Yet another call to boycott Israel...
This time..the Irish...
Israeli academics over the holiday weekend slammed a call for a European Union boycott of Israeli academic institutions delivered by 61 Irish academics in a letter sent to The Irish Times. Signatories to the petition, meanwhile, defended their actions.
While complaining that "The Israeli government appears impervious to moral appeals from world leaders and to long-standing United Nations resolutions," the September 16 petition called for "a moratorium on any further [cultural and academic] support to Israeli academic institutions, at both national and European levels."
The petition cited Israel's "policy of violent repression against the Palestinians in the occupied territories, and its aggression against the people of Lebanon" and urged that the "moratorium should continue until Israel abides by UN resolutions and ends the occupation of Palestinian territories."
"It is obvious that there is no universal norm [in the call for boycott], only discrimination," said Dr. Alexander Yakobson in response to the petition. Yakobson, a lecturer in history at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, recently authored a book with former MK and renowned legal scholar Amnon Rubinstein entitled Israel and the Family of Nations: The Jewish Nation-State and Human Rights, which confronts anti-Israel activism and discourse.
"The petitioners don't call for a boycott of academic institutions in every country with whose policies they disagree," Yakobson explained. "They don't demand a boycott of Sudan, or of China, which has tremendous academic ties to Europe. And they don't want to boycott the United States or Britain over Iraq. There is no universal norm, they're just anti-Israel. So," he concluded, "we have to ask what it is about Israel that upsets them."
More importantly, for Yakobson, "they don't demand of any Palestinian academic even to disavow terror." This is particularly strange, he believes, since "even when Europe imposed sanctions on the Hamas government, it did not impose them on Palestinian universities. Nobody has even suggested doing this."
posted by GayandRight @ 11:56 PM
3 Comments:
The esteemed academics of Europe must be digging through their archives again and re-publishing the stuff they wrote in 1938.
When will learned people ever learn...
To be fair, Israel's civil and human rights record is... well, terrible. But its often overlooked, because in contrast to the countries nearby they look like saints. There have been conformed cases of everything from election-rigging via voter surpression to the government just demolishing non-jewish settlements to the use of weaponry condemned by international agreements as recently as the Lebanon war. Cluster bombs, in that case - highly effective but non-discriminatory weapons that have a tendency to kill civilians.
The Irish state and their academics do not have a stellar record of supporting the right side of key conflicts.
Just wait, Swedish academics will probably be next to call for a silly boycott.
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