By Edward Alexander , Professor Emeritus of English, UW,
Since it is now a core belief of academic “progressives” that Israel is the world’s most wicked country, and responsible for all the globe’s miseries except (perhaps) avian flu, it’s hardly surprising that the very day of that country’s 60th birthday should, in an act of depraved malevolence, have been marked at UW by the appearance, courtesy of the Simpson Center and the Graduate School, of two Israel-hating lecturers. We were treated to both Norman Finkelstein, the failed academic and beloved dream-Jew of all the world’s anti-Semites, and Yitzhak Laor, a second-tier poet who specializes in depicting Israel as the devil’s experiment station.
Laor delivered the (once prestigious) John Danz Lecture.
A few people at UW may remember that the Danz lectures were founded to deal with the subject of “the role of science in society and in understanding a rational universe.”
Since the UW Graduate School long ago decided to disregard the intentions of the Danz family and bring an endless parade of distinctly non-scientific but very leftist lecturers — Edward Said, Angela Davis, Naomi Wolf — the appearance of Yitzhak Laor, who is less a scientist than any 12-year-old with a chemistry set, is no occasion for surprise.
But Laor’s appearance raises another question. Since UW president Mark Emmert last year issued a ringing denunciation of the Nazi-style movement to boycott Israeli universities and scholars, how is it that the Graduate School (at the urging of the departments of Comparative Literature, English, and Near Eastern Languages) brings to campus, and at considerable expense, one of the promoters of that boycott?
President Emmert showed a clear understanding that the boycott of Israel is anti-Semitic because it uses a double standard: if one thinks that Israeli policies toward Palestinian Arabs are objectionable, are they really worse than Russian actions in Chechnya, Chinese actions toward Tibetans, Turkish actions toward the Kurds?
But where are the boycotts of Russia, China, and Turkey?
What President Emmert now needs to do is to require the Graduate School (also the Simpson Center, etc.) to boycott the boycotters.
Words of condemnation are not enough.
If boycotters of Israel are not given a taste of their own medicine, [and] made to pay a price for anti-Semitic actions, the highly organized international assault on Israel, in which Laor and Finkelstein are devoted functionaries, will grow by the weakness it feeds on.