18 November '10
“Thy destructors and destroyers shall come from amongst you “ warns Isaiah (49:17). And in recent years such would-be obliterators of the Jewish State have included not only far-left, often deracinated, Jews, but Israelis or ex-Israelis (yordim), many of whom teach in universities.
Interfering with academic freedom is rarely if ever a worthy undertaking. Stifling the free expression of opinion leads to the burning of books and to McCarthyist witch hunts, and is the hallmark of tyrannous dictatorships. Nevertheless, when some academics, in their classrooms and outside them, advocate harm to their own democratic nation state – for example in the form of crippling economic boycotts – it seems prudent to subject them to scrutiny. Similarly, when they call for that state to be dismantled altogether, it seems not unreasonable to suspect them of sailing close to the wind of treason.
In 2004, alarmed at the presence on campuses of Israeli academics calling for BDS, a non-profit watchdog organisation called Israel Academia Monitor (IAM) was founded, stating that "Israeli academic institutions have been misused in recent years for radical anti-Israeli and even anti-Semitic propagandizing, often by tenured radicals with embarrassing academic records and dubious research credentials." IAM aimed to "bring to light statements written by and about the academic extremists and university anti-Zionists...to expose their activities”.
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