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Source: https://www.thejc.com/opinion/europes-silenced-scholars-the-forced-gaza-genocide-consensus-fifilnd4
Europe's Silenced Scholars: The Forced Gaza Genocide "Consensus"
(Jewish Chronicle-UK) Maarten Boudry - Across Europe, open letters from academics - often amassing hundreds or even thousands of signatures within days - denounce Israel in the strongest terms. Dozens of universities have now severed ties with Israeli institutions, citing alleged complicity in genocide or systematic war crimes. In August 2025, the International Association of Genocide Scholars adopted a resolution that declared Israel was guilty of the "crime of crimes." In reality, the accusation of genocide is obscene. There's no evidence whatsoever that Israel intends to exterminate Gazans, and abundant evidence to the contrary. The eagerness of Western intellectuals to accuse Israel of genocide is by now depressingly familiar, as is their blindness to Hamas's cynical war tactics and the extraordinarily difficult conditions under which Israel has had to pursue its legitimate aims of defeating Hamas and freeing the hostages. Yet there are clear indications that this supposed academic consensus was artificially contrived. For the past two years, I have been receiving regular emails from academic colleagues saying, "I completely agree with you and am glad that you're fighting this battle, but please keep it quiet - I don't want to get into trouble." A senior lecturer at a Dutch university writes: "I'm afraid to share my thoughts freely with my colleagues and feel restricted in my freedom to speak openly about this." A philosophy professor describes the academic debate on the war in Gaza as effectively "impossible," writing that "Critical voices are silenced through exclusion, dismissal, and sometimes even violence." In today's academic climate, speaking out in support of Israel is widely regarded as tantamount to "academic suicide." The "Gaza genocide" accusation is a baseless claim that defies logic and evidence. Breaking the spiral of silence will require more people to step forward and call out such nonsense, thereby lowering the social cost of dissent. The writer has been a researcher in philosophy and moral sciences at Ghent University in Belgium since 2006.