[Peace-discuss] Academic Freedom Conference

[Morton K. Brussel]

Norman Finkelstein wrote of the following article:

"A surprisingly accurate article"

Critics of pro-Israel lobby hold parley

Several of the pro-Israel lobby's strongest critics gathered in  
Chicago to fight what they described as Jewish efforts to stifle  
academic freedom.

10.16.2007 | Jewish Telegraphic Agency (JTA)
By Ben Harris

CHICAGO (JTA) -- Collectively they have published more than a hundred  
books and countless articles. Four are tenured professors at elite  
American universities. Internet searches reveal them to be widely  
cited experts on international affairs and American foreign policy.

In short, it's difficult to imagine a collection of academics more  
secure in their posts or more prominent.

But there they were -- Noam Chomsky, John Mearsheimer, Tony Judt and  
fellow travelers -- at a conference last week hosted by the  
University of Chicago warning that pressure from American Jewish  
groups is having a chilling effect on unpopular scholarship and free- 
wheeling debate on university campuses.

"Universities are the one place in the United States where Israel  
tends to get treated like a normal country," said Mearsheimer, the  
University of Chicago professor and co-author of "The Israel Lobby,"  
which asserts that the pro-Israel community stifles debate over U.S.  
policy in the Middle East.

"Some find this situation intolerable," he told a nearly packed 1,500- 
seat auditorium, "which causes them to work hard to stifle criticism  
of Israel and to instead promote a positive image of Israel on  
campuses."

Barely a month into the academic year, university campuses are beset  
by controversies related to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the  
related issue of American policy in the Middle East.

Last week, anti-Muslim posters were found at George Washington  
University in an apparent promotion for Islamo-Fascism Week, a week  
of events across the country that organizers are billing as the  
largest conservative campus protest ever.

The week before, the cancellation of an appearance by Archbishop  
Desmond Tutu at a Minnesota university caused an uproar, leading the  
university to reverse itself and reinvite Tutu to campus.

To many in the pro-Israel community, the Chicago conference featured  
a rogue's gallery of Israel's most vehement critics, a group that  
opponents say lavishes attention on the supposed crimes of the Jewish  
state while ignoring the terrorism directed at its citizens.

That many of the speakers are Jewish themselves hasn't muted  
criticisms of their writings as anti-Semitic, self-hating and Nazi- 
sympathizing.

On Sunday, the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in  
America, a pro-Israel media watchdog, will host a daylong conference  
on the subject titled "Israel's Jewish Defamers."

The Oct. 12 conference, titled "In Defense of Academic Freedom,"  
brought together not only Jews and non-Jews, but professors whose  
ideological differences are so vast they likely agree on little else  
than the notion that Jewish groups have degraded the quality and  
breadth of discussion in the media and in Washington.

Mearsheimer is a proponent of the realist school of international  
relations, which resists the intrusion of moral considerations into  
cold calculations of national interest. Chomsky's belief that  
American policy in the Middle East is motivated solely by imperialist  
aggression is greatly informed by the moral consequences of American  
behavior.

Nevertheless, they came together around the view that universities  
are the final redoubts of robust criticism of Israel. Naturally, they  
added, these institutions are now coming under assault.

"It's a reversal of the real situation," said Daniel Pipes, director  
of Campus Watch, an academic watchdog group that was cited several  
times by conference speakers as one of the forces allegedly  
suppressing academic freedom.

Pipes noted that when he speaks at universities, he does so under  
intense police protection and is frequently interrupted by hecklers.

"When I go on universities, I can barely give a talk," Pipes told  
JTA. "Whose academic freedom is being infringed? Noam Chomsky doesn't  
have this problem, I do. David Horowitz does. Ann Coulter does.  
Benjamin Netanyahu does."

The Chicago parley was most immediately inspired by the case of  
Norman Finkelstein, a vigorous critic of Israeli policy and the  
author of the controversial books "The Holocaust Industry" and "Image  
and Reality of the Israel-Palestine Conflict."

Finkelstein was recommended for tenure at DePaul University by his  
department and the college-level tenure committee, but the school's  
dean overruled them following a concerted campaign against him led by  
prominent Harvard Law Professor Alan Dershowitz.

Mearsheimer professed to not always seeing eye to eye with  
Finkelstein on Israel, but nevertheless supported his application for  
tenure and delivered an impassioned defense of his scholarly  
credentials. Denial of tenure, Mearsheimer claimed in his speech last  
week, only has one possible explanation: outside pressure from the  
pro-Israel community.

"There's no other plausible explanation for the top administrator's  
decision to override the recommendations of the political science  
department and the college-wide tenure committee," Mearsheimer said.

For those at the conference, Finkelstein has become Exhibit A in the  
case against what they see as the pernicious effect of Jewish  
pressure on universities. Speakers mentioned other tenure battles,  
including the one now being fought over Nadia Abu El-Haj at Barnard  
College in New York City, and plenty of instances of failed attempts  
to have controversial professors fired.

No other examples were presented, however, to buttress the claim that  
pro-Israel groups had made any significant headway in blocking  
professorial appointments.

Akeel Bilgrami, a tenured professor of philosophy at Columbia,  
reviewed the furor that descended upon his university a few years ago  
when Jewish students and "McCarthyite" groups accused several  
professors of intimidating and harassing pro-Israel students. A  
committee concluded there was no evidence of anti-Semitism, and the  
accused professors continue to teach at Columbia.

Neve Gordon, a tenured professor of politics at Ben Gurion University  
in Israel, said professors in his country enjoyed much greater  
freedom to discuss Middle East issues than their counterparts in the  
United States. He further observed that had Finkelstein been teaching  
at Ben Gurion, he would have received tenure.

Gordon said the main pressure involving his own controversial words  
came from outside Israel. In a letter to the university's president  
at the time, the Zionist Organization of America urged Avishay  
Braverman to withdraw support for Gordon, citing several examples of  
his writings, including those in which he called Israel's separation  
barrier an "apartheid wall."

The ZOA warned that it intends "to make our members -- many of whom  
are supporters of Ben-Gurion University -- aware of Neve Gordon's  
activities and of his position on the faculty of the university."

Gordon is a visiting professor this academic year at the University  
of Michigan.

Mearsheimer and Judt both said their universities generally have been  
supportive and not caved to outside pressures.

Chomsky, a tenured professor of linguistics at the Massachusetts  
Institute of Technology, was unable to attend in person because of  
his wife's illness. In videotaped remarks to open the conference,  
Chomsky offered his own explanation for what he described as efforts  
to suppress Middle East and peace studies departments.

"State power is focused on the war in the Middle East, so impediments  
have to be removed and conformist subservience to those in power has  
to be ensured in these areas," Chomsky said. Middle East and peace  
studies departments are targets since they are "inherently subversive  
if they’re at all serious."

Judt, a tenured professor at New York University and author of the  
controversial essay "Israel: The Alternative"-- it called the idea of  
a Jewish state an "anachronism" -- cited two examples in which he was  
disinvited to speak at universities because of his views on the  
Middle East.

In one instance, Judt said he was asked not to mention Israel in his  
speech -- he turned down the invitation rather than comply. In the  
other, the Jewish studies instructor who issued the invitation backed  
out, saying that if the event went forward, the instructor's tenure  
might be at risk as a result of outside pressure on the the university.

"Universities are very vulnerable -- that's clear," Judt said.

Judt also dismissed the argument made often by Israel's defenders  
that the pro-Israel lobby is but one of many interest groups in  
Washington. The pro-Israel lobby is the only one, Judt suggested,  
that denies its own existence.

"That makes it a different kind of lobby," he said. "It exists in  
part to silence as well as to voice. And it operates, of course,  
through a particularly unpleasant moral leverage -- the leverage that  
comes out of being able to accuse someone of anti-Semitism."

The conference, held inside the University of Chicago's soaring  
Rockefeller Memorial Chapel, was sponsored by the DePaul Academic  
Freedom Committee, a group set up amid the controversy over  
Finkelstein. Its pews were filled nearly to capacity throughout the  
five-hour conference.

The Chicago chapter of Jewish Voices for Peace, listed as one of 10  
other co-sponsors, was given a special mention by Tariq Ali, the  
conference chair.

Finkelstein, who spoke last and received a standing ovation as he  
approached the podium, chose not to discuss the conference topic but  
to defend his occasional recourse to uncivil speech -- a  
transgression of which he has often been accused and one that even  
his regular defenders acknowledge sometimes gets him in trouble.

Finkelstein said there is never an excuse for incivility in the  
classroom; professors should seek to teach, not argue for a position.  
But outside the university they have the same rights as anyone else,  
including the right to outraged expression.

"My own experience has been that young people in particular, they  
yearn for persons in authority to speak the unvarnished truth and  
give expression to the moral indignation warranted by the occasion,"  
Finkelstein said. "There are moments that require breaking out of  
constraints of polite discourse to sound the alarm that innocent  
people are being butchered while we speak due to the actions of our  
government."

Still, Finkelstein called the whole argument over civility a "red  
herring," considering "indubitable war criminals" like Henry  
Kissinger and Donald Rumsfeld have been offered posts at prestigious  
universities.

Focusing on civility is a "meaningless sideshow, or just a  
transparent pretext for denying a person the right to teach on  
account of his political beliefs."


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