{"id":9832,"date":"2013-02-03T13:11:56","date_gmt":"2013-02-03T17:11:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/?p=9832"},"modified":"2013-02-03T13:11:56","modified_gmt":"2013-02-03T17:11:56","slug":"brooklyn-college-israel-event","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/brooklyn-college-israel-event\/","title":{"rendered":"Brooklyn College & Israel Event"},"content":{"rendered":"

Via the Guardian newspaper:<\/em><\/p>\n

Brooklyn College’s academic freedom increasingly threatened over Israel event<\/b><\/p>\n

New York politicians join the Alan Dershowitz-led campaign to dictate to colleges what academic events they can hold<\/em><\/p>\n

Glenn Greenwald<\/a><\/p>\n

\"dershowitz2\"<\/a>
\nguardian.co.uk<\/a>, Saturday 2 February 2013 10.35 EST<\/p>\n

Harvard Law Professor Alan Dershowitz is leading the campaign against an event featuring Israel critics, sponsored by the Political Science department of Brooklyn College. Photograph: AP\/Sergei Chuzakov<\/p>\n

On Tuesday, I wrote about<\/a> a brewing controversy that was threatening the academic freedom of Brooklyn College (see Item 7). The controversy was triggered by the sponsorship of the school’s Political Science department of an event<\/a>, scheduled for 7 February, featuring two advocates of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement (BDS) aimed at stopping Israeli oppression of the Palestinians [one speaker is a Palestinian (Omar Barghouti) and the other a Jewish American (philosopher Judith Butler)]. The event is being co-sponsored by numerous student and community groups, including Students for Justice in Palestine, the college’s LGBT group, pro-Palestinian Jewish organizations, and an Occupy Wall Street group.<\/p>\n

When I wrote about this earlier in the week, opposition to the event was confined to the usual suspects devoted to so-called “pro-Israel<\/a>” advocacy, including many with a long history of trying to destroy anyone critical of the Israeli government. The controversy was largely fueled by BC alumnus Alan Dershowitz, who denounced the event in a New York York Daily News Op-Ed<\/a> as a “hate orgy”. Dershowitz – with whom I had a lengthy and contentious email exchange yesterday on this and other topics (see below) – previously led the successful campaign<\/a> to pressure DePaul University into denying tenure to long-time Israel critic Norman Finkelstein (after his tenure had been approved by an academic committee), all but destroying Finkelstein’s career as an academic.<\/p>\n

Dershowitz has been joined in his current crusade by a cast of crazed and fanatical Israel-centric characters such as Brooklyn State Assembly member Dov Hikind. Ignoring the BDS movement’s explicit non-violence stance<\/a>, Hikind publicly (and falsely) claimed that the event speakers (to whom he referred as “Barghouti and\u2026the lady”<\/a>) “think Hamas and Hezbollah are nice organizations, and they probably feel the same way about Al Qaeda”.<\/p>\n

Hikind called on<\/a> the college’s President, Karen Gould, to resign, recklessly insinuating (needless to say) that she’s an anti-Semite: “Perhaps President Gould wasn’t bullied; maybe she secretly approves. . . . I can only speculate to what her motivation or lack of motivation is in allowing this irresponsible endorsement of this loathsome event by her College.”). In 2011, Hikind led the campaign<\/a> to force Brooklyn College to fire the young adjunct professor Kristofer Petersen-Overton for the crime of writing a pro-Palestinian paper (after firing him, the college rehired him days later<\/a>).<\/p>\n

One of the key members of Brooklyn College’s board of trustees, Jeffrey Wiesenfeld, is notorious for having led the 2011 effort<\/a> to block CUNY from granting an honorary degree to Tony Kushner in light of Kushner’s Israel criticisms (“My mother would call Tony Kushner a kapo,” Wiesenfeld said of the Jewish playwright<\/a>). When a New York Times reporter writing about the Kushner controversy asked Wiesenfeld whether one side of the Israel\/Palestine debate should be suppressed, Wiesenfeld objected that “the comparison sets up a moral equivalence.” When the Times reporter asked him: “equivalence between what and what?”, Wiesenfeld replied: “between the Palestinians and Israelis. People who worship death for their children are not human<\/b>.”<\/p>\n

[…]<\/p>\n

Read the complete article\u00a0here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Via the Guardian newspaper: Brooklyn College’s academic freedom increasingly threatened over Israel event New York politicians join the Alan Dershowitz-led campaign to dictate to colleges what academic events they can hold Glenn Greenwald guardian.co.uk,...<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[59,79],"tags":[1349,1348],"class_list":["post-9832","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-israel","category-palestine","tag-alan-dershowitz","tag-brooklyn-college"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9832","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9832"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9832\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9839,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9832\/revisions\/9839"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9832"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9832"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9832"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}