PACBI Statements
| PACBI STATEMENTS ON THE ACADEMIC BOYCOTT OF ISRAEL |
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Ethical Hero Gideon Saar Israeli university officials are wetting themselves in a tantrum. It seems the Israeli Minister of Education Gideon Saar wants them to adopt an “ethics code.” In it, he wants it to say that faculty members and students will not be victims of discrimination because of their political beliefs. And by that he means that he wants to make sure that non-leftist faculty and students are no longer victimized. No one seriously thinks that leftist faculty at Israeli universities suffer any disadvantages. In fact they RUN the institutions. Saar also wants to include calls by faculty members for boycotts of Israel and endorsements of attacks against Israel as examples of “unethical behavior.” But that has university honchos up in arms. How dare Saar attempt to interfere with their longstanding practices of discriminating against non-leftists while hiring and promoting far leftist anti-Israel extremists having no serious academic records? The tenured Left is screaming that an ethics code will “destroy Israeli academia.” See this. How dare anyone suggest professors behave ethically!! Saar also wants diversity in university departments, by which he clearly means that non-leftist opinion should be heard and not suppressed. The University heads are proposing instead that each university adopt its OWN ethical code written internally. You know, codes they have never quite gotten around to formulating over past decades. But this is absurd. The officials at Israeli u7niversities, including at Ben Gurion University, Haifa University and Tel Aviv University, have all come out in the past year in OPPOSITION to the rights of critics of tenured Leftists to criticize them. They demand that such “McCarthyism” be silenced. They have repeatedly failed to defend the academic freedom of non-leftists on campus. The firing of the professor at Ben Gurion University who dared to express a heterodox opinion about children being raised by gay couples is only one example. They have failed to protect freedom of speech within campuses. They themselves have led smear campaigns against the Im Tirtzu student movement. They have totally failed to maintain serious academic standards of excellence. Israeli universities are crawling with extremists who built entire careers upon churning out anti-Israel hate propaganda. And any “ethical code” the campus heads would adopt would be based first and foremost on defending the rights of radical leftist faculty to collaborate with the enemies of Israel, to call for its destruction, to call for world boycotts against Israel, and to endorse Hamas demands. |
