Editorial Article
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.
http://www.israelnationalnews.com/Articles/Article.aspx/12195
http://www.jewishtribune.ca/commentary/2012/09/19/shut-down-ben-gurion-universitys-politics-department
Op-Ed: Shut Down Ben Gurion U. Politics
Department
Israel's Council of Higher Education called to close the Politics
Dept. at Ben Gurion University. It has not been closed, but this
writer feels strongly that it should be.
Prof. Steven Plaut
Published: Wednesday, September 19, 2012
Some departments in the liberal arts universities in Israel
operate as anti-Israel indoctrination centers. In the departments of
the humanities and softer social sciences, college "education"
includes anti-Israel propagandizing and the preaching of Marxist
pseudo-scholarship.
Functioning as the occupied territories of the anti-Israel Left,
these departments often seem to hire and promote faculty members on
the basis of their anti-Israel activism.
Many of the leaders of the "BDS Boycott Israel" campaigns are
faculty members at Israeli universities. Sociology and political
science departments, law
schools, and education schools are homes to these
offenders. Many of them are exposed and documented at
Isracampus.com.
Since the lion's share of the operating budgets of Israeli
universities comes from the government, Israeli taxpayers are being
forced to finance anti-Israel propaganda and anti-Zionist political
initiatives of tenured extremists, who in some cases openly seek the
annihilation of Israel itself.
Academic freedom of speech is also frequently suppressed by the
self-anointed defenders of Post-Zionist enlightenment. Invariably,
the tenured radicals demand "diversity," but never in the arena of
ideas. They seem to seek a diverse academic institution in which men
and women, Jews and Arabs, Ashkenazim and Mizrachim, all denounce
Israel and Zionism, promote Palestinian nationalism and socialism,
and unanimously boycott the academics working in the newly
proclaimed Ariel University located in Samaria.
The anti-Israel mischief of the academic Left is documented at
length in my article
"Israel's Tenured Extremists," in the Fall 2011 issue of Middle
East Quarterly. Let me emphasize that all this has nothing at
all to do with questioning "academic freedom," but merely with
asserting the right of taxpayers to refuse to pay for anti-Israel
agitprop.
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. Haaretz has stepped in to defend
preserving the Department. The reason for this is that Haaretz
itself is as extremist and anti-pluralistic as BGU's Department of
Politics. There is about as much pluralism at Haaretz as
there was in Pravda back in the days of Brezhnev.
No doubt the most notorious among the tenured anti-Israel faculty
in the Department of Politic Science at Ben Gurion University is
Neve Gordon. Most of his academic career has consisted of churning
out Bash-Israel propaganda with some Marxist diatribes, all
represented as scholarly research. Strongly opposed to freedom of
speech for non-leftists, Gordon is best known for his denunciations
of Israel as a fascist apartheid regime, one that behaves in some
ways like Nazi Germany, a state in need of dismemberment.
Gordon has been leading the campaign for a worldwide boycott of
Israel. Denounced even by BGU's own president, he serves as a
columnist for the Iranian state Holocaust-Denying newspaper and for
the jihadist Al-Jazeera. His
articles also appear on Neo-Nazi
and Holocaust Denier web sites. His students have gone public and
complained that in Gordon's classrooms no pro-Israel opinion is
tolerated.
Gordon's mentor at BGU is David Newman, the Dean of Social
Sciences and Humanities (and sometime Jerusalem Post
columnist). Newman, who has granted Gordon control over budgets in
the school, thus built the Department of Politics at BGU into a
monolithically homogeneous center for leftist activism, one in which
no Zionist nor non-leftist may teach.
A lone Zionist faculty member in the department was fired several
years back. Newman is not a political scientist, but a geographer.
He may be best known for having helped produce an anti-Semitic
documentary for British Channel 4 Television about the
cabals of the Zionist Lobby.
Newman has been the leading voice in Israeli academia calling for
the suppression of the freedom of speech of critics of the radical
Left.
Newman joined BGU President Rivka Carmi and Rector Zvi Hacohen in
circulating a memo a few days ago to all university students and
faculty pledging to defy the decisions of the Council on Higher
Education.
Carmi responded to the CHE demands with a few cosmetic changes.
The bottom line is that failure to close down BGU's Department of
Politics would signal the lowering of academic
standards at BGU and thus endanger
the reputation of all of Israeli higher education.
Steven Plaut teaches at the University of
Haifa and is author of "The Scout" (available from Gefen Publishing
House). More of his writings can be seen on the New Plaut Blog, as
well as in numerous electronic and print newspapers.
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