THE HANDSTAND

june 2005

AUT boycott supporters: Efforts to ostracize Israel will continue By Tamara Traubman, Haaretz Correspondent and The Associated Press

haaretz:Education minister slams Haifa historian for supporting academic boycott
By Tamara Traubman, Haaretz Correspondent

Education Minister Limor Livnat slammed Dr. Ilan Pappe, a Haifa University historian, on Thursday for supporting the academic boycott on Israel imposed by Britain's Association of University Teachers (AUT). She said it is permissible to criticize, but not to undermine the Jewish state's right to exist. "No one may approach our enemies and ask them to boycott," she said at Israel Prize ceremony held at the Jerusalem Theater.

Bar-Ilan University has created a new Web site to enlist academics to oppose the boycott that the AUT declared against it and the University of Haifa. The two universities have been attempting to increase pressure on the AUT ahead of its special meeting called to reconsider the boycott, to be held in two weeks. The site, launched Wednesday, carries an appeal from Bar-Ilan rector Prof. Yosef Yeshurun for academics in Israel and abroad to join a new association called the International Advisory Board (IAB) for Academic Freedom of Bar-Ilan University. According to its mission statement, the IAB "will undertake actions and steps to guarantee freedom of thought and expression at Bar-Ilan, as well as at other Israeli and non-Israeli institutions of higher education."The site contains information on the boycott along with articles, letters, and responses it has elicited from around the world.

On Tuesday, the University of Haifa sent a letter to the AUT threatening to sue the British organization for libel.Jewish organizations and British university lecturers - mostly Jewish - who object to the boycott are trying to recruit as many AUT members as possible to ensure the boycott is canceled at the gathering later this month.

Assaults on Academic freedom:

Neocons Lay Siege to the Ivory Towers

By Saree Makdisi,
Los Angeles Times, 4 May 2005
http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/opinion/la-oe-makdisi4may04,1,1436422.story

In the months ahead, the state Senate Committee on Education will consider a bill that pretends to strike a blow for intellectual honesty, truth and freedom, but in reality poses a profound threat to academic freedom in the United States.

Peddled under the benign name "An Academic Bill of Rights," SB 5 is in fact part of a wide assault on universities, professors and teaching across the country. Similar bills are pending in more than a dozen state legislatures and at the federal level, all calling for government intrusion into pedagogical matters, such as text assignments and course syllabuses, that neither legislators nor bureaucrats are competent to address.

The language of the California bill -- which was blocked in committee last week but will be reconsidered later in the legislative session -- is extraordinarily disingenuous, even Orwellian. Declaring that "free inquiry and free speech are indispensable" in "the pursuit of truth," it argues that "intellectual independence means the protection of students from the imposition of any orthodoxy of a political, religious or ideological nature." Professors should "not take unfair advantage of their position of power over a student by indoctrinating him or her with the teacher's own opinions before a student has had an opportunity fairly to examine other opinions upon the matters in question."

To protect students from what one might (mistakenly) suppose to be an epidemic of indoctrination, the bill mandates that students be graded on the basis of their "reasoned answers" rather than their political beliefs. Reading lists should "respect the uncertainty and unsettled character of all human knowledge." Speakers brought to campus should "promote intellectual pluralism," and faculty should eschew political, religious or "anti-religious" bias.

Notwithstanding its contorted syntax, the bill may sound reasonable. But, in fact, it has nothing to do with balance and everything to do with promoting a neoconservative agenda. For one thing, the proposed "safeguards" to "protect" students from faculty intimidation are already in place at all universities, which have procedures to encourage students' feedback and evaluate their grievances. Despite a lot of noise from the right about liberal bias on campus, there are simply no meaningful data to suggest that any of these procedures have failed.

The real purpose of the bill, then, is not to provide students with "rights" but to institute state monitoring of universities, to impose specific points of view on instructors -- in many cases, points of view that have been intellectually discredited -- and ultimately to silence dissenting voices by punishing universities that protect them.

"Why should we, as fairly moderate to conservative legislators, continue to support universities that turn out students who rail against the very policies their parents voted us in for?" asks the Republican sponsor of the Ohio version of the bill.

Backers of the Florida bill would like to empower students to sue professors with whom they disagree on the theory of evolution.

The campaign for academic "rights" actually originated with organizations and individuals committed to defending Israel from criticism, and whose interest in curtailing academic freedom dovetails with those of conservatives.

At the federal level, for example, a confluence of conservative and pro-Israeli forces helped push HR 3077 through the House of Representatives in 2003. That bill, which foundered in a Senate committee (but has been resurrected in the current Congress), called for government monitoring of international studies programs that receive federal funding. The bill was drafted in response to the claim that the federal government was funding programs that criticize American foreign policy. If passed, it would have created a board (including two members from "federal agencies that have national security responsibilities") to ensure that academic programs "better reflect the national needs related to homeland security." Its supporters included the American Jewish Congress, the Anti-Defamation League, and the American Israel Political Action Committee, the bulwark of Israel's Washington lobby.

Daniel Pipes

The bill was also backed by pro-Israel agitators Daniel Pipes and Martin Kramer, who, via allies such as neoconservative firebrand David Horowitz, are among the proponents of the "bill of rights" legislation at the state level. All the proposed bills before state legislatures are variants of a text written by Horowitz and backed by Students for Academic Freedom, which maintains a website where students can complain about their instructors' supposed bias.

The problem with all this is that the university is meant to be an insular environment. Those within its walls are supposed to be protected from outside political pressures so that learning can take place.

But the lesson of the recent upheavals at Columbia University -- where an individual professor became the object of a concerted campaign of intimidation because of his criticisms of Israel -- is that pressure groups targeting an individual professor for his public views are willing to inflict collateral damage on an entire university. What the new legislation offers such groups is the opportunity to inflict damage preemptively on our entire educational system.

Despite its narrow defeat in the California Senate Education Committee last week, SB 5's supporters clearly will not disappear quietly. If this and similar bills pass, who gets hired and what gets taught could be decided not according to academic and intellectual criteria but by pressure groups, many of whose members are failed academics driven by crassly political motivations. Society would pay the price.

[Saree Makdisi is a professor of English literature at UCLA]

100 Israelis to testify in Florida trial of alleged Jihad fundraisers
ByRoni Singer and Nathan Guttman, Haaretz Correspondent

Some 100 survivors of terror attacks, relatives of those killed, police investigators, Magen David Adom paramedics, and ZAKA volunteers will testify in what American authorities regard as the most important terrorist trial in the United States since the September 11, 2001 attacks.

The group will be flown to Tampa, Florida early next month to serve as prosecution witnesses in the trial of four Arab-Americans accused of belonging to Islamic Jihad and raising funds to finance terror attacks, including some that took place in Israel.

The trial is due to start on June 6, with jury selection to begin this week.

The Israeli witnesses, flying to Florida at the expense of the U.S. government, include survivors of terror attacks going back to 1989, as well as relatives of some of those killed, eyewitnesses, doctors from the Institute of Forensic Medicine at Abu Kabir in South Tel Aviv and police officers.

Dozens of boxes of documents in Hebrew are also being flown to the trial, for the prosecution's use.

Among the terror attacks for which the four are being charged are the Bus 405 incident, from 1989, when an Islamic Jihad man forced an Egged bus off the highway and into a ravine on the road to Jerusalem, the 1992 pitchfork attack at a training base, the 1995 double suicide bombings at Beit Lid, the 1996 bombing at the Dizengoff Center, and a terror attack in Karkur in 2002. More than 100 Israelis and Americans were killed in the attacks mentioned in the 118-page indictment.

The Israelis will be asked to testify about their experiences.

The lead defendant in the case is Sami al-Arian, a University of South Florida computer engineering professor who has been held by authorities for the last two years. Also on trial are Sameeh Hammoudeh, Hatim Naji Fsariz and Ghassan Zayed Ballut.

The indictment also names non-U.S. citizens who are absent from the U.S. and therefore not being charged. Most prominent of these is Ramadan Salah, a friend and partner of Al-Arian and the head of Islamic Jihad, who lives in Damascus. Also named in the indictment are known Islamic Jihad leaders from Gaza, London, Lebanon and Saudi Arabia.

There are more than 50 individual charges being leveled against the four defendants, including running an organized crime ring, membership in a criminal organization and financing terror. They are also accused of murder, money laundering, conspiracy and extortion.

The FBI investigation against the four has gone on for some 10 years, both inside the U.S. and abroad. Much of the evidence was gathered via electronic surveillance and wiretaps, a result of close cooperation between U.S. and foreign police, including the Israel Police.

In Israel, investigators from the International Crimes Unit worked on the case. Although there is no gag order, police have refused to divulge anything about the case to the press as the trial has approached. Furthermore, the U.S. authorities will likely play down the role of the Israeli authorities in gathering the material on which they are basing their case.

However, the Americans do want to make the jury understand not only how the four defendants helped finance terror, but also "what terror looks like." It is for this purpose they are bringing in the Israeli witnesses. They also plan to play videotapes of news footage shot at terror scenes, display material from the forensic institute and present testimony from both survivors and the ZAKA volunteers who collect the tiny bits of human remains that are often left by a bombing.

The prosecution is planning to present examples of correspondence between the four defendants and others raising money for the families of terrorists. Al-Arian is accused of heading a large-scale fund-raising operation inside the U.S. starting in the early 1990s.

The trial was supposed to begin this week, but it was postponed until June because of a defense request for a change in venue. While the prosecution plans to focus on the work the four did to help Islamic Jihad, the defense is planning to argue that Islamic Jihad is a legitimate resistance group - an argument that might not pass muster with the judge in the case since not only has the U.S. listed Islamic Jihad as a terror group since the 1980s, but the judge has announced he does not plan to allow the case to become a lesson in the history of the Middle East conflict.

Nonetheless, the defense has asked controversial University of Haifa lecturer Ilan Pappe to appear as an expert witness. Pappe says he has not decided whether to appear in the trial on the defense's behalf.

The defense also plans to show the jury photographs and other documentation to show that Arian was a well-known Arab-American politician, friendly with major U.S. political figures such as former U.S. president Bill Clinton and President George W. Bush. If the FBI suspected the defendants of being terrorists, the defense will ask, why didn't they warn the political figures to stay away from Arian and the others?

A full report on the case and its background will appear in the Weekend Magazine on Friday.

A Day in the Life of A Palestinian Student
Dr. Ilan Pappe pappe@poli.haifa.ac.il
Tue, 17 May 2005


  This morning a group of Palestinian and Jewish students demonstrated
outside the hall of the conference in the university of Haifa titled 'The
demographic problem and the Demographic policy of Israel' – the euphemism
used for talking about the Arab Demographic threat and the need to encounter
it; by transfer even, if need be. The posters against the conference were
brutally torn and taken away by the security guards of the university,
bruising and beating some of the students on the way. The students were
unable to go into the whole as a wall – what else – of tables and chairs
blocked their way into the seats. Cameras were working overtime, taking
photos of the Arab students, so that they could be charged with violating
public order and brought in front of a disciplinary committee.



  My student, L. H.,  a fragile young Palestine woman, succeeded in getting
in: "they thought I was Jewish", she told me later. She managed to stay calm
when one demographer elaborated on the dangers of loosing a Jewish majority,
and even when Professor Arnon Sofer, claimed that it was me who sent the
students to demonstrate as part of my alliance with 'contemptible' Europe
and 'despiable' Britain. She even sat through when he explained that he will
not allow Tel-Aviv to become Cairo. The kind of rhetoric one hears in the
meetings of the national fronts meetings across Europe and in the neo-Nazi
rallies in Berlin. Here it was in an academic conference sponsored and
honoured by the Rector.



  But she had enough when Yoav Gleber claimed that any numbers of
Palestinians living before 1948 were fabricated for political reasons, and
in any case if he had to choose between a Jewish State and a Democracy, he
prefers the former.  She stood up and condemned him and was silenced by the
crowed as being stupid and later ushered out of the meeting by the security
people.



  L.H. is afraid to go into classes today if this is the university she
studies in. But she will overcome her fear and continue to demand what is
hers by right and virtue. The important question what does it tell us of the
University of Haifa. The speakers in the conference came from among its top
professors, but also the demonstrators came from that university. The former
threw out the latter: oppressed and silenced them. Another question is how
best can we help the Palestinian and Jewish students who demonstrated
bravely and will be probably charged? I have answered these questions in the
past and suggested that only outside pressure can help, but far more
important is the question of what will happen if nothing is done? Can you,
like me, conjecture the titles of next year's conferences: 'The Meaning and
Objective of Transfer'; 'Encouraging Abortion Among Palestinian Women' etc.
Sometimes you feel that the authorities of this university deserve every bit
of the trouble that came its way recently.