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The whole world seems now to have heard about the hostility to freedom of speech at Tel Aviv University. The death this week of Ze'v Segal is as good an opportunity as any to retell the following tale of horror of one-sided ideological indoctrination at Tel Aviv University.

http://thejewishpress.blogspot.com/2011/01/leftist-indoctrination-at-tel-aviv.html

Leftist Indoctrination at Tel Aviv University is not new - a comment on the event of Ze'ev Segal's Death

Posted by Steven Plaut
January 13, 2011

Ze'ev Segal was a Professor at Tel Aviv University in their Public Policy department. A legalist by training, he was better known as the legal correspondent for the ultra-leftist anti-Zionist Israeli newspaper Haaretz. For decades he was the Haaretz voice on matters of law. As such, he never once denounced - in fact he defended - the campaign of leftist McCarthyism to persecute and indict Rabbis and other "Rightists" after the assassination of Rabin. He never spoke up against suppression of freedom of speech of non-leftists. He did not condemn extremists at Tel Aviv University, including when they attempted to censor the law school and prevent an Israeli woman army colonel from teaching there.

About 16 years ago,the very same Segal organized a panel discussion at Tel Aviv
University on affirmative action quotas. The Supreme Court in Israel had just issued a writ, one of its very stupidest decisions in its entire history, ordering public companies to appoint women directors by quota, regardless of whether the woman appointed had any qualifications or training in business. The Left in Israel was ecstatic at this "victory." I wrote a series of articles at the time, mainly in Haaretz, attacking the decision and attacking affirmative action programs of all sorts. Segal called me up and invited me to participate in the panel he was organizing. Attendance at the panel was mandatory for students in the department.

When I arrived, I saw there was no place for me on the platform. Instead there were five people on the stage, who then spent two and a quarter hours presenting the PRO side of affirmative action, singing its praises, in a one-sided indoctrination. The five included feminists and radical leftists. Not a single comment about anything harmful or evil about quotas, double standards, dumbing down, injustice from reverse discrimination, harm from hiring incompetents. Gur nichts. Nothing.

After two and a quarter hours of nonstop one-sided indoctrination, Segal pointed to me in the audience and invited me to the platform, announcing that I have three minutes to present the other side, the reasons why affirmative action programs are harmful. As I went to the mike, two feminists in the audience started screaming, "Don't allow him to speak." I took the mike and announced that the rules of the debate, with two and a quarter hours for one side and three minutes for the other, did not appeal to me and so I was relinquishing my three minutes. I then walked out of the hall, with several students running out after me to shake my hand.

This was 16 years ago, before Tel Aviv University sunk even further into the cesspool of one-sided leftwing indoctrination.

Aharon Barak, the past Chief Justice of Israel and Israel's worst promoter of "judicial activism," is cited in Haaretz today saying that he and Segal shared legal ideas. I cannot think of a worst condemnation.