurion University - David Newman (Dean of Social Sciences) justifies BDS

The Ariel recognition has provided new ammunition for the pro-boycott and BDS movements which, until now, have been unable to justify their calls for academic boycotts inside Israel (largely unsuccessful and not implemented) due to the government's policies with respect to the Palestinians.

Many Israeli academics undertake their own personal boycott of Ariel, refusing to take part in joint scientific work with Ariel faculty. Nor do they attend seminars or conferences which take place at that institute.

Based on the academic criteria used for the recognition of Ariel, there are a number of large colleges of higher education in Israel which are no less deserving of full university status. But the country is not seeking to recognize new universities, and the only reason for the recognition of Ariel is the fact that it is located in the West Bank.

Many international faculty who actively oppose and fight against all attempts at academic boycott, and who promote scientific collaboration and research between the two countries, are telling us how this latest decision removes the very basis and justification for their antiboycott activities. Some have made it clear that they are no longer able to defend Israel's universities in front of their colleagues. For their part, those who actively promote and support boycott are now able to prevail upon their dithering colleagues, who until now have hesitated from taking such action. They are able to show them that the Israeli government makes no distinction between civilian activities inside Israel and those operating in the West Bank.

For more details and to see the full original article, go here

 

Ben Gurion University - Political Science Dept to Remain Open

On Tuesday, the council [of Higher Education] decided to overturn the decision [to close the Political Science Dept] and recommend that new students be admitted to the program next year, provided that the faculty hire an additional two or three faculty members by the end of the year.

For more details and to see the full original article, go here

 

Scandal at Ben Gurion University
Ben Gurion University - Yair Green, BGU's Chaiman of Executive Committee Who is Under Investigation in the Madoff Scandal, Might Have Donated Illicit Funds to BGU

Monies dispensed by Green awarded him his BGU position, an honorary PhD, and political contacts in the Labor Party, including Israeli President Shimon Peres. Has the salary for Neve Gordon been paid in part with stolen funds?

Ben Gurion University in Israel is probably best known for being home to many of the worst far-leftist anti-Israel radical faculty members in the country, people like Neve Gordon, Oren Yiftachel, and David Newman… Now it has been learned that the University is also up-to-its-neck involved in the Bernard Madoff mega-scandal. Indeed, it appears that part of the salaries for Neve Gordon and his ilk come from funds stolen by Bernard Madoff from his victims and transferred to BGU.

In recent months many details have emerged about the connections between Ben Gurion University and the Madoff scandal. In particular, attention is focusing on the role of Israeli lawyer Yair Green, who currently serves as the Chairman of the Executive Committee of the Board of Governors of Ben Gurion University. BGU was a major beneficiary of donations transferred to it by Green, whose source was money stolen by Madoff. The University has indicated no plans or willingness to return any of the stolen funds.

Green is being investigated in the United States and in Israel; he has been indicted in the United States by the court-appointed trustee Irving Picard, who is in charge of unraveling and cleaning up the disaster left over by the Madoff Affair. That Affair involved the largest Ponzi scam in human history, in which losses to investors amounted to more than $50 billion. While Madoff's victims came from across the spectrum, a very large portion of them were Jewish institutions, philanthropies, and individuals. Green is suspected of being involved in several funds with close ties to the Madoff operations, and also operating a "charity fund" in Israel that made donations to Israeli universities and other institutions using funds stolen by Madoff from his victims.

Green not only ran "Magnify," but also some other funds or operations in which Igoin was involved, including Primero and Strand, based in the Virgin Islands. In 1988 Green set up with Igoin the so-called Yeshaya Horowitz Association, which funded applied research projects in Israel. It is named after an 18th century kabbalist and Rabbi. Its stated purpose was to channel donations to Israeli universities, hospitals and other institutions.


Green was also the direct beneficiary of funds handled by his operations, including a payment of over three million dollars from the "Magnify" fund. Green's children also received cash "gifts." Green claimed that some of these came from the daughter of Albert Igoin, who now lives in Europe. But when contacted by Israel's Channel Ten, she denied even knowing who Green is or having met him. Igoin himself died in 1995.

Green began raising funds for Ben Gurion University while the Madoff scheme grew. In exchange, he was first granted an honorary PhD by the University and later appointed chairman of the executive committee of the University's Board of Governors by its leftist President Rivka Carmi, a post he still fills. Green also developed political ties with Israeli politicians, especially from the Left. He has close ties with Israeli President Shimon Peres and with assorted Labor Party activists and leaders, including Avishai Braverman, past president of BGU. The Labor Party's one-time Minister of Education Yuli Tamir appointed Green to sit in the country's Council on Higher Education. Peres received funds from Green and granted him honors in exchange.

If you would like to demand that Ben Gurion University return all the stolen funds it received out of the Madoff Affair, then please write to

The Council for Higher Education in Israel
(governmental body that funds and supervises Israeli universities and colleges):

Prof. Manuel Trachtenberg
Chairman, Council on Higher Education
Email: manuel@post.tau.ac.il
POB 4037, Jerusalem 91040, Israel

Aharon Beit-Halahmi
Planning & Budgeting Committee Chairman
Council for Higher Education
Email: betha@eurofund.co.il
P.O.B. 4037, Jerusalem 91040, Israel
Tel: 02-5679911
Fax: 02-5679969
E-mail: info@che.org.il

Ministry of Education

The Honorable Gideon Sa'ar
Acting Minister of Education
Ministry of Education, Culture and Sports
Kiryat Ben Gurion, Jerusalem
Email: gsaar@knesset.gov.il
Additional Email: sar@education.gov.il
Phone: 972-2-6408131
Fax: 972-2-6753525

Shalomit Amichai
Director General of the Ministry of Education
Ministry of Education, Culture and Sports
Kiryat Ben Gurion, Jerusalem
Email: mankal@education.gov.il

For more details and to see the full original article, go here

 

Israel's Tenured Left Rallies to Support anti-Israel Violence and Child Abuse

Once again the Israel dual justice system has showed its ugly face. This is the court-cum-prosecution system that promotes the agenda of the Left and refuses to convict leftist criminals of anything, while at the same time refusing to defend the freedom of speech and other basic constitutional rights of non-leftists.

The Jerusalem District court just overturned a conviction of the far-leftist child molester Ezra Nawi for calling an army officer a war criminal. Seems that this is protected speech, unlike - say - saying that people who want to enjoy rights should also comply with duties and obligations (THAT slogan was just banned as "racist" by the leftists on Israel's elections commission because it was thought to offend the delicate sensitivities of Arabs).

Nawi is a violent leftist hooligan who has been involved in a long series of violent confrontations with soldiers and police, as he pursues his promotion of Palestinian violence. He was arrested in 2007 for violence and hooliganism. He was convicted of assault and sentenced to a month of hard jail time plus 3 years of probation.

In 2009 he was in a protest in which he called a military officer a war criminal. Nawi was part of a violent anti-Israel demonstration there that the soldiers were dispersing. He was charged in 2010 with insulting a public official, which is a crime in Israel. The problem is that it is a crime that the courts are only willing to convict Jewish Right-wingers for. As far as I know, no Arab or leftist was ever convicted for it.

Nawi was convicted, but appealed and the Jerusalem appeals court just overturned the conviction. After all, under the dual justice system, laws for the geese never apply for the ganders.

Because he is both anti-Israel and gay, Nawi became the hero and mentor of some of the worst anti-Semites on earth. He has been celebrated by Neve Gordon and Noam Chomsky, among others. For example, here is Gordon proclaiming Nawi his idol, in the anti-Semitic Neo-Nazi web magazine Counterpunch:
http://www.counterpunch.org/gordon05082009.html. Gordon also raised funds for Nawi. As you can see, Gordon claims Nawi was arrested for "caring about people's homes." Sure and Gordon was hired and promoted at Ben Gurion "University" thanks to his being a serious scholar. The Hebrew University's tenured leftist David Shulman has also spent years beatifying Nawi.

And while we have the conscripted judicial Left in our sites, let us also mention that today's Israeli press carries large paid ads of solidarity with Hanin Zoabi, signed by leading leftist law professors. Zoabi was the Arab woman Knesset member who personally participated in violent attacks against Israeli troops in the "Turkish Flotilla" terrorist incident. She was also running for re-election to the parliament of the state which she does not recognize and which she seeks to destroy. Except the Knesset ethics committee voted to bar her from running, due to her participation in violence (and open support for terrorism).

A group of tenured law dons are unhappy with this. After all, they insist, why should Zoabi be any less entitled to run for the Knesset than Bin Laden would be to run for the US Senate?

Well, 17 of the worst leftist law dons in Israel signed the petition, opposing the banning of the terrorist form running for the parliament.

For more details and to see the full original article, go here

 

The BGU Tanzim Tag Team - Neve Gordon (Dept of Political Science) Teams up with Niza Yanay (Dept of Sociology) in an interview for Al-Jazeera

Most people consider "suicide bombings" as motivated by hate, while very few people consider air strikes on populated areas to be hate crimes. The media often describes the suicide attack as a hate crime, but I have never come across a report describing the US drone attacks in Pakistan - that have killed over 3,500 people - as hate crimes. This suggests that hatred as ideology is at work. And this ideology helps determine who is blamed for being the initiators of hate, who becomes the target of hatred, and, in fact, when hatred counts as hatred at all.
...

Yet, my contribution has to do with my examination of the ideology of hatred. I believe that by excavating the ideology of hatred we can reveal how the political unconscious operates in the current political climate - through desire and its repression, through love and its disavowal, and through attachment and its elision. Once the unconscious workings of the ideology of hatred are laid bare then other future discourses, which recognise their ambivalence towards the other, suddenly become possible.

Let me give another example. The Israeli government forces the Palestinians to declare loyalty to the state of Israel as the condition for entering dialogue. No matter how many times Palestinians in Israel declare loyalty to the state or denounce terrorism, their words will not be heard and accepted because for Jewish Israelis this is not enough; they want the Palestinians to love them. Without love it is difficult for them to maintain their moral superiority. But at the same time the Jews in Israel will never ever admit to this.

So for me, the discourse of loyalty and betrayal, and particularly the repetitious demand that the Palestinians be loyal signifies that something else is going on here. It is about something the Jews want and will not get, or want and will never acknowledge. The repetition suggests that unconscious forces are at work here and in this case they are not individual but political.

For more details and to see the full original article, go here

 

Ben Gurion University - Ami Vatury (Dept of German Studies) defends the militant Islamofascists who beat him unconscious in Swedish slum

However, the Swedish 'hospitality' was not enough beat the Marxism out of him. Defends the 'Immigrants' of the Scandinavian Socialist Utopia that inhabit the neighborhood in which he was mugged.

Well, Comrade Social Democrat [Ami Vatury] was in Malmo, Sweden a few weeks back. Malmo is perhaps the worst city in Europe these days when it comes to violent assaults against Jews by Moslems. There is a large, violent, and militant local Islamist population there. There have been countless incidents in which Jews from the small and disappearing Malmo community were beaten.

Comrade Vatury had gone there in person to make friends with the local Islamists and write about how misunderstood they are. As he relates in his own words in an entry in the far leftist Haokets web site (in Hebrew here), he got the Marxist stuffing beaten out of himself there, when two or three "locals" jumped him, did a Sopranos routine upon him, and left him unconscious in the street…

Vatury was taken to a local hospital, and the rest of his article is devoted to singing the praises of the socialist Swedish medical system. He notes that he was mugged near one of the low-income slums of Malmo, and then goes to extreme contortions in order to try to explain how his beloved Swedish socialism can even have low-income slums and poverty. He tries to claim that it is all somehow the fault of the rising Far Right in Sweden, but fails to notice the contradiction in having a growing Far Right in a socialist utopia.

For more details and to see the full original article, go here

 

Ben Gurion University - CHE questions David Newman's (Dean of Social Sciences) Public Money Spending Habits

No cow is too sacred for Newman in his resistance to Academic Pluralism in his Faculty. He crosses all red lines to defend the little fiefdom he created in the Politics and Government Dept

The founder of Ben-Gurion University's Politics and Government Department, Professor David Newman, has called for international pressure and other measures to prevent the department from being shut down by the council.

"I am in favor of exerting measured international pressure, coupled with a trickle of letters from a number of world-famous organizations, some of which will be leaked to the media," Newman, now the dean of the university's Humanities and Social Sciences Faculty, wrote in an internal memo. "At the same time, we will begin legal proceedings against the Council of Higher Education through our attorneys and actions by the [university] president and the rector."

The council has threatened to prevent potential students from applying to study at the faculty in the coming academic year. The dispute began about a year ago when an international committee of experts appointed by the Council of Higher Education to evaluate political science departments at Israel's universities, issued a report harshly criticizing the department for a series of failures. The committee voiced concern that the "study of politics as a scientific discipline may be impeded by such strong emphasis on political activism" at the department, and recommended "major changes," such as diversifying the faculty's views and approaches and altering key programs.

The staff and the department's curriculum were criticized by Israeli officials as being radically left-wing and anti-Israel. The committee did not, however, recommend shutting the department down or blocking registration.

On the steps Newman plans to take, another senior member of the Council for Higher Education said, "We wonder about the behavior of the institution. Instead of investing their academic efforts in education, the university is spending public funds on private attorneys, strange conduct, to say the least."

For more details and to see the full original article, go here

 

Ben Gurion University - Faculty at BGU Call for the Closure of the Political Science Dept

Ben-Gurion University's Prof. Israel David of the industrial engineering and management department, and Prof. Dan Censor of the electrical and computer engineering department have openly criticized the department and its administration over the past month.

Censor published a letter on the Internet over the weekend where he wrote that the new faculty that the department had brought in on the CHE's first suggestions were just "more of the same" and that because of this, no other, more appropriate faculty will want to join the department, according to him.

"In my opinion, it follows that the department must be closed down, and persons transferred to other departments, according to their areas of activity," he wrote.

"What I don't want to happen is for the CHE to drag their feet, and maybe say that they'll close it next year or leave the issue hanging," David said. "That would be the worst."

Ronen Shoval, the head of Im Tirtzu, explained he is waiting for the decision in the hope that "the CHE does its job as academic investigator and does not surrender to the campaign of fear and threats that BGU is conducting."

Shoval further explained that in his opinion, since the department did not make the changes that the CHE demanded at first, he sees no option other than to shut down the program.

"I think it's very important to have a political science program at BGU just like there is one at every respected university. However, the university refused every opportunity to a solution, lied to the CHE, and tried to trick and manipulate it," he said.

"At this moment, it needs to close down and be reopened later, when it is ready to incorporate pluralism and academic freedom into its curriculum," Shoval added.

He also said that he holds Rivka Carmi, the president of Ben-Gurion University, responsible for "tarnishing the name of the institution."

"She needs to go home. She's the president, she's responsible for not taking the CHE seriously. She basically has just been laughing in its face," he said.

For more details and to see the full original article, go here

 

Prof. Ziva Shamir Exposes the Eradication of Free Speech and Academic Freedom by the Extreme Radical Left in the Social Sciences

Explains the processes in which Departments like BGU's Political Science Dept are allowed to form. Laments the loss of Academic Standards that Leftist 'discourse' has brought about.

She says, "Very few will dare admit openly that several departments in Israel's largest universities, like many places around the world, are now on the most radical fringe of the political map, and quite a few fields of study long ago gave up solid research for fashionable 'discourse.'" In certain departments, says Shamir, it is impossible to express all opinions freely because the "defenders of free speech" will set up an immediate outcry and boycott any 'non-standard' speech without delay. They will condemn the speaker vociferously and delegitimize him publicly.

"Nobody will even admit that in quite a few departments, many of the lecturers can no longer be trusted, since they are tainted by extreme radical thinking. They use the objects of their research and the subjects they teach as nothing but a platform on which to proclaim their extreme political axioms," Shamir says.
...
There are lecturers who commit political harassment. Sometimes it's hard to tell the difference when it comes to the fine points of what is allowed and what is not, but it's important to know that political harassment is like sexual harassment. Lecturers in classes have authority over their students. Add to that the fact that low-ranking staff members are dependent on their superiors for years.

"This leads to phenomena that are similar to cloning. A department head collects people around him who think as he does. Sometimes, the staff member behaves at first like one of the anusim [the Jews of Spain who were forced to convert to Catholicism during the time of the Inquisition, also called Marranos]. Later, they end up 'converting' because they have no choice. When a language teacher gives the class a sentence for analysis such as 'IDF soldiers at checkpoints act like neo-Nazis,' what is there to talk about? Israeli academicians call abroad for the boycotting of Israel and its educational institutions and then they're astonished when the rug is pulled out from under them."

For more details and to see the full original article, go here

 

Ben Gurion University - BGU Faculty Come Out Against the Politics Department

Claim that taking the Council of Higher Education to court "would be taken at the expense of other important university initiatives"

Disagreement with the department's teaching methods does not only come from external groups, however. BGU Professors Israel David, of the industrial engineering and management department, and Dan Censor, of the electrical and computer engineering department, have openly expressed their critiques of the program.

"I don't want the department to close, but I am in favor of kicking out malignant elements," said David, specifically pointing to Prof. Neve Gordon, who is known for his radical left-wing political opinions and is currently on sabbatical at Princeton University in the US.

According to David, Gordon has often mentioned the term "apartheid" when talking about Israel. "I'm not against the department because I'm Zionist, that's not what makes me get involved in this at the age of 50-something. The reason is, and I hope this will be heard, that I am fed up with people pissing on my head. There are a few people here that piss on everyone, on this university," he said.

David also said that the department's website states its goal as helping students bring about "economic and political change."

"That is not the mission statement of a university program," he said. "It's the platform of a political party."

He further discussed the department's threat to take the issue to court, saying the money that would go toward such an action would be taken at the expense of other important university initiatives.

Censor, for his part, said: "I see the whole department as accomplices in the offense. I think they are in a status of 'useful idiots,' they are contributing in destroying their own environment."

Whatever the MALAG's decision, he said, it will be significant and "will change the face of Israeli academia in Israel for the better."

Censor added that the idea to sue CHE is "absurd" and "surrealist."

David and Censor agree that the program's methods and persistence in contradicting MALAG hurts the university's reputation – and their jobs. Censor noted that he had been denied the opportunity to present research at a conference, and he is convinced it was due to the controversy.

"It's a bleeding wound that will never close," he said of the program.

For more details and to see the full original article, go here

 

Breaking News
MK Gideon Saar, Minister of Education, calls for the firing of BGU’s Neve Gordon (Dept of Political Science)

A Major Breakthrough at Last with regard to Tenured Treason in Israel

Over this past weekend Israel’s Minister of Education Gideon Saar gave an interview in which he formally called for the firing of Ben Gurion University’s Neve Gordon.

Gordon is the tenured extremist in the Department of Politics at Ben Gurion University who this week is the keynote speaker in a conference in Canada endorsing Arab terrorism against Jews.

In the Maariv report, Saar is cited as mocking the claims by BGU president Rivka Carmi that she cannot legally fire Gordon. Saar, who is a lawyer, dismisses the claim.

This is the first time that an Israeli politician has openly called for the firing of an anti-Israel tenured extremist.

For more details and to see the full original article, go here

 

The Campaign by the Totalitarian Left to Preserve Ben Gurion University's Center for Radical Indoctrination

There is a species of radical Leftist that believes that it is the main purpose of taxpayer-funded universities to engage in indoctrination of students into radical left-wing ideology. Such people believe that the only legitimate form of scholarly research and teaching is to force upon students the ideas and agendas of the radical Left, because only these represent correct thinking.

The totalitarian Left believes that taxpayers are morally obligated to fund the teaching of extremist ideology in the classroom, including by people advocating the demise of those same taxpayers and of their country. It is the job of citizens to sit back passively and pay for the far Left to operate propaganda centers, while the radicals collect their cushy salaries as payment for advocating their anti-Israel agenda…

Nowhere is this ideological extremism so clearly on display as in the Department of Politics at Ben Gurion University (BGU), a pseudo-academic propaganda and indoctrination center disguised as an academic department. It is not the only such department in Israel nor at BGU, but it may well be the worst.

In recent weeks, the totalitarian Left has been circling its wagons in solidarity with the Department of Politics at BGU. Leftist-dominated academic associations are flooding the press and the CHE with angry demands to defend the right of the Department of Politics at BGU to engage in "advocacy" and leftist indoctrination. Recruited by the members of BGU's politics department, foreign members of the academic Left and Israeli tenured radicals, even some notorious members of the communist party, have been leading the campaign to defend the BGU propagandists.

The campaigners demand that the right of BGU leftists to indoctrinate and propagandize at taxpayer expense be defended against CHE criticism and interference. The defenders of the department insist that "positivism," meaning actual scholarly research, is only one legitimate strand of academic activity in political science, meaning they really want ideological indoctrination to be the "alternative" function of academics…

And so the Orwellian inversions continue. Under the campaign to defend the right of BGU radicals to indoctrinate students into anti-Israel ideology, pluralism and diversity are achieved by maintaining a department in which only far leftists may teach. Academic freedom is achieved by suppressing the right to criticize anti-Israel extremists. The highest form of scholarly research is the promulgation of hate propaganda and anti-Zionist advocacy. Diversity of ideas is achieved by suppressing all non-leftist thought. And the highest form of public responsibility and accountability is when taxpayers are coerced into paying for the inculcation of extremist ideas, those which the taxpayers themselves reject and abhor.

For more details and to see the full original article, go here

 

Politicians from the Far Left rallying to support the anti-Israel propagandists in the BGU department of politics

As the debate over Ben-Gurion University's politics department continues, Meretz head Zehava Gal-On declared on Saturday that "the Likud wants to scalp the academia and show it off to [Likud activist] Moshe Feiglin's camp during the primary."

BGU's political science department has strongly divided the Left and Right, as the issue has been very much politicized in the past few weeks.

The department has been criticized for the radical left-wing opinions of some of its faculty members, by rightwing organizations such as the Zionist NGO Im Tirzu – which called the program "unbalanced" and "very disturbing."

...
Prof. Dan Censor, who specializes in electrical engineering at BGU, called the comment by Gal-On "pre-election farting" and said it has "nothing to do with any factual issue."

"In her statement there is no fact other than that Gideon Sa'ar is the minister of education," he added. "If anything, Gal-On pretends to help in putting out the fire by dousing it with fuel."

For more details and to see the full original article, go here

 

Ben Gurion University - Neve Gordon (Dept of Political Science) to be Keynote Speaker in Conference in Canada endorsing Palestinian Terrorism

Here is how the conference is advertised:

Not in Our Name: Jews in Solidarity with the Palestinian Resistance:
Independent Jewish Voices, Canada
Annual General Meeting
18-20 October 2012
Steelworker's Hall
25 Cecil Street -- Toronto

This year's Annual General Meeting of Independent Jewish Voices, Canada will focus on issues of Jewish solidarity with the Palestinian struggle for self-determination.

Keynote Speakers: Yafa Jarrar and Neve Gordon

All Are Welcome

For more details and to see the full original article, go here

 

Ben Gurion University - David Newman (Dean of Social Science and Humanities) complains that Israel's Scientific Reputation will be destroyed if the Council of Higher Education maintains academic standards and shuts down pseudo-academic propaganda centers

BGU underhandedly tries to increase the uniformity of critical thought in Newman's Political Science Dept under the cheap political façade of adhering to the CHE recommendations. In a typical belligerent left-wing response, Newman threatens the CHE to change or be ignored.

It is even more troubling that this chorus of international opinion is a direct result of the policies of the CHE itself, resulting from the recommendation of its Quality Assessment subcommittee to prevent further registration of new students in the Department of Politics and Government at Ben-Gurion University. This recommendation appears, to most observers, to have been influenced by political, rather than professional, considerations, and raises serious questions concerning the role of the CHE in overseeing Israel's universities.
...
And what has been the response of the CHE to this global and unanimous condemnation? In a response which is so typical of the right wing in
Israel, they have accused the university of orchestrating an international campaign against the CHE as part of the "radical leftist" attempts to delegitimize Israel.

A university which bears the name of Ben-Gurion, which is at the forefront of developing the Negev and whose social and national agenda brings credit to the State of Israel, now stands accused by the CHE of joining forces with Israel's enemies. The CHE totally ignores the professional criticism of its recent recommendations and, instead of congratulating the university on meeting almost all of the professional recommendations in the original report, has resorted to a cheap political response to a problem which they created in the first place.

The CHE must return to being a professional body, free from political ideologies and pressures. It must seek a new way of ensuring the highest scientific and academic standards at all of Israel's universities. Failure to do so will make the CHE irrelevant, to the detriment of both the Israeli and the global scientific community.

For more details and to see the full original article, go here

 

The Assault by the Totalitarian Left against Academic Freedom on Israel

Sharp criticism of the "Solidarity with Ben Gurion University" movement

In recent weeks the very worst assault upon academic freedom in Israeli history has transpired in the form of a growing campaign of "solidarity" with the Department of Politics at Ben Gurion University. This "department" is nothing more than an anti-Israel far-leftist propaganda and indoctrination center, containing pseudo-academics, misrepresented and disguised as a university academic department. It is also a department in which freedom of speech and academic freedom are brutally suppressed.

The department is the epitome of the ideal of the Far Left regarding what they think universities should be, namely totalitarian indoctrination centers in which students are brainwashed into Marxist and Far-Leftist ideology, in which no non-leftist dissent is tolerated.

The nature of the Department of Politics as a pseudo-academic
taxpayer-funded anti-Israel agitation center is well known by now. An international panel set up by Israel's Council on Higher Education investigated things and recommended that the department be shut down altogether. Since then, the anti-democratic totalitarian Left in Israel and abroad has been circling the wagons in solidarity with the department and denouncing the Israel Council on Higher Education as a fascist oppressive tool of the "Right." In typical Orwellian inversion, these enemies of academic freedom and freedom of speech demand that the BGU department of politics be preserved as a totalitarian anti-democratic indoctrination center, one in which no pluralism or diversity or dissent from leftist dogma is permitted.

Anyway, today (5/10/2012) the Deputy Editor of Maariv, Ben Dror Yemini, who is himself left of center but is a bona fide Zionist patriot, takes on the "Solidarity with Ben Gurion University" movement. He does so in Hebrew here:

The academic world has found itself in the heart of yet another storm in response to the recommendations to end all registration of new students in the degree programs of the Department of Politics at Ben Gurion University. Hundreds have signed petitions demanding that this "assault against academic freedom" be stopped. As usual, the outward impression is supposed to be of the forces of enlightenment battling against the forces of darkness, meaning those seeking to silence "critics." This impression is worth a closer look!

While failures exist in many departments, the only one for which the panel issued a call that it be shut down was the politics department at Ben Gurion University, at least unless major changes and reforms were to take place in it. The CHE unanimously adopted the panel's recommendations. It is worth noting that the members of the CHE are NOT political hacks or apparatchiks and they were NOT appointed by the Right or even by the Minister of Education. The panel included two prominent and distinguished political scientists from Germany….The "reforms" were supposed to be two-fold, first in the area of recruiting faculty who could teach sub-disciplines not currently taught in the department [meaning anything other than Marxist leftism – SP] and introduction of diversity of points of view, so that not only "critical" [meaning Marxist – SP] ideology was being taught.

The department did hire three new people. [All three were also far-leftists; what grand diversity!! – SP]. No one checked up on their political opinions or challenged their credentials. The problem was with regard to the second goal. Two of the three [Yemini is wrong – actually all three – SP] were hired in direct defiance of the instructions of the CHE. The panel had criticized the fact that most of the existing departmental faculty members belong to the "critical" [meaning Marxist – SP] strand of political science, considered fringe in academia. These are people who toss out conjectures that cannot be tested or disproved in a scientific manner. The CHE ordered the department to diversify away from its monolithic "critical" makeup. So what did Ben Gurion University do? It hired MORE "critical" faculty members. One of these is not even a political scientist at all… Meaning that the department simply defied the CHE.

This is the background to the recommendation by the CHE to shut down the department! But that recommendation served as the spark for a new campaign (by the anti-Israel far Left). So instead of carrying out the CHE instructions, BGU and its department of politics launched a political campaign.

Those are the facts, but the "campaign" has been launched, impervious to facts and truth. Academics and journalists from around the world are sending swarms of angry messages to the CHE. Petitions inside and outside Israel are being collected. The signers are unaware of the fact that this is a battle by the CHE AGAINST those who seek to suppress pluralism and restrict academic freedom [the department of politics at BGU and its supporters – SP]. The CHE is the agency SEEKING diversity and pluralism! But it is always such fun to proclaim that Israel is a reactionary backward primitive entity that censors and silences its leftist academic critics. This is an unprecedented campaign of intimidation and distortion directed AGAINST the members of the CHE by these who would coerce them into adopting the political agenda of the Far Left. This is no academic campaign. …

For more details and to see the full original article, go here

 

Prof Steve Plaut helps to enlighten David Newman (BGU, Dean of Humanities), the man who could find no wrong, as to where his Politics Dept is flawed

Sir, – The leftist geographer who single-handedly built the politics department at Ben- Gurion University of the Negev into the worst anti-Israel indoctrination and propaganda center in the country is simply is unable to find anything wrong with it ("Prof. David Newman defends BGU's politics department against Council on Higher Education registration ban," September 24).

Newman's dissimulation is of course familiar nonsense. The simple fact of the matter is that every single member of the Ben-Gurion University politics department, including the three new recruits supposedly hired to create diversity there, are radical leftists. The main activity of the department is anti-Israel agitprop, as the international panel appointed by the Council on Higher Education (CHE) also reported.

This is not only the most openly anti-Israel (and sometimes anti-Semitic) academic department in all of Israel, it is also the least pluralistic, least tolerant and least diversified. It is also one with the very lowest academic standards, as the CHE panel found.

Academic standards died years ago in the department built by Newman. The fact the Neve Gordon, Israel's Norman Finkelstein, was hired and promoted by Newman on the basis of an "academic record" consisting almost entirely of churning out anti-Israel hate propaganda illustrates how academic standards there are dead.

Yes, by all means, it is time to shut down this pseudo-academic taxpayer-funded disgrace.

For more details and to see the full original article, go here

 

Ben Gurion University - Oren Yiftachel battles against Israeli Sovereignty and Democracy by Urging World anti-Semites to Pressure the Israeli Council of Higher Education to Preserve BGU's anti-Israel Indoctrination Center

The Israeli Council of Higher Education (CHE known also in Hebrew as MALAG) is on the verge of ordering the closure of the Politics and Government Department at Ben-Gurion University (BGU), Beersheba, Israel.

Any thinking person can clearly see that the intervention is blatantly political. The government and its satellite nationalist organizations have made this department a test case in their quest to silence critical academics. To this end, we should do all we can to save this department, and with it critical and free research, particularly as regards the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Against the worrying scenario of a Mccarthyist purge, we would like to ask for your help. Israeli officials and professors are sensitive to their international image. Hence we ask you to express grave concern about the possible closure of the department. A particularly effective way may be writing directly to the members of the CHE listed above (under the "Act to Protect Academic Freedom in Israel" heading). Most of them are professors and may be swayed by Israel's international reputation and by the need to protect academic freedom.

Of course, you may also write to journalist, blogs, petitions, electronic media, to your politicians, your governments and to heads of Israeli universities with a clear message – closing an academic department through blatant political intervention will gravely stain Israel's standing in the a academy, and hinder future contact and status with academics worldwide!

For more details and to see the full original article, go here

 

Ben Gurion University - David Newman (Dean of Social Sciences) Can Find No Wrong in the Dept of Politics and Government; Attacks the Council of Higher Education

The geographer who single-handedly built the Politics Dept denies the far-leftist reality of the department, where every faculty member is a radical leftist, including the political leanings of the rumored three new recruits to be hired to create "diversity".

Prof. David Newman, dean of the Faculty for Human and Social Sciences at BGU in Beersheba, said on Sunday, “As a person who spends half his time involved in combatting boycotts in Europe, I can tell you that from responses we are receiving from friendly academics throughout the world, the Council of Higher Education is doing more damage and harm to name of Israel’s universities than all of our enemies put together.”

Claims that the politics and government program was left-wing oriented were “just not based on reality,” Newman, a Jerusalem Post columnist, said.

Newman also said the faculty at the department was of varied personal political positions… “This is clearly a question of political interference in academic freedom,” he said.

For more details and to see the full original article, go here

 

Special Isracampus Report:
Rivka Carmi's new "Diversity" in the Department of Politics at Ben Gurion University.

The new "Diversity" is the old "Diversity" – three NEW far-leftist radicals added

Carmi is telling the whole world that she has introduced "diversity" into the Department of Politics at BGU in response to the calls from the Council on Higher Education to shut down the anti-Israel department. Carmi is proud that there are three new "recruits" in this department. But who are these recruits? Every single one of the new recruits is a Far Leftist! That is correct. Rivka Carmi is diversifying the worst anti-Israel propaganda department in Israeli academia by adding three NEW leftist radicals to it!

The first and the worst of the three is a radical anti-Israel historian, who is not even a political scientist at all. She is Michal Givoni, and she was a "researcher" at Tel Aviv University until offered a position in the Carmi cosmetics fix-up. Givoni may be even more anti-Israel than the existing members of the Department. You can read all about her here.

She will be joined by Gad Arieli, who evidently is also a far leftist, this based on the fact that he has been on the staff of the leftwing Israel Democracy Institute and also that he is an author of [extreme leftist] (and other similar) articles…

The third new "recruit" is actually now doing a Post-Doc at UCLA and has not yet joined the department. She is Ayelet Harel-Shalev, and she is also a far-leftist. She works with and turns out propaganda for the extremist anti-Israel Arab nationalist Adalah group (see this report on it - http://www.ngo-monitor.org/article/adalah). She claims to be an expert on Israel's oppressed Arab minority (she calls them "Israeli Palestinians")… Her PhD is from the very same department of politics at BGU. So she is a product of Neve Gordon, Dan Filc, and David Newman.

For more details and to see the full original article, go here

 

Shut down the anti-Israel Department of Politics at Ben Gurion University

Arguably, the worst institution in the country when it comes to anti-Israel agitprop (misrepresented as academic performance) has been Ben Gurion University (BGU), although Tel Aviv University is a close runner-up. And the worst anti-Israel department in all of Israel has been BGU's Department of Politics.

An international panel of prestigious experts appointed by Israel's Council on Higher Education (which oversees and funds Israeli universities) last year called for shutting down that Department of Politics altogether due to its openly extremist "activism," its absence of pluralism and diversity of ideas, and its low academic quality.

A few days ago an Inspections Subcommittee of the CHE submitted a report on the department that repeated the demand that it be closed down.

Meanwhile, the anti-Israel Left has been racing to close ranks with the BGU extremists.

For more details and to see the full original article, go here

 

Ben Gurion University - Thabet Abu Rass (Dept of Geography) among the Gaggle of anti-Israel Activists trying to help the Bedouins Seize Control of the Negev illegally

The director of Adalah's Negev bureau, Dr. Thabet Abu Rass, commented on the decision, saying that "achieving recognition by the European Parliament that the Israeli government practices the same policies of displacement and dispossession against Palestinian citizens of Israel as it does against Palestinians living under occupation is a tremendous step forward."

All the usual suspects, NGOs which work to weaken the State of Israel in their so-called post-Zionist world, such as Adalah, Rabbis for Human Rights, Bimkom and ACRI, back the Beduin claims. They not only support the usurping of land, they take clear aim at pillars of our Zionist establishment such as the JNF, which they claim is a racist, colonial entity that should be shut down....Their goal for the Beduin is no less than the establishment of facts on the ground, as Pnini Badash – the mayor of Omer states, "to create an autonomous region" that will eventually be contiguous with the oft-promised Palestinian state to be created only a few kilometers to the north.

For more details and to see the full original article, go here

 

Ben Gurion University - Yossi Yonah (Dept of Education) Pooh-Poohs the Threats from Iran

The dire Iranian rhetoric is only PM Netanyahu spin to divert attention from Social Justice Issues.

So, while he exerts so much effort in providing an answer to the military threats on his citizens, Netanyahu does not hesitate to abuse them with an unrestrained capitalist policy. He fails to understand that these socio-economic wrongs pose a real strategic threat to the resilience of Israeli society, just as much as the external threats do.

Even now, after we have learned of the huge hole in the state budget, Netanyahu refuses remains adamant in his refusal to change his priorities. Instead, he places the burden on the middle class and on the weaker sectors of society, which are asked to pay the price for his failed economic policy.

Therefore, now is the time for the Israeli public to display political maturity and refuse to fall victim to Netanyahu's diversions. Now is the time for the Israeli public to clarify to its leaders that society's internal resilience is just as important as the country's military capability to face external threats, as grave as they may be.

For more details and to see the full original article, go here

 

Ben Gurion University - Neve Gordon (Dept of Political Science) compares Israel's use of Barbed Wire to the Nazi construction of Dachau

While this analysis appears accurate when thinking of the Nazi concentration camps, it does not ring true in relation to World War I. It is precisely the diverse historical roles barbed wire has played—both as sign and as action—in the modern process of separating and homogenizing society that needs to be exposed, analyzed and explained.

Explicating and trying to understand the continued widespread use of barbed wire could have added an additional dimension to this fascinating book. For example, examining the architectural similarity and differences between the camps Israel has constructed to hold Palestinians and the concentration camps Jews were held in during the Holocaust, urges one to ponder how it is that the reappearance of barbed wire in the Israeli landscape does not engender an outcry among survivors.

For more details and to see the full original article, go here

 

Special Isracampus Report:
Rivka Carmi, the president of Ben Gurion University, has announced her intention to defy the Council on Higher Education (CHE) in Israel and, in effect, to break the law and convert Ben Gurion University into an outlaw institution.

Her campaign to turn her school into Scofflaw University is in response to the recommendations by an Inspections Sub-Committee set up by the CHE Council to follow any reforms or changes that Carmi and BGU take in response to the recommendations by an international panel of experts regarding the University's Department of Politics (political science)…

[The Inspections] sub-committee reported a few days ago that little of substance has been changed, and it repeated the demand that the Department of Politics be shut down altogether starting in the 2013-14 school year…

Now the News1 web site, a news service in Hebrew, carries a report here (http://www.news1.co.il/Archive/001-D-309321-00.html) entitled "Ben Gurion University Mutinies against the CHE." It reports that Carmi and other officials at Ben Gurion University distributed a letter to all faculty and students in the university this week, announcing their intention to defy the CHE and ignore the demands and the call to shut down the Department of Politics. The letter of defiance, which can be read in its original in Hebrew here: http://www.news1.co.il/ShowCurrentFile.aspx?FileID=11060, is signed by Carmi, the BGU Rector Zvi Hacohen, and Dean of Social Sciences and Humanities David Newman, himself a geographer who is a member of the Department of Politics.

… [T]he letter denounces the report by the Inspections Sub-Committee, calling it unfounded and unprecedented and devoid of facts. It also threatens to take legal measures against the CHE (which provides the bulk of BGU's funding), to make sure that the recommendations are not implemented. In the letter these BGU officials insist that the demands of the Sub-Committee are an assault against academic freedom and are politically motivated and undemocratic. Evidently it is undemocratic for taxpayers to be able to expect accountability and serious standards of academic excellence from a university they pay for! (How amusing that the very same BGU people insist on the right to maintain a one-sided department of anti-Israel indoctrination within Ben Gurion University!!)

… The letter concludes with the proclamation by its signers that the Department of Politics will continue to operate unimpeded.

For more details and to see the full original article, go here

 

Isracampus Special Report:
Yediot Ahronot Reports that Ben Gurion University's Political Science Department is about to be Closed

Israel's daily Yediot Ahronot reports on Sept. 6, 2012 that the Department of Political Science at Ben Gurion University is on the verge of being forcibly shut down by the Israeli State Commission on Higher Education, the public body that oversees and regulates (and funds) Israeli universities.

According to the news story, an independent balanced international panel of experts investigated the department and found it extremely politicized (meaning uniformly far leftist and anti-Israel) and with abysmally low academic standards. The Council on Higher Education adopted and approved the panel's proposals. Among these was the demand that mainstream ideas and methods also be taught in the department, in contrast with the current situation in which only Marxism and "post-colonialist" post-Zionist rhetoric are the main forms of analysis. The panel spoke out most forcefully against the open political activism (most of it anti-Israel) that dominates the activities of the department. The panel expressed skepticism over whether the students were actually learning anything scholarly besides being indoctrinated in "activism"…

The international panel proposed that no new students be admitted for studies in that department in the 2013-14 school year unless serious reforms are first undertaken.

For more details and to see the full original article, go here

 

Ben Gurion University - Lee Kaplan Takes Neve Gordon (Dept of Political Science) to Task; Provides Rebuttal to Gordon's Attacks on Kaplan and the Haifa Court's Credibility

Gordon celebrates Rachel Corrie's "martyrdom" as one unconsummated Human Shield for Terrorists only can. Kaplan fills in the blanks about the terrorist-accomplice Rachel Corrie that Gordon conveniently wishes others to ignore. "The Nation" itself refused to run Lee Kaplan's Rebuttal, showing that its one-time Stalinistic Tendencies are still alive and well!

One such victim of the demise of academic standards [in the Social Science and Humanities, particularly in History and Political Science and Communications Departments] was the young woman Rachel Corrie, who died while trying to interfere with the work of an Israeli army earth mover operating in Gaza…

… Gordon recently wrote an Op-Ed piece in the extremist anti-Semitic "The Nation," magazine, which celebrated the "martyrdom" of Rachel Corrie and questioned my own journalistic integrity. This coming from someone whose main venue for venting his opinions is the Neo-Nazi "Counterpunch" web site and whose Bash-Israel diatribes are also published on the site of Holocaust Denier Ernst Zundel.

Gordon specifically attacks me for submitting a photograph that was cited in the 145 page transcript of the trial in which ISM activists in the West Bank are shown waving terrorist-provided machine guns in the presence of an Al Aksa Martyrs Brigade terrorist and a Palestinian policeman.

Gordon is supposed to be a college professor so one might assume he knows how to do research. Well, one would be wrong. Gordon's academic record consists almost entirely of churning out anti-Israel hate propaganda misrepresented as research. The photos, he claims, attempted to impute guilt of the ISM by association. My article here names the people in the photos and discusses the ISM at length…

Before I parse the rest of Gordon's "article" in the Nation, let me show you another photo, this one of Neve Gordon:

The above photo was taken shortly after the Passover Massacre in Netanya, Israel in 2002, where 31 people, some Holocaust survivors, were murdered by a suicide bomber who was dispatched and paid by Yasser Arafat himself. Gordon, in the photo, was acting as a human shield for Arafat who was surrounded in the PLO's headquarters by the IDF. Gordon entered Ramallah illegally, a bit like Rachel Corrie in Gaza, in order to interfere with Israeli army anti-terror operations.

The ISM was founded by similar "human shields." You can see why Gordon embraces them. In the photo, Gordon is clearly making a victory and solidarity salute in support of Arafat.

What Neve Gordon conveniently left out in his column in the Nation was that Rachel Corrie was recruited and trained by the ISM. She was even given a training manual, one that I furnished to the Haifa court, showing that the organization prepares all volunteers before going into combat zones to interfere violently with the anti-terrorist activities of the IDF. Marxist Gordon tries to suggest that Rachel Corrie may not have agreed with ISM teachings about terrorism as "legitimate resistance," when she made statements to the contrary. Actually, Rachel Corrie wrote home to her mother in praise of the "martyrs" (suicide bombers) who were fighting the Israelis and in support of "legitimate resistance" (ISM Newspeak for terrorism). Gordon did not mention in his article in The Nation that Rachel Corrie wrote copious emails home to her mother, in which she described entering the weapons smuggling tunnels dug by Hamas to bring out the dead bodies of terrorists killed in them by the IDF.

"Professor" Gordon, like Rachel Corrie, likes to pose in front of cameras with terrorists and to aid international murderers, while claiming to be a peace activist. It therefore comes as no surprise that he writes such an article in The Nation, insisting justice was not done for the Corrie family. Since the Corries were not jailed by Israel for their role in abetting terrorism, in a sense we agree that justice was not done. The judge even ordered the Israeli taxpayer to pay the state's cost for the trial for another ISM propaganda stunt.

The Corries are touring the world promoting the goals of the Hamas. The trial was just another publicity stunt by them to damage Israel. Gordon tries to beget countless other Rachel Corries in his lectures when he calls upon his students to emulate this young woman who died for the Hamas.

For more details and to see the full original article, go here

 

Ben Gurion Univeristy - Neve "SLAPP SUIT" Gordon (Dept of Political Science), who illegally interfered with IDF anti-terror operations, defends the right of terrorist-accomplice Rachel Corrie to do the same

Defends the harassment suit by her parents against Israel, and condemns the judge who tossed it out. Questions Lee Kaplan's journalistic integrity and dismisses any responsibility that Rachel Corrie had in her own death that Kaplan's photos implicate.

In the days leading up to the ruling, I wondered how the state was going to make the case that Corrie was to blame for her own death; I therefore read the 145-page summation submitted by the defense. The document appeared convincing at first. Indeed, if read on its own—ignoring the political context and the plaintiff's summations and response—one might easily be persuaded that Corrie was a reckless human being who was fully responsible for her own demise.

Let's consider the photographs, since they were brought forth as markers of unadulterated truth.

Corrie's face is directed upwards, mouth wide open; she is screaming as she looks at a piece of burning paper held with both hands against the sky. She is portrayed here as the paradigmatic extremist whose fanatical behavior is influencing a group of young children huddled around her. The caption for this photo reads: "The deceased, Rachel Corrie, burning an American flag during a protest in Rafah."

Directly under this photo of Rachel is a picture of four people, three of whom are holding guns and one wearing a uniform without a gun. The two standing figures appear to be foreigners, the person in uniform appears to be Palestinian, while the face of the second person sitting is intentionally blurred. (Why? We are not told) The title of this photo and of another one next to it (with several people posing in a similar manner, two with guns) reads, "Photographs of organization members holding guns, disclosed by the American journalist Lee Kaplan."

Let's set aside the question of whether the so-called journalist Lee Kaplan—whose claim to fame are [sic] articles he writes for the academic monitoring website IsraCampus—is trustworthy and think about what these images are meant to prove.

The fact is that we are not told where and when the two additional photos were taken, who the people in the photographs are, whether Corrie knew them or what their affiliation is. Yet this uncertainty is obscured by the placement of these suggestive photos adjacent to the one of Corrie. Through this crude juxtaposition, the state attempted to impute guilt by association.

Due to a deeply ingrained institutional bias that has been documented by law professor David Kretzmer of Hebrew University, the judge did not ask the defense team such questions. He was not disturbed by the fact that the state failed to produce a military order declaring the region a closed military zone, or by the fact that the state's expert witness had been the IDF spokesperson at the time of Corrie's death, or by the fact that several minutes were missing from the military tapes that recorded the incident. Nor was the judge at all disturbed by the state's twisted presentation of the political context in which Corrie's killing took place.

The defense team used these statistics against Corrie, claiming that she put herself in harm's way, but one could, more persuasively I think, say that she was an incredibly courageous human being who believed that all people should enjoy basic rights, such as freedom, self-determination and security. And Rachel was willing to struggle for such rights.

Haifa District Court Judge Oded Gershon showed no empathy toward this line of thinking, and on August 28 handed down his verdict: the State of Israel and the Defense Ministry were not responsible for Rachel Corrie's death.

Tragically, the judge's dismissive attitude mirrors the attitude of the US State Department from the time of Rachel's killing up to the verdict.

For more details and to see the full original article, go here

 

Ben Gurion University – Neve Gordon (Dept of Political Science) Outed Along with Other Jewish Anti-Semites

Among its many critics, there is a startling number of Jews who calumniate Israel and, in some cases, champion those threatening its existence.

Noam Chomsky heads this list, but he is hardly alone. Norman Finkelstein, Ilan Pappe, Richard Falk, Tony Judt, Howard Zinn, Eric Hobsbawm and many other Jews have joined in this project. Neve Gordon, head of the Department of Politics and Government at Ben-Gurion University, claims that "Israel resembles Nazi Germany."

Gabriel Schoenfeld's explanation of this in The Return of Anti-Semitism is straightforward: amid a rising tide of anti-Semitism, Jewish enemies of Israel are out to save their own skins, aiming "to deflect the poisonous arrows coming at their fellow Jews."

In The Oslo Syndrome: Delusions of a People Under Siege Kenneth Levin asks: "Why are Jews so self-destructive? So suicidal?" He argues that constant oppression can lead to a variant of the Stockholm Syndrome: "empathy for and emotional bonding with the aggressor." The logic of this "embrace by members of an abused community of the indictments of their abusers" is that this allows the possibility of "salvation [through] self-reform and concessions."

For more details and to see the full original article, go here

 

Ben Gurion University - Danny Rubinstein (Dept of Communication Studies) can't help but slander the settlers and complain about the "Judaization of Jerusalem"

Creates a Pre-1967 Palestinian Independence Movement out of thin air

There is no doubt that Fayyad, supported by Chairman Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen), is attempting to create a new reality in the West Bank… His success has been limited for the simple reason that without progress on the political front, there is no possibility of establishing a serious infrastructure for a Palestinian state. For example, in keeping with the Oslo Accords, Israel continues to rule over 60 percent of the West Bank—"Area C." This includes all the settlements, the main roads, and the whole of the Jordan Valley and the Judean Desert. In these areas, the settlers and the Israeli Defense Force have almost complete control, and within Area C are "reserved tracts" through which Israel regulates the water supply and the flow of traffic on the roads. Without control over these lands, the Palestinian Authority cannot construct a physical infrastructure (for example, the national airport that Fayyad wants to establish in the Jordan Valley). In fact, there is no possibility of establishing Palestinian control, and Fayyad knows this. In consultation with Abu Mazen, he arranged a series of demonstrations and protests against the separation barrier; against the provocations of the settlers, whose produce the Palestinians ban and burn; against the strengthening of the Israeli hold on East Jerusalem (which the Palestinians refer to as the Judaization of Jerusalem); and against the continuing expansion of the settlements.

From its beginnings at the start of the twentieth century, the Palestinian movement has had one clear goal: to free itself from foreign occupation, first from the British and then from the Israelis. The demand to create a Palestinian state does not appear in the national covenant that the PLO proclaimed in the 1960s. And in the short period in which most Palestinians lived under Arab rule (from 1948 to 1967), they did not work for the establishment of a state in the West Bank and Gaza.

For more details and to see the full original article, go here

 

Ben Gurion University – David Newman (Dean of Social Sciences and Humanities) making excuses for the Boycott-Israel Assault Mob!

Why is it so difficult for Newman to understand that his opinions and activism Must Lead to Israel being inundated with tens of thousands of rockets fired from his beloved proposed Palestinian State?

We can go on contesting each other's right to be here, or we can – each of us – make those painful compromises which require each of us to make do with only part of the territory between the Mediterranean and the Jordan River. We each require guarantees that the other side will no longer threaten our safety and security, and that the human rights and democracy of both peoples will be respected.

This will almost certainly require a clear line of separation, a border...

There will now be renewed calls for sanctions, BDS and boycotts by those groups who are continuously seeking ways to delegitimize Israel. Only this time they will no longer be forced to make a distinction between sovereign Israel and the "occupied territories." By trying to justify an unjustifiable situation, all we will have managed to do is to weaken even further the foundations on which the sovereign state exists.

For all those of us out there in the battle to deflect and defuse the boycott attempts, this report has just made our task a hundred times more difficult. It has simply played into the hands of our detractors, weakened even further our international standing, and reflects the failed policies of a right-wing government which is doing its best to lead Israel into a new era of international isolation.

For more details and to see the full original article, go here

 

Ben Gurion University's Assault against Jewish Studies

Dean David Newman slashes Jewish Studies Dept while adding to his Pol Sci Dept; Neve Gordon gets to control the funds

[A]ccording to Makor Rishon, Dean Newman has a new cause and that is slashing and reducing the departments in the university in which Jewish Studies are taught. The university has departments of "Jewish Thought," Jewish History, and Hebrew literature. Dean Newman thinks that is far too much. He wants to reduce the sizes and number of those departments, slash their budgets and merge them into a single small department. Is he upset because so few students and faculty in these departments participate in campus pro-Hamas rallies and call for world boycotts of Israel?

Newman, whose own department was denounced for its academic standards, likes to call these Jewish departments "mediocre" in terms of academic quality. They do not publish enough in English, he says, you know – unlike the books by Neve Gordon calling for world boycotts of Israel and denouncing Israel as an apartheid regime. Of course, at the same time Newman is struggling to ADD slots and budgets to his OWN political science department! Newman, whose department runs "conferences" every few weeks in which only leftists may speak, including conferences devoted to Marxist indoctrination, criticized the Jewish departments for running conferences whose academic quality was not "high enough"!

The newspaper notes the atmosphere of suppression and terror introduced by Newman, manifested in the fact that none of the faculty members of the departments being targeted by Newman were willing to be interviewed. The newspaper also notes that while the commission appointed by Israel's Council on Higher Education demanded that BGU's department of political science not run a PhD program or accept PhD candidates (because of the department's low quality), not only is the department still doing so but the chap in CHARGE of the doctoral program is none other than Neve Gordon. Gordon's own PhD is from the sixth rate Notre Dame University, where he was associated with the Kroc Institute… According to Makor Rishon, Newman has also appointed Gordon to be in charge of the School's budgets.

For more details and to see the full original article, go here

 

Ben Gurion University - Ofer Neiman (Dept of Math/Computers) Lobbies for Arab Violence against the Jews

In exposing the behavior of Israel's academic leftists, Isracampus reports in most cases about well-educated people who like to define themselves as "peace activists," who believe they think beyond the curve, and as "humanitarians" who are concerned about abuses of the Arabs by nationalistic Jews. Most of course seem to view the world in a Manichean mindset, that is, all is good or bad and there is no gray in-between. They often claim that Israel is the embodiment of evil, of oppressive colonialism and apartheid. These people gravitate to Academia where they can get tenured and be sheltered from accountability. Political Cronyism among other faculty and staff converts Israeli academia into a self-perpetuating bureaucracy misinterpreted as "academic freedom."

This describes tenured treason superstar in Math and Computer Science Professor Ofer Neiman at Ben Gurion University. He is an open advocate of Palestinian violence against Jews.

Neiman is one of the leaders of the Boycott Within movement, which consists of Israelis urging world boycotts of their own countrymen. They promote these boycotts from within
Israel, even against the University that employs Neiman:

Quoting Neiman: "There are Israelis -- not just a few -- who think this is equivalent to treason. I disagree… Ours in not a violent campaign… And another thing about BDS is that it gives a voice to people all over the world…"

Sorry, but no, Ofer, it is treason when someone lobbies for those who want to harm one's fellow countrymen and one aids and abets a genocidal enemy.

Economic aggression under the guise of "BDS" or "Boycotts, Divestment and Sanctions," ultimately directed at Israeli children, is violence. Indicting those engaged in BDS treason is resistance.

For more details and to see the full original article, go here

 

Breaking News – Ben Gurion University loses multi-million dollar contribution because of the anti-Israel activities of Neve Gordon conducted under BGU's auspices

Maariv June 23, 2012 reports ( http://www.nrg.co.il/online/1/ART2/380/004.html) that Ben Gurion University's cabbagehead president Rivka Carmi has just announced that the university lost a multi-million dollar contribution that was intended for development of the university library and other infrastructure investment because the donor was outraged at the treasonous activities being conducted by Neve Gordon, a lecturer in political science at the University, including his open calls for world boycotts of Israel. According to the story in Maariv, the donor conditioned his or her contribution on Gordon being dismissed. Carmi refused to initiate dismissal proceedings against Gordon. Carmi claims there is no "legal basis" for firing Gordon. She failed to note the academic basis for doing so, namely, that Gordon's "academic record" consists largely of Bash-Israel hate propaganda. She also failed to note that Gordon's track record of law breaking, including his illegal interference with the IDF's anti-terror operations, is itself sufficient legal justification for his being fired.

For more details and to see the full original article, go here

 

Ben Gurion University runs yet another biased anti-Israel "conference," one in which BGU Professor Aref Abu-Rabia (Middle East studies) engages in Slander and Libel

It was in the midst of my reply to some of these comments that BGU Professor Aref Abu-Rabia interjected, "But you are a collaborator, aren't you?" His outburst didn't end there; he then said "collaborator" again and mumbled something about the Holocaust.

In an academic setting, one might think that accusing people of being connected to the Nazis or of being "collaborators," a term also associated with Nazism, would be considered inappropriate. But the conference organizers, (BGU's) Avi Rubin and Iris Agmon, were mum.

...
The misbehaving academics are not solely to blame. It is the culture of extremism as well. One conference attendee told me, "I've gotten used to this harassment and lack of respect."

WHEN THE university becomes the equivalent of a cross between a football locker room and extremist political rally, where decorum is at its lowest level, the culture of the academy has sent the message that this hostile environment is acceptable.

It is a shame that in a university named after Israel's first prime minister, a person who dares to question whether the Beduin do in fact have indigenous rights to much of the Negev – a right they don't have in any other country in the Middle East – is condemned as a "collaborator." We know what that implies. The collaborators with the Nazis were killed after the war.

For more details and to see the full original article, go here

 

BGU Would-be Murderer not to be Prosecuted - Political Corruption in Israel's Attorney General Office

Leftist Attorney General Circles the Wagons to defend Leftist Anti-Israel Lecturer Eyal Nir (Dept of Chemistry) from BGU who Incited to Murder

For those who think I am exaggerating when I say that Israel has a corrupt politicized dual justice system, one for leftists and the other for everyone else, then just consider the following news item:

You may recall the reports here about one Eyal Nir, a far-leftist anti-Israel lecturer in chemistry at Ben Gurion "University," the Bir Zeit of the Negev. Nir posted calls and threats to murder non-leftists on his Facebook page. The same Attorney General's Office that rounds up and arrests Rabbis by the bushel if they dare to recommend that people read a book of which the Leftists disapprove was petitioned to prosecute Nir. Today it was announced that Nir will not be prosecuted.

And don't hold your breath waiting for Rivka Carmi, the Cabbagehead president of Ben Gurion "University," to do anything about Nir either.

'Case Closed Against Inciting Lecturer

The State Attorney's Office announced, Thursday, that it was closing the file of a Ben Gurion University lecturer who had called, on his Facebook page, to "break the necks" of right wing participants in last year's Jerusalem Day Flag Dance parade. The announcement cited lack of evidence. The Legal Forum for the Land of Israel, which filed the complaint has announced that it will appeal the "surprising" decision. "Law enforcement cannot ignore such a blatant incitement to murder, said Forum Director, Nachi Eyal.'

For more details and to see the full original article, go here

 

Ben Gurion University - Hysterical attack on Isracampus by David Newman (Dean of Social Sciences) in JPOST

Bemoans increased involvement of Board of Governors' dealing with Traitorous Academics who abuse their positions; Boasts the increased attention of the Council of Higher Education but fails to mention that the Council almost closed the department Newman founded.

In recent years, spurred on by extremist right-wing groups, members of the Boards of Governors have also become increasingly involved in the political debate surrounding Israeli universities and their academic staff. Many of them have blindly supported the false assertions of well-oiled and funded groups, such as Im Tirtzu, NGO Monitor, IsraCampus and Academic Monitor, that the universities have become hotbeds of "anti-Zionism" without ever bothering to check the facts on the ground.

The crisis of the humanities, which was all too apparent during the past decade, has finally been recognized by the Council of Higher Education (the MALAG) which is beginning to redirect resources to this field. In financial terms, the liberal arts and the humanities will not always stand up to the stringent measures of economic feasibility. [nor to the stringent measures of Academic standards – Isracampus]

For more details and to see the full original article, go here

 

Ben Gurion University - David Newman (Dean of Social Sciences) Denounces "exclusion of critical voices" by Israel while excluding all Non-Leftist Critical Voices from his Own Department at BGU

In his Op-Ed, David Newman complains about Israel attempting to "exclude those who think differently," such as Israel's barring entry into the country for Gunter Grass, a man who would be welcomed with open arms by Newman's politics department at BGU as a fellow hater of Israel and Zionism. Newman is opposed to preventing "critical voices" from entering Israel. This coming from the fellow who has spent recent years demanding that critical voices of critics who criticize the anti-Israel Left be silenced and suppressed.

Of course this article about how terrible it is to exclude those who think differently is written by a professor who built up the entire politics department on the principle of excluding all those who are pro-Israel or non-leftist. Zionists and non-leftists are rigidly prevented from teaching in Newman's department!

"This is part of a policy which Israel has adopted in recent years in relation to many who are critical of the country and its policies vis-a-vis the Palestinians. It is a policy which is causing immense damage to Israel's reputation as a democracy where free speech is allowed. Outspoken critics of Israeli government policies, such as Noam Chomsky, the noted Jewish linguist and philosopher, Norman Finkelstein, the American political scientists and activist who has been critical of the way in which the Holocaust has been manipulated for political gain, and, most recently, Gunter Grass, the German novelist and Nobel prize winner – have all been denied entry into Israel.

Preventing these critical voices from entering the country only draws added attention and headlines to their views. It is a policy which reflects a cowardice to engage in debate with people whose opinions do not fall in line with those of a state which has become increasingly hard-line in both its domestic and international positions in recent years. It raises questions concerning the very definition of the state as an open democracy. It makes us look pretty stupid in the eyes of the world, including those who strongly support and promote Israel within the international arena, but who believe that Israel has to justify its policies rather than simply shut the debate down because the views expressed are unpopular at the best, or indefensible at the worst."

For more details and to see the full original article, go here

 

Special Isracampus Report
Harvard Prof. Alan Dershowitz denounces BGU's Neve Gordon (Dept of Political Science) as a Fifth-Rate Pseudo-Academic and Traitor, Compares him with Holocaust Denier

On April 27, 2012 the Right-leaning daily Makor Rishon ran an extensive in-depth interview with the legendary professor of law Alan Dershowitz... Dershowitz fires his most devastating ammunition in the interview against three anti-Semitic Israelis. They are Neve Gordon from Ben Gurion "University," Ilan Pappe, once at the University of Haifa but today a full-time Israel Basher in Britain at the University of Exeter, and the demented Holocaust Denier, ex-Israeli sax player Gilad Atzmon.

In the interview, Dershowitz is asked about a comment of his cited last year in Globes in which he said that some of the worst enemies of Israel are themselves Israelis. Dershowitz responds by saying that not only are these anti-Israel Israelis among Israel's worst enemies, but also they are among Israel's most dangerous enemies. He then says that he has in mind (in this order) Neve Gordon, Ilan Pappe and Gilad Atzmon. ...Dershowitz says that these three and people like them are "People who wrap themselves in the Israeli flag only for the purpose of burning it. The only time these people claim to be Israelis at all is when they wish to wave this as a certificate to legitimize their own malicious and unreasonable attacks against Israel." While insisting that criticism in and of itself is something positive, Dershowitz says that these people are not "critics" but rather are seeking the demonization and delegitimization of all of Israel in the most hypocritical manner.

Dershowitz is then asked about the ulterior motive of these people. He replies: "Most anti-Israel Israelis are fifth rate academics incapable of finding themselves professionally or academically in Israel. Hence they try to find themselves positions in Europe, even though they generally are also too inferior to get work there. But they believe if they market themselves as anti-Israel Israelis, the novelty will boost their standing and they just might find jobs. I realize this may sound like I have a personal grudge against them, but in fact this is the simple truth."

It is notable that Dershowitz lumps Neve Gordon (and Pappe) together with Gilad Azmon, an open Holocaust Denier...

For more details and to see the full original article, go here

 

Ben Gurion University – Oren Yiftachel (Dept of Geography) Dictates the End of the Jewish State of Israel as the Only Route to Achieve Peace

Either by Suicidal Territorial Concessions or by the "Rwandan" One-State solution

The first is a political-geographical partition perceived as legitimate and just by both sides, with UN decision 242 as a basis. Israel would then retreat from all occupied territories, except for very small areas mutually agreed upon by the Palestinians. Most Jewish settlements would be evacuated, and would form an important infrastructure for the resettlement and rehabilitation of Palestinian refugees, while the large near-border settlements (such as Gilo or Ramot in the Jerusalem region) may stay under Israeli sovereignty, subject to territorial exchange.

The second option is the granting of equal citizenship to all residents of the Israeli/Palestinian space, with the establishment of a binational (as distinct from a "secular") democratic state. Given the immense problems associated with the very division of political space (the question of refugees, Jerusalem/al-Quds, and Jewish settlements, to name just a few), this option appears more attractive than ever. This solution is favored by many among the Palestinian citizens in Israel, and by small leftist and religious circles among both Palestinians and Jews worldwide.

For more details and to see the full original article, go here

 

Ben Gurion University – Oren Yiftachel (Dept of Geography) accuses Israel of "Creeping Apartheid", ethnocratic Judaization, and creating Ghettos in a rambling rant

In place of movement toward two states or one, there is a process of "creeping apartheid"- undeclared, yet structural - reordering the politics and geography of the country between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. The colonized West Bank, the besieged Gaza Strip and Israel proper, each with its own official set of rules, are in fact merging into one regime system, ultimately controlled by the Jewish state, which increasingly appears to bear the characteristics of apartheid, and inhabited by people with citizenship status akin to "blacks," "coloreds" and "whites." Repeated statements by Israeli leaders in support of Palestinian statehood have thus far functioned to lend this process legitimacy, rather than lead to the end of colonial settlement, military occupation, minority oppression and resolution of the conflict.

The Israeli regime system has long been "ethnocratic," that is to say, an overall logic of Judaization prevails in all regions under Israeli control despite the differences in their legal and political circumstances. Over time, however, the contradictions of ethnocracy have led to a deepening of the "separate and unequal" conditions in Israel-Palestine. Jews enjoy a relatively even and privileged political and legal position, while Palestinians are divided into several proto-groups, each having a differently inferior set of rights and capabilities. Under the process of creeping apartheid, Palestinians are increasingly confined to a series of what may be called "black" and "colored" ghettoes, while Jews reside in relatively open localities, both in Israel and in the Judaized West Bank.

For more details and to see the full original article, go here

 

Special Isracampus Report

Ben Gurion University - Oren Yiftachel: Legacy of Fraud, Incompetence, and Struggle against the Existence of Israel

Oren Yiftachel is one of the worst anti-Israel "academic" extremists in Israel… He specializes in trying to paint Israel as a racist apartheid entity, or – to use his own favorite nonsense word – an intolerant "ethnocracy." He justified the firing of Hamas rockets into Israel, even when some landed near his own campus, on grounds that Israel had "jailed" the entire Palestinian population of Gaza. This "jailing" consisted of refusing to allow the Gazan terrorists to import advanced weapons systems. (See this anti-Semitic smear by him, still carried on the BGU official web site, and see also this) Yiftachel churns out anti-Israel hate propaganda for some of the most anti-Semitic groups and magazines on the planet. Along with BGU's Neve Gordon and Lev Grinberg, he is part of the core BGU group of tenured extremists who make no secret of their endorsement of Arab mass murder of Jews.

For the past few years, Yiftachel has spent much of his time attempting to demonize Israel for supposedly mistreating its Bedouin citizens. This "mistreatment" consists of Israel's refusal to accept at face value the fictional and imaginary "legal" claims of the Negev Bedouins to huge portions of the entire Negev... Yiftachel also has a long track record of denouncing Israel for allowing Jews to move to the Negev and the Galilee, or what he calls "Judaizing" these territories. The term "judaization" has been used by anti-Semites as a nonsense term to denounce Jews since the Middle Ages.

In recent weeks, Yiftachel testified in a Beer Sheba Court about those Bedouin claims in a suit against the state of Israel brought by the Bedouin lobby. Yiftachel's fraudulent testimony has now become the matter of public record and of a growing number of media reports.

Yiftachel gave false testimony to the court. A second geography professor from Jerusalem, Prof. Ruth Kark, gave non-fictional and factually correct testimony on behalf of the state, challenging the fraudulent claims of Yiftachel and the Bedouin lobby. Kark has published a serious academic book about the Negev Bedouins, along with her PhD student, Seth Frantzman, currently an editor at the Jerusalem Post and someone who often writes for Isracampus.

The court ruled against Yiftachel and his lobby. The judge in question, Sarah Dovrat, went out of her way to denounce Yiftachel for fabrication and fraudulent misrepresentation of the contents of a number of historic documents during his testimony, denouncing him explicitly for testifying about the contents of documents he had never even bothered to read!

The denunciation of Yiftachel and his fraud has now appeared in several news venues. Citations from the judge's verdict in which Yiftachel was denounced were posted on an Israeli chat list by the distinguished Israeli professor of Geography from Tel Aviv University, Gideon Biger.

On April 20, 2012, a particularly good expose of Yiftachel's fraud was carried in Hebrew by the Makor Rishon daily newspaper [paraphrased in English in the full article]…

A second somewhat similar article appears this week on the internet at http://2nd-ops.com/adiby/?p=5658 (in Hebrew). It accuses Yiftachel of forgery and perjury, when he submitted to the court a corrected later affidavit carrying the false date of an earlier affidavit he had submitted.

For more details and to see the full original article, go here

 

Ben Gurion University - Writing in anti-Semitic pro-jihad "Counterpunch," Little Neve Gordon (Dept of Political Science) is back with a new Blood Libel and Historic Fiction

Under the directives of Israel's first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, many of the remaining Bedouin were uprooted from the lands they had inhabited for generations and were concentrated in the mostly barren area in the north-eastern part of the Negev known as the Siyag (enclosure) zone. This area comprises one million dunams [one dunam = 1,000m2], or slightly less than ten per cent of the Negev's territory. Through this process of forced relocation, the Negev's most arable lands were cleared of Arab residents and were given to new kibbutzim and moshavim, Jewish agriculture communities, which took full advantage of the fertile soil.
...

Prawer's algorithm is an extremely complex mechanism of expropriation informed by the basic assumption that the Bedouin have no land rights. (From this we learn that Gordon does not know what an algorithm is -- Isracampus)

For more details and to see the full original article, go here

 

Special Isracampus Report –
Ben Gurion University - Judge Dismisses Oren Yiftachel (Dept of Geography) as a Charlatan

In an important landmark court case, Judge Sarah Dovrat in Beer Sheba court dismissed the fraudulent claims presented by Prof. Oren Yiftachel (Ben Gurion University, Dept of Geography). Yiftachel has a long track record of granting "academic" artillery support to fraudulent claims by Negev Bedouins to huge tracts of land they do not own and to which they have no legitimate claims. Yiftachel's position has long been that Israel needs to recognize every imaginary "claim" to land made by any Negev Bedouin.
...
In the verdict rejecting the Bedouin case, the judge repeatedly blasted Yiftachel and his "research." She accused Yiftachel of endorsing claims made by Bedouins without even having bothered to read them. She attacked Yiftachel for relying on the "Palestine Law Report" without even understanding what it was referring to, and then trying to twist and turn his way out of his being nailed for his errors. It would have been far more dignified for Yiftachel to concede his errors, said the judge in the verdict. The Bedouins were represented by radical leftist lawyer Michael Sfard and were ordered to pay 50,000 in court costs.

For more details and to see the full original article, go here

 

Ben Gurion University – Rivka Carmi, BGU President, Staves the Closing of the Political Science Dept with Cosmetic Changes

As you recall, an international panel had called for shutting down the political science department at BGU because it is nothing but a pseudo-academic radical anti-Israel propaganda center engaged in anti-Israel hate and demonization. It is composed entirely of far-leftist anti-Israel extremists and no Zionist is permitted to teach in the department. And it is a department devoid of the slightest hint of serious academic standards or scholastic achievement. It is home to Neve Gordon, in the news this week for defending Iran's right to nuke the Jews, and also to the enemy of freedom of speech David Newman, Dean at BGU, who actually is a geographer, best known for his helping produce an anti-Semitic documentary for British TV.

Well, Rivka Carmi proclaimed that the school would make some cosmetic changes in the department to get the international panel off her back. Israel's Ivory Soviet, the Council on Higher Education, seems to be buying her spin. It has backed down from the decision to shut down this BGU department for jihadist studies.

For more details and to see the full original article, go here

 

Writing for the jihadist Aljazeera, Ben Gurion University's own Mini-Ayatollah Neve Gordon (Dept of Political Science) Joins the Initiative to Defend Iran's Right to Nuke the Jews

Preparing Israel for war

Most analysts wittingly or unwittingly intimated, however, that there were other reasons for initiating the current cycle of violence, and justifying a major offensive on Gaza was not one of them.
...
The recent attack is, however, not only about allocating more money to the military; it is also about
Iran. The media continuously drew a connection between the Islamic jihad, which launched most of the rockets against Israel, and Iran. The IDF spokesperson pointed an accusing finger towards Teheran, claiming that it is transferring weapons and money to the Islamic Jihad. A couple of days later a headline in Yisrael Hayom declared, "Iran is Behind the Jihad's Rocket Attack". Hence, another objective was to show the Israeli public that Iran, by means of a proxy, had already begun attacking Israel.

For more details and to see the full original article, go here

 

Leftist Fascist Academics Exempt from Prosecution when They Call for Murder

The State Attorney's Office has refused to file charges against a former lecturer at the Bezalel art school who wrote "death to the settlers" on his Facebook page.

The man, Tzvi Elhayani, wrote: "Death to the settlers – because you are a spiritual murder of the nation of Israel."

Following this publication, the Legal Forum for the Land of Israel asked the Attorney General and Government Legal Advisor to initiate an investigation on suspicion of incitement to murder.

Last June, a lecturer at Ben Gurion University [Eyal Nir – Isracampus] called for violence against Jewish participants in the Jerusalem Day Flag March. "I call on the world to come and help break these scoundrels' necks," he wrote on his Facebook page, and described the flag-bearing marchers as "gangs of bandits swarming in our country."

While an investigation was reportedly launched against Nir four months later, there has been no report that charges have been filed.

For more details and to see the full original article, go here

 

Ben Gurion University - Cabbagehead Rivka Carmi, the mad cow president, is the star of a sycophantic cover story in the Haaretz weekend magazine.

The entire first 1/3 is about the role of the radical Left at BGU, about BGU's loss of respect and reputation because of the role of the radicals, and about the criticism of standards in the politics department. Carmi gives her typical spins. She even manages to bash the donors to BGU.

"It was a routine report," Carmi says drily about the CHE document [which called for radical changes in the Political Science Dept or to close the department completely-Isracampus]. "They are always examining a different field across all the universities. We thought we would adopt the report's conclusions about strengthening the core subjects, even though there was an argument about this, because the department was established with a mandate to be different... But our thinking was that if the committee says so, then maybe we overdid things a little, and okay, we accept the conclusions."

So, what do you do when a donor says, "Get rid of a wayward teacher or I will cancel my donation"?
"That has happened on more than one occasion. I try to put things into context and say that it is an extreme political approach espoused by fewer than a handful. We have 800 faculty members, and of them five, maybe ten, espouse that approach... One of them, a donor to a beit midrash [place of Torah study] on the campus, became so angry that he stopped donating. So what? There was also an American who wanted to donate $7 million to the library."

For more details and to see the full original article, go here

 

Ben Gurion University – Idan Landau (Dept of Foreign Literatures & Linguistics) claims rock throwing is not a "violent protest"

Say, Landau, how come there are no photos on your blog of Jewish children murdered by West Bank Arab terrorists that the Israeli soldier failed to arrest?

Landau's choices of words resemble those on Hamas web sites.

Everything Israel does is "unlawful", "occupation" and "dispossession." Hezbollah terrorists are "freedom fighters."

Oh, and here's more of his take on rock throwing at Jews:

"Just to be clear: throwing stones at an occupying army which prevents you from demonstrating on your own land does not constitute "violent protest." It is the expected response to someone who not only steals your land but also denies you the basic right to protest this. If the army stops acting against the residents of Nabi Saleh and just gets the hell off their lands, no one will throw stones at it."

Since Idan Landau claims stone throwing is not a "violent protest," I think we should have students take stones into Landau's classes and throw them at him for fifteen months while he lectures. This could be our protest to his support for those who don't want to negotiate and settle with the People of Israel, but to really wipe them off the map.

For more details and to see the full original article, go here

 

David Newman (a.k.a. Neve Gordon Lite from the Dept of Politics at BGU that the international panel of experts called for shutting down) attacks Isracampus in the anti-Israel pro-LSD hippy magazine "Tikkun," on whose board of editors he sits; Newman forgets to mention that he has been leading the McCarthyist campaign to silence critics of the Radical Left

Or, they are all members of the anti-Zionist, Israel bashing, self-hating Jews conspiracy who have been targeted by any one of the three extremist right wing organizations Im Tirtzu, Academic Monitor and Isracampus in recent years.

And this is but the tip of the iceberg....

Almost anyone who dares to think aloud, promotes social justice, works on behalf of peace and the cause of human rights, dares to dream (as did Herzl so many years ago) or believes in freedom of speech, has a chance of finding himself / herself on the list. Indeed, anyone reading this column and who perceives themselves as a law abiding upright citizen of the State of Israel could well find themselves on this list.

For more details and to see the full original article, go here

 

Ben Gurion University – BGU Prof Israel David Determines that the Demise of BGU's Imbalanced Pol-Sci Dept is Inevitable Based on his Insider Information

Ben Gurion University has found itself at a fork in the road, where it is being required to provide clear and non-evasive answers to Israel's Council on Higher Education, the public body that oversees higher education in Israel. As the reader no doubt recalls, this Council earlier appointed an international panel of professional evaluation for the department of politics at BGU, and that panel recommended shutting down the department of politics altogether, unless the severe academic and professional shoddiness and incompetence there would be cured.

There are indeed quite a few "imbalances" at Ben Gurion University. Take for example the fact that nine out of the eleven tenured faculty members in the department of politics at BGU, as well as a great many of the non-tenured faculty members there, are radical extremist seditious far-leftist activists. [Actually, all 11 tenured faculty members are far-leftist activists – Isracampus] The chance that such a department could have emerged by chance is far lower than the chance of winning millions in the lottery. It should be noted that no similar "coincidence" can be found at any other university! Therefore there can be no doubt that this department was constructed intentionally using the "One friend brings in another friend" method of nepotism, and that in turn is the source of the absence of professional and scientific standards in the department.

The imbalance of interest when it comes to the department of politics is the imbalance of purpose. The bulk of faculty members in the department have no idea what the mission of an academic institution is… [The current chairman of the department, Dr. Dani] Filc believes the mission of the department is advocacy, whereas the proper mission of an academic unit is research and instruction. Much more serious is Filc's inability to understand that it is NOT a proper function for an academic department to persecute and harass Israeli army officers, smearing them as "war criminals," nor to vandalize Israeli military security points and checkpoints, nor to infiltrate illegally into Arafat's headquarters in Ramallah and there get photographed in warm embrace with Arafat (which a faculty member in this department has already done), nor to organize violent illegal "protests" (some of which have already been the subject of prosecution in BGU disciplinary committees).

Shutting down the department of politics at BGU is a matter of great seriousness. There are precedents in Israel for doing so… And that is what has to be done at BGU!

For more details and to see the full original article, go here

 

Ben Gurion University - Tenured Enemy of Freedom of Speech Neve Gordon (Dept of Political Science) sets up a Web Site that Claims to Mock Isracampus

Haaretz (http://www.haaretz.com/print-edition/news/10-percent-of-israeli-academics-labeled-anti-zionist-by-campus-watchdogs-1.408535) reports that Ben Gurion University’s worst Anti-Semite Neve Gordon has set up his own little web site called www.blacklist.co.il that is an attempt to mock Isracampus. The web site purports to invite radical leftists to sign up to be added to black lists of anti-Israel extremists. Gordon claims his web site will allow leftist academics to search the archives of Isracampus and other watchdog groups to see if they are listed and find what is said about them there. But we tried out Gordon’s site and it did not do any of things Gordon claims it does. It does not even locate any article written about Neve Gordon himself, showing what an effective search tool it is!

Meanwhile Gordon lists the owners and initiators of the webs “blacklist” site he runs here: http://blacklist.co.il/cgi-bin/bl/who.py

Well, we checked that list of names. Aside from Gordon himself, none of the people in that list except Yinon Cohen is even an academic.

For more details and to see the full original article, go here

 

Haaretz reports on how Isracampus Exposes the Tenured Left

Three self-proclaimed watchdog organizations have labeled about 10 percent of Israeli academics as anti-Zionist, according to a recent study by a group of academics, artists and university students who aim to counter the categorizations. The organizations, which are open about their activities, are Im Tirtzu, IsraCampus and Israel Academia Monitor. … Members of the group include political scientist Prof. Neve Gordon of Ben-Gurion University of the Negev; Israeli Film Directors Guild chairman Rani Blair; and the chairman of the Israeli Documentary Filmmakers Forum, Uri Rosenwaks.

University of Haifa economist Prof. Steven Plaut, one of the founders of IsraCampus, said in a statement: "Our main function is to quote what these teachers say and write ideologically and politically in order to bring it to the attention of the public. The issue is not an ideological argument, but rather publicizing the anti-Israel group that openly supports the enemy," Plaut said.

For more details and to see the full original article, go here

 

Ben Gurion University – Discriminating against Jews

Racism and discrimination have suddenly appeared as a serious problem in Israeli academia. The racism and discrimination in question is anti-Jewish and is being practiced by Ben Gurion "University." That is right, 73 years after Kristallnacht Jews are being discriminated against and barred from attending a university program in psychology at Ben Gurion "University" because it is only open to Arabs. And a Jewish victim of this overt discrimination has filed suit with the Supreme Court.

The program in question is a MA program in psychology open only to Arabs and particularly to Bedouins. Jews who qualify are excluded. In addition, the program is secret. Ben Gurion University has been trying to hide it from the media and from students and even from the government.

For more details and to see the full original article, go here

 

Ben Gurion University – Calls for PolSci Dept to Stop Ignoring the Recommendations from the Council for Higher Education or Resign

Back at Ben-Gurion, the political biases of the politics department are well-documented. Indeed, though Prof. Newman should be lauded for his efforts to combat the proposed academic boycott of Israel in the UK, they do ring somewhat hollow when the chair of his own department supports the boycott, a matter to which one would assume Newman would urgently attend. Instead of ignoring the report, Prof. Newman and the rest of the faculty should immediately correct the failings in their departments. And if they fail to step up, the authorities should press them to step down.

For more details and to see the full original article, go here

 

Ben Gurion University – Additional Calls to Deal with BGU's Tenured Tanzim

Yaakov Bergman, a prominent professor at the Hebrew University, has joined the assault on the Tenured Tanzim who teach "politics" at Ben Gurion University. He published a response to Neve Gordon and Dani Filc, the two most extremist Israel-hating faculty members in this otherwise wall-to-wall anti-Israel far-leftist department.

Then, Commentary Magazine adds its voice:
 …Back at Ben-Gurion, the political biases of the politics department are well-documented. Indeed, though Prof. Newman should be lauded for his efforts to combat the proposed academic boycott of Israel in the UK, they do ring somewhat hollow when the chair of his own department supports the boycott, a matter to which one would assume Newman would urgently attend. Instead of ignoring the report, Prof. Newman and the rest of the faculty should immediately correct the failings in their departments. And if they fail to step up, the authorities should press them to step down.

For more details and to see the full original article, go here

 

Ben Gurion University – Neve Gordon (Dept of Political Science) Writes in Al Jazeera; Suggests Unreasonable Arab Demands to Bring About the End of the Jewish State of Israel and Unilateral Israeli Comprise

Israel’s continued unwillingness to fully support these three components is rapidly leading to the annulment of the two-state option and, as a result, is leaving open only one possible future direction: power sharing.

The notion of power sharing would entail the preservation of the existing borders, from the Jordan valley to the Mediterranean Sea, and an agreed upon form of a power sharing government led by Israeli Jews and Palestinians, and based on the liberal democracy model of the separation of powers. It also entails a parity of esteem - namely, the idea that each side respects the other side’s identity and ethos, including language, culture and religion. This, to put it simply, is the bi-national one-state solution.

For more details and to see the full original article, go here

 

Ben Gurion University - Professor Ze’ev Maoz (University of California & Interdisciplinary Center (Herzliya)) endorses the Calls for The Complete Shutting Down of the Department of Politics at Ben Gurion University; Insists it is a bunch of substandard pseudo-academics

He begins by proclaiming that he is a proud member of the Israeli Left. … He then reveals that he himself had been recruited nine years ago by the Council on Higher Education to evaluate the very same department at BGU. At the time he proposed shutting down the entire department for essentially the same reasons as those in the new panel report. He claims his reasons were entirely academic, not political, just as the current panel’s recommendations are academic.

Back then, Maoz found that there are no serious academic standards in place in that department. Most of the faculty members have no serious credentials in political science. He says that not only was the Council on Higher Education not conducting a witch-hunt against the Politics department at BGU, but it even refused to implement Maoz’ own recommendations, treated the department with permissive (his word) kid gloves, allowed it to go on functioning and even to develop new programs for students, and refused to apply the same rigorous standards to the department of Neve Gordon and David Newman that it was applying to all other departments across the board.

He concludes that the Department of Politics at BGU is an academic disgrace and the petitions of support for it are motivated by the most dubious of motives. Translation: those petitions consist of anti-Israel extremists seeking to defend other anti-Israel pseudo-academic extremists from criticism and accountability.

For more details and to see the full original article, go here

 

Ben Gurion University - David Newman (Dean of Social Sciences and Humanities) Defames London Professor Efraim Karsh and the Middle East Forum

Dismisses any criticism emanating from the Jewish Diaspora as “disgraceful” “verbal terrorism”

The use of “Nazi” slur terminology has also been used as a means of delegitimizing legitimate criticism of Israel and its policies. Just this past week, an Israeli emigrant to the UK, Prof. Efraim Karsh of Kings College at the University of London, used the right-wing, pseudoacademic journal Middle East Forum to attribute such remarks, falsely, to the writer of this column.

The article by Karsh is a pathetic attempt to falsify facts and portray the intellectual Left (sic), be it in Israel or elsewhere, as rabidly anti-Semitic and thus to shut down the debate on any form of legitimate debate and discourse concerning the situation in Israel.

And when it emanates from “patriotic supporters” of Israel who sit in the safety of their Diaspora homes in the USA or London, it is not only disgraceful, it is outright laughable. It is a form of verbal terrorism which must not be allowed to take root in the debate concerning Israel and anti-Semitism. The issue is simply too serious for that.

[Isracampus comment: The Middle East Forum is a far more respectable academic institution than is the Department of Politics at Ben Gurion University, built by David Newman as a pseudo-academic jihadist camp in which uniformity of thought has been documented, and Efraim Karsh’s academic credentials are countless times stronger than David Newman’s!

As to the “falsely” attributed “Nazi” slur terminology, Isracampus would like to refresh Newman's memory. The forgetful Dean has used such “Nazi” metaphors to delegitimize Israel in the Jerusalem Post as recently as Nov 2011:

“These may sound like strong words and I will no doubt be strongly criticized for making such a comparison, but we would do well to paraphrase the famous words of Pastor Niemoller, writing in 1946 about Germany of the 1930s and 1940s: “When the government denied the sovereign rights of the Palestinians, I remained silent; I was not a Palestinian.”

Prof Karsh reports in correspondence with Isracampus that the above is the quote that prompted his Middle East Forum expose.]

For more details and to see the full original article, go here

 

Rallying the International anti-Israel Left on behalf of the Extremists at Ben Gurion University

…Last year Israel’s Council on Higher Education, which oversees and funds Israel’s universities (and is composed of representatives of those same universities) appointed a special commission to investigate and evaluate the Department of Politics at Ben Gurion University. That commission found what everyone already knew, that the department is a radical monolithic politicized incitement camp, not a serious academic department, one in which anti-Israel activism had replaced serious scholarship and in which serious academic standards have been trashed. The commission proposed that the entire department be shut down unless radical reform and restructuring takes place, including complete de-politicization of and introduction of real pluralism into the department.

Since that CHE report was issued, Israel’s radical Left, led by its tenured Left, has been leading a campaign to defend the anti-Israel indoctrination camp calling itself the Department of Politics at Ben Gurion University… And they are also being championed by Haaretz, the radical anti-Israel leftist “newspaper,” better thought of as a Palestinian newspaper published in Hebrew… Universities must continue to serve to indoctrinate students into correct leftist anti-Israel ideology. All attempts at interfering with this sacred mission must be resisted and defeated.

Now the tenured Left in Israel is organizing petitions of like-minded radical tenured leftists in Israel and around the world to express their support and solidarity with the Ben Gurion University indoctrination camp.

…While one could go through the lists of signers of the petition name by name to document their own anti-Israel far-leftist biases, it is sufficient to illustrate the point with one of the leading signers, Berkeley’s Judith Butler. She is a notorious collaborator with anti-Semites and supporter of Israel annihilation and can represent the other signers.

To remove all doubt, Butler made it clear that she objects to Israel’s presence not only in the West Bank, where she was doing her Terrorism Grand Tour. She also wants Israel removed from within Israel’s pre-1967 borders. Butler has long supported a worldwide boycott of Israel, and not simply because Israel “occupies” the West Bank. She has made it clear that she demands that Israel allow millions of Arabs claiming to be Palestinian “refugees” to flood into Israel and convert it into yet another Palestinian Arab state. She wants this even after the creation of some Palestinian state. … Butler explained to her terrorist hosts that she opposes the existence of a Jewish state even alongside some future Palestinian Arab state. Instead, she favors what she calls a bi-national state, something along the lines of Rwanda.

For more details and to see the full original article, go here

 

University of London & Middle East Forum Director Efraim Karsh Exposes Ben Gurion University’s Pseudo-Academic anti-Israel Dean of Social Sciences and Humanities David Newman

So much so that an international committee of scholars, appointed by Israel’s Council for Higher Education to evaluate political science and international relations programs in Israeli universities, recently recommended that BGU “consider closing the Department of Politics and Government” unless it abandoned its “strong emphasis on political activism,” improved its research performance, and redressed the endemic weakness “in its core discipline of political science.” In other words, they asked that the Department return to accurate scholarship rather than indoctrinate the students with libel.

The same day the committee’s recommendation was revealed, Professor David Newman -- who founded that department and bequeathed it such a problematic ethos, for which “achievement” he was presumably rewarded with a promotion to Deanship of the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, from where he can shape other departments in a similar way -- penned an op-ed in theJerusalem Post in which he compared Israel’s present political culture to that of Nazi Germany…

… And therein, no doubt, lies the problem with BGU’s Politics and Government Department: the only Israeli department singled out by the international committee for the unprecedented recommendation of closure. For if its founder and long-time member, who continues to wield decisive influence over its direction, views Israel as a present-day reincarnation of Nazi Germany in several key respects, how conceivably can the department ensure the “sustained commitment to providing balance and an essential range of viewpoints and perspectives on the great issues of politics” required for its continued existence?

For more details and to see the full original article, go here

 

Ben Gurion University - David Newman (Dean of Social Science and Humanities Dept) denounces those who "leaked" the fact that his BGU department consists of Anti-Israel Extremists devoid of serious academic achievements; He then whitewashes the politicized hiring process in that department

Comes perilously close to supporting and advocating BDS

WHOEVER LEAKED the report to the press clearly had a political agenda. It is unheard of for such reports to be leaked or publicized before the CHE has an opportunity to discuss them. And the way in which it was leaked, partially and with false information and highlights, clearly was intended to create a hostile public atmosphere prior to the meeting of the CHE. The report will be the subject of a specially convened meeting of the Knesset Education Committee tomorrow – and it is clear that this has very little to do with education, but a great deal to do with politics.

The idea that universities appoint faculty according to their political opinions is the most ridiculous of all the accusations. Anyone who has the slightest knowledge of the appointment and promotion process (be it at Ben Gurion or Bar Ilan) will know that this is a tortuous process, demanding a thorough review of the candidate's academic and professional competence, his research achievements, his publication record and letters and recommendations which are received from academic peers throughout the world. [ROFL!! – Isracampus]

... Their ongoing, well-funded war of attrition against freedom of debate and academic freedom is slowly destroying Israel's democracy and leading academic friends around the world to think twice before developing research links with Israeli universities and academics. Academics who have refused up until now to be part of the boycott campaign are now turning against Israel because of the country's growing international image as a place where people, and now entire departments, with the "wrong" political views are being silenced and threatened by the activities of these extremist right-wing groups.

For more details and to see the full original article, go here

 

Amit Barak, 'Im Tirtzu' spokesman, Implores BGU President Rivka Carmi to Comply with the CHE Recommendations or Resign

Unfortunately, however, the university, under your guidance, has chosen to completely disregard these demands and continues to silence the student body, while enabling the professors in the Department of Politics and Government to continue their uniform, anti- Israel teachings.

Professor Neve Gordon recently announced that the kidnapping of Gilad Schalit was not terrorism, while, at a conference held by the Department of Politics and Government last week, terrorists sentenced for the murder of Israeli citizens were termed "political prisoners."

Professor Carmi, under your guidance Ben- Gurion University of the Negev has been the subject of a report containing severe criticism, degrading the reputation of Israeli academia.

Today, you have a unique opportunity to begin leading the university back to prominence by choosing to adopt the recommendations of the Council for Higher Education and completely revamping the structure of the Department of Politics and Government, including lecturers, courses and syllabi. We implore you to follow this path, in order to restore the status and reputation of the university.

If, on the other hand, you refuse to accept the decision of the CHE, you should take responsibility for these failures and resign immediately.

For more details and to see the full original article, go here

 

The Full report of the International Panel that called for the dismemberment of Ben Gurion University's Politics department due to pseudo-scholarship, absence of standards, and monolithic anti-Israel indoctrination

http://www.scribd.com/doc/74235533/BGU-Report

 

Ben Gurion University - David Newman (Dept of Political Science) Claims that One-Sided leftist Classroom Indoctrination is the highest form of academic pluralism

The Council for Higher Education is set to vote Tuesday to ratify the external report it commissioned on the political science faculties at Israel's universities, including Ben-Gurion University of the Negev's Politics and Government Department, which came under heavy criticism. The document lists a series of shortcomings at Ben-Gurion University and even advises, as a last resort, closing down the department entirely if the problems are not resolved.

The report also refers to the fact that students at the Ben-Gurion University department are exposed to the personal political opinions of their professors, noting: "Lecturers must ensure that their personal opinions are presented as such, so that the students can judge things from a critical perspective and be exposed to a wide range of perspectives and alternatives."

… According to Prof. David Newman, the dean of Ben-Gurion's Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences and one of the founders of its Politics and Government Department, "The department has become a target for attack by all those who wish to suppress any pluralist dialogue and trample every piece of academic freedom. One brief glance at this activity is enough to grasp the inherent danger it poses for the existence of Israeli democracy."

For more details and to see the full original article, go here

 

Interdisciplinary Center (Herzliya) - Galia Golan (School of Government) Far Leftist Galia Golan, Founder and Leader of radical leftist 'Peace Now', cannot seem to Find any Political Bias at Ben Gurion University; Claims Pluralism in the classroom negates Academic Freedom

Furthermore, committee member Prof. Galia Golan refused to sign the report, claiming it was politically-motivated. Instead, Golan wrote a Minority Opinion (can be read at the end of the report below), in which she wrote that the demand “for a balance (of views) in the classroom… runs directly counter to the principle of academic freedom.”

For more details and to see the full original article, go here

 

The Whole World now Knows - the Politics Department at BGU is an anti-Israel Pseudo-Academic Propaganda Group that Needs to be Shut Down at Once

In an unprecedented move, an international committee appointed by the Council for Higher Education has recommended that the Politics and Government Department at Ben Gurion University be shut down unless it addresses some of the problems pointed out by the committee.

According to the Yedioth Ahronoth daily, several of the department's researchers are considered to be radical leftists. Some of them have even called for an economic, political and cultural boycott on Israel due to its "apartheid regime."

The committee, which is headed by Professor Thomas Risse from the Free University in Berlin, expressed its concern that the department's political inclinations may be resulting in what it referred to as an imbalance between the opinions of the faculty members and the curriculum.

For more details and to see the full original article, go here

 

Ben Gurion University - David Newman (Dept of Political Science) again attacking the donors to his own university. THEY are NOT entitled to freedom of speech!

Leads the campaign to protect the right of the EU to fund and promote treason in Israel

Neither are the bastions of freedom of expression immune to these pressures. Universities, where freedom of expression and diversity of opinion should be the most cherished of values, are proving themselves weak in the face of these same pressures. Right-wing donors who feel that their checkbooks give them the right to determine what goes on in a country they are not even prepared to be citizens of threaten to cease their funding and influence others to do the same.

In the tight economic situation of recent years, the leaders of these institutions are not always prepared to publicly stand up for academic freedom, as the lure of the donation takes precedence over the values around which these important centers of science and education were created in the first place. It has become easier for university heads to lay the blame for their failure to bring in new donors at the door of left-wing academics than than to attribute the drop off in funding to the realities of economic recession or to their inability to succeed in a highly competitive world of Israeli institutions (universities, hospitals, yeshivot, welfare associations) all vying for the evershrinking dollar.

For more details and to see the full original article, go here

 

Ben Gurion University - Neve Gordon (Dept of Political Science), writing in the Pro-Terror Anti-Semitic "Counterpunch" magazine, claims Israel preparing to Attack Iran for no Reason at all

Regardless of whether Netanyahu and Barak are already set on launching an assault, the media hype and the portrayal of Iran as constituting an existential threat to Israel surely help to produce the necessary conditions for a military campaign.

What is remarkable about this saber rattling is its abstraction. Not a single analyst noted that entering war is easy but ending it is far more difficult, particularly if on the other side stands a regional power with vast resources and a well-trained military (unlike Hamas or Hezbollah). And, of course, no one really talked about the likelihood of a gory future or what kind of life we were planning for our children. This kind of abstraction makes war palatable, providing a great service to the war machine.

For more details and to see the full original article, go here

 

Ben Gurion University - Sanity at last at BGU? BGU docks Idan Landau (Dept of Foreign Literatures & Linguistics) salary for the period he spent in prison for refusing to do army service

States that 'many others' in the Foreign Literature Dept spend little time on campus

Dear staff members of the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences,

Executive Summary

In May this year I went for a week to a military prison for reserve duty disobedience. The university has decided to deduct from my salary the research part (50%) of this week. I protested the decision at the meeting I had with the President of the university this week, but to no avail. In light of the President's announcement, I no longer see Ben Gurion University as my academic home.

And now, in detail

I am a military reserve objector since the year 2000. In 2001 I went to prison for two weeks. I was a Kreitman scholarship recipient in the Department of Foreign Literatures and Linguistics. In 2003 I went back to prison for two weeks. I was already part of the university staff (as an Alon scholarship recipient). And the last time was in May this year: I went to prison for a week.

Unlike previous times, this time a surprise was waiting: the Human Resources Dept. decided to dock a week's wages from my salary. After I created a little stir and made it clear that no damage was done to my teaching (I gave supplementary lessons), or my research (the week in prison was especially productive, quiet and almost without interruption) - I was told that the decision had been suspended. It turned out that someone forgot to update me, and on June 27, the Management submitted the final decision (Management = president, rector and CEO) to deduct half my weekly wage due to lack of research. I received notice only in October, and immediately asked to meet with the President for clarification.

The official justification, repeated by the President, is that Social Security does not cover the period of incarceration. In my defense, I argued that it is unclear why there is room for indemnification when there is no evidence of damage; was my research really damaged because of the week I was in prison? The legal premise here is that research can only be performed in the physical confines of a university office. Any intelligent person (especially in our faculty) knows that it is not so; many others are not present in the office more than three times a week. Many others come to the institution only to teach, and perform their research at home.

[IsraCampus translation of original letter (in Hebrew)]

 

Academics Uri Hadar (TAU, Dept of Psychology) and Oren Yiftachel (BGU, Dept. of Geography) named as part of a concerted effort to deconstruct Zionism

The scenes of the Israeli army's attack on Gaza at the turn of 2008 evoked... images of Auschwitz. I came out... saying to myself: Of course, we found our [sacrificial] lamb – the people of Gaza.
– from The Hermeneutic Underpinning of Ethnic Brutality: The Jewish Israeli Case, Prof. Uri Hadar, Department of Psychology, Tel Aviv University, 2011
...
The sentiments expressed in the citation from Tel Aviv University's Uri Hadar at the start of this column dovetail well with those of his colleague Oren Yiftahel of Ben- Gurion University.

In The Jailer State (January 18, 2009), the good professor states: "Palestinian violence, and particularly the shelling from Gaza, should also be perceived as a prison uprising... suppressed with terror by the Israeli state."

In her meticulously researched and documented 'Tenured Radicals' in Israel, Prof. Ofira Seliktar traces the ongoing activities of academics who exploit their positions to promote the delegitimization of Israel. This is becoming evermore prevalent not only in academic research agendas but also in the content of courses taught and of conferences/ seminars held, as well as an increasingly weighty factor in the selection of faculty.

Seliktar describes how the "Zionist endeavor" is routinely portrayed as a "colonialist enterprise" in which the Jews have no any more rights to Palestine than the British had to India.

According to her study, Israeli academics support petitioning the International Criminal Court against IDF officers, and Israeli academic institutions are depicted – by those employed by them – as an indivisible part of an oppressive state, which has perpetrated unforgivable crimes against the Palestinian people.

Numerous Israeli scholars endorse the boycott, sanctions and disinvestment measures against Israel and even support sanctions against the very universities paying their salaries – salaries that they are somehow loath to "boycott," despite the fact that they come from the coffers of the iniquitous racist state they decry.

Might this not be cause for the average Israeli to ponder the use being made of taxes deducted from his hard-earned income?
...
The conceptual foundations underpinning the Zionist enterprise are being deconstructed; the ideological edifice embodying the notion of Jewish political sovereignty is being eroded. This deconstruction, this erosion, is being carried out by those who should be entrusted with the maintenance of those foundations and the enhancement of that edifice – those charged with dispensing justice, imparting knowledge and conveying truth

For more details and to see the full original article, go here

 

Ben Gurion University – Eyal Nir's (Dept of Chemistry) inflammatory statements against right-wing religious group calls into question the Academic Freedom in his classroom

Two weeks ago it was reported that State Prosecutor Shai Nitzan had asked police to investigate Ben-Gurion University chemistry lecturer Eyal Nir for incitement because of a call he made to "break the necks" of a right-wing fringe group. The same week, Kent State University Professor Julio Pino yelled "death to Israel" during a lecture by Israeli diplomat Ishmael Khaldi. It is important to examine not only the merits of these cases but also the wider context of freedom of expression and the "right" of academics to engage in extremist speech while at the same time enjoying the presumption that their work with students remains unbiased and uninformed by their sometimes radical views.

The Nir incident took place in June, 2011, after Israelis marched through Jerusalem on Jerusalem Day. Some of the fringe part of the march included a group that chanted anti- Arab slogans and whose comments were posted on YouTube. Nir saw the YouTube video and linked to it on his Facebook page, with a comment in Hebrew that "gangs of bandits are swarming our country. I call on the world to come and help break these scoundrels' necks."
...
It is worth noting that Eyal Nir is no stranger to radical politics in Israel. In 2010 he was photographed being arrested by the IDF during a protest at Nabi Salah in the West Bank. Blogger Alison Ramer wrote that "Nir was taken into an army jeep for insulting a soldier with a racial slur."

Ben-Gurion University has seemingly stood by Nir, noting in a statement: "Dr. Nir published his comments as a private individual, on his personal Facebook page. The university does not take a side in the matter, and therefore justice should be sought in appropriate legal forum."
...
THE PROBLEM with Nir's comments is not whether they constitute incitement under Israeli law, since the incitement law is, in my opinion, flawed. The issue that should be raised about Nir's diatribe is how it impacts the university environment he teaches in. A review of cases abroad shows that most faculty members who have been fired for things they said had their jobs terminated only in connection to comments made in class or which were directly related to campus activities.

Most respected academics know the value of having their students believe classes are not biased against certain individuals due to race, creed or gender. Since national-religious students in Israel clearly constitute a creed it is certainly possible that these students might feel that Nir's "break their necks" comment was directed at them and would feel uncomfortable attending his classes. How can one study in such a hostile environment? Could a black student feel comfortable in a class where she knew that the lecturer had written in an op-ed that black activists should have their necks broken? Furthermore, why do academics enjoy a special type of free speech that no other occupation enjoys? Those defending these "outbursts" seem to misconstrue the notion of academic freedom, which means a freedom to research, with the idea that academics have the right to behave in the lowest manner possible, using outbursts that befit the village drunk more than they do a holder of a doctorate.

For more details and to see the full original article, go here

 

Ben Gurion University - BGU lecturer Esmail Nashif (Dept of Sociology) running a jihad against the "Zionist presence in Palestine" from his cushy Israeli university job

Does the anti-boycott law preclude psudeo-academic support of the BDS movement?

The boycott, in its diverse forms, against the colonial regime in Palestine is a welcome step so long as its objective is to undermine the regime. Presumably, the intentions and aims of the leaders of the campaigns calling for the boycott are indeed to weaken the Zionist regime in Palestine, and that they are based on the contradictions of this regime. However, the boycott against the colonial rule in Palestine raises some questions that the horizon of Palestinian collective action has often ignored. Of particular importance is the question of the relationship between the tools of resistance and their users. This question is tied to the vision from which the tools of resistance are derived. From this perspective, the boycott does not exist in and of itself, and it can be effective only if it is used in a more general framework that strives to undermine colonialism. In this article, I shall examine the relations between the general, theoretical-political framework of the boycott as a tool of resistance, on the one hand, and the Palestinian who uses the tool to bring down the Zionist colonial regime in Palestine, on the other hand.

For more details and to see the full original article, go here

 

Ben Gurion University – Eyal Nir (Dept of Chemistry) to be investigated for incitement after calling 'to break rightists' necks'; BGU Officials absolve themselves from any responsibility

Will Dr. Nir become the first leftist indicted for incitement to murder?

Deputy State Prosecutor Shai Nitzan has asked the police on Thursday to investigate a Ben Gurion University professor due complaints that have been made over an inciting web post.

"I call on the world to come help break these scoundrels' necks," the lecturer wrote. The post was accompanied by a video clip that showed some of the marchers chanting anti-Arab slogans.

According to a Justice Ministry statement, Nitzan said that the post warranted an investigation on suspicion of incitement to violence.

Ben Gurion University responded by saying that "Dr. Eyal Nir published the post on his Facebook page as a private citizen. The university has nothing to do with the issue, which is why the issue must be discussed in the appropriate forum."

For more details and to see the full original article, go here

 

Ben Gurion University - Dahlia Scheindlin (“Conflict Resolution” lecturer) just Wants To Flotilla Along with the Jihadis

A lot of Israel’s academic-fifth-column has its origins in the left-wing Marxist ideology that has taken over humanities disciplines in American universities… A living breathing example of the product of this situation is Tel Aviv University doctoral candidate Dahlia Scheindlin... She is a “researcher” (meaning political advocate) with the leftwing Israel Democracy Institute and lectures at Ben Gurion… “Peace and Conflict Studies”, Ms. Scheindlin’s pseudo-field of research, is an American university touchy-feely invention that originally emerged out of marriage counseling. Its underlying fundamental idea is that in any conflict both sides have to be accepted as having some valid arguments and they need only to listen compassionately to one another to settle their differences.

So when Arab hordes scream, “Itboch al Yahud!” (Massacre the Jews!), they are simply letting off steam and hoping for productive dialogue and feeling the pain of the Other. Peace is achieved by always recognizing the legitimacy of at least some of the grievances of the other side unless the other side is Israel, which has no legitimate demands, even the right to exist as a Jewish state.

... A case in point is Scheindlin’s writing in the leftwing Huffington Post in an article titled, “Dismantling Israel’s Myths.” There she defends the pro-Hamas Gaza flotillas and their bands of violent terrorist passengers, the “human shields for Hamas” who help keep the conflict roiling forever... This is a woman who makes her living “researching” conflict resolution? The fact that Ben Gurion University would have her lecture students is another example of the absence of serious academic standards at that school.

For more details and to see the full original article, go here

 

Ben Gurion University - Confessions of Political String Pulling and Hiring Practices at BGU contrast President Rivka Carmi's claims of Ivory Tower Utopia

[Benny Morris said] '… In fact, I was given a job (at Ben-Gurion University) only in 1997, and only after the intercession of Israel's (far-leftist at the time -- SP) president, Ezer Weizman, years before my allegedly specious "conversion" to pro-Zionism that Karsh says occurred in or after 2000.'

So when the president of Ben Gurion University, the cabbagehead Rivka Carmi, insists that hiring at Ben Gurion University is completely depoliticized and political ideology plays no role in hiring, we would like to hear her explain away the hiring of Benny Morris, which – by his own insistence – took place simply because of the ideological and political intervention of Ezer Weizmann.

For more details and to see the full original article, go here

 

Ben Gurion University - Anti-Israel Crusader Neve Gordon (Dept of Political Science) claims that the Israeli democracy is dead because the Knesset defends Israel, writing in the anti-Semitic "Counterpunch" web magazine

Israeli legislators realise, though, that in order to quash all internal resistance, the destruction of the rights groups will not be enough. Their ultimate target is the High Court of Justice, the only institution that still has the power and authority to defend democratic practices.

Their strategy, it appears, is to wait until the Court annuls the new laws and then to use the public's dismay with the Court's decisions to limit the Court's authority through legislation, thus making it impossible for judges to cancel unconstitutional laws. Once the High Court's authority is severely hamstringed, the road will be paved for right-wing Knesset members to do as they wish. The process leading to the demise of Israeli democracy may be slow, but the direction in which the country is going is perfectly clear.

For more details and to see the full original article, go here

 

Ben Gurion University - BGU Middle East Historians Do their Edward Said Impressions:

Haggai Ram (Dept of Middle East Studies), Ahmedinejad's rep in Israel supporting the Iranian regime and claiming it is all a Zionist plot to paint Iran as violent and fanatical, and his sidekick Yoram Meital, from the same department, have an Op-Ed in Haaretz. It is nothing less than a recycling of the fruitcake "theories" of Edward Said, about how all western Orientalists are racists who cannot possibly understand the Arabs. Said was a professor of English literature.

The two BGU "Middle East experts" start out by slapping Israel's Middle East Studies profs for not foreseeing the current wave of unrest in the Arab world. Of course THEY did not foresee it either!

Here is the whole atrocious piece in Hebrew
http://www.haaretz.co.il/hasite/spages/1218078.html

 

Open Call for Violence at BGU too

For months the cabbagehead president of Ben Gurion University, Rivka Carmi, has been telling everyone and anyone willing to listen that there are no tenured traitors at all at her university besides Neve Gordon (SHE calls him a traitor!). … There are no problems at all at BGU, insists Madame Cabbagehead, other than Little Neve.

Well, let us introduce you to Dr. Eyal Nir, who teaches chemistry at BGU, at least when he is not busy as an activist in the HADASH Stalinist Party and other anti-Israel groups. Over the weekend, the YNET news web site, run by Israel's largest daily Yediot Ahronot, reported that Nir issued a call for murdering Israelis who fail to support his far-leftist communist political positions. Specifically, he called for the breaking of the necks of Israelis who march with Israeli flags and support the right of Jews to live in neighborhoods of East Jerusalem where Stalinists like Nir think that Jews do not belong.

The "theory" that "incitement" produces murder has been embraced by all of the Israeli media and by almost all of the political establishment. … Preventing "incitement" that will cause violence is the figleaf of the leftists in the Attorney General's office when they harass, interrogate, and arrest rabbis and activists who express opinions of which leftists disapprove. … But the crusade of the Israeli establishment against freedom of speech and "incitement" has never extended to incitement to murder by leftists. Not a single leftist has ever been jailed for expressing approval of terrorism, of murders against Jews, or for endorsing anti-Semitic groups, ideas or positions.

For more details and to see the full original article, go here

 

Ben Gurion University - BGU's Anti-Israel Extremist of the Week - Amnon Raz Krakotzkin (Dept of Jewish History) has a Plan to Eliminate Israel, replace it with "Binationalism"

On these grounds I believe that a bi-national framework is crucial for any thought and discussion on the question of Palestine. The concept of "bi-nationalism" does not necessarily refer to the one-state solution, as it is commonly understood in the political discourse. Rather, it involves fundamental principle elements whose realization should be advanced by any political process: (a) national and civic equality between Jews and Arabs; and (b) reconciliation based on historical justice. Considered in this way, the concept of bi-nationalism does not describe a "solution," but rather serves as a crucial point of departure and perspective to direct the struggle towards democratization and de-colonization, based upon the recognition of both Palestinian and Jewish rights. Underlying this point of departure is the recognition that it is impossible to separate the discussion on the rights of the Jewish people from the discussion on the rights of the Palestinians.

Bi-nationalism is first of all a description of the reality already established by the Zionist regime–one obviously asymmetrical and colonial; it is the reality in which Jewish superiority is exercised in different ways upon geographically divided Palestinian groups.

For more details and to see the full original article, go here

 

Meet Ben Gurion University President Rivka Carmi's latest little darling, Eyal Nir (Dept of Chemistry)

Remember this is a tenured faculty member at Ben Gurion University!

Among his many bon mots there are these:
 "The rotten corpse calling itself the state of Israel must be strangulated."
"All of Israel is an entity established on the ruins of the Arab community."
The state of Israel is "The Zionist monstrosity that can never be satisfied."
"International sanctions must be placed on Israel to coerce it to live
up to international standards of behavior and to strip it of its
nuclear weapons."

Doc Jihad also likes to call everyone with whom he disagrees, notably the Im Tirtzu Zionist student organization, "Skinheads." Think Israel has the right to exist? You are a skinhead! He refers to all of Israel as the skinhead nation. He uses "stormtrooper" as a synonym for Zionist.

For more details and to see the full original article, go here

 

Ben Gurion Univeristy – BGU Faculty Members oppose settling Israel by Jews WITHIN the 1967 Borders

According to YNET (http://www.ynet.co.il/articles/0,7340,L-4083778,00.html [in Hebrew]), the tenured leftists are irate because an NGO calling itself "Ayalim" has been approaching students and asking to speak in classrooms at the University about their initiative to set up rural communities in the Galilee and the Negev designed for students. The tenured Left is upset that Ayalim people are not recruiting Arabs to move to these settlements. Led by Dr. Hamutal Tzamir, who teaches Hebrew literature, and who as far as we know has no Arab neighbors, these "academics" are screaming against the "racism" in the initiative. Wouldn't it simpler if Tzamir and her friends simply set up their own organization calling itself Jews Against Jews?

For more details and to see the full original article, go here

 

Ben Gurion University – Eyal Nir's incitement to murder inspires a petition to get him fired

In response to his incitement to violence and hateful speech, we the undersigned demand that Eyal Nir be fired immediately from his position as a professor in the University of Bar Ilan.

We see no room in an Israeli University for a professor employed by the University to speak hatred and promote violence against a group of citizens of our country.

Bar Ilan University should not tolerate such behavior by one of its professors and should take immediate action making a statement proclaiming that hatred and violence will not be tolerated.

http://www.thepetitionsite.com/1/fire-dr-eyal-nir-immediately/

For more details and to see the full original article, go here

 

Ben Gurion University – Left-wing Faculty Member Eyal Nir (Dept of Chemistry) Incites to Commit Murder of Right-wing Activists

A lecturer at Ben Gurion University has issued a Facebook call for violence against right-wing activists who marched through the capital with flags on Jerusalem Day, urging people to "break their necks".

"I call on the world to come and help break these scoundrels' necks," Eyal Nir, a doctor of Chemistry known as a left-wing activist, wrote on the social networking site. He described the rightists as "gangs of bandits swarming in our country".

For more details and to see the full original article, go here

 

Ben Gurion University – Neve Gordon (Dept of Political Science) Resorts to Boycott after he Can't Change Israeli Policy by Democratic Means

In a sense, the need for a boycott is a sign of weakness following the polarisation and marginalisation of the left in Israel. We are witnessing the development of a proto-fascist mindset. I am, for example, extremely anxious about the extent that the space for public debate in Israel is shrinking.

One of the ways of silencing dissent is through the demand for loyalty, so that a slogan you hear a lot now is "no citizenship without loyalty". This reflects the inversion of the republican idea that the state should be loyal to the citizen and is accountable for inequities and injustices.
...
Yet there is also a sense that the pro-government proponents have gone too far. They are not only targeting people on the far left, but practically everyone who is even slightly critical of government policies. A couple of months ago a high-school principal who objected to military officers coming in to speak to his pupils, was all but crucified.

For more details and to see the full original article, go here

 

Ben Gurion University - Mayor of Omer calls for boycott of BGU

Well, Maariv reports (June 2, 2011) [in Hebrew] that the mayor of Omer has issued a call for a boycott of Ben Gurion University because of the treasonous activities of its radical anti-Israel faculty members. Hizzoner, Pini (short for Pinhas) Badash, is calling upon Jewish donors in Israel and abroad to halt all contributions and donations to the University because the university refuses to take action against its tenured traitors and its faculty members who are actively working against Israel.

For more details and to see the full original article, go here

 

Ben Gurion University - BGU President Rivka Carmi Hysterically Attacks groups that "Monitor" anti-Israel Faculty Members in Israel

Defends the Neve Gordons as "Critical thinking and alternative perspectives"; Defends anti-Israel NGOs as "human rights watchdogs"

'The truth is that these monitoring groups claim to be motivated by a love of Israel, but in fact they have a clear political agenda which they are willing to advance using the age-old method of blackmail. Either Israeli universities accept their conditions and "remove" those people with whom they disagree, or they will encourage donors to cut off funding.

These are the kinds of attacks that do not allow for critical thinking or alternate perspectives, and have created an atmosphere in Israel today such that pro-human rights groups are being dismissed as "anti-Zionist," only adding to the polarization of Israeli society.'

For more details and to see the full original article, go here

 

Ben Gurion University - Campus Watch responds to Dean David Newman's "flawed information," "hackneyed clichés" and "unsupported attacks"

In "Bashing the Academic Left," a rambling rant against critics of left-wing Israeli professors published in today's [14/4/2009] Jerusalem Post, Ben-Gurion University government professor David Newman strays far afield in his unfounded, and unsupported, attacks on Campus Watch.

… Critics who cannot muster empirical arguments often settle for ad hominem attacks and hackneyed clichés, and no cliché is more worn than the charge that off-campus critics of higher education engage in McCarthyism.

… Newman's information is flawed and his analogy fails. …More to the point, without naming any donors to CW or the other organizations he mentions, Newman impugns their reputations by raising the specter of "extremist right-wing" donors whose views are "totally unacceptable" to some, and who may even "advocate" breaking the law. Where is his evidence for this absurd, unfounded charge? Who are these extremists? If he knows any, surely he would list their names and thereby embarrass any organization that accepted their donations. Once again lacking empirical evidence to advance a reasoned argument, Newman resorts to hollow insults and baseless charges.

For more details and to see the full original article, go here

 

Geoffrey Alderman Demolishes Ben Gurion University Dean David Newman's Defense of Tenured Treason

TO BEGIN with, no academic is above the law. An academic who – shall we say – incites violence can expect both criminal and institutional penalties – criminal because of the law of the land and institutional because an academic who incites violence brings her or his institution into disrepute. Even for those with tenure, the charge of bringing the employing institution into disrepute can customarily result in dismissal. And quite apart from this, there is the issue of defamation. Can an academic legitimately claim that he should be able to – say – libel or slander a colleague without hindrance? Of course not! So academic freedom is not academic license.

... (In Britain during war) Academics most certainly could not say what they liked, if for no other reason than that the law of the land prescribed draconian penalties (including hanging) for offenses deemed by the courts to fall within the definition of treason. This definition included consorting with the enemy, inciting, aiding and abetting the enemy, and engaging in any act likely to give comfort to the enemy.

... I must also point out that the BDS movement is itself at odds with the very concept of academic freedom, since it seeks to make the espousal of a particular set of political principles the price for entry into that academic dialogue which is at the very heart of what we mean by a university.

"Agree with my views" – it says – "or I will boycott you and freeze you out of the academy."

In this sense I believe that the movement is essentially totalitarian, and indeed fascist in nature. It has no place – none at all – in a true university environment.

For more details and to see the full original article, go here

 

Ben Gurion University –Appeal to BGU's Board of Governors NOT to support continued employment of Anti-Israel inciters

The news of the massive refusal of Jewish donors to support Ben Gurion University as long as it continues to operate as Israel's University of Treason continues to thunder in Israel.

In the Hebrew news web site News1 comes an interesting Op-Ed written by Yehuda Drori. The writer was once in charge of fundraising for the Keren Kayemet fund in the American southwest. His article in News1 is entitled, "No Contributions to Slanderers and their Patrons." His article calls on people to contact donors and supporters of Ben Gurion University and other Israeli schools, and to call upon them NOT to support those academics involved in slandering Israel and serving anti-Semites and Israel bashers.

For more details and to see the full original article, go here

 

Ben Gurion University - Maariv Defends the Right of BGU Donors to Refuse to Support BGU

In recent weeks, a series of malicious media attacks against the donors to Ben Gurion University have been published by representatives of Ben Gurion University itself. Evidently these officials believe that smearing their own donors is a great way to up the level of their generosity! Some of the most venomous attacks have come from David Newman, the Dean of Humanities and Social Sciences at BGU. Newman accuses the donors to his own university of plotting to suppress academic freedom at BGU. He calls them McCarthyists and other foul names. And he also smears every organization and person that dares to criticize the many far-leftist anti-Israel extremists among the faculty at BGU. Every conceivable form of treason should be protected as academic freedom and freedom of speech, insist Newman and his ilk. But anyone who dares to speak out AGAINST such tenured treason is a "McCarthyist," someone who must be suppressed and silenced.

Among those critics of tenured extremists, who have NO right to freedom of speech and NO right to criticize, are the DONORS, insist Newman and his friends.

For the first time, a major Israeli newspaper has published a defense of those donors to Israeli universities who refuse to finance "academic" treason, and an attack on those who smear such activist donors.

For more details and to see the full original article, go here

 

Ben Gurion University - Fact-free Nevie strikes again! Neve Gordon (Dept of Political Science) attacks Isracampus on anti-Israel radical web site "972+"

Claims we are "collaborating with the government to stifle academic freedom." This from the fellow who organizes conferences in which no non-leftist and no Zionist may speak! When asked why that is, Gordon responds: "The whole notion of 'balanced' is now being used as a weapon against the left. If there's a conference on Darwin we do not need to invite creationists. For a Holocaust conference we should not be inviting Holocaust deniers – although one could claim that in the name of balance we would have to. Why, one might ask, should we invite people who are against human rights?" In other words, all Zionists and non-leftists are opposed to human rights.

Gordon says:
"There's an assault on Israeli academia in general. It involves an alliance between forces such as IsraCampus and Israel Academic Monitor on the one hand, who try to convince donors to stop giving money to universities that harbor leftists, and Im Tirzu, which tries to mobilize government Ministers and Members of Knesset to pressure the top university executives to discipline recalcitrant academics. There's an alliance between elements in civil society, a handful of donors, and the government to stifle academic freedom and criticism of Israeli policy. The phenomenon is not only in the academic sphere…it also includes, for example, the attacks on the human rights organizations in Israel.
"As I understand it, the assault has a twofold objective. The idea is to prevent the flow of information from Israel abroad, and because both academics and the Israeli human rights community have strong networks outside of Israel they are the one's currently targeted. Simultaneously, there is an attempt to stifle internal debate, by reducing the limiting discussions about policies that lead to social wrongs and more violence and aggression....
"We are seeing a totally new phenomenon in Israeli academia: students sitting in class, filming the classes and then passing information on to the monitor groups and the media. The recordings are almost always edited, so the information doesn't reflect what really went on in class. Such students consider themselves to be class monitors , rather than people who have come to the university in order to study, broaden their horizon and expand their knowledge…not unlike the McCarthy era in the US, some Israeli student see themselves as agents of the state, as spies."

The interviewer Dahlia Scheindlin is herself a leftwing anti-Zionist who teaches politics at BGU

(The web site is censoring out talkbacks from non-leftists under the guise of "trolling". No Academic freedom to be found here.)

For more details and to see the full original article, go here

 

The Hysterical Leftist Opponent of Freedom of Speech, David Newman, Dean of Social Sciences and Humanities at Ben Gurion University, attacks Isracampus

How dare anyone criticize extremist anti-Israel academics!!! Newman forgot to mention that Zionists and non-leftists are prohibited from teaching in his own Department of Politics at BGU!!

"The thought police of the extreme rightwing has grown in strength in recent years. It includes sites such as Campus Watch and Isracampus, well-funded organizations like Im Tirtzu and NGO Monitor, whose objectives are to prevent freedom of expression among all those who do not share their fortress view of the world. For them, anyone who believes in such values as peace, human rights or the universal values of Judaism are collectively labeled as traitors, anti-Zionists and enemies of the Jewish State. In scenes reminiscent of darker days, they send their representatives into universities to record lectures, which are then selectively edited, published on their web sites and used as ammunition to impose an extreme rightwing agenda on public discourse.

The attempt by my own university to prevent a conference on human rights from going ahead last week, and its refusal to allow the conference organizers to use the Senate Hall for the main session, was a knee-jerk reaction to this form of pressure."

For more details and to see the full original article, go here

 

Ben Gurion University – Neve Gordon (Dept of Political Science) is awarded the Qaddafi Human Rights Prize

Members of the Zionist student organization "Im Tirtzu" crashed the Nuremberg Rally at Ben Gurion University. They handed out to participants copies of a diploma, announcing the award to Neve Gordon of the Muammar Qaddafi Prize in Human Rights. As you recall, Qaddafi's people sit in the UN's "Human Rights Commission," and their ideas about human rights are exactly the same as those of Neve Gordon: namely, that pretend concern for "human rights" is a great bludgeon to use to destroy Israel.

Maariv cites officials at Ben Gurion University who expressed unhappiness with the one-sided anti-Israel character of the "conference." That did not have any effect on the content or the organizers, who just went ahead and held their Nuremberg Rally in campus facilities paid for by the Israeli taxpayer. Gordon himself is cited by Maariv as saying that there is also opposition in Iran and Syria to human rights conferences. He is wrong. The sort of conference he ran, consisting entirely of Israel bashing, is precisely the sort of "human rights conference" that Libya and Syria often happily host.

For more details and to see the full original article, go here

 

Ben Gurion University - Rivka Carmi and the BGU Nuremberg Rally

Rivka Carmi, President of Ben Gurion University, insists there is no on-campus anti-Israel propagandizing and indoctrination at BGU. Not a bit. So read about the one-sided anti-Israel atrocity BGU is about to host!!

For more details and to see the full original article, go here

 

Ben Gurion University - The Creative "Logic" of David Newman (Dean of Social Sciences and Humanities) - The South African Boycott of BGU is all the fault of BGU's Own Donors!

Meanwhile Ben-Gurion University will continue to develop. Its 20,000 students and almost 1,000 teaching and research faculty will continue to push the frontiers of science.

Its politically aware [meaning leftist – Isracampus] faculty will continue to take part in the vibrant debate about the nature of Israeli society.

The boycotters, whether they be anti-Israel activists such as UJ, or the anti-democracy activists of Im Tirtzu and the right-wing donors, will become forgotten footnotes of history, remembered only for their attempt to manipulate science for their own narrow aims.

A plague on both of their discriminatory houses.

For more details and to see the full original article, go here

 

Ben Gurion University - A Letter to the Heads of Ben Gurion University from a Former Director of Its "Friends of" Offices in Los Angeles

What do Academic rights & freedoms & Civil-Political Freedoms-of-expression in any Democracy have to do with lecturing for 10 solid years, (as Neve Gordon has been doing diligently with impunity and with the Univ. support & Rivka Carmi's support), specifically calling- lecturing for the delegitimization and demonization of Israel's, thus directly undermining its very existence???

How many thousands of Jewish & non-Jewish BGU students has Neve Cordon brainwashed to detest & hate Israel over the last 10 years???...

With such Professors blossoming on Israeli Universities campuses, who needs enemies like Achmadinejad? With professors like Neve Gordon, who needs to read the "Charters" and the "Covenants" of the PLO? Fatah? Hamas? and the Hezbullah, that not only do not recognize Israel and its very rights to exist, but specifically call for Israel's destruction ??? Does Neve Gordon teach his students about 1,000,000 Jewish Refugees from the Arab countries & from Iran that Israel fully absorbed since 1948???

I am astonished, disappointed, enraged and heartbroken,

For more details and to see the full original article, go here

 

Ben Gurion University President Rivka Carmi Complains that her university is under unprecedented attack thanks to the "treasonous article" published by Neve Gordon in the Los Angeles Times

But less than an hour after my landing in Israel I received a panicky phone call from the US, in which I was informed that a faculty member at BGU, Dr. Neve Gordon (since promoted under Rivka's guiding hand and with her blessings to Associate Professor --- Isracampus) had just published an article in the Los Angeles Times. This article calls upon the entire world to boycott the state of Israel, which Gordon there terms an apartheid regime. From that point and onwards, I received and continue to receive an unprecedented storm of angry messages and outraged letters from donors and supporters of the University, as well as from others who merely heard about the article. I also was forced to take enraged phone calls from donors and Jewish public figures in Israel and abroad.

The university officials and many of you members of the faculty work hard at raising funding for the University. Unfortunately, without these donations we simply do not have life (sic), and certainly not development and progress. This work is particularly difficult during a period of global financial strife and of intensified competition for funding from other public bodies, especially other universities. An article such as this brands our University as an institution undeserving of global Jewish support. Many of those contacting me stated that they would never again support any Israeli university employing people who harm Israel in this way, and indeed that they would encourage their friends and associates to likewise withhold donations. I am citing the bottom line from so many letters and messages that I am receiving these days.

For more details and to see the full original article, go here

 

Ben Gurion University - David Newman's (Dept of Political Science) latest Smears of Israel - Claims Undemocratic Israel has mere Democratic "Veneer"

Does BGU's Dean of Social Science have mere Academic Veneer, as well?

In the Jerusalem Post, Newman claims that Israel is filled with three anti-democratic populations: Russian immigrants, Orthodox Jews, and low-income Sephardim. Why are these anti-democratic? Because they are all hostile to the Far Left!! David Newman's test of "democratic" is whether someone agrees with the anti-Israel post-Zionist Left!

"What is fast becoming an anti 'others' tsunami, is an internal kulturkampf taking place between the declining and politically inactive old elites, and those groups who were, for a long time, at the socio-political periphery.

OVER THE past 20 years, the country has experienced substantial demographic and political change. This is reflected in the absolute growth of formerly peripheral groups such as the haredi and national-Orthodox communities, immigrants from the former Soviet Union and the poorer Mizrahi groups. These diverse groups now make up more than half the Jewish population, and hold many key positions in the Knesset and other decision-making institutions.... The convergence of these groups at this specific juncture, despite the internal contradictions and even mutual animosities between their respective beliefs and interests, has for the first time created a critical mass which is challenging the democratic ethos of the state."

For more details and to see the full original article, go here

 

Mona Charen exposes Israel's Academic Fifth Column

Neve Gordon, a professor at Ben Gurion University of Beer-Sheva, has led international efforts to boycott the Jewish state. Rachel Giora, a professor at Tel Aviv University, actively encourages international divestment campaigns. Shlomo Sand, the son of Holocaust survivors and a professor at Tel Aviv University (and Berkeley), proclaims that “there is no Jewish people and no justification for a Jewish state.” Meirav Michaeli, the leading announcer on the Army radio channel, has urged Israelis to resist the draft. Israeli professors have cheered the idea of issuing international arrest warrants for leading Israeli politicians and army officers — though none has so far volunteered to renounce his own salary as a contribution to international sanctions.

For more details and to see the full original article, go here

 

Ben Gurion University – Haim Gordon (Dept of Education) "screams" about "Israel's War Crimes"

We scream at the war crimes that Israeli forces are daily committing against the Palestinian people. As Jews, as members of a people who suffered from the terrifying war crimes of the Holocaust, we believe that we should be sensitive to the freedom and suffering of others, especially of our neighbours, the Palestinians. But for thirty-five years, Israeli forces have oppressed and exploited the Palestinian people, denying them freedom and respect. The most recent result of these evil policies has been the al-Aqsa intifada, the latest Palestinian rebellion against Israel's harsh occupation. Israeli war crimes intensified in response to this new intifada. Hence our screams, which almost nobody hears.

For more details and to see the full original article, go here

 

Ben Gurion University - Ben-Dror Yemini trashes yet another Left-wing Fanatic Teaching at BGU - Zvi Bentwich (Dept of Health Sciences)

Ben Dror Yemini, depity editor of Maariv, Israel's second daily, blasts Prof. Zvi Bentwich, for his running the treasonous pro-terror leftwing NGO "Physicians for Human Rights." who is mainly in BGU's health sciences department but also teaches a leftwing propaganda course in the politics department.

The article by Yemini demolishing Bentwich is only in Hebrew, here:
http://www.nrg.co.il/app/index.php?do=blog&encr_id=f2b4c1b55be76d1e6d7b777256ea0370&id=2105

But it puts the lie once again to Rivka Carmi's idiotic claims that "only Neve Gordon" is the problem, that there are no other leftwing extremists teaching in the politics department. Now it turns out that even people teaching there who come from Health Sciences are leftwing anti-Israel propagandists.

For more details and to see the full original article, go here

 

Ben Gurion University - Parents Claim "We Won't Send Our Children to Ben Gurion U"

Boycotts, incitement, subversion against the state's foundations, silencing of students who are afraid to say their opinions when lecturers and their assistants are within earshot. That, you call pluralism!

We, too, will make use of our right to freedom of speech. We will send this letter to the Minister of Education and to the Chairman of the Knesset's Education Committee, we will send this letter out in mass circulation and we will declare that we will not send our children to an academic institute that silences Zionist mouths, incites against the IDF, drips poison and preaches destruction.

For more details and to see the full original article, go here

 

Ben Gurion University - In the pro-terror anti-Semitic web magazine Counterpunch, on the same page alongside Holocaust Denier "Israel Shamir," Neve Gordon (Dept of Political Science) Whines that Making anti-Israel groups reveal what he says they already reveal is fascist oppression

Considering that the funding of all human rights organizations in Israel is made public each year and scrutinized by the state auditor, the idea of creating a parliamentary commission to inspect their income is merely a smokescreen. The parliamentary commission's actual goal is to intimidate Israeli rights groups and their donors and, as a result, stifle free speech.

[This, from the Neofascist who filed a SLAPP harassment suit against another professor to stifle free speech!]

For more details and to see the full original article, go here

 

Ben-Gurion University - Yael Ben-Zvi (Dept of Linguistics and Literature) - Post-Colonialist BUTCH(er) of Words

Ben-Zvi's dogma of "post colonialist theory" amounts to her belief that Israel is a conspiratorial concoction of Ashkenazic Zionists.  When it comes to being an anti-Semite, no closet can hold her!

Pity the poor hapless students at Ben Gurion University

For more details and to see the full original article, go here

 

Ben Gurion University - BGU Attempting to Control Damage from its Tenured Extremists

In the past year, Ben-Gurion University in Beersheba suffered a series of public statements by staff members which gave it an image of an institution identified with radical ends of the political spectrum.

One of the most controversial affairs concerns Prof. Neve Gordon from the Political Science Department. Gordon had published an article at the LA Times calling for a boycott of Israel which he described as an "apartheid state."

The new protocol states that "In voicing their political or religious opinions, unlike particular professional views, staff members should refrain from using the Ben-Gurion University's name." The lecturers were asked to clarify they were speaking for themselves and not representing the university's positions

For more details and to see the full original article, go here

 

Ben Gurion University - Tali Latowicki – yet another pseudo-academic Israel Basher from BGU

The question that lingers is if her job there was obtained because she spouts the ever present anti-Israel dogma, or if she became so-against-the-Jewish-state as a result of working on the Negev campus that Neofascist Neve Gordon calls home. …

But nothing can compare with Tali Latowicki's justification for suicide bombings and terror attacks:

"And between us, it is clear that these terror attacks, that seem to us like Satanic craziness, are the only way for the Palestinians to remind the average Israeli of their existence. Because if it will be quiet here, really quiet, the average Israeli will not care if several million people are rotting under closure. He will simply forget that they exist and will continue to live his everyday life. He will not have any interest in returning one meter of their land."

Latowicki recites the Arab mantras about the "stolen lands" (that weren't stolen) and "the right of return." And she excuses terrorism some more…

This woman is an embarrassment for Ben Gurion University, if BGU is even still capable of being embarrassed by its anti-Israel pseudo-academics.

For more details and to see the full original article, go here

 

Ben Gurion University - Neve Gordon (Dept of Political Science) with poster in Hebrew and Arabic denouncing Israeli leaders as "war criminals"; Standing next to sign in Arabic calling for Terrorist Violence "In Spirit and in Blood"

BGU Professor Neve Gordon, on far left, is holding a sign that denounces Israeli leaders as "war criminals". He is also standing next to a sign in Arabic calling for terrorist violence "In Spirit and in Blood". Gordon is participating in a demonstration endorsing the Flotilla Terrorists and condemning the Israeli Naval Action to stop them.

The demonstration is undeniably unlawfull as one can see from the blatant calls for murder and violence. To see more of this demonstration for terrorism, and the signs and slogans used, you may view the two clips below:

The first clip was taken from the first pro-Flotilla demonstration on the 31.05.10. Professor Neve Gordon is holding a poster in Arabic saying War Criminals to Trial. Gordon took part in the demonstration that chanted terrorist slogans supporting suicide bombings against Jews and endorsing violence, chanting "In spirit and in blood we will redeem you"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S82WXqUOCY8

The second clip from 02.06.10 consists of mainly students and staff of Politics and Government Department. Pro-Flotilla supporters demonstrating at the heart of the campus.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=34LcRhZ_hYE

We wish to thank Professor Israel David of Ben Gurion University who edited the clips as well as translated them and sent us for distribution.

 

Ben Gurion University's Official Campaign of Lies and Disinformation

All of this puts into perspective the weekend column (December 31, 2010) in Maariv by Kalman Liebskind, one of the best publicist journalists in Israel. The column is so important that my translation of it follows here. Liebskind has revealed that Ben Gurion University is intentionally lying and providing disinformation to its supporters and prospective donors from all around the world and in different languages.

For more details and to see the full original article, go here

 

Ben Gurion University - Im Tirtzu wants to take BGU to court for dragging feet in changing their radical anti-Israel Departments and failing to deal with Profs who support boycotting Israel

In Sunday's letter to Ben-Gurion University President Prof. Rivka Carmi, Im Tirtzu leaders Ronen Shoval and Erez Tadmor wrote that in July, they had pointed out the "gross politicization of the Department of Politics and Government," as reflected by the fact that "eight out of 11 tenured faculty members held radical political views."

The July letter also charged that faculty members were not hired in a transparent manner, that students' education suffered from "the presentation of a grossly one-sided view of the course material," and that senior faculty members in the department supported an academic boycott of Israel, in contravention of the CHE's stand. That letter closed with a threat to work to persuade donors to halt contributions to the university unless these problems were corrected - a threat not repeated in the current letter.

For more details and to see the full original article, go here

 

Ben Gurion University - Israel-hating Neve Gordon (Dept of Political Science) insists that Arabs be exempt from obeying the law, recruits the Bible to demonize Israeli demolition of illegally built structures, in anti-Semitic "The Nation" magazine.

The viewers are asked to open their wallets in order to "sow a seed for God." In this case, the donations seem to have actually been allocated toward sowing seeds, but these seeds are ones of hate and strife. They are antithetical to Isaiah's prophecy about the people beating their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks. Indeed, if Isaiah were alive today, he would probably be among the first to lie in front of the bulldozers in an effort to stop the destruction of the Bedouin homes.

For more details and to see the full original article, go here

 

Ben Gurion University – US International exchange student shares her bad experience with Oren Yiftachel's (Dept. of Geography) Intimidations and Propagandistic Teaching Style

This past semester [Spring 2010], I took a course at Ben-Gurion University entitled "Selected Topics in the Geography of the Middle East," which was taught jointly by Dr. Nir Cohen and Dr. Oren Yiftachel. The course was part of the MAPMES program, which is a masters program taught in English that is designed to teach international students about the situation in the Middle East. To my dismay, in this particular course, international students, instead of being educated about the complicated reality in the Middle East, were instead being taught to be hostile towards Israel.

For more details and to see the full original article, go here

 

Emmanuel Navon accuses Leftist Israeli Academia of "Scorn and Arrogance"; Rectors of BGU and TAU stoop to heckling at Knesset hearing

Instead of addressing the issues raised by the IZS and by Im Tirtzu, the academic establishment has reacted with scorn and arrogance. At the Knesset hearing, Ben-Gurion University rector Zvi Hacohen interrupted IZS's presentation, calling it "nonsense" and claiming (without proof) that its paper did not meet the most basic criteria of academic research. Tel Aviv University rector Aharon Shai also claimed IZS's paper was not a research paper (without explaining why) and added that adopting an academic code of ethics (as proposed by Sa'ar at the beginning of the hearing) would "destroy Israeli academia."

... TWO DAYS after the Knesset hearing, Haaretz came out in defense of the universities by claiming that adopting a code of ethics would harm academic freedom. It wrote that Sa'ar proposed such a code as a result of the lobbying of Im Tirtzu. But the idea of a code was first proposed by Prof. Amnon Rubinstein, a renowned academic with impeccable liberal credentials. Moreover, BGU has such a code (the only local university to have one).

For more details and to see the full original article, go here

 

Ben Gurion University - Leftist Neo-fascist Neve Gordon (Dept of Political Science) sees Fascism breaking out all Over Israel

Some of the bills now going through the Knesset, which have a good chance of being ratified, would make support for an alternative political ideology, such as the idea that Israel should be a democracy for all its citizens, a crime.

A proposed amendment to the existing anti-incitement bill, for instance, stipulates that people who deny Israel's Jewish character will be arrested. This extension to the penal code, which has already passed its preliminary reading, incriminates a political view. Another bill lays the groundwork for turning down candidates for membership in communal settlements built on public land if they do not concur with the settlement committee's political views or are adherents of a different religion. The point of this is to make it legal to deny Palestinian citizens of Israel access to Jewish villages.

Still another bill that has already passed its first reading stipulates that institutions marking the Palestinian Nakba of 1948 will be denied public funds.

For more details and to see the full original article, go here

 

Ben Gurion University -Neve Gordon, BGU's Arch-Hater of Israel, and the Anti-Israel Boycott Movement

Neve Gordon has changed his mind on the campaign to boycott Israel. In 2003 he wrote a compelling piece under the headline: "Against the Israeli Academic Boycott" in the The Nation in which he puts forward some of the central reasons why a boycott of Israeli academia would be both unjust and also counterproductive.

...

The reason seems to be that things are now so bad in Israel that 'something must be done'. But what Neve Gordon is unable to do is to show what is wrong with his previous arguments about doing this particular 'something'. He offers nothing.

No reason why the boycott campaign no longer contains echoes of antisemitism.

No reason why he singles out Israel, and only Israel, for boycott.

No reason why he is willing to overlook the 'biases' of the boycott movement.

No reason why BDS would no longer bolster the right and harm the left in Israel.

For more details and to see the full original article, go here

 

Ben Gurion University - Neve Gordon (Dept of Political Science) is Upset that a Far Leftist Israel Hater got Turned Down for Tenure just because she hasn't any Academic Publications

Ariella Azoulay made a career out of collecting anti-Israel photographs. She got fired even though she is wife of radical Prof. Adi Ophir. And that has the Israeli Far Left up in arms! Neve Gordon thinks being anti-Israel is enough to get you tenure. We wonder if he has anyone else in mind who got tenure that way!

"There is, however, another fact to be taken into account: Azoulay's prominent political activism. One of the exhibitions she curated, for example, Act of State, included hundreds of photographs exposing the realities of four decades of occupation."

For more details and to see the full original article, go here

 

Ben Gurion University – BGU on the Front Line of the BDS as a consequence of its own faculty

But now along comes the sweetest story of comeuppance the country has ever seen. A university in South Africa that used to be one of the main bastions of South African racism and apartheid is voting this week on a proposal to boycott and apply sanctions against the very same Ben Gurion University. For being part of Israeli "apartheid," of course. And where did the South African anti-Semites hear that Israel is an apartheid regime? From anti-Israel BGU faculty members, of course.

For more details and to see the full original article, go here

 

Ben Gurion University - Ran Greenstein (University of the Witwatersrand) signs name to a blatantly Anti-Semitic petition to have Johannesburg U cut ties with BGU; Criticism of Neve Gordon's treasonous call for boycott cited as reason enough to boycott BGU

What goes around comes around. South African University threatened to boycott Ben Gurion University. Its hordes of tenured treason did not spare it from accusations of engaging in "apartheid" made by South African anti-Semites!

"Written in part by Omar Barghouti:

A true breakthrough in the academic boycott of Israel!!

A South African, long brewing, campaign at the prestigious University of Johannesburg to cut off academic links with Ben Gurion University due to its complicity and racist practices has won the endorsement of John Dugard, Desmond Tutu, Breyten Breytenbach, Allan Boesak, Mahmoud Mamdani and almost 200 other academics from 22 academic institutions in SA.

Here is the petition to sever links with Ben Gurion University

SOUTH AFRICAN ACADEMICS CALL FOR UJ TO TERMINATE RELATIONSHIP WITH ISRAELI INSTITUTION

http://desertpeace.wordpress.com/2010/09/24/boycott-of-apartheid-gets-a%5C-boost-from-south-african-academics/

3. CRIMINALISING DISSENT


• BGU has been publicly criticised for disciplining academic staff, such as Professor Neve Gordon, the head of the politics department, for supporting the non-violent boycott of Israeli companies and institutions which profit or are complicit in the Israeli occupation."

For more details and to see the full original article, go here

 

Ben Gurion University - What Freedom Of Speech? Zvi Hacohen, the new rector at BGU, robs from the many to give to the few

Hacohen is just one of Israel's many increasingly hysterical radical leftists inside (and outside) academia who demand that freedom of speech for non-leftists be suppressed.

Leftists in Israel are free to endorse violence, to call for Israel to be destroyed, and to endorse anti-Semites and terrorists. They are free to promote lawbreaking and violence. They are free to call on the world to boycott Israel and to impose upon Israel by force an outside "resolution" of the conflict along lines the vast majority of Israelis oppose. Yes, it may be upsetting to people, say the leftist poseurs, but offensive speech needs to be protected in the name of democracy. ...

He is not disturbed that entire departments at his own university operate as open anti-Israel indoctrination camps. He is not disturbed that faculty members at Ben Gurion University are leaders in the international campaign to boycott Israel, to "divest" from Israel, to place sanctions against Israel. … Prof. Hacohen is not concerned about reports of leftist faculty members at BGU harassing and penalizing students there who dare dissent from the anti-Israel ideology poured out in classroom indoctrinations. He is not concerned that anti-Israel radicals are being hired and promoted on the basis of "academic records" consisting of nothing more than anti-Israel hate propaganda. He is not concerned about BGU faculty members who endorse terrorist violence. He is not concerned about Arab and Jewish leftist students marching about his campus giving Heil Hitler salutes.

The only thing he seems worried about is that some Zionist students at BGU wish to express their opinions and criticize treasonous behavior. He demands that they be silenced. He insults the students at his own university, calling them "McCarthyists." He demands that criticism of treason be silenced in the name of protecting academic freedom.

The academic freedom of which he dreams is the sort to be found in North Korea.

For more details and to see the full original article, go here

 

Ben Gurion University – a Rankled Reader calls out BGU President Rivka Carmi's "Elitist Misjudgment"; corrects the Left's mis-definition of McCarthyism

This letter is in response to your interview with the Jerusalem Post of August 21 under the inappropriate heading "McCarthy vs Voltaire in Beersheba". Inappropriate, because the brouhaha about the abuse of academic freedom in Israeli universities bears no resemblance whatsoever to McCarthyism which is defined in The American Heritage Dictionary as "The practice of publicizing accusations of political disloyalty or subversion with insufficient regard to evidence". …

In the circumstances, I am particularly disturbed by your statement that you did not intend to respond to Im Tirtzu's letter as you considered that it didn't deserve the dignity of a response. In all seriousness I ask you to reconsider this elitist misjudgment. Neither the public, nor the Knesset, nor the Council for Higher Education consider it undignified to respond to them.

For more details and to see the full original article, go here

 

Ben Gurion University - Neve Gordon (Dept of Political Science), who himself filed a fascist harassment SLAPP suit against an Israeli professor to silence him because the latter had criticized Gordon, now is suddenly concerned about freedom of speech for academics.

Such personal attacks are part of a much broader assault on Israeli higher education and its professors. Two recent incidents exemplify the protofascist logic that is being deployed to undermine the pillars of academic freedom in Israel, while also revealing that the assault on Israeli academe is being backed by neoconservative forces in the United States....

Israeli academe, which was once considered a bastion of free speech, has become the testing ground for the success of the assault on liberal values. And although it is still extremely difficult to hurt those who have managed to enter the academic gates, those who have not yet passed the threshold are clearly being monitored.

For more details and to see the full original article, go here

 

Ben Gurion University - Dan Illouz, Im Tirtzu Leader, Answers Rivka Carmi

LAST WEEK, the story developed further. According to Im Tirtzu's research, Ben-Gurion University's Political Science Department is not only homogeneously anti-Zionist, it is also the source of the silencing of Zionist students. As such, Im Tirtzu found it fair to inform donors to the university.

Donors to Israeli universities often find their donation to be an act of Zionism. Helping academic institutions in Israel helps Zionism. Im Tirtzu believed many of those donors would be shocked and dismayed at the findings published in the report. They would feel their donations have become counterproductive. It is the right of those donors to be informed of the situation in the university; a donor is allowed to know where his money goes. Therefore, Im Tirtzu was ready to inform those donors of its findings.

However, in a gesture of goodwill toward Ben-Gurion University, Im Tirtzu sent it a letter giving it a 30-day warning while asking it to use this time to change its policies and remove the need for contacting donors.

The university used this gesture of goodwill against Im Tirtzu, accusing it of threatening it with an ultimatum.

For more details and to see the full original article, go here

 

Caroline Glick asserts - The Israeli Public is fed up with the Academic Left's "Intellectual Terror" led by the likes of Neve Gordon

Israeli academia is in an uproar. And this is a good thing. Last week, the Zionist student movement Im Tirtzu opened a rather modest campaign against Ben- Gurion University's Politics and Government Department....

And the howls of protest stretched from the Negev to the border with Lebanon. One of Im Tirtzu's central goals is to engender an atmosphere of academic freedom and intellectual pluralism on university campuses. Over the past generation or so, those campuses, and particularly the humanities and social sciences faculties, have become hotbeds of anti- Zionist activism and intellectual terror. Stories of professorial intimidation of and discrimination against Zionist students are widespread, as are instances of outright indoctrination in the classrooms.

...

The situation at Ben-Gurion University's Politics and Government Department is particularly distressing. It is headed by Dr. Neve Gordon, an anti-Zionist activist who has written that Israel is a "proto-fascist state," has castigated it as an "apartheid state" and has signed petitions calling for international academic, scientific, economic and cultural boycotts of the country.

For more details and to see the full original article, go here

 

Ben Gurion University - Lev Grinberg (Dept of Sociology) Demands Israel Stop being a Jewish State

Why isn't Israel a modern, democratic nation-state? I suspect that the secular Jews are not ready to relinquish the special privileges that the Jewish state grants them. With no other definition for Judaism, they are ready to accept the yoke of the religious establishment and give up democracy and equality. In my view, that is the meaning of the continued impossible defense of a Jewish and democratic state.

Woe to such Zionism: conservative and complacent, lacking imagination and vision. After such a bitter failure, we should start thinking of tikkun, of repair. Tikkun is a kosher concept; it's both Jewish and democratic.

For more details and to see the full original article, go here

 

Ben Gurion University - David Newman's (Dean of Social Sciences and Humanities) Hysterical attack against Isracampus; De-legitimatizes criticism by Im Tirtzu and the ISZ report

These were not isolated incidents. The past few years have witnessed a growth in right-wing activity aimed at delegitimizing the country's universities and their academic staff. To ISZ and Im Tirtzu can be added Isracampus and NGO Monitor, both of which have targeted academics and NGOs which hold views, or promote projects, which are not in line with their well-funded right-wing agendas.

The objective of these organizations is clear and has nothing to do with academic objectivity or balanced research. They are out to impose their own single-minded view of Israel and Zionism, close down any form of critical discourse and, given the nature of the present government, influence the legislators in the Knesset to support their cause.

The main problem with both the ISZ report and the Im Tirtzu letter is that they are full of false and highly selective information. ISZ, headed by former West Bank settlement leader Yisrael Harel, chose to focus on just a few research projects and courses out of the hundreds which are taught, conveniently ignoring the diversity of research which goes on in the country's sociology and anthropology departments. The Im Tirtzu letter put out false information about a dynamic and highly popular academic department which promotes social and political awareness among its students.

For more details and to see the full original article, go here

 

Isracampus has a question for Ben Gurion University President Rivka Carmi

In the interview you gave to the Jerusalem Post, published on Aug 21, 2010, you said, and we quote, "I can't stress this enough. I want any student who feels threatened to come directly to me. I promise them complete protection. If anyone feels that a faculty member is silencing them, belittling their opinions, putting them down or intimidating them, I want them to tell me about it immediately. I am sorry that there are students who instead of approaching the university management with their concerns or complaints, choose to go to a group like Im Tirtzu."

Well, we at Isracampus would like to know what you did in the case of the overseas woman student threatened by BGU Geography professor Oren Yiftachel when she refused to submit to his ideological diktats, reported to you in detail.

In the same interview, you are asked whether there is any truth to the claim that the politics department at BGU is a treasonous indoctrination camp into anti-Israel extremism. You said that answering that question is beneath your dignity. We nevertheless would like to hear your answer. We think you are insulting the dignity of every citizen in Israel by NOT answering!

 

Ben Gurion University - Sedition and Nazi hand salutes at BGU

If, for example, a senior lecturer (Neve Gordon) in that department dares travel to Palestinian government headquarters in Ramallah (while blatantly violating the law) a day after one of the most terrible massacres we've ever seen here, in order to support Yasser Arafat and pose next to him in a photo where both hold their arms up, does this constitute academic freedom? Is this about the freedom to explore, or about a despicable act by someone who under false pretenses holds on to a job in a publically funded academic institution?

And if this department includes students who take part in an illegal rally at campus following the Turkish flotilla raid, while being photographed (knowingly) giving the Nazi salute, does this have anything to do with academic freedom? Are Nazi salutes a part of the education offered to politics and government students?

I saw the photographs, both of the lecturer alongside Arafat and of the student giving the Nazi salute; I also saw the photo of a female Master's student who climbed up a campus building in order to post a libelous, outrageous, provocative anti-Israeli banner, and I contend that we must put an end to this "academic freedom."

Those interested in this kind of "academic freedom" should go ahead and become lecturers elsewhere. There are many "academic research institutions" abroad funded by anti-Semitic, pro-Nazi, Holocaust-denying elements that would be happy to establish a politics and government department to be run by "refugees" from the Beersheba university.

For more details and to see the full original article, go here

 

Ben Gurion University - Saddam-style freedom: Leftist professor Nitza Bercovitch's (Dept of Women's Studies) concept of 'freedom' is similar to Saddam Hussein's vision

I would not be referring to Saddam had it not been for Dr. Nitza Berkovitch's article, McCarthyism in Tel Aviv, where she bemoaned the assault on what she dubbed "academic freedom" and various elements' desire to politicize academia. As I discovered, Dr. Berkovitch and myself apparently hold different definitions for the term "freedom"; however, to properly explain this, I must put Saddam Hussein aside for a moment and turn to Edward Said. ...

This is just one example. It is also no coincidence that most sociology students are enthused socialists. Just like me, they studied Marx, and it's absolutely fine for them to study Marx, because how can one study sociology without studying Marx? However, there are some strong arguments in favor of capitalism as well, yet these are not being taught at all.

It's the same story on every front – the radical thinkers who write about discrimination and exploitation will be taught and praised. Yet every different opinion that counters these views and enables the students to realize that there are other ways is unavailable.

This precisely is the problem that makes the claims about lost academic freedom laughable. Freedom always has to do with the liberty to choose between one option to another. Freedom is impossible when only one option exists to begin with, unless we are talking about Saddam-style freedom.

For more details and to see the full original article, go here

 

Ben Gurion University - Radical anti-Israel leftist "Women's Studies" lecturer and Neve Gordon Collaborator Nitza Berkovitch Bleating about "McCarthyism"

Thou Shalt not Criticize Leftist Traitors!

In recent months, we have witnessed an unprecedented attack on Israel's academic freedom. Organizations such as Im Tirtzu and the Institute for Zionist Strategies publish more and more ephemeral reports that classifies course curricula, researchers, conventions and research work, designating them as legitimate or not. Anyone who fails to toe the line with what they define as the "Zionist consensus" is labeled as "illegitimate" and hence has no place in academia, in their view.

For more details and to see the full original article, go here

 

Ben Gurion University - Im Tirtzu issues BGU a Set of Demands to Restrain the Anti-Israel Bias in its Politics Department; the far Left is hysterical

Im Tirtzu has issued a set of demands (remind anyone of Berkeley in the 60s?) insisting that Ben Gurion University do something to restrain and balance the anti-Israel bias in its politics department and in other departments, or else Im Tirtzu will call upon donors to the university to withhold funds or put them into escrow until BGU really does something about the anti-Israel indoctrination there.

The Israeli mainstream media is hysterical and having a field day. Haaretz runs the story as its top banner headline on its front page. Every other Israeli newspaper today (I have not seen Maariv yet but suspect it makes a full house with this) runs the story. Every radio station in Israel carried reports and debates about the Im Tirtzu move and no doubt the evening news shows on TV will also carry reports. The far Left is hysterical. BGU's David Newman is all over the place trying it discredit the report.

For more details and to see the full original article, go here

 

Ben Gurion University – Eyal Nir (Dept of Chemistry) Gets Arrested

Lawyers and activists are currently negotiating the release of 3 men who were arrested for protesting against the states demolitions of a Palestinian village in the North of the Nakab (Negev). Mohammad Mahajna from Um Il Fahim and Mohammad Masarna are both students at Ben Gurion University; Eyal Nir is a teacher at the university located in Beer Sheba.

For more details and to see the full original article, go here

 

Ben Gurion University - Neve Gordon (Dept of Political Science) inventing new Israeli "Ethnic Cleansing"

Writing in The Guardian's Comment is Free, notorious anti-Zionist academic Neve Gordon, not even bothering to address the wider context of the demolition, even went as far as to state that he

suddenly understood how far the state is ready to go to accomplish its objective of Judaising the Negev region; what I witnessed was, after all, an act of ethnic cleansing.

While the rest of the media did not sink to Gordon's level of vitriol, most of them certainly did nothing to dispel a one-sided narrative that portrays Israel as the usurper of Arab land. The status of the Bedouin in Israel is far more complex, as is this particular case of the demolished unrecognized village.

For more details and to see the full original article, go here

 

A Review of the Bash-Israel Pre-Conference organized by Far-Leftist Academics prior to the Prestigious International Geographical Union’s regional conference held in Tel Aviv

As happens so often, the ideological opinion offered by Israeli scholars, under the banner of free speech and pluralism, at these conferences was primarily monolithic, anti-Israel, and leftist. If scholars were somehow still able to leave these conferences with a neutral or positive view about Israel, it was in spite of the best efforts of Israel’s academics who organized the pre-conferences, not because of them.

... For Newman, only one voice should be heard in a democratic society, the voice of critique and anti-state hatred. The only ‘beacon of light’ in Israel are the organizations and individuals who compare the country to a fascist state and the only “value” of democracy is the voice of extremism. On the other side democracy is having a “black day” when other organizations use free speech to critique those who critique.

For more details and to see the full original article, go here

 

Ben Gurion University – Not every form of speech is protected at BGU

His answer came from Faye Bittker, director of BGU’s Department of Public Relations and Media Relations, who was outraged that Prof Levitt not only believes homosexuality is “a hindrance, defect, deficiency, and an urge that can be treated and overcome,” but that he also refused to apologize for his convictions. … Small wonder BGU decided immediately, “on the basis of academic considerations alone,” to cancel the course.

Prof Steven Plaut, who teaches economics at the University of Haifa and heads Israel’s CampusWatch, a monitoring organization, has been following Prof Levitt’s case. “Now if Levitt had called for murdering all Israeli Jews or said that Jews drink gentile blood for Passover, that would have been protected speech,” said Prof Plaut. The Legal Forum for the Land of Israel has taken up Prof Levitt’s case and says the next stop will be the Supreme Court.

For more details and to see the full original article, go here

 

Isi Leibler, retired Senior Vice President of the World Jewish Congress, warns of Stalinism at Ben-Gurion University (or just behavior in a "degenerate manner")

The firing of Dr. Leavitt exemplifies the absurd and obscene double standards being imposed by Israeli academic institutions. Universities are willing to sack a lecturer for expressing a view not considered politically correct by dominant academic establishment. Yet the same authorities insist on retaining tenure for a senior academic like Gordon, described by Alan Dershowitz as a man "who has gotten into bed with neo-Nazis, Holocaust deniers, and anti-Semites... a despicable example of a self-hating Jew, and a self-hating Israeli."

This episode demonstrates how a cabal of post-Zionist and far left academics have succeeded to create an environment in which tenured staff are conscious that they have a license to debase the State - and even call for the destruction of their own University in the name of academic freedom - whilst suppressing any views that are politically incorrect from their bigoted perspective. It is truly reminiscent of the universities in the former Soviet Union approved by Stalin.

The government and donors to Ben-Gurion University and other academic institutions should have their heads examined if they continue providing funds which can be exploited in such a degenerate manner.

For more details and to see the full original article, go here

 

Ben Gurion University - Haggai Ram continues to serve his Iranian Masters; reported by UAE newspaper

'Haggai Ram, an Iran specialist at Ben-Gurion University in southern Israel, said: "Placing Gaza under a dark and ominous Iranian shadow allows Israel to commit the atrocities that it has committed in Gaza." '

For more details and to see the full original article, go here

 

Ben Gurion University – Israel David (Dept of Industrial Engineering) admonishes BGU administration indifference to Far Leftist incidents occurring under the banner of "Academic Freedom"

The protests following the Turkish flotilla incident included activists marching outside the Ben-Gurion University senate building while giving the Nazi salute and shouting “Heil Bibi.” These were apparently outside provocateurs, yet members of the university’s teaching staff participated in the demonstration. ...
Outside the university senate building we have a large poster bearing Prime Minister Netanyahu’s image, graced with a large “catastrophe” caption.” Anyone can come and see the display, which originally was meant to glorify Prime Minister Ben-Gurion. The protest expressed by about 90% of those signing the exhibit’s guestbook have not impressed university officials, who responded by saying this is “artistic freedom.” The management of my university would do well to stop ridiculing itself and making people fed up with it, and instead contemplate the complex meaning of terms such as “academic freedom,” “freedom of speech,” “artistic freedom,” and “artistic considerations” vis-à-vis its own simplistic perception.

For more details and to see the full original article, go here

 

Ben Gurion University – fires Prof. Yeruham Levitt for exercising "Free Speech". Why not Neve Gordon?

[Keeping Neve Gordon on the staff turns out to be an active choice rather than a limitation within the rules of "Free Speech" at BGU. Another case of  "Freedom for me but not for thee" at BGU:]

'Ben Gurion University has fired a professor for stating his opinion that the development of children raised by homosexual parents could be harmed, and that sexual inclinations can be restrained and chosen.
...
The Legal Forum for the Land of Israel promptly protested, noting that just a few weeks ago, another Ben Gurion lecturer, Dr. Neve Gordon, head of the Department of Politics and Government, escaped being fired even though he called for a political boycott against Israel. University Rector Prof. Weinblatt said at the time, “We live in a democratic country in which there is freedom of expression for all, even for those whose opinions are not appreciated by all.”'

For more details and to see the full original article, go here

 

Ben Gurion University - Head of Security at BGU confirms that Leftist Faculty members there took part in illegal activities

There is some news at BGU. The head of security confirmed in writing that leftist professors took place in illegal political activities on campus including Nazi salutes. See attached [in Hebrew].

For more details and to see the full original article, go here

 

President of Ben Gurion University Discovers some "Verbal Violence"

This week Gordon ran to Haaretz and claimed ecstatically that he had gotten a letter threatening to kill him. Haaretz scanned the entire letter, printed it, and devoted a large news story to this. The letter was written in a child’s handwriting and said “I will be coming to Ben Gurion to kill you.” ... Now I cannot prove this but I nurse a strong private suspicion that Neve Gordon sent that “death” letter to himself. I have a legitimate reason for suspecting that.

For more details and to see the full original article, go here

 

Ben Gurion University – Neve Gordon (Dept of Political Science) bemoans the arrest of his Communist Rachel-Corrie-Wannabe Friend

In an article in the British journal, The Guardian, which also appeared on the leftwing anti-Semitic jihadi website Counterpunch, Gordon takes a swipe at Israel once again by protesting the supposed gross miscarriage of justice. His ISM buddy is being sent to jail for a month for lying down in front of that bulldozer:

“This sentence is not a minor matter,” writes Gordon. “The Israeli court has basically decreed that the only legitimate way to oppose the occupation is by standing on the side of the road with some kind of placard.”

For more details and to see the full original article, go here

 

Ben Gurion University - On anti-Semitic Counterpunch web site, Neve Gordon (Dept of Political Science) gives HIS version of Israeli patriotic student protests (and misrepresents himself as a professor)

Pro-government students interviewed in the press said they were ’shocked to see faculty members, together with students from the left and Arab students shouting slogans against Israel’. Their classmates posted pictures of the protests on Facebook, asking likeminded students to ‘identify their classroom “friends”’.

A Facebook group was created to call for my resignation: by the end of the day more than 1000 people had joined. As well as hoping that I die and demanding that my family be stripped of our citizenship and exiled from Israel, members of this Facebook group offer more pragmatic suggestions, such as the need to concentrate efforts on getting rid of teaching assistants who are critical of the government, since it is more difficult to have me – as a tenured professor – fired.

What is troubling about these pro-government students is not that they are pro-government, but the way they attack anyone who thinks differently from them, along with their total lack of self-criticism or restraint.

For more details and to see the full original article, go here

 

Ben Gurion University - Neve Gordon (Dept of Political Science) accuses Israel of "piracy" in anti-Semitic Counterpunch magazine

Like a group of pirates in the Mediterranean, the Israeli navy attacked humanitarian aid ships in international waters, and yet Israeli officials and commentators were totally surprised when the passengers did not receive them with open arms.

For more details and to see the full original article, go here

 

Comeuppance for Ben Gurion University?

Don’t you love poetic justice? Ben Gurion University has long been one of the centers of the anti-Israel academic Left inside Israel and the capital for calls from tenured traitors for a world boycott of Israel.

Well, Cowabunga! Now it turns out that a South Africa “University” wants to boycott Ben Gurion University, in response no doubt to the bleatings of Comrade Neve Gordon and his BGU friends in mufti:

'The University of Johannesburg (UJ) is considering cutting academic ties with Israel's Ben-Gurion University (BGU) in protest against Ben Gurion's alleged association with Palestinian human rights abuses.'

For more details and to see the full original article, go here

 

Ben Gurion University - Neve Gordon (Dept of Political Science), the Kommissar of the Boycott-Israel Movement, complaining again about Israeli "McCarthists"

'There is also a third strategy: to undermine the reputation of anyone who dares to question Israel’s human rights record, and to obstruct the flow of unpalatable information that’s gathered, organised, and distributed by rights groups and circulated by the international media. Right-wing NGOs and social movements such as Gerald Steinberg’s NGO Monitor and Im Tirtzu are doing much of this McCarthyist dirty work. Their blacklist includes not only individual critics of Israeli rights abuses, like Goldstone, but also local and international NGOs and their donors, particularly the European Union, the Ford Foundation and the New Israel Fund. Naomi Chazan, the former Knesset member who now runs the New Israel Fund, was recently featured on giant billboards with a horn emerging from her head because her organisation funded human-rights NGOs that passed information on to Judge Goldstone.'

For more details and to see the full original article, go here

 

Ben Gurion University - David Newman, the new dean of Social Sciences and Humanities at BGU, smears and distorts Isracampus

"I think what NGO Monitor is doing is very harmful to Israel's democracy. We sell ourselves as the only real democracy in the Middle East, but what it is saying is that in this real democracy you can't be critical of the state anymore, you can't fund pro-human rights organizations and so on. I think we are damaging our own image as a democracy.

"In universities there are a lot of attacks on left-wing academics, there are all these sorts of sites like Campus Watch and IsraCampus. You go on to IsraCampus and you just happen to be a supporter of the two-state solution and you are treasonous and traitorous. It's just become so absurd. This country can be proud of the fact that, despite the ongoing conflict and security threats, we have created human rights organizations such as B'Tselem, Rabbis for Human Rights [of which his father, Rabbi Isaac Newman, is a former chairman], and that we promote Jewish-Arab dialogue and cooperation through grassroots programs, many of them promoted by the New Israel Fund.

For more details and to see the full original article, go here

 

Ben-Gurion University – David Newman (Dept of Politics and Government) Ducks the Issues, Whines about "McCarthyism"

One of the main critics of IsraCampus and other sites and organizations that monitor anti-Israeli Israelis, including academics and NGOS, is David Newman, professor in the Department of Politics and Government at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. He is currently running to be elected Dean of Social Science and Humanities at Ben Gurion University. Newman has condemned these monitoring activities in harsh and sweeping terms. “I have no hesitation in calling this a McCarthyite campaign,” he told an Abu Dhabi-based newspaper. And he has written of “a concerted campaign…to silence and delegitimize anyone who holds pro-peace, pro-human rights positions…,” a “vicious, anti-democratic campaign,” “the concerted right-wing campaign to silence all critics,” and even “concerted attempts to delegitimize and silence more than half of the country’s [Israel’s] citizens”! About donors who have been disturbed by what the monitoring organizations report on, Newman also has unkind words, speaking of “donors from abroad [who] attack any left-wing academic for daring to air his/her views” and “false supporters who use the power of their pocketbook to threaten Israeli academics because of their perceived political views.” The upshot is that Newman sees Israeli democracy as being on its last legs, writing,: “A country which [sic] ceases to value the spirit of open debate…is a country whose democracy has much to fear,” and referring to “Israel’s rapidly fading democracy” and “our dying democracy.” (The various quotations above are taken from here, here, here, and here.)

For more details and to see the full original article, go here

 

Ben Gurion University – Neve Gordon (Dept of Political Science) explains to the Ayatollahs how evil Israel is, in the Tehran Times. Iran is not anti-Semitic enough!

Boycott us, Gordon urges, “For the sake of our children, I am convinced that an international boycott is the only way to save Israel from itself.”

For more details and to see the full original article, go here

 

Another One-Sided Indoctrination Course at Ben Gurion University, this time taught by Jonathan Anson (Dept of Social Work)

For the second course assignment, students were required to write an essay based on four articles taken from a book edited by two of the most radical anti-Israel extremists at Ben Gurion University:  Uri Ram and Nitza Berkovitch (who frequently collaborates with Neve Gordon).  The topic is supposedly “Inequality”

For more details and to see the full original article, go here

 

Ben Gurion University – David Newman (Dept of Political Science) attacks IsraCampus.Org.il

IN THE past I have been attacked for daring to suggest, on the pages of this newspaper, that the politics of delegitimization practiced in recent years by such organizations such as Campus Watch, IsraCampus and, most recently, NGO Monitor have been a contemporary brand of McCarthyism. But if it was unclear until now, this past week’s events have highlighted the fact that there is a concerted campaign on the part of these well-funded organizations to silence and delegitimize anyone who holds pro-peace, pro-human rights positions, views which uphold the very best of democratic and Jewish traditions and for which the State of Israel is rightly proud.

For more details and to see the full original article, go here

 

Ben Gurion University - Will David Newman (Dept of Political Science) have the courage of his convictions and call upon Israel to turn the Western Wall over to the Palestinian terrorists?

BGU's David Newman opposed to Israel Preserving the Tomb of the Patriarchs and other Shrines as its Heritage. He writes:
‘Obviously, places have to be treated with respect and preserved, especially if they have particular mythical meaning for specific groups, or if people have given up their lives at these sites as part of the national struggle. But if they are being promoted as a way to strengthen the political claims of one side while ignoring the places important to the other, or as a means of making a political statement concerning the control of land, then it is highly questionable whether we are in fact sanctifying or desecrating these places. If, through our choice of sites, we only throw additional fuel on the flames of conflict, then we have achieved exactly the opposite of what the government set out to do.’

We note how he nowhere in his article calls on the Muslim world to relinquish control of the Dome of the Rock in the name of relaxing tensions and creating a more peaceful world.

For more details and to see the full original article, go here

 

Ben Gurion University - Oren Yiftachel (Dept. of Geography) calls Israel an “ethnocracy”

Yiftachel has developed the theory of Israeli ethnocracy in his own setting. He published a book in 2006 entitled Ethnocracy: Land and Identity in Israel/Palestine. A mundane description of the book notes that “the notion of ethnocracy suggests a political regime that facilitates expansion and control by a dominant ethnicity in contested lands. It is neither democratic nor authoritarian, with rights and capabilities depending primarily on ethnic origin and geographic location.”

In Middle East Report Yiftachel wrote that the development of Israel was based on “the ‘return’ of Jews to their ancestors’ mythical land” and notes that “I argue that the Israeli polity is governed not by a democratic regime, but rather by an ‘ethnocracy.’”'

For more details and to see the full original article, go here

 

Ben Gurion University – David Newman (Dept of Political Science) “reduced to name-calling”

In his classical defense of free speech, John Stuart Mill imagined a free marketplace of ideas, in which truth will usually prevail. But Newman could not be bothered to respond to a single item in Im Tirzu’s meticulously documented report on NIF funding. Instead of refutation, he offered only name-calling. ... Many on the Left employ a double standard concerning free speech. They want their own advocates or professors immunized from criticism – thus Prof. Newman’s outrage at groups, such as Campus Watch, which publicize what professors say in and outside the classroom. On the other hand, they develop an elaborate set of rules to disallow the speech of others as incitement, Islamophobia, homophobia, sexism, racism, or McCarthyism. Neve Gordon is an egregious example. He published a widely disseminated op-ed in The Los Angeles Times calling for a boycott of Israel, but whines when others point out what kind of people head Ben-Gurion University’s Political Science Department and files libel suits to silence critics.

For more details and to see the full original article, go here

 

Israel’s taxpayer-supported academic McCarthyism

'Pogrund and Newman are incensed that IsraCampus and other campus watch groups might expose to the public Israeli professors who promote the academic boycott of Israel’s universities, or who work to support the dissolution of the Jewish state. Pogrund quotes David Newman in an interview on an Arab website based in the EU: “I have no hesitation in calling this a McCarthyite campaign. What they are doing is very dangerous.”' Hmmmmm.

For more details and to see the full original article, go here

 

Ben Gurion University Senior Lecturer of Middle East History Haggai Ram (home page here) claims Israel is inventing the threat from Iran in order to oppress Palestinians.

'By playing up the purported genocidal threat issuing from Iran, the Netanyahu government thus hopes to avoid making any concessions that are likely to bring about a meaningful breakthrough in the Israeli-Palestinian impasse. "The message is: Iran is an existential threat to Israel; settlements are not," as an Israeli official recently told The Guardian.... because such expressions have thus far enabled the Jewish state to exacerbate, rather than help to alleviate, the Palestinian problem. It is this yet-to-be resolved problem - and not Iran - that presents the Jewish state with the most serious challenge to its survival.'

For more details and to see the full original article, go here

 

A Governor of Ben Gurion University tells Far Leftist politics professor at BGU, David Newman, to "go perish" for his aiding anti-Semitism

'The British-born philanthropist Michael Gross, a governor of BGU, had been so incensed at Newman’s contribution to the Channel Four programme that he had sent him several emails, in one of which, alluding to Newman’s “disgusting contribution” to the programme, he had promised to “use whatever influence I have at BGU to have you thrown out… I hope you perish,” while in another he had proffered the view that “the sooner you are removed from BGU and the face of the earth, the better.”'

For more details and to see the full original article, go here

 

Ben Gurion University – Neve Gordon (Dept of Political Science) presents Arab rioters as part of a “pro-peace” and “nonviolent” resistance

"Why," I have often been asked, "haven't the Palestinians established a peace movement like the Israeli Peace Now?" The question itself is problematic… Most important, though, is the false supposition that Palestinians have indeed failed to create a pro-peace popular movement. In September 1967 – three months after the decisive war in which the West Bank, Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem were occupied – Palestinian leaders decided to launch a campaign against the introduction of new Israeli textbooks in Palestinian schools. … Palestinian dissidents … declared a general school strike: teachers did not show up for work, children took to the streets to protest against the occupation and many shopkeepers closed shop. … the message Israel wanted to convey was clear: any act of resistance would result in a disproportionate response, which would make the population suffer to such a degree that resistance would appear pointless. After a few weeks of nightly curfews, cutting off telephone lines, detaining leaders, and increasing the level of harassment, Israel managed to break the strike. ... But over the past five years, Palestinians from scores of villages and towns such as Bil'in and Jayyous have developed new forms of pro-peace resistance that have attracted the attention of the international community.

For more details and to see the full original article, go here

 

Ben Gurion University – David Newman (Dept of Political Science) feels the heat from a peeved Board of Trustees due to his contributions to an anti-Semitic documentary on British Channel 4

Prof. David Newman from the Department of Politics and Government at Ben Gurion University has already experienced persecution by the Board of Trustees of the institution where he teaches. A month ago he received an angry e-mail from Michael Gross,, who sits on the University’s Board of Trustees, following an appearance on the British Channel 4 television. In the e-mail, Gross threatens to use all of his influence to fire Newman. He uses very strong language, to the point of death wishes

Members of the faculty of humanities at the university are organizing a petition that will be sent to the Chairman of the Board of Trustees Roy Zuckerberg, who lives in New York, to protest Gross’s e-mails. “It is an example of how a university donor who lives abroad (Gross lives in England) is trying to take over the university’s agenda,” said a faculty member. Newman would only say this week: “Others are fighting for me, not I for others, and I prefer not to talk about it.”

For more details and to see the full original article, go here

 

Ben Gurion University - David Newman (Dept of Political Science) Collaborates in Production of anti-Semitic Documentary; defends it as "Legitimate Journalism"

So Newman is remorseful, not necessarily because of what he said, but rather because of the outrage he caused. He was petrified by people's reactions and he freaked out. He ran all the way to the Post to clear his tarnished image as an Israeli scholar who appears to be giving his name to a conspiracy theory that could easily fit inside the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. But Channel 4 was quick to refute his righteousness and its spokesman issued a statement saying: “We are absolutely clear that David Newman understood the subject matter of the film before being interviewed by Peter Oborne.” … The programme … [gave] the impression that Jewish donors are profiteering from the "occupation" in exchange for their financial generosity to political parties. … The truth was that, like David Newman, Oborne was “shocked” by some of the comments made after Dispatches was aired. What shocked him and caused his outrage was not the programme’s anti-Semitism, however, but rather the charges of anti-Semitism made against the programme, Newman defended the programme as legitimate journalism. … So what did the veteran Channel 4 investigative reporter do? He fabricated a mountain of rumors and speculations, and then admitted, after the act, that they have no substance. … Newman also suddenly "saw the light" after the broadcast, saying the program "wasn’t balanced in the context of the Middle East and didn’t explain that lobbying is a legitimate part of the political process.” But he did enormous damage, not only to Israel, but also to the Anglo-Jewish community of which he was once a member. He lent his name as a prominent Israeli academic to baseless anti-Semitic allegations that accuse perfectly normal political activities as a sinister cabal orchestrated from Jerusalem against the British people.

For more details and to see the full original article, go here

 

Ben Gurion University - Uri Gordon (Arava Institute for Environmental Studies in Ketura), lecturer in anarchism, has discovered that the ancient Hebrews were pagans who did not believe in a single deity

How then did this pagan nature religion transform into abstract monotheism, the basis for Judaism, Christianity and Islam? The answer lies not in theology, but in politics. The change took place in two stages, the first of which came with the sweeping campaign of religious and political centralization enacted in Jerusalem by King Josiah in 621 BCE. The chief instigators were the high priest Hilkiah, the royal secretary Shaphan, and the prophetess Huldah, a prominent noblewoman. During renovations in the temple, they “discovered” a forgotten manuscript, the Book of the Covenant, later incorporated into the book of Deuteronomy. Its centerpiece was the Shema – the passage beginning “Hear, O Israel, Yahweh our God, Yahweh the One” (Deut. 6:4) – along with harsh prohibitions on idolatry and exogamy, a stress on one exclusive temple, and threats of total annihilation of the people if they worship other gods. Presented to the king, these writings formed the perfect pretext for a wholesale centralization of theocratic power in the hands of the House of David and the Jerusalem priestly caste. Josiah acted swiftly. … Josiah’s coup created and enforced a patriarchal state religion, to whose intellectual elite modern scholarship attributes the books of Deuteronomy, Joshua, Judges, Samuel and Kings – a retroactive historiography which would drastically reshape Judean identity and collective memory.

For more details and to see the full original article, go here

 

Ben Gurion University - Neve Gordon (Dept of Political Science) turns His Own Home into a Spa for Convicted Terrorist

Dr. Neve Gordon of Israel’s Ben Gurion University is known as one of the most radical academic Palestinian sympathizers. However, his activities appear to have peaked this year with a call for an anti-Israel boycott, and revelations that he hosted a convicted Palestinian sentenced to house arrest. Despite being the chairman of the political science department at Israel’s Ben Gurion University, Gordon wrote an L.A. Times op-ed calling for a worldwide boycott of Israel, including Israeli universities, to achieve what he calls “ending our apartheid.“ Gordon’s call was widely seen as an anti-democratic attempt to undermine Israeli democracy and sovereignty and drew scathing criticism from his peers in both the academic and activist communities. … Around the same time as the boycott call, Gordon turned his own home into a refuge for convicted Fatah organizer Mohammed Abu Humus, a resident of the Issawiya neighborhood of East Jerusalem. As a local Fatah organizer, Abu Hums had previous convictions for several security related offenses including arson and assault. Despite the latest conviction for directing demonstrators to throw rocks, Gordon described Abu Humus as a “political prisoner” and “a Fatah leader.” A Jerusalem district judge earlier this year convicted Abu Humus and handed down a nine-month sentence, converted to house arrest. Gordon organized a group of far-left academics to testify on behalf of Abu Humus, and Gordon offered the court to host Abu Humus in Gordon’s own home in Beersheva for the duration of the house arrest. It is evidently the only case on record of a Palestinian terrorist being released to house arrest in the home of a Jewish Israeli citizen.

For more details and to see the full original article, go here

 

German Youth/Student Website attacks IsraCampus.Org.il as “McCarthyite”

French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner, who arrived on Tuesday for talks in Israel, expressed the impression that Israel is no longer interested in a peace agreement. Previously there had been a large peace movement and a left that had stood for peace. He had the impression that "the desire for peace has completely vanished, as if the people no longer believe in it." That ensures that Israel has a kind of "witch hunt" against anti-government statements that "getting to feel very left academics in universities. I refer to this as a McCarthyite campaign," said David Newman, professor of politics at Ben-Gurion University of Beersheva, in conversation with journalist Jonathan Cook on groups that specifically denounce professors. On the website of IsraCampus (www.isracampus.org.il) the photos were published of 100 dissident professors and academic as a "fifth column called". One of them is Anat Matar, a professor of philosophy from the University of Tel Aviv. "Our society has become somewhat fascist," Cook cites him in his report.

For more details and to see the full original article, go here

 

Ben Gurion University – David Newman (Dept of Political Science) enlists the help of Jonathan Cook - a columnist for the anti-Semitic, pro-jihad, neo-Stalinist web magazine Counterpunch - to attack IsraCampus.Org.il However they have to go all the way to Abu Dhabi to get it published

“I have no hesitation in calling this a McCarthyite campaign,” said David Newman, a politics professor at Ben Gurion University, in Israel’s southern city of Beersheva. “What they are doing is very dangerous.” Last month, in what appeared to be a new tactic, IsraCampus placed a full-page advertisement in an official diary issued to students at Haifa University, urging them to visit its website to see a “rogues’ gallery” of 100 Israeli scholars the group deems an “academic fifth column”. “The goal is to transform our students into spies in the classroom to gather information and intimidate us,” a senior Israeli lecturer said. “It’s a model of ‘policing’ faculty staff that has been very successful in stifling academic freedom in the US.”

For more details and to see the full original article, go here

 

Ben Gurion University – Neve Gordon has his material featured on anti-Semitic web site amid Holocaust Denier columnists

Neo-Nazi anti-Semitic web site that insists that the Jews were behind 9-11 attacks on the US and that Jews worship Satan, features, amidst the Holocaust Denier columnists, Neve Gordon:

http://www.ziomania.com/

Either Gordon himself asked to be reprinted there, or Gordon has declined to sue the web site to get his material removed! (He did sue Prof. Steven Plaut though because the latter dared to criticize Gordon's political opinions)

 

Ben Gurion University – Neve Gordon (Dept of Political Science) has issues with the “less tolerant” “Zionist national narrative” in Israeli Schools; contributes to the “Palestinian People” Myth by calling non-Jewish Israeli citizens “Palestinians”

Consider the way Jewish and Palestinian children are educated. Segregation in the classroom is the rule so that Jewish and Palestinian children only rarely mix. This strict segregation exists despite the fact that the Palestinians are citizens of Israel … It is, no doubt, a truism that public schools in modern liberal democracies inculcate their students with the dominant national worldview. In the US, for example, children still recite the pledge of allegiance and in France children sing La Marseillaise. But while the public schools in these democracies are today more willing to provide students with a multicultural curriculum that includes the historical narratives of those who have been oppressed and marginalised over the centuries, Israel is arguably becoming less tolerant to any pedagogy that challenges the dominant Zionist national narrative.

For more details and to see the full original article, go here

 

Ben Gurion University - Oren Yiftachel (Dept. of Geography) smears the Israeli voter that “voted for apartheid”; the “democratic bloc” for Yiftachel is composed of Meretz and the Arab parties

Ironically, the militaristic mood caused by the Gaza invasion backfired against its architects-the ruling Kadima and particularly the Labor party, which at least in rhetoric supports the peace process. The Jewish public adopted Barak’s hard line against Hamas, but then (logically) decided to strengthen the “real” militaristic alternative-the colonialist Right. Another irony was that in the name of “democracy” the Israeli elections, which were neither general nor free, put in power a colonialist bloc bent on deepening the “creeping apartheid” process even while vowing to remove the democratically elected Hamas government. … The democratic bloc includes mainly the small leftist-liberal Zionist party Meretz, the mixed Arab-Jewish socialist party al-Jabha al-Dimuqratiyya lil-Salam wal-Musawa (the Democratic Front for Peace and Equality; Hadash), and the Arab parties al-Tajammu‘ al-Watani al-Dimuqrati (the National Democratic Assembly; Balad) and al-Muwahida (Ra’am-Ta’al).

For more details and to see the full original article, go here

 

Ben Gurion University – Summary of Neve Gordon’s (Dept of Political Science) anti-Israel activity

One of the most bizarre aspects of this campus war against the Jews is how numerous self-hating, anti-Semitic Jews are in the ranks of the movement to achieve the annihilation of Israel. For reasons that only a psychiatrist could fully understand, these people use their birthright to give authenticity to the campaign of delegitimizing and demonizing Israel. … Though he is an Israeli citizen, Gordon invariably sides with Israel’s enemies in the ongoing Mideast conflict. During the siege of Ramallah in 2002, for instance, he barricaded himself with Yasser Arafat, the terrorist responsible for the deaths of more Jews than any human being since Adolf Hitler. For years, Gordon has been referring to Israel as a fascist, terrorist, “apartheid” state that “resembles Nazi Germany.” He has posted numerous writings on Holocaust-denial websites. And he has repeatedly advocated a “one state” solution, in which Israel, by way of the so-called Palestinian “right of return” would be inundated with Arab “refugees” whose inevitable political supremacy would spell the de facto end of Israel.

For more details and to see the full original article, go here

 

Jerusalem Post readers comment on Yocheved Miriam Russo’s article on Neve Gordon and Ben Gurion University's response (updated as of 29/9/2009 11:55pm)

40. Gordon and his anti Israeli Position

I have been to Ben Gurion University and met some of the faculty and students and have earmarked a large contribution. The fact that Ben Gurion University gave Gordon tenure and promoted him to Department Head is very disturbing. Long ago it was said freedom of speech does not go so far as to allow a man to go into a crowded theatre and yell fire. This article is making me reconsider altering my contribution.

Max Zaslawsky - USA (09/29/2009 11:09)

25. Neve Gordon

Is not the first or the last academic in Israel to issue such statements of self-hatred, getting in bed with neo-nazis if necessary to quote A. Dershowitz. He should start his boycott by resigning from his position and leaving the country that raised him at once. This kind of individual is counterproductive and a burden for our society. I hope that BGU's Senate will take the appropriate stance with this mentally impaired faculty of them. D. Rittel Professor, Technion, Haifa

daniel rittel - israel (09/26/2009 17:05)

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Ben Gurion University – Neve Gordon (Dept of Political Science) praises Kobi Snitz’s “civil disobedience” against the “annexation wall”; laments the “non-lethal” options the Security Forces use to encourage civil obedience

Kobi Snitz … is an Israeli anarchist who is currently serving a 20 day sentence for refusing to pay a 2,000 shekel fine. Thirty-eight year-old Snitz was arrested with other activists in the small Palestinian village of Kharbatha back in 2004 while trying to prevent the demolition of the home of a prominent member of the local popular committee. … Both the demonstrations and the attempt to stop the demolition were acts of civil disobedience. … that once a village decides to struggle against the annexation barrier the entire community is punished. In addition to home demolitions, curfews and other forms of movement restriction, the Israeli military forces consistently uses violence against the protestors--and most often targets the youth-- beating, tear-gassing as well as deploying both lethal and “non-lethal” ammunition against them.

For more details and to see the full original article, go here

 

Ben Gurion University – The real reason why BGU became a den of treason

Ben Gurion University just can't get itself out of the headlines thanks to its hordes of anti-Israel extremist faculty members. The worst is Neve Gordon of BGU's political science department, so anti-Semitic that his articles run on Holocaust Denial and official Iranian governmental web sites, who has been leading the call for a world boycott of Israel. So, Want to know the REAL reason why Ben Gurion University became a den of treason? Ask Avishai Braverman, who personally set up the Political Science Department there as Israel's worst anti-Israel anti-Zionist propaganda bureau. Braverman was president of BGU for many years and was in many ways even worse than its current President, the clueless Rivka Carmi. Braverman filled BGU with "post-Zionists" and "New Historians." He allowed the political science department to fire and refuse to employ Zionists.

For more details and to see the full original article, go here

 

Ben Gurion University – Neve Gordon (Dept of Political Science) - Jerusalem Post takes on Neve Gordon and Ben Gurion University; Isracampus.Org.il and Campus Watch featured

Unless one is a news junkie, an academic, or closely involved with BGU, the name Neve Gordon may not ring many bells among mainstream Israelis, either. Even so, within 48 hours, 4,000 emails protesting Gordon's remarks had landed in the inbox of BGU President Rivka Carmi. Several days later, Carmi responded to her department head's call for a boycott through her own LA Times op-ed, admitting that she was "shocked" at what Gordon had written, suggesting that even she hadn't been fully aware of what she called Gordon's "destructive views."

NOT EVERYONE was shocked. For years, watchdog organizations like Campus Watch and IsraCampus had monitored Neve Gordon's words and activities, even before Gordon made international news during the "Siege of Ramallah," when, in 2003, he joined Palestinian Authority Chairman Yasser Arafat, holed up in his Ramallah compound. Defying IDF orders which forbade his entry to Ramallah, he moved in to protect Arafat, taking up a position as a "human shield." During the height of the intifada, when suicide bombers belonging to the military wing of Arafat's movement were blowing up Israeli cafes and buses, a photo of Gordon and Arafat, hands joined and held high in solidarity, splashed across the front pages of Israeli newspapers.

According to documents compiled by watchdog IsraCampus (www.IsraCampus.org,il), Gordon's dissident career was politically consistent. Calling Israel an "apartheid" state had long been part of his anti-Israel rant. Last December, at the height of Operation Cast Lead, as Hamas rockets and missiles slammed into Israel - including striking the BGU campus - Gordon again spoke out, denouncing not Hamas but Israel.

In any communal organization, no one enjoys unrestricted rights, they note. Just as the right to swing your arms stops where the other fellow's nose begins, why can't there be some limit on the things anyone - professor or not - is entitled to say, if his words will prove detrimental to the community as a whole?

For more details and to see the full original article, go here

 

Ben Gurion University – Even Uri Avnery comes out against Neve Gordon’s boycott however his argument is that it would be ineffective

No one who entertains this hope can support the call for boycotting Israel. Those who call for a boycott act out of despair. And that is the root of the matter.

Neve Gordon and his partners in this effort have despaired of the Israelis. They have reached the conclusion that there is no chance of changing Israeli public opinion. According to them, no salvation will come from within. One must ignore the Israeli public and concentrate on mobilizing the world against the State of Israel. (Some of them believe anyhow that the State of Israel should be dismantled and replaced by a bi-national state.)

I do not share either view - neither the despair of the Israeli people, to which I belong, nor the hope that the world will stand up and compel Israel to change its ways against its will. For this to happen, the boycott must gather worldwide momentum, the US must join it, the Israeli economy must collapse and the morale of the Israeli public must break.

How long will this take? Twenty Years? Fifty years? Forever?

Avnery is not arguing that a boycott would be bad, but that it would be ineffective, that it would eviscerate any popular support the 'peace movement' has here.

For more details and to see the full original article, go here

 

Ben Gurion University – Neve Gordon reiterates call for boycott on NY radio station

IsraCampus.Org.il's Summary of audio interview:
Neve Gordon repeats claim that Israel is an Apartheid regime. Lumps all non-Jewish Israeli citizens as “Palestinians”. He wants the “pre-occupied” middle-class to “feel” the financial pinch to effect “change”. Claims an obscure sentence from the original editorial said that his advocacy of BDS was to be “gradual”.

Demands an academic boycott of Ariel College. Advocates tracking businesses that work in Judea and Samaria.

Believes the BDS is for all: “one-state” and “two-state” believers as well as “Zionists” and “Anti-Zionists”. BDS is a tool for which to force Israel to abide by “international law”.

Voices opinion on tenure and BGU President's comments: Academic freedom is at stake, his right to call for a boycott has to be protected. Testifies to receiving 5000 emails of support – 1000 from professors and other Academic Institutions around the world [Why can’t he go to one of those Universities and feel more at home?]. Belittles the BGU donors and calls the donor boycott of BGU “ironic”.

For more details and to see the full original article, go here

 

Ben Gurion University – BGU Rector wants Gordon to resign

Ben-Gurion University will not fire Dr. Neve Gordon, who endorsed a boycott of Israel, but officials call on him to resign his post as head of the Political Science Department. University Rector Professor Jimmy Weinblatt met Thursday with faculty members who signed a petition supporting Gordon and told them he thinks it is not appropriate that Gordon continue on in his position and that he must reach the proper conclusions.

For more details and to see the full original article, go here

 

Ben Gurion University – Gordon’s cry for boycott gets likened to "anti-Semitism"

True, dirty laundry should be washed at home, but boycotting Israel has long been heard internationally. Baseless, outrageous, counter-productive and basically a very valuable weapon, these cries against Israel stem from innate, deeply embedded hatred. It is purely and simply anti-Semitism. Professor Gordon’s demand is no different than Prof. Myers’s position that kidnapping Israeli soldiers is a justifiable weapon. The aftermath of the LA Times article teaches two things: First, donor revolt is a very valuable tool and withholding funding garners attention. Second, the Israeli and Jewish communities have slowly accepted the realization they are at war. Now they must focus on the Israeli Public Diplomacy front, where the battle is raging and they are mounting incalculable losses.

For more details and to see the full original article, go here

 

Ben Gurion University - Even J Street denounces Gordon

J Street believes that calls for boycotts and sanctions undermine our ability to achieve a two-state solution and regional, comprehensive peace. … The answer, however, isn’t to divest, boycott or sanction - steps that deepen Israel’s sense of isolation and increase the antagonism that surrounds the issue.

For more details and to see the full original article, go here

 

Ben Gurion University - Jerusalem Post Columnist calls for Sanctions against BGU as answer to its Academic Fifth Column

Nor do professors' statements become immune to criticism because they are uttered in a classroom. Professors, like everyone else, should expect to have their work evaluated. Just as parents and students have an interest in knowing which professors have a tendency to get too friendly with female students, so do they have a right to form judgments about which professors are using their classrooms for political indoctrination, not education. Groups like Campus Watch and IsraCampus.Org.il foster such informed judgments by publicizing both the published utterances and classroom statements of university lecturers. In general, it would be foolish to refrain from contributing to a university based on the views of one faculty member. Doing so would eliminate every potential recipient. But Neve Gordon is not a solitary rogue professor on the BGU campus. The BGU Department of Politics and Government, which he chairs, fits the description of former Minister of Education Amnon Rubinstein of academic departments in Israel in which no traditional Zionist could be appointed.

For more details and to see the full original article, go here

 

Ben Gurion University – Neve Gordon is not the ONLY Anti-Israel Illness at Ben Gurion University

Dr. Neve Gordon has turned David Ben Gurion in his grave one more time, but who is really to blame for the fiasco in Beer-Sheba? The answer is obvious. The University president who helped to create in her midst the mafia that is called "the department of Politics and Government.” For the last few years Prof. Carmi ignored all the writing on the wall, but now she is panicking as American Jewish donors refuse to take her telephone calls. ...

Professor Carmi was certainly aware of this Gordon-terrorism encounter, which was splashed on many Israeli newspapers, and yet she did not register any "outrage" at the time, nor protest, needless to say, in the name of "academic freedom.” But if the horror show in the Mukata'a might have been dismissed by her as a one-off display of collaboration with Arafat, she could have taken a note of more of Gordon’s other recent "misdemeanors" that made similar headlines. Not in the very distant past Gordon campaigned for and endorsed the views of the notorious anti-Semite Norman Finkelstein. He also published articles on Holocaust denials website, declared that Israel is not a democracy, celebrated Palestinian bulldozer-murders, defended Azmi Bishara, the fugitive former MK and Hezbollah agent, labeled IDF officers as war criminals, called on his students to “resists” military service and - maybe worst of all - tried to gag his critics by taking them to court demanding financial compensation.

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The Orwellian Lobby for Neve Gordon

Neve Gordon makes Ilan Pappe look like a serious academic and a patriotic Zionist. He makes Micah Leshem and Yuval Yonay look rational and pro-Israel. It is always amusing watching the Israeli Academic Fifth Column joining anti-Semites from all over the world, rushing out to defend the right of anyone to smear Israel and Jews, and to defend the most mind-bogging falsehoods and blatant fabrications in the name of "academic freedom." These are invariably the very same people who oppose freedom of speech for those who disagree with their own political agendas and, in particular, oppose freedom of expression for those who think Israel has the right to exist and the right to defend itself

For more details and to see the full original article, go here

 

Ben Gurion University - LA Times readers express their dissatisfaction with Neve Gordon’s call for boycott

-----Original Message-----
From: marion dreyfus
Sent: Tue, Aug 25, 2009 6:32 pm
Subject: letter to editor printed in the LAT (on Neve Gordon)

Gordon has always been quixotic, anti-Israel, anti-Jewish and now, anti-common sense.

Boycotting his own country is clearly an extreme and bizarre position for his bizarrely held views, and both are problematic for his neighbors and co-religionists.

Marion DS Dreyfus
Atlanta

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Ben Gurion University Prez Carmi cites Gordon's claim that Israel is an "apartheid" regime, but never gets around to pointing out that it is NOT

However, I strongly believe a call for a worldwide boycott of Israel written by a Ben-Gurion University faculty member, Neve Gordon, that appeared in The Times oversteps the boundaries of academic freedom -- because it has nothing to do with it. Academic freedom exists to ensure that there is an unfettered and free discussion of ideas relating to research and teaching and to provide a forum for the debate of complicated ideas that may challenge accepted norms. Gordon, however, used his pulpit as a university faculty member to advocate a personal opinion, which is really demagoguery cloaked in academic theory. Gordon argues that Israel is an "apartheid" state and that "a boycott would save Israel from itself." But the empirical facts show that it would destroy the very fabric of the society that he claims to want to protect. … At the same time, by calling on other entities, including academic institutions, to boycott Israel -- and effectively, to boycott his own university -- Gordon has forfeited his ability to work effectively within the academic setting, with his colleagues in Israel and around the world. After his very public, personal soul-searching in his Op-Ed article, leading to his extreme description of Israel as an "apartheid" state, how can he, in good faith, create the collaborative atmosphere necessary for true academic research and teaching?

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Ben Gurion University - Neve Gordon's LA Times boycott editorial draws reader response

I am a great believer in academic freedom, but academic freedom does not mean one has free license to defame ones own country with anti-semitic and anti-zionist propaganda as conducted by Neve Gordon, not just in his latest outburst which you have censored but for years in the past. I agree entirely with the stance taken by the LA Jewish Federation. You and your predecessor had plenty of opportunity to impose responsible freedom of speech amongst tenured staff but you have declined to act responsibly to date. So is it surprising that your funders have no option to take things in their own hands to ensure that responsibilities instilled throughout all academic fields in your University? ... I have stopped giving donations to Friends of Israel universities  for the same reason ages ago. There are other ways open to me to ensure that those who are deserving of funding, particularly on the critical scientific research side (critical for Israel’s future) do get funding through donations but not the likes of Mr. Gordon.

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Ben Gurion University - Dr. Alex Grobman reflects on why Self-hating Israelis, like Neve Gordon, Denounce Israel

In an August 20, 2009 editorial in the Los Angeles Times, Neve Gordon, a professor of political science at Ben-Gurion University, accused Israel of being an apartheid state. He said a two-state solution was the “more realistic” way to end this inequity. Since only “massive international pressure,” will bring about this state and thus save Israel, Gordon recently joined the Arab sponsored Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement founded in July 2005.1 Vilification of Israel by Jews is not a new phenomenon. … Levin sees an element of arrogance in “this self-delusion” by Israelis who believe they can affect change. Jews assume a responsibility for something over which they have no control, to ward off despair. This is similar to an abused child who feels responsible for his plight and views himself as “bad.” The child maintains, “the fantasy that if he becomes good enough,” his father will stop hitting him, his mother will give him attention and whatever other form of abuse he suffered will end. 15 In the same way, some Israelis are delusional when they assume they can control Arab behavior.

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Ben Gurion University - Martin Sherman (TAU - Dept of Political Science) shreds Neve Gordon’s logic for boycotting Israel; rejects Alon Harel’s abuse of “freedom of academic expression” on SocSci List

I should like to place on public record my unequivocal refusal to attach my name to the proposed letter distributed by Alon Harel, expressing support for Neve Gordon's right to call for a boycott of Israel. … While freedom of academic expression is of course a value of great importance it should not be exposed to unbridled misuse - even less to cynical abuse – as it has been in this instance. One might hope that the exercise of such freedom would be constrained by other values - arguably of no lesser importance -- such as moral integrity, and moral consistency. Indeed, one can detect neither integrity nor consistency in Gordon's continued acceptance of a salary paid in large degree from the coffers of regime he finds so despicable and iniquitous that he feels morally bound to work for its downfall. … Moreover, while there may well be legitimate debate as what is true, there are clearly claims that are demonstrably false. … Gordon's claim that Israel is an apartheid state is no less preposterous than these examples.

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A Day of Shock in Beersheba

BGU President Prof. Rivka Carmi says she’s “shocked” by the call to boycott Israel made in a LA Times op-ed written by Dr. Neve Gordon, the Chairman of her Department of Politics and Government. ... As for me, I’m shocked that she’s shocked. ... As seems apparent, Prof. Carmi has been unaware of the anti-Israel venom that has, for many years, been spewing out of her Department of Politics and Government. Not only has she not taken steps to reprove or reform her wayward Department head, she’s done precisely the opposite, not only promoting him, but endorsing him, supporting him, defending him, repeatedly terming his vicious hate propaganda "serious and distinguished research into human rights." This can’t go on. So here’s my proposal: In order to save BGU from itself, I think a boycott is in order. If we want to save Beersheba’s much-loved Ben Gurion University of the Negev, then we must boycott it.

For more details and to see the full original article, go here

 

Ben Gurion University – Jon Anson (Dept of Social Work) - Among Other Anti-Zionists at BGU backing Neve Gordon's call for boycott of Israel

He states clearly: this is his opinion, this is what worries him, as an Israeli, as someone who has chosen to make Israel his home. He doesn't even call for a boycott, he merely states his conclusion that only international pressure will get us out of the impasse we are in, and that only a boycott will create sufficient pressure to have an effect. His description of the situation is uncomfortable -- but if what is happening on the West Bank is not Apartheid, then what is it?

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Ben Gurion University – Yaakov (Yaki) Dayan, Israel's Consul-General in Los Angeles, warns BGU President Rivka Carmi of pending financial sanctions by “benefactors of Ben-Gurion University” due to the Neve Gordon's apartheid editorial and “anti-Zionist lecturers like Gordon”

In the wake of the publication of the article, Israel's Consul-General in Los Angeles, Yaakov (Yaki) Dayan sent a letter to the president of Ben-Gurion University, Prof. Rivka Carmi, in which he said that such statements may be detrimental to the university. "Since the article was published I've been contacted by people who care for Israel; some of them are benefactors of Ben-Gurion University," Dayan wrote. "They were unanimous in threatening to withhold their donations to your institution. My attempt to explain that one bad apple would affect hundreds of researchers turned out to be futile." "I believe that the definitive answer to anti-Zionist lecturers like Gordon is to set up a center for Zionist studies, which unfortunately does not exist in Israeli academia," he continued. "This center would help dispel the lies disseminated by Gordon in the name of your university."

For more details and to see the full original article, go here

 

Ben Gurion University – LA Jews threaten to boycott Ben Gurion University to save it from Neve Gordon

According to Israel's Haaretz, Aug. 23 2009, a large group of Los Angeles Jews are launching a campaign to boycott Ben Gurion University for as long as Gordon works there: … Gordon served as a "human shield" for wanted terrorists and murderers being hidden by Yassir Arafat. He has spent much of time in recent years promoting and supporting Neo-Nazi Norman Finkelstein, who was fired by DePaul University for his own lack of serious academic work. At DePaul University, anti-Israel hate propaganda does not count as scholarship, but at Ben Gurion University it does! He is a leftist Neo-Fascist who opposes freedom of speech for those with whom he disagrees and has attempted to use the Israeli court system to suppress democracy and freedom of speech through SLAPP harassment. He has repeatedly called for Israel to be eliminated altogether. Gordon's campaign for the annihilation of Israel is being carried out while Gordon sits in a cushy academic job paid for by the Israeli taxpayer.

To tell the heads of Ben Gurion University what you think of all this, write to

Rivka Carmi, President
P.O. Box 653,
Beer-Sheva,
Israel, 84105
rcarmi@bgumail.bgu.ac.il
and president@bgu.ac.il
Tel: 972-8-6461211/9
Fax: 972-8-6472991

Prof. Jimmy Weinblatt, Rector
P.O. Box 653,
Beer-Sheva,
Israel, 84105
rector@bgu.ac.il
Tel: 972-8-6461223
Fax: 972-8-6479434

For more details and to see the full original article, go here

 

Ben Gurion University - Neve Gordon (Dept of Political Science) calls in the Los Angeles Times for a world boycott of Israel. Is there no limit to academic treason even at Israel's "Bir Zeit" of the Negev?

It is indeed not a simple matter for me as an Israeli citizen to call on foreign governments, regional authorities, international social movements, faith-based organizations, unions and citizens to suspend cooperation with Israel. … The most accurate way to describe Israel today is as an apartheid state. … It is therefore clear to me that the only way to counter the apartheid trend in Israel is through massive international pressure. … I consequently have decided to support the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement that was launched by Palestinian activists in July 2005 and has since garnered widespread support around the globe. The objective is to ensure that Israel respects its obligations under international law and that Palestinians are granted the right to self-determination.

Please write to the heads of Ben Gurion University (contact information below) and let them know what you think of this:

Rivka Carmi, President
P.O. Box 653, Beer-Sheva, 84105, Israel,
rcarmi@bgumail.bgu.ac.il
and president@bgu.ac.il
Tel: 972-8-6461211/9
Fax: 972-8-6472991

Prof. Jimmy Weinblatt, Rector
P.O. Box 653, Beer-Sheva, 84105, Israel
rector@bgu.ac.il
Tel: 972-8-6461223
Fax: 972-8-6479434

For more details and to see the full original article, go here

 

Ben Gurion University – David Newman (Dept of Political Science) anti-Israel drivel inspires blogger Taming Korach

It is an irony that it was Richard Silverstein's anti-Jewish blog that prompted me to look into Newman's nonsense again after 8 years. It was probably that initial exchange that was the real beginning of Taming Korach. Now we are living under the threat of Iranian nuclear weapons-an Iran that has been the principle supporter of Hezbollah. Newman, like his American counterpart Silverstein uses a religious cover-a bluff-to weaken Israel's position and attempt to incriminate the very nation he belongs to. Newman is the quintessential Hellenized Anglo Jew. He is "our" version of George Galloway-spending all of his time and energy plotting against Israel, meanwhile remaining oblivious to spiritual underpinnings of the Jewish presence in the Land of Israel.

For more details and to see the full original article, go here

 

Ben Gurion University - Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin (Dept of Jewish History) - arch-hater of Israel and Zionism - denounces Israel as an apartheid regime for pro-LSD anti-Zionist Tikkun Magazine

"The vision of separation was realized by erecting a separation wall between Israel and Palestine. The wall, and the entire system of apartheid that is gradually being established in the Occupied Territories, and the suffering that it inflicts on the Palestinians, is legitimized in the name of the "war against terror," and as a means of preventing suicide bombers from entering Israel. But we should remember that the wall was there long before its present monstrous realization. What we call the separation wall was actually the Israeli vision of peace."

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Ben Gurion University – Uri Gordon (Arava Institute for Environmental Studies in Ketura) promotes “anarchy”; more proof that Academic Standards are dead at Ben Gurion University

Leadership in anarchist politics is addressed through sustained attention to the concept of power, proposing an agenda for equalising access to influence among activists, and an “ethic of solidarity” around the wielding of non-coercive power. Violence is approached through a recipient-based definition of the concept, exploring the limits of any attempt to justify violence and offering observations on violent empowerment, revenge and armed struggle. Technology is subject to a strong anarchist critique, which stresses its inherently social nature, leading to the exploration of Luddism, the disillusioned use of ICTs, and the promotion of lo-tech, sustainable human-nature interfaces as strategical directions for an anarchist politics of technology. Finally, questions of nationalism are approached through the lens of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, addressing anarchist dilemmas around statehood, and exploring approaches to “national conflicts” that link multiple forms of oppression and that employ a direct action approach to peacemaking.

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Ben Gurion University – Neve Gordon’s (Dept of Political Science) distain for Israeli Democracy shows him to be “out of touch” and “elitist”

The ever-present calls from within Israeli society for "greater international involvement and pressure" on the country are emblematic of a contempt for democracy. … Just after Israel's 2009 elections, Prof. Neve Gordon of Ben-Gurion University declared it was time for the US under Barack Obama to impose a solution on Israel, and "if such intervention includes sanctions, it is the only way to secure Israel's existence in the long run." … The voter casts his vote for Lieberman primarily because the Left is seen as being out of touch, elitist and incapable of solving the intractable situation. … The reaction of those in a democracy when the electorate fails to agree with them should not be to declare that democracy a failure but to frame their proposed solutions in a palatable manner.

For more details and to see the full original article, go here

 

Ben Gurion University – Neve Gordon (Dept of Political Science) calls Israel an “apartheid regime”; ignores Jewish “Right of Settlement” recognized by the British Mandate; calls all settlements in Judea and Samaria “illegal”

So far Obama's challenges to Israel have been theoretical, and the only substantive demand that Washington has made involves the 100 or so Jewish outposts in the West Bank. Reiterating President Bush's directive, Obama recently asked Netanyahu to begin dismantling the outposts. Legally the outposts are just like the 121 settlements (namely, they are all illegal). Only the outposts were built following the 1993 Oslo Accords, and, as opposed to the settlements, which are now home to close to half a million Jews - or about 7 percent of Israel's citizenry - almost all the outposts are extremely sparsely populated with less than a dozen people in each.

If Obama hesitates, Israel will become a full blown apartheid regime, while if he remains bold he will probably be remembered as the president who helped save Israel from itself. To do so he will have to make Netanyahu sweat much more.

For more details and to see the full original article, go here

 

Ben Gurion University - Neve Gordon joins Stalinist cheerleader for terrorism and jihad Noam Chomsky in protesting the arrest of the criminal Ezra Nawi; concerned about “proto-fascist elements in Israeli society”

People might assume that Nawi's impending imprisonment as well as other alarming developments (like the recent arrest of New Profile and Target 21 activists, who are suspected of abetting draft-dodgers) are due to the establishment of an extreme rightwing government in Israel. If truth be told, however, the rise of the extreme right merely reflects the growing presence of proto-fascist elements in Israeli society, elements that have been gaining ground and legitimacy for many years now.

For more details and to see the full original article, go here

 

Ben Gurion University - David Newman (Dept of Political Science) prettifies and rationalizes the anti-Israel boycott by British Anti-Semites

'Moreover, many Israeli academics simply do not buy into the simplistic notions of collective anti-Semitism as the main argument used by many of the community groups. No, my colleagues are not naive....But to simply regurgitate the argument of collective anti-Semitism in response to every criticism of Israel and its policies is as self-defeating as it is helpful. In continuous and ongoing discussions with our academic colleagues in the UK, it is this simplistic charge of anti-Semitism and the failure to engage with the real issues which pushes the silent majority and the waverers into the corner of the pro-boycotters.'

For more details and to see the full original article, go here

 

A Conference on "Academic Freedom" At Ben-Gurion University

Reflecting on the Ben Gurion University politics department conference as a whole, the main messages were two. First, academics’ right to be paid to write and teach what they please, even if destructive, should be regarded as an automatic entitlement. Post-Zionists are always happy to bring their views to the public’s attention in newspaper articles and advertisements, to teach them to their students and to attempt to sway public opinion. The only people they feel are not entitled to know about their activities are those who foot the bills. Both private donors and public funders are supposed to sign their checks behind a veil of ignorance, with no full picture of how their money is being used.  Public political activities and published writings by extremists should never be cited by anyone, except those who endorse their extremism. Anybody seeking to enlighten the general public or university donors should be shut up.  In the name free speech, speech is to be curtailed and information in which the public has a legitimate interest must be suppressed!

For more details and to see the full original article, go here

 

Ben Gurion University – David Newman (Dept of Political Science) denounces those who demand accountability by universities

They are a small minority but do great damage to the image of the universities and are, in turn, partially responsible for the attempts by external agencies - be they private philanthropists or public governmental agencies [including the Prime Minister's Office? - Isracampus] - to intervene in the running of these institutions.

For more details and to see the full original article, go here

 

Ben Gurion University – David Newman’s (Dept of Political Science) tirade continues to provoke responses; NGO-Monitor.org Executive Director Prof. Gerald Steinberg shows Newman where he was wrong

He [Newman] even invoked the hoary memory of "McCarthyism" - named for the leader of the anti-communist witch-hunts of the 1950s in the US (that, not coincidentally, also had anti-Semitic dimensions). And he omits the role of "the academic Left" in targeting its enemies on the Right and, more widely, of a wider indulgence in gratuitous Israel-bashing. His allegations are wrong on many counts, beginning with the over emphasis on ideology.

For more details and to see the full original article, go here

 

Daniel Bar-Tal (Tel Aviv University - Dept. of Political Psychology) and David Newman’s (Ben Gurion University – Dept of Political Science) use of “McCarthyism” is “absurd, intellectually dishonest and immoral” according to NGO-Monitor.org Executive Director Prof. Gerald Steinberg

Is the right to criticize restricted to this elite, while its members have divine immunity from being criticized when they fail to live up to the universal moral principles that they exploit? Furthermore, I find ideological claims of "attempts to restrict free speech" and the absurd use of the term "McCarthyism", intellectually dishonest and immoral. By screaming "McCarthyism" whenever critical analyses of their claims or activities are published, these critics can themselves be accused of trying to suppress and discredit free speech.

For more details and to see the full original article, go here

 

Ben Gurion University – David Newman (Dept of Political Science) – Time has proven David Newman wrong about the Security Wall

The lull in bombings over the past six months has been taken by most Israelis as proof that the security wall has served its professed purpose: keeping the bombers out of Israel. The proponents of the wall, which is still being built even though the international court of justice has ruled it illegal, point to the Beersheba bombings as further proof of its value. Why, they ask, did terrorism move southwards this week? Because, they answer, this is the only region where suicide bombers can still cross with relative ease from the West Bank into Israel.

For more details and to see the full original article, go here

 

Ben Gurion University – David Newman (Dept of Political Science) continues, on the Social Science Network, his crusade to squash Freedom of Speech and Democracy; calls University Heads and Rectors to support the Far-Leftist Treason in the name of Freedom of Speech

It is also time that University Presidents and Rectors made their voices heard. They have remained silent for too long, always fearing to annoy their donors - especially in North America. While we cannot be naive about the perilous state of finance of our universities, there are times when the power of the pocket book must be combatteed [sic] with a principled argument and statement. The failure of the heads of our Universities to make their position on academic freedom and right of speech absolutely clear, is not to their credit.

For more details and to see the full original article, go here

 

Ben Gurion University – David Newman's (Dept of Political Science) Jerusalem Post Editorial spurs reader responses

Bashing critics of the Left, David Newman purports to defend free speech. But in his April 14 op-ed "Bashing the academic Left," he simply tries to silence those who disagree with him.

For more details and to see the full original article, go here

 

Ben Gurion University – David Newman (Dept of Political Science) – Was David Newman's nasty outburst caused by the refusal of SPME to sponsor a speaking tour by him as he was demanding?

One of the groups smeared by BGU leftist and Tikkun columnist David Newman in the Jerusalem Post a few days ago was the Scholars for Peace in the Middle East. SPME is a pro-Israel advocacy group, hardly associated with the "Right."  Indeed for years I have criticized its directors for failure to confront the anti-Semitic Left more vigorously and for their delusion that such people may be "persuaded" and convinced.   In any case, now it turns out that David Newman's tantrum against SPME and nasty outburst in the Jerusalem Post was actually caused by the refusal of SPME to sponsor an all-expenses-paid speaking tour for Newman, as he was demanding from them a while back.

For details and the SPME rebuttal, go here
Meanwhile, Campus Watch has issued a devastating rebuttal of Newman's rant,
go here

 

Ben Gurion University – David Newman (Dept of Political Science) – Yet another Enemy of Freedom of Speech and Democracy at Ben Gurion University

That does not stop Newman from attacking on the pages of the Jerusalem Post critics of seditious leftist anti-Israel propagandists pretending to be academics. Newman dismisses critics of anti-Israel critics as "McCarthyists," as people who should be stripped of their right to exercise THEIR freedom of speech, prevented from criticizing anti-Israel extremists. Newman specifically attacks Dr. Daniel Pipes of Campus-Watch.org, Prof. Gerald Steinberg of NGO-Monitor, and Israeli academic watchdog groups (such as isracampus.org.il), for the "crime" of exposing anti-Israel fanatics serving on Israeli campus faculties. In most cases, these watchdogs simply cite the malicious hate propaganda produced by these fanatics in their own words. But in the eyes of the neo-fascist McCarthyist Left, critics of the Left are not entitled to freedom of expression.

For more details and to see the full original article, go here

 

Ben Gurion University – David Newman (Dept of Political Science) has arguments casually shredded by Winfield Myers of Campus Watch in response to Newman's assault on critics of Left-wing dogma

Critics who cannot muster empirical arguments often settle for ad hominem attacks and hackneyed clichés, and no cliché is more worn than the charge that off-campus critics of higher education engage in McCarthyism. … But feelings of persecution lend a touch of authenticity to lives of some academics, providing as they do a veneer of viability and importance to those who might otherwise be overlooked and ignored.

For more details and to see the full original article, go here

 

Ben Gurion University – David Newman (Dept of Political Science) – Extreme Left-wing critic who can not tolerate criticism from others

The academic McCarthyism of the Right endangers Israeli democracy and society. It threatens the very basis of freedom of speech. The self-styled patriots are causing enormous damage to the country and should be prevented from assuming the cloak of self-appointed defenders of the common good, which they are clearly not.

For more details and to see the full original article, go here

 

Ben Gurion University – David Newman (Dept of Political Science) has long history of claiming Israeli “McCarthyism”

But many of these scholars, particularly those who are critical of government policy on social and political issues - such as the debate around the peace process and the treatment of Palestinians - have come under increasing attack since the breakdown of the Oslo agreements and the return to mutual terror and violence. Attempts are being made to silence or delegitimize their views in ways that some view as Israel's own take on McCarthyism.

For more details and to see the full original article, go here

 

Ben Gurion University "Academic" Serving as Accomplice for Tehran Holocaust Deniers

That same Neve Gordon has a new job - bashing Israel as a columnist for the Tehran Times. Yes, Gordon is openly the accomplice of the Holocaust Denying mullahs of Iran threatening Israel with nuclear annihilation. See his latest exercising in anti-Semitism here.

For more details and to see the full original article, go here

 

Ben Gurion University - Oren Yiftachel (Dept. of  Geography) - Anti-Israel Totalitarian Indoctrination at Ben Gurion University

Current Events Quiz:

Count the number of pro-Israel articles or writers appear on Ben Gurion University anti-Zionist Oren Yiftachel's course syllabus for course entitled "ISRAEL/PALESTINE: THE POLITICS OF LAND AND IDENTITY" (note the discovery of a new country called Israel/Palestine)

Correct answer: zero (aside from some writers about America and ethnicity in general under the first topic)

For more details and to see the full original article, go here

 

Ben Gurion University – Lev Grinberg (Dept of Sociology) laments the use of “horror comedy” in recent Israeli films; chalks it up to “impotence of Israeli civil society”

These movies well exemplify the lack of hope and inability to even imagine a non-violent reality in Israel since 2000, a situation that became evident to most Israelis as a result of the second Lebanon War in August 2006. At the end of the most consensual war since 1967, Israeli public debate became completely apolitical with only military options discussed. The Winograd Commission of Inquiry, established by public pressure to investigate the failure of the war, did not even ask whether there could have been a nonviolent option following the abduction of two soldiers by the Hezbollah. … Palestinian filmmakers discovered the hopeless political reality before the Israelis, apparently after 11 September 2001 and the re-occupation of the West Bank.

For more details and to see the full original article, go here

 

Ben Gurion University - Neve Gordon (Dept. of Political Science) is an Israeli Disgrace

If western leaders want to be conceived as credible, they must change their policy and meet with Hamas as well. Otherwise, their decision to meet Lieberman will be rightly perceived as hypocritical and duplicitous, and the pervasive perception in the region – that the United States and Europe are biased in Israel's favour – will only be strengthened.

For more details and to see the full original article, go here

 

Ben Gurion University - Neve Gordon (Dept of Political Science) - Al Jazeera Columnist article draws response from IsraCampus.Org.il reader

Rivka I can not understand why an eminent institution like Ben Gurion University would continue to employ Professor Neve Gordon. I am appalled to learn that he has taken up a position as a columnist with the web site Aljazeera.com. Are you not aware of his anti Israel comment and activities? He has his articles still posted on Holocaust denial websites; apparently he thinks Israel is a pariah state. He certainly has distorted historical facts and turned the classroom into a propaganda battlefield.

For more details and to see the full original article, go here

 

Ben Gurion University - Neve Gordon (Dept of Political Science) is Al Jazeera's newest Columnist

So here we have the spectacle of an anti-Semitic Israeli lecturer turning out Bash-Israel and Bash-the-Jews propaganda for one of the most openly anti-Semitic group of jihadniks on the planet. Ben Gurion University regards Gordon's anti-Israel hate propaganda as "scholarship" and "research" and granted him tenure on its basis, proving that serious academic standards no longer are upheld at Ben Gurion University.

For more details and to see the full original article, go here

 

Ben Gurion University – Neve Gordon (Dept of Political Science) promotes the re-division of Jerusalem; calls on Obama to intrude on Israel’s sovereignty and to impose sanctions

The task might seem greater than it actually is, since ironically the majority of Jews (despite the elections) and Palestinians in the region support the two-state solution. The deadlock has occurred because the Israeli political configuration has allowed a sizable minority of settlers and their sympathizers to block all past governments from making the necessary compromises. This deadlock, however, can be overcome if the international community, and particularly the US, assumes a more interventionist role. And while intervention may be conceived by some as anti-Israeli, particularly if such intervention includes sanctions, it is the only way to secure Israel's existence in the long run. Obama should not therefore hesitate to compel the incoming government to adopt the two-state solution. This would be the genuine pro-Israeli stance.

For more details and to see the full original article, go here

 

Ben Gurion University - Amnon Raz-Karkotzkin (Dept of History) supports pro-terror Arab Party Balad

"The ongoing incitement against Balad stems from a fear of equality, which is why Azmi Bishara is being persecuted," he stated. "Find someone who seriously thinks that he spied for Hizbullah. Anyone looking for a spy wouldn't have used Azmi Bishara," he added. …"Balad doesn't give me an identity and I don't vote in the elections in order to secure self-identity. Balad's platform talks about full civil equality "… "I feel compelled to identify with Balad's demand for a state of all its citizens," he said.

For more details and to see the full original article, go here

 

Ben Gurion University - Oren Yiftachel (Dept. of  Geography) makes his bed with the Hamas

He points out at the fact that the recent operation in Gaza has been launched and backed by two outgoing Governments in Jerusalem and Washington against a "democratically elected Government". Here Yiftachel excels himself by arguing that Israel and the USA had no legitimacy to attack Hamas because their administrations were at their "dying days", while the regime in Gaza enjoys popular and legal acceptability. And what does the world do, he cried out, "…it imposed sanctions on the Hamas Government", and by doing so it "punished the occupied twice: once by the brutal occupation and a second time for attempting to resist".

For more details and to see the full original article, go here

 

Ben-Gurion University – Anti-Israeli Extremists utilize the University closure to publish additional Israel-bashing materials

Ben-Gurion University, the campus with arguably the largest number of anti-Israel extremist faculty members, was shut down for weeks as Hamas rockets bathed Beersheba. Several rockets landed close to the campus. Public-school buildings in Beersheba were destroyed by rockets. Yet leftist faculty members at BGU went on the warpath against Israel and in support of Hamas. In an article titled "Black January," BGU sociologist Lev Grinberg proclaimed Hamas terrorists to be the true Maccabees, struggling against the evil empire:

I admit that I find the name "Cast Lead" in bad taste because of its allusion to Chanukah and the Maccabees who fought against a mighty conqueror. If indeed there is a struggle here of the weak against an occupying empire, it is the struggle of Hamas against Israel, not the other way around. Our self-image as the weak victim is utterly surreal and trapped in the mythology of the Jews as the ultimate victims, regardless of reality.... The firing of missiles by the prisoners in protest against their starvation was interpreted as aggression, while their oppression by their jailers was interpreted as self-defense.

Grinberg had earlier denounced Israel's targeting of terrorist leaders as "symbolic genocide."

Neve Gordon, a BGU lecturer now serving as the chairman of political science at the university, turned out one pro-terror anti-Israel article after the next for anti-Semitic and neo-Nazi websites, denouncing Israel as a criminal entity. In one, he excoriated Israel for bombing the Islamic "university" in Gaza that was serving as the storage warehouse for the very same rockets being fired at his own university campus.

Oren Yiftachel, a professor of geography at Ben Gurion University who has made a career out of denouncing Israel for being an "apartheid" regime, cheered the firing of rockets at the children of Sderot and Netivot as the moral and just response of Palestinians "imprisoned" by Israel firing at their "jailers."

For more details and to see the full original article, go here

 

On the anti-Semitic web site Counterpunch, Ben Gurion University's Neve Gordon and Tel Aviv University's Yigal Bronner smear Israel using Hamas propaganda "statistics" verbatim

'This latest assault underscores that Israel, not unlike Hamas, readily resorts to violence and does not distinguish between civilians and combatants (only the weapons at Israel's disposal are much more lethal). No matter how many times the Israeli government tries to blame Hamas for the latest Palestinian civilian deaths it simply cannot explain away the body count, especially that of the children. In addition to the dead, 1,855 Palestinian children were wounded, and tens of thousands of others have likely been traumatised, many of them for life.....Israel's masters of war must be happy: the seeds of the next wars have certainly been sown.'

For more details and to see the full original article, go here

 

Ben Gurion University - Lev Grinberg’s (Dept of Sociology) “Symbolic Genocide” is nothing more than reversal of culpability - Critique of the original claim

Despite Grinberg’s carefully formulated language, the term “symbolic genocide”, represents a false accusation. The main reason why it lacks merit is that the Palestinians target Israeli civilians, while, in the exercise of its legitimate right of self-defense, Israel does not target Palestinian civilians. One may observe that Grinberg has actually reversed the role of the criminal and the victim, portraying Israeli society as sick and attributing to it genocidal intent which does not exist, but which, on the contrary, may be clearly identified on the other side. During the Cold War, Soviet propagandists first developed this technique which has later become known as “the moral inversion of terms” or the “reversal of culpability”.

For more details and to see the full original article, go here

 

Ben Gurion University - Lev Grinberg (Dept of Sociology), the guy who claims that targeting terrorist leaders is "symbolic genocide", claims the Hamas are the real Maccabis fighting the evil empire:

' admit that I find the name 'Cast Lead' in bad taste because of its allusion to Hanukah and the Maccabees who fought against a mighty conqueror. If indeed there is a struggle here of the weak against an occupying empire, it is the struggle of Hamas against Israel, not the other way around. Our self-image as the weak victim is utterly surreal and trapped in the mythology of the Jews as the ultimate victims, regardless of reality....The firing of missiles by the prisoners in protest against their starvation was interpreted as aggression, while their oppression by their jailers was interpreted as self-defense.'

For more details and to see the full original article, go here

 

Ben Gurion University - Oren Yiftachel (Dept. of  Geography) promotes the claims of the refugee expulsion; alleges a conspiracy over Gaza history

If so, the current invasion into Gaza is not just an operation to halt the rockets, a pre-election effort to improve political profiles or an attempt to rehabilitate Israeli deterrence. The invasion is not just another attempt to ‘make order’ for others and bring down the elected Hamas government, or an imperial (Israeli-American) effort to control the Muslim populace by increasingly violent means. The current invasion is of course all of the above. But it is also the continuation of a long-lived strategy to deny, erase and smash any mention of this place’s history over recent generations. Almost everyone – politicians, artists, the media, university researchers and intellectuals have joined in this erasure project.

So, against the erasure efforts, let us remind ourselves: the Gaza strip was formed as a geographical entity after the 1948 war, when about 150,000 Palestinian Arabs fled or were expelled to it from what is today south-western Israel.

For more details and to see the full original article, go here

 

Ben Gurion University - Haim Yacobi (Dept of Politics & Bimkom Board Member) and Prof. Zvi Bentwich lead an Israeli call to stop the "disproportionate harm" and investigate "grave violations" by the military

[You may recall that just before the US and its allies invaded Iraq to topple Saddam, a group of more than 500 Israeli "academics" disseminated a petition all over the world in which they announced that the moment the first GI stepped foot in Iraq Israel was planning to conduct Nazi-like genocidal atrocities against Arabs. The GIs arrived and no mass murders of Arabs took place. Not a single one of those 500+ faculty members then issued an apology. Several explained that Israel really WAS planning to conduct a genocide but was scared off from doing so thanks to their petition.

Well, now a smaller number of similar moonbats, including some of the usual Israeli academics for Hamas, are back, with a new petition. It is being promoting by a gaggle of treasonous pro-terror leftist groups, led by Uri Avnery, Israel's Lord Haw-Haw:]

For more details and to see the full original article, go here

 

Ben Gurion University – Neve Gordon (Dept of Political Science) gets indignant over arrests of Leftist Protesters [its good enough for the Settlers but its “intimidation” when applied to Leftists]

NEVE GORDON: I have two comments to make, one related to protest in media. 700 Israelis have been arrested since this war began, because they protested this war. This has not made it to an international media, and it’s an act of intimidation by the state against those who protest the war.

For more details and to see the full original article, go here

 

Ben Gurion University – Neve Gordon (Dept of Political Science) continues his PR campaign on behalf of the Hamas on the anti-Semitic pro-terror Counterpunch web site; divides Jerusalem:

'Regardless of how lethal Israel's military attacks are now, the idea is to intimidate the Palestinian population by underscoring that the violence can always become more deadly and brutal. This guarantees that violence, both when it is and when it is not deployed, remains an ever-looming threat.

'The message to the Israelis is a moral one. The subtext is that the Israeli military could indiscriminately unleash its vast arsenal of violence, but chooses not to, because its forces, unlike Hamas, respect human life.

'This latter claim appears to have considerable resonance among Israelis, and, yet, it is based on a moral fallacy. The fact that one could be more brutal but chooses to use restraint does not in any way entail that one is moral.... Ultimately, the moral claims the Israeli government uses to support its actions during this war are empty. They actually reveal Israel's unwillingness to confront the original source of the current violence, which is not Hamas, but rather the occupation of the Gaza Strip, West Bank and East Jerusalem.'

For more details and to see the full original article, go here

 

Ben Gurion University - Oren Yiftachel (Dept. of  Geography) calls Israel an apartheid state and repeats claims of “ethnic cleansing” as justification for the Hamas' shelling from Gaza

I have termed this process "creeping apartheid" — an undeclared yet powerful political order which creates vastly unequal forms of citizenship under one ruling power. Rights under such regimes are determined by a combination of ethnic affiliation and place of birth. This cannot be illustrated more vividly than by noting the differences in mobility and property rights — Jews are free to move and purchase land in almost the entire area under Israeli control, while Palestinians are limited to separated enclaves — Gazans in Gaza only, Jerusalemites only in Jerusalem and so on.

For more details and to see the full original article, go here

 

Ben Gurion University – Neve Gordon (Dept of Political Science) defends the rights of the Hamas to bomb Israel, because occupation itself is a worse form of violence, and never mind that Gaza was relieved from occupation years ago

NEVE GORDON: ... First of all, I agree with the idea of a basic right to self-defense. And the right to self-defense is a right to self-defense from violence. We have to understand that the occupation itself is violence. It’s an act of violence. Putting people in a prison, in a prison of one million and a half million people and keeping them there for years on end without basic foodstuff, without allowing them to enter and exit when they will, is an act of violence. Without electricity, without clean water, it’s all an act of violence. And these people are resisting. I am against the way they’re resisting, but we have to look at their violence versus our violence.

About between ten and twenty people, Israelis, have died from rockets in the eight years that rockets have been launched from the Gaza Strip into Israel. During the same amount of time, 4,000 Israelis have died from car accidents. And yet, we don’t see an outrage against the terrorism on the streets in Israel. But from these twenty people, we’re allowed to enter into the Gaza Strip and bomb them from the air into their cage and kill 275 children.

For more details and to see the full original article, go here

 

Ben Gurion University – Neve Gordon (Dept of Political Science) says its ok for Hamas' development of weapons and explosives at Islamic University to continued unimpeded

Notwithstanding the importance of the Islamic University, Israel has tried to justify the bombing. An army spokeswoman told The Chronicle that the targeted buildings were used as “a research and development center for Hamas weapons, including Qassam rockets. … One of the structures struck housed explosives laboratories that were an inseparable part of Hamas’s research-and-development program, as well as places that served as storage facilities for the organization. The development of these weapons took place under the auspices of senior lecturers who are activists in Hamas.” Islamic University officials deny the Israeli allegations. Yet even if there is some merit in them, it is common knowledge that practically all major American and Israeli universities are engaged in research and development of military applications and receive money from the Pentagon and defense corporations. Weapon development and even manufacturing have, unfortunately, become major projects at universities worldwide - a fact that does not justify bombing them.

For more details and to see the full original article, go here

 

Ben Gurion University - Neve Gordon's (Dept of Political Science) anti-Israel ravings continues to irritate more University Donors and Fund Raisers

President Rivka Carmi, Ben Gurion University:

It is astounding the Dr. Gordon can continue in his position with your university when he publicly expresses fervent anti-Israel sentiments. No matter the position you state regarding the position of your University, his statements undermine your own. Your support of his right to free speech is actually an endorsement of hate speech that damages the image of Ben Gurion University. Perhaps the bombing of the Islamic University robs him of a future platform from which he can support the anti-Israel fervor of their own students. There can be no intellectual benefit for Jewish students who attend Ben Gurion University and are confronted by Dr. Gordon's hate speech from his classroom podium. Why would Ben Gurion University expect donors to pay for him to continue undermining the position of Israel in the current war with Hamas in Gaza? I hope you will reconsider your hiring criteria for professors and terminate Dr. Gordon's position as soon as possible before he can do more damage to the minds of students and the image of your outstanding University.

Sincerely,
Barbara Moretsky, Michigan, USA

 

Ben Gurion University - Neve Gordon's (Dept of Political Science) long term defamation does not go unnoticed

A Letter from Prof. Barr:

From: driheart@aol.com
To: rstrongin@aabgu.org
Sent: Tue, 6 Jan 2009 8:38 am
Subject: Gordon continues to defame Israel while escaping up north out of range of Qassams

Dear Ronni Stronin, Here we go again: Three defaming articles by Neve Gordon in one week. The "chair" of the university which you support is only expressing his opinion out of range of missiles. This coward is defaming you and your effort. I call to AABGU to close your offices and go home. Israel does not need your support of people like Neve Gordon who work hard to destroy Israel.

Professor Isaac Barr, Michigan.

 

Ben Gurion University - The latest anti-Israel diatribe by Neve Gordon (Dept of Political Science) in the anti-Semitic magazine "The Nation"

There is something extremely cynical about how Israel explains its use of humanitarian assistance, and yet such unadulterated explanations actually help uncover an important facet of postmodern warfare. Not unlike raising animals for slaughter on a farm, the Israeli government maintains that it is providing Palestinians with assistance so that it can have a free hand in attacking them. And just as Israel provides basic foodstuff to Palestinians while it continues shooting them, it informs Palestinians--by phone, no less--that they must evacuate their homes before F-16 fighter jets begin bombing them.

For more details and to see the full original article, go here

 

Yossi Amitay of Ben-Gurion University does the Shimmy-Dhimmi Cocoa Pop

Amitay has called openly for divestment and boycotts against Israel, the country that pays his salary at Ben Gurion University. He has called for international involvement to force militarily or otherwise Israelis and Jews in Judea and Samaria from their homes and objected to the IDF fighting terrorism as not leading to a solution. ... Something else though that Amitay does not consider in his analysis of Arab suffering and humiliation is that the anti-Israel, anti-Zionist carryings-on by the Arabs are also a business, and a big business it is. Every “Palestinian” Arab created by the Arab League after 1948 was forced to tithe to Yasser Arafat and the PLO. This included even so-called “refugees” who were no longer refugees. The Arabs, whose ancestors were from “Palestine” in Kuwait, for example, were given Palestinian passports and had their incomes deducted to pay Arafat regularly, who parlayed those funds into being the fifth richest man in the world at the time of his death. The Palestinians are the biggest moneymaking scam in the history of the world.

For more details and to see the full original article, go here

 

Ben Gurion University - Neve Gordon and Jeff Halper denounce Israel in the leftwing neo-nazi web magazine Counterpunch for bombing terrorists holed up in an Islamofascist "university" in Gaza, the very same day that Gordon's own university, Ben Gurion University, had to shut down because of rockets landing in Beer Sheba

The notorious Solidarity-with-Terrorism duo Neve Gordon, Chairman of the Political Science Department at Ben Gurion University, and Jeff Halper, the latter who used to teach at Ben Gurion University, denounce Israel in the leftwing neo-nazi web magazine Counterpunch for bombing terrorists holed up in an Islamofascist "university" in Gaza, the very same day that Gordon's own university, Ben Gurion University, had to shut down because of rockets landing in Beer Sheba. In other words, they are upset that Israel attacked the very same terrorist "university" in Gaza that was being used as a warehouse for rockets being aimed at Ben Gurion University!

For more details and to see the full original article, go here

 

Ben Gurion University - Neve Gordon (Dept of Political Science) has uncovered the reason for Israel's "aggression" and "war crimes"

'The assault on Gaza is also being carried out to help Kadima and Labour defeat Likud and its leader Binyamin Netanyahu, who is currently ahead in the polls....Yet, the government is actively misleading the public, since Israel could have put an end to the rockets a long time ago. Indeed, there was relative quiet during the six-months truce with Hamas, a quiet that was broken most often as a reaction to Israeli violence: that is, following the extra-judicial execution of a militant or the imposition of a total blockade which prevented basic goods, like food stuff and medicine, from entering the Gaza Strip. Rather than continuing the truce, the Israeli government has once again chosen to adopt strategies of violence that are tragically akin to the ones deployed by Hamas; only, the Israeli ones are much more lethal. If the Israeli government really cared about its citizens and the country's long term ability to sustain itself in the Middle East, it would abandon the use of violence and talk with its enemies.'

For more details and to see the full original article, go here

 

Idan Landau is one linguist who minces words (against Israel).

Both Chomsky and Rhinehart cloned themselves with students who not only became linguists, but carried on the same radical leftist anti-Semitism against Israel and other such claptrap in our colleges. Hence, today we find Idan Landau, a student and acolyte of both professors, now a Foreign Literatures and Linguistics professor at Ben Gurion University, and another example of an anti-Israel Israeli academic plying the world with the misuse of language as if he is one of the Arabs himself, when he could be showing the world how the Arabs use language to deceive the West to condemn Israel.

For more details and to see the full original article, go here

 

Ben Gurion University - Neve Gordon (Dept. of Political Science) appointed to Department Head despite anti-Israel "research"

He barricaded himself with Arafat during the siege of Ramallah, he has his articles posted on Holocaust denial websites, he thinks Israel is a pariah state, he distorted historical facts, he turned the classroom into a propaganda battlefield, he advocated a one-state solution, and yet, he was recently appointed as the head of Ben Gurion University's department of Politics and Government. Will you send your child to study there?

For more details and to see the full original article, go here

 

Ben Gurion University - Haim Yacobi (Dept of Politics & Bimkom Board Member) rants that the Acre Riots were a result of a national “intentional policy” to repress the 1948 “internal refugees” and ignores that the Acre Rioters were not from Acre

More on Bimkom’s Anti-Israel activities can be seen here

A significant portion of the Arab population in mixed cities within the Green Line (Israel's pre-1967 border) is comprised of internal refugees, who were disinherited from their lands following the establishment of Israel. Not only do they suffer from the trauma of displacement, but they are also socially and economically disenfranchised. This status is not coincidental, evolutional or neutral: It is the product of intentional policy, mostly implicit but occasionally explicit, operating according to ethno-national logic. Its main objective has and continues to be maintenance of the demographic dominance of the Jewish majority over the Arab minority in mixed cities.

For more details and to see the full original article, go here

 

Ben Gurion University - Assassin in Prison but his Protector (Neve Gordon) is Teaching at Ben Gurion University

The murderers of Ze’evi were kept hidden in the “Mukata’a” headquarters of Yassir Arafat in Ramallah, in defiance of all the obligations of the Palestinian Authority under the Oslo accords. While hidden there, the Israel Defense Forces attempted to apprehend the murderers and had the headquarters surrounded. But then a group of “human shields” and “Solidarity with Terrorism” protesters from the anti-Israel radical Left entered Ramallah illegally and interfered with the attempts to arrest the murderers. ... Among those leading the “Solidarity with Terrorism” human shields that illegally interfered with the attempt to arrest the murderers in Ramallah was Neve Gordon, an anti-Israel extremist at Ben Gurion University. Gordon considers Israel to be a fascist, apartheid terrorist entity and recently has been calling for Israel’s elimination altogether as part of the so-called “One-State Solution,” in which Israel will be enfolded inside a larger Arab-dominated Islamofascist-controlled state. The “One-State Solution” of the anti-Semitic Left should better be called the Rwanda solution to the Jewish problem.

For more details and to see the full original article, go here

 

Ben Gurion University - Rivka Carmi, President of Ben Gurion University, hails anti-Israel activity on her campus

That is an educational system like those of totalitarian and communist countries, countries where radical socialism rules what everyone thinks. Whereas, some faculty at BGU - without protest from Rivka Carmi - have called for the annihilation of Israel and even served as human shields for Arafat in his compound after the Passover Massacre, or objected to Israel’s controlling overseas Arab academics from entering the West Bank out of security concerns, Rivka Carmi has stated that she considers American donors objecting to funding of such anti-Israel “faculty” at BGU constitutes “trying to dictate the agenda of the University.” She considers donors speaking up as outside interference, but the boycotting her own university by outside interests inspired by overseas radicals as perfectly justifiable.

For more details and to see the full original article, go here

 

Ben Gurion University - Uri Ram (Dept. of Sociology) has a "glaring flaw of logic"

For it takes only the most elementary analytical skill to identify the glaring flaw in the logic of post–Zionist positions which - allegedly in the name of enlightened liberal values - call for the conversion of Israel from a "Jewish State" to a "state of all its citizens." It requires no extraordinary intellect to grasp the fact that should such a change indeed take place, the resulting realities would in fact be the exact antithesis of the values invoked for making it.

For more details and to see the full original article, go here

 

Ben Gurion University students strike back at Yakim Silverman

You may recall the incident a few months back in which an Arab lecturer at the Sapir College in Sderot refused to allow a student wearing an army reserve uniform to enter his class room.

Well, this time a radical leftist self-hating Jewish teaching assistant at Ben Gurion University named Yakim Silverman did the same thing. A few weeks back he asked a student in reserve uniform not to enter his class. Silverman teaches in the Ben Gurion U math department, the same department in which ultra-leftist Kobi Snitz, head of Anarchists for Attacking Israeli Police and Tearing down the Security Wall so that Terrorists can Get In, used to teach. Snitz has since moved to Bar Ilan's math department. On his Linkedin entry, Silverman describes Ben Gurion University as occupied Palestinian land. It is not known whether he ever studied under Ben Gurion University anti-Israel fanatics Neve Gordon or Oren Yiftachel.

Yesterday a student wearing an army reserve uniform and a mask entered the classroom in which Silverman sat with two students and dumped a bucket of paint on him.

For more details and to see the full original article, go here

 

Ben Gurion University’s Disloyalty Pledge

Several faculty members at BGU openly call for Israel to be eliminated and replaced by a Rwanda-style bi-national state run by the PLO with an Arab majority, including Prof. Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin. BGU sociologist Lev Grinberg made headlines last year for claiming that Israel was engaging in "symbolic genocide against Palestinians" when it assassinates arch-terrorists and mass murderers like the Hamas' Sheikh Yassin. This led the past Minister of Education in BGU to boycott BGU's Board of Governors meeting.

For more details and to see the full original article, go here

 

Ben Gurion University - Neve Gordon, (Dept. of Political Science) celebrates anti-Israel violence and hooliganism in the West Bank

'Another aspect of Ni'lin that goes against existing stereotypes is that Palestinians and Jews are not fighting on different sides of this fray, but rather scores of Jewish Israeli and international activists are standing beside the Palestinians residents as they try to stop military bulldozers from destroying Ni'lin's land. Indeed, among those injured are many Israelis. The story of Ni'lin is, in other words, the story of a colonized people resisting colonization.'

For more details and to see the full original article, go here

 

Dr. Isaac Barr (Michigan) comments on anti-Israel extremism at Ben Gurion University:

From: DrIHeart

To: president@bgumail.bgu.ac.il

Sent: 7/11/2008 1:32:55 P.M. Eastern Daylight Time

Subj: Ben-Gurion University is loosing Jewish support.

President, The fact that BGU harbors and nourishes a radical anti Israel, anti Jewish person like Neve Gordon is a disgrace. On his sabbatical in Ann Arbor University of Michigan he did whatever he could to propagate hate to Israel and her right to exist. Under the mask of "freedom of speech" and "academic freedom" he attempted to indoctrinate students to share his views. He must be doing same in BGU. He ignored homicide bombers, Qassam missile launching and the plight of Sderot. He does not allow to be criticized. Students complained. Academic freedom requires accuracy, fairness, honest, balance and must allow criticism. University classes cannot be a stage for propaganda. BGU should not renew the tenure of Neve Gordon.

Isaac Barr MD, 6209 Dakota Circle, Bloomfield Hills, Michigan 48301.

 

Ben Gurion University - Uri Ram (Dept. of Sociology) clashes with the President of University of Haifa

The President of Haifa University declared that a certain teacher who supports the boycott should resign, because one cannot support a boycott of the university and still "enjoy its delights." It's good to know that the President is "enjoying the delights" of the university. Maybe this is why he thinks that the university is his own private property, or the property of those who agree his stance. It is, of course, a "non-political" stance - just a simple acquiescence to the occupation and its horrors, all while enjoying the university's delights.

For more details and to see the full original article, go here

 

Ben Gurion University - Neve Gordon, (Dept. of Political Science) writes in the anti-Semitic web magazine "Counterpunch" that Israel is practicing the "politics of death"

'If in 1968 Israel helped Palestinians in the Gaza Strip plant some 618,000 trees and provided farmers with improved varieties of seeds for vegetables and field crops, during the first three years of the second Intifada Israel destroyed more than ten percent of Gaza's agricultural land and uprooted over 226,000 trees.

The appearance and proliferation of the flag on the one hand, and the razing of trees on the other, signify a fundamental transformation in Israel's attempts to control the occupied Palestinian inhabitants. It appears as if Israel decided to alter its methods of upholding the occupation, replacing a politics of life, which aimed to secure the existence and livelihood of the Palestinian inhabitants, with a politics of death.'

For more details and to see the full original article, go here

 

Israeli Academics threaten the future of the Israeli State

A list of Anti-Israel statements and actions are laid out in the following article.

Among those mentioned are Haifa University politics professor Ilan Pappe, who is quoted saying:

  • “I want people to boycott Israeli institutes.”

  • “I think the de-Zionisation of Israel is a pre-condition for peace; I have no doubt about that.”

and Ben-Gurion University politics lecturer Neve Gordon who went to Ramallah in February 2002 and clasped hands with Yasser Arafat.

For more details and to see the full original article, go here

 

Ben Gurion University - Isaac (Yanni) Nevo (Dept of Philosophy) - Calls kettle black by mocking mock trial on BGU's "Academia List"

And if they shrug the image of a mock-trial, in which they are prosecutors, judges, and executioners, let me rephrase my own point without the image: Criticism is only effective, if it directs itself to the arguments of the opponent, and takes upon itself to present these arguments in their strongest light. Otherwise, it quickly debilitates into a shouting match, or as in this case of one-sidedness, a shouting campaign of name-calling and vilification. BGU-Watch and its parent organizations seem to specialize in this unenlightening genre: they vilify their opponents, they call them names, they attempt to suppress them, but they don't do one simple thing. They don't listen to their arguments, and they don't give counter-arguments.

For more details and to see the full original article, go here

 

University of Michigan - Neve Gordon (Ben Gurion University - Dept of Political Science) - "Neve Gordon misuses the Classroom to Conduct anti-Israel Propaganda There"

Eyewitness Student Testimony from University of Michigan:

"Gordon's playground this fall was Arab-Israeli Conflict course with over 200 students. Twice a week, Gordon had the opportunity to fill the fresh minds of University of Michigan students with skewed history and highly politicized anti-Israel rhetoric. He consistently embarrassed students who dared to question or object to his controversial and sometimes offensive claims.

"In a lecture on November 14th, Gordon told the class that he wasn’t interested in giving an unbiased academic history of the Arab-Israeli conflict: 'Jeremy asked why I would give a revisionist history. And I give a revisionist history because I think it's true. What's said in a textbook is not what it's about."

For more details and to see the full original article, go here

 

Ben Gurion University - Plaut Vs. Israeli Justice

I read with fascination Steven Plaut’s account of his battle for minimal freedom of speech in Israel (“How I Beat Israel’s Dual Justice System,” op-ed, April 11).

Israeli universities are indeed swarming with malignant anti-Israel radical extremists. Ben-Gurion University, named after David Ben-Gurion, is arguably the worst institution in Israel in terms of hiring and promoting anti-Israel extremists. From the start, university officials and spokespeople backed Gordon in his assault on freedom of speech in Israel and misuse of the courts, repeatedly describing him in terms such as “serious and distinguished human rights scholar,” which most of us would find a repugnant claim.

While BGU does contain some serious academic departments and scholars, notably in the natural sciences, when it comes to the “soft” disciplines of the social sciences and the humanities the school deserves its nickname of “Bir Zeit of the Negev.”

Donors and supporters in the United States should draw conclusions from the role BGU played in endorsing and justifying Gordon’s anti-democratic behavior.

Harvey Schwartz

Passaic, NJ

For more details and to see the full original article, go here

 

Ben Gurion University - Uri Ram - McShande: One of Worst Israeli Anti-Zionists to be Honored

Uri Ram is a sociologist at the Bir Zeit of the Negev, er, I mean, Ben Gurion University. You know, the Negev's "academic" bastion of anti-Zionism.

Now the Association of Israel Studies has decided to give him an award, I guess for his efforts to see Israel destroyed and replaced by a "de-zionized" Palestinian state. The leftist Zionist David Hirsh fiercely told off Ram recently in Yediot Ahronot in a piece worth reading in full:

For more details and to see the full original article, go here

 

Tel Aviv University - Yigal Bronner (Dept of East Asian Studies) and Ben Gurion University - Neve Gordon (Dept. of Political Science) refute Jewish claim to the City of David

"Archaeology has become a weapon of dispossession," Yonathan Mizrachi, an Israeli archaeologist, said in a recent telephone interview with us. He was referring to the way archaeology is being used in Silwan, a Palestinian neighborhood in the oldest part of Jerusalem, where, we believe, archaeological digs are being carried out as part of a concerted campaign to expel Palestinians from their ancestral home.

According to the Old Testament, King David established Jerusalem as his capital, but the Jews were later conquered and expelled. Israel occupied East Jerusalem during the Six-Day War four decades ago, and ever since Israeli archaeologists have been trying (unsuccessfully) to produce proof of David's presence in that area. Occasionally they have even refrained from documenting the long Muslim presence, which is the cultural heritage of the Palestinian inhabitants. And, at any rate, the fact that not a single Muslim structure has been preserved in the entire national park that has been set up in Silwan is a clear indication of this erasure strategy. By concentrating almost entirely on unearthing the remains of the Judean kingdom, while ignoring the subsequent 3,000 years, archaeologists have violated several ethical rules as stipulated by the World Archaeological Congress. Those include the acknowledgment of the "indigenous cultural heritage, including sites, places, objects, artifacts, human remains" as well as establishing "equitable partnerships and relationships" between archaeologists and indigenous peoples whose cultural heritage is being investigated.

For more details and to see the full original article, go here and here

 

Ben Gurion University - Neve Gordon (Dept. of Political Science) fails in court

"Neve Gordon is a venomously anti-Israel lecturer in political science at Ben-Gurion University (BGU). Gordon was hired and promoted by BGU largely on the basis of the prodigious amounts of anti-Israel political propaganda he churns out and misrepresents as scholarship. He regularly denounces Israel as a fascist, racist, terrorist, apartheid state, and he openly calls for Israel.s elimination (in what Israeli leftist extremists these days call the 'one state solution,' but what should more accurately be called the Rwanda solution)."

For more details and to see the full original article, go here

 

Ben Gurion University - Neve Gordon (Dept. of Political Science) is told Off

The over-the-top decision attracted the outrage of Harvard professor Alan Dershowitz.

'It is my opinion that Neve Gordon has gotten into bed with neo-Nazis, Holocaust justice deniers, and anti-Semites,' Dershowitz wrote in a Jerusalem Post column. 'He is a despicable example of a self-hating Jew and a self-hating Israeli.'

Then Dershowitz issued his own make-my-day challenge to Gordon: 'Sue me, too!' Gordon declined, calling Dershowitz' challenge 'a cheap dare.'

...

One judge went even further. In his pleadings, Gordon had asserted that Plaut called him a 'Jew for Hitler' and a 'Holocaust denier.' Plaut claimed he had never said that, but Naddaf sided with Gordon. This raised the hackles of Appellate Judge Abraham Abraham, who not only criticized Judge Naddaf, but also went beyond, saying that based on Gordon's record, even if Plaut had said Gordon was a 'Jew for Hitler,' he would have been within his rights.'

For more details and to see the full original article, go here

 

Ben Gurion University – Benny Morris (Department of Mid East Studies) “fabricates” evidence to promote own political agenda

"Since Israel's founding in 1948, there have been two Arab-Israeli conflicts. The first one is military in nature. Played out on the battlefield, it has heroes, villains, martyrs, and victims. The second conflict, less bloody but no less incendiary, is the battle over the historical culpability for the 1948 war and the displacement of large numbers of Palestinian Arabs."

"In the late 1980s the Palestinian narrative was bolstered by the advent of a group of Israeli "new historians" who systematically rewrote the history of Zionism, warping the saga for Israel's survival."

"Upon close examination, it appears that Morris and other new historians engaged in systematic falsification of evidence. They seem to have invented an Arab-Israeli history that fits with the political agenda they promote. Tactics range from the "innocent" act of extrapolating incorrect conclusions from documents, to tendentious truncation of source materials in ways that distort their original meanings, and even rewriting original texts to convey things they did not intend."

For more details and to see the full original article, go here

 

Prof Steven Plaut’s Appeal Reverses Earlier Ruling

A five-year-old legal case which pitted a far left-wing Ben-Gurion University professor against a politically conservative professor at Haifa University came to a close last month, when an appeals court in Nazareth overturned an earlier lower-court ruling that had awarded a legal victory to the left-winger.

In their decision, the panel of three judges ruled that Dr. Neve Gordon, a professor of Political Science with an interest in “Political Theory, Human Rights, and the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict” at Ben-Gurion University in Beer Sheva, had lied in his earlier testimony and that Dr. Steven Plaut’s description of Dr. Gordon’s academic record as consisting largely of “anti-Israel hate propaganda misrepresented as scholarship” was not only protected speech, but entirely legitimate.

For more details and to see the full original article, go here

 

Israeli Appeals Court: You Can Denounce the Radical Left

It was a big loss for Israel’s radical Left, and a big win for the freedom to criticize it and describe it accurately.

An appeals court in the Israeli town of Nazareth overturned an earlier lower-court ruling that had awarded a legal victory to Neve Gordon, a far-Left Israeli lecturer in political scientist at Ben-Gurion University in Beersheba. Gordon had filed a SLAPP suit in that court against Prof. Steven Plaut, a prominent columnist and academic economist, based on articles Plaut had published denouncing Gordon’s political opinions and public political activities. Plaut is a critic of Israel’s radical academic Left and is associated with websites that monitor it, including www.isracampus.org.il

SLAPP stands for “Strategic Lawsuit against Public Participation.” In many parts of the United States there are serious penalties for filing SLAPP suits, but to date none in Israel. 

For more details and to see the full original article, go here

 

Ben Gurion University - Ran Chermesh (sociology) defends the thesis that claims that Israeli soldiers do not rape Arab women because the jewish soldiers are such racists.  Interesting dialogue on the "ACADEMIA" chat list of Israeli professors:

'I read it and was deeply impressed by its scientific value....This is a study which is based on an in-depth interview with a small sample. It fulfills the frame of reference of a journal named Qualitative Sociology.  Qualitative Sociology is a major source of current research based on the qualitative interpretation of social life...  It's in a way, an indication for the need of a more comprehensive research and a complement to aquantitative research.'

For more details and to see the full original article, go here

'The MA itself is available on the net in

http://www.zeevgalili.com/http://zeevgalili.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/01/military-rape.pdf

 

Prof. David Newman is One Geographer who can't Figure out Where he is

It's a peculiar trait of academia that scientists in many academic fields unrelated to politics are able to dub themselves as "experts" in political science when the theme surrounds the existence of Israel and what sacrifices or guilt the Jewish nation must endure in the interest of "peace," no matter how unrealistic on the ground.

A case in point is Professor David Newman, former head of the Department of Politics and Government, which he was largely responsible for building at Ben Gurion University of the Negev.  Newman almost single handedly turned that department into a monolithic department of far leftism and "Post-Zionism," recruiting for this purpose such people as Neve Gordon. 

For more details and to see the full original article, go here or go here

 

Ben Gurion University - Neve Gordon (Dept. of Political Science) declares that Pro-Terror Anti-Semite Norman Finkelstein could get Tenure at Ben Gurion University

"On Oct 12, 2007, a group of jihadniks and anti-Israel "academics" held a rally to protest the firing of Finkelstein. Neve Gordon spoke there, declaring that if Finkelstein had been a faculty member at Ben Gurion University, he WOULD have gotten tenure. I agree - he would have. David Irving may have also, as well as Robert Faurisson and Leonard Jeffries and Ward Churchill."

http://thejewishpress.blogspot.com/2007/10/neo-nazi-professors-would-have-gotten.html

Officers at Ben Gurion University Repudiate Gordon for making This Assertion:

"Recently, Dr. Gordon chose to participate on a panel at the University of Chicago with several American academics who are perceived by many to be anti-Israel. The student-organized panel, "In Defense of Academic Freedom," was held on October 12 to protest the tenure denial and dismissal of Prof. Norman Finkelstein, formerly of DePaul University.

Ben Gurion University has expressed strong regret regarding Dr. Gordon's decision to participate in this forum and AABGU shares the assessment of the administration that he overstepped his authority when he portended to speak on behalf of the University, claiming that if Norman Finkelstein were at BGU he would have received tenure."

Link to statements

Neve Gordon's Guru  meanwhile has been cheerleading for the Hezbollah and Promoting anti-Israel Terrorism:  see

http://thejewishpress.blogspot.com/2008/01/guru-of-ben-gurion-universitys-gordon.html

 

BGU's Neve Gordon (Dept. of Political Science) defames Israel at the "Palestinian Awareness Week" (also known as Israel Apartheid Week) at the University of Michigan.  Eyewitness student report:

'In 1981, Israel used force to push Palestinians out of their homes. As a result, they had to learn to drive and farm. He also mentions how hard it was to get driver’s license in Rafa…. Neve Gordon says, “Israel’s actions towards the Palestinians were for resources and that they had to treat the Palestinians like this to get these resources.” The separation barrier and treatment of the Palestinians, according to Gordon, “were inhumane.” He also addresses why the violence went up in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank. “Israel put the Palestinians in ghettos, instituted by one people, and by frontier, which is thinly instituted, which means, lawless violence occurs.” ….My Reactions: Neve Gordon is one of the biggest self-hating Jews I have ever seen. It is no surprise the University of Michigan hired him as a “Visiting Professor.” This University is really anti-Israel and that they had to hire a Jewish person to push the hatred on Israel and Jewish people.'

 

For more details and to see the full original article, go here

 

Ben Gurion University - Dan Bar-On's (Dept. of Psychology) Defamatory Psychobabble

"For Bar-On to compare Deir Yassin to the Holocaust is one step away from Holocaust denial; it is Holocaust trivialization. To say that "there are fundamental differences between these human tragedies - and we have no intention of comparing them" - does not help at all; it does not say what the differences are, and presumably Prof. Bar-On with his psychological expertise knew that this was not the sentence that would stay in readers' minds, but rather his article's clear equation of the two events and unmistakable message that Jews were Nazis and perpetrated evil that was the equivalent of Nazi evil." By Joel Amitai

For more details and to see the full original article, go here

 

Ben Gurion University - Neve Gordon (Dept. of Political Science) in PLO newspaper claims Israel is intentionally starving the Palestinians:

"The recent crisis reveals, once more, that Israel's August 2005 unilateral withdrawal from the Gaza Strip was not an act of decolonization but rather the reorganization of Israeli power and the implementation of neo-colonial rule. Israel realized that in order to maintain sovereignty all it would have to do is preserve its monopoly over the legitimate means of movement. Very different from the withdrawal of British forces from the various colonies of old, it accordingly continued to dominate Gaza’s borders, transforming the Strip into a container of sorts whose openings are totally controlled by Israel.   

The experiment in Gaza is, in other words, not really about the bombardment of Israeli citizens or even about Israel’s ongoing efforts to undermine Hamas. It is simply a new draconian strategy aimed at denying the Palestinians their most basic right to self-determination. It is about showing them who is in control, about breaking their backs, so that they lower their expectations and bow down to Israeli demands."

http://www.palestinechronicle.com/story-013008163718.htm 

 

Ben Gurion University - Oren Yiftachel (Dept. of Geography) incites Bedouins against the Israeli state in 'Bedouin in Limbo'

"These people are being denied their basic rights and ignored by the planning system." This master plan is wrong environmentally, socially and politically, contends Oren Yiftachel, professor of Political Geography, Planning and Public Policy at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev (BGU), who has contracted with the Council of Unrecognized Villages to produce another alternative plan for the Council of Unrecognized Villages. "The real issue here is a planning crime, because the state's discrimination has caused great suffering."

For more details and to see the full original article, go here

 

Ben Gurion University - Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin (Dept. of Jewish History Lecturer) - An "academic conference" in London gives an Israeli quisling a chance to shine

'The panel has its academic Jewish quislings to lend support to its real purposes. One of those academics is Israeli history professor Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin of Ben Gurion University. Raz-Krakotzkin objects to Jews (but not Palestinian Arabs) seeking a national homeland for both religious and secular reasons, and has used the Arab term "Nakba" ("catastrophe" in Arabic, meaning the founding of Israel). ...

In discussing secular Israeli Jews, perhaps the majority of he not only declares the Torah as replete with Jewish "myths" about the land of Israel belonging to the Jews, a fairy tale among the religious (who, and in contradiction by him, if they were true to the faith would not want a Jewish state), but expands his interpretation to debunk secular Jews who also feel a connection to a Jewish national homeland as a result of world genocide and persecution as also being founded on the same myth. '

For more details and to see the full original article, go here

 

Ben Gurion University - Henriette Dahan Kalev (Dept. of Gender Studies) detects a 'Fear of Arabness in Zionism' in her Post-Zionist Perspective - no Arab Hatred of Jews though

Dahan Kalev: 'In this talk I discuss the fear of Arabness of the Ashkenazim, the way in which it has affected Mizrahim as well as Israeli-Palestinians. I explore this topic from a post Zionist perspective and examine the difficulties to trace the roots of the fear of Arabness.

I argued than, that although Mizrahim and Ashkenazin are Jews, they differ profoundly from each other. Fear of Arabness is the sediment lying in their daily encounters amongst themselves and with the Israeli-Palestinian. I conclude by explaining how this approach opens new context with new options for the understanding of the Israeli Palestinian conflict.'

For more details and to see the full original article, go here

 

BGU's Sociologist Uri Ram is told off - It’s not about Israel, stupid

David Hirsh runs the pro-Israel Engage Online web site in the UK and is a leftwing Zionist:

'Uri Ram’s mistake is to assume that the boycott campaign is really about Israel. But it’s not about Israel, stupid, nor is it about Palestine; it’s about Britain. Nationalism can be an insidious temptation and it can narrow our perspective; it has narrowed Ram’s perspective. He is not considering the effect or the symbolism of a campaign to exclude a significant proportion of the world’s Jewish scholars from European universities; he is not thinking about how the argument to exclude is made in British public life. Ram seems only concerned with fighting an Israeli battle against the Israeli government'

For more details and to see the full original article, go here