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Imagine the
reaction if the publisher of The Washington Times
had said that, in response to the 9/11 attacks by
Muslim terrorists, all Muslim employees of The
Times were to be fired, the newspaper would refuse
to publish any articles by Muslims, would refuse
to accept advertising from Muslim-owned companies,
and would refuse to sell copies to Muslims. There
would have been immediate protests, discrimination
lawsuits filed and a steady chorus of talking
heads from academia making the rounds of the
various political talk shows all pontificating
about the “need for dialogue.”
Or imagine the reaction if, during the LA riots of
1992 when numerous convenience stores owned by
Americans of Korean descent were firebombed and
looted, the President of UCLA had said that in
support of the looters and rioters that UCLA would
no longer accept applications from
Korean-Americans and would expel all current
Korean-American students and fire all
Korean-American members of its faculty.
An absurd scenario you say? Not if you are an
academic from Israel.
For the past year there has been an international
effort underway by hundreds of college professors
in the European Union and the United States to
boycott all academic ties with Israeli
institutions of higher learning and with Israeli
scholars themselves. On April 6 of 2002, The
Guardian (London) newspaper published a letter
signed by 120 academics calling for a ban on all
European cooperation with Israeli universities. A
petition drive supporting the letter quickly
garnered over 700 signatures by European and
American academics.
The boycott movement came to the forefront when
Mona Baker, an Egyptian-born professor of
translation studies at the state-funded University
of Manchester in England, removed from the
editorial board of two scholarly journals she
edits the highly-regarded Israeli academics Dr.
Miriam Schlesinger and Professor Gideon Toury
simply because of their Israeli citizenship.
Professor Paul Zinger, head of the Israeli Science
Foundation, reported last month that 25 scientific
papers sent abroad for reference were returned
unopened because the referees refused to consider
any paper coming from Israel.
Israeli scholars now find their articles routinely
rejected by scholarly journals and their
participation in academic conferences similarly
routinely rejected, all because of their
nationality.
This type of blatant discrimination based solely
upon nationality (and in the case of Israel also
upon religious affiliation) flies in the face of
the Western ideal of freedom of expression and
puts the lie to the oft-expressed mantle of
academic freedom in which universities love to
wrap themselves with self-righteous superiority.
During the Communist era Jews were often refused
the right to emigrate from the Soviet Union. They
were known as refuseniks. Today, Israeli and
Jewish scholars are academic refuseniks and find
themselves banned and boycotted by publicly-funded
academic institutions supposedly dedicated to the
free and unfettered pursuit of knowledge. This is
not only wrong and is in violation of the ideals
and rights enshrined in the American Constitution,
it also is reminiscent of the early years of the
Nazi regime in Germany when one of the first
restrictions against Jews was to ban their
participation in all scholarly, academic and
professional institutions.
It is more than a little ironic that the denizens
of academe in Europe and America, who never cease
to remind us of the need for dialogue and
education, are so willing to silence all dialogue
with their Israeli counterparts, in effect to halt
the progress of education.
More and more the university is becoming
irrelevant to the creation and dissemination of
knowledge. And with the worldwide availability of
the internet it is now relatively easy to share
knowledge freely and avoid the latter-day
bookburners of academe who seem not to be
interested in the disinterested pursuit of
knowledge, but in advancing a tendentious,
intolerant and ultimately anti-intellectual
political agenda.
To fight against this deliberate suppression of
knowledge, we at ZCPortal would like to invite the
academic refuseniks to send us their rejected
scholarly articles and conference papers. We will
post them on ZCPortal so that these works are
available to any and all who wish to read them.
This offer is available to academic refuseniks in
any field of scholarly or scientific endeavor
regardless of your political beliefs or the
methodologies employed in your articles.
Freedom of speech is a universal human right. It
is guaranteed in the First Amendment of the
American Constitution and in the basic laws of all
democracies. But this is a lesson that seems to
have been forgotten in the Kafkaesque (and
increasingly Stalinist) hallowed halls of ivy.
Perhaps it is time for academics to go back to
school.
[Academic refuseniks who wish to have their
suppressed papers and articles published on
ZCPortal can do so by sending them to
William Grim. Articles may be sent as Word or
pdf attachments or as part of the body of the
email itself.]
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