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Intellectual Boycott of Israel Hits U.S.

[Weekly Standard] Erin Sheley - In January, a group of American university professors launched the U.S. Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel. The boycott follows on the heels of several similar attempts made by British professors. Despite the comparatively low number of signatories, the campaign puts an official face on what many students already experience as a monolithic anti-Israel narrative across American campuses that obscures the harm inflicted upon the Palestinians by their own leaders, as well as gross human-rights violations by the leaders of the rest of the Arab world. As Ruth Wisse, Professor of Yiddish and comparative literature at Harvard, says, "being against the Jewish nation was a great feature of leftism since Karl Marx" and this impulse to "be against something," coupled with the natural instinct of activist students to seek a single scapegoat for the plight of an undeniably oppressed people, results in a dramatically simplified story, in which Israelis become the "only group that you can safely aggress against with no price to be paid." All this despite the role of Arab nations themselves in keeping Palestinians victimized.
2009-03-20 06:00:00
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