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What Academic Values Does the British Boycott Protect?

[History News Network-George Mason University] Richard L. Cravatts - If the British union members deny Israeli academics any discourse at all in what is usually called "the academic marketplace of ideas," of banishing them from the world of dialogue, research, and learning, have not they already struck a fatal blow to the core guiding principle of the academy? Since when has it been the responsibility of the university to control the actions of the state, or for its members to share culpability for the political decisions of a nation? And if the union members in fact feel that academics shape and influence national policy and political behavior, their choice of the Palestinians, now being led by homicidal Islamists, Hamas, seems a bit troublesome. In what has been deemed by observers to be essentially child abuse, young Palestinians are inculcated, nearly from birth, with seething, blind, unrelenting, and obsessive hatred of Jews and the "Zionist regime"; kindergartners graduate with blood-soaked hands while toting plastic AK 47s and dedicating their lives to jihad; and older children are recruited to hide explosives on their bodies to transform themselves into "shahids" - a new generation of kindling for radical Islam's cult of death.
2007-08-02 01:00:00
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