...It is easy to demonize Israel, and certainly it requires no bravery in academia, where moral narcissists console each other in an echo chamber of good intentions, willing to sacrifice academic integrity, true scholarship, and vigorous, honest debate in the process.
Richard L. Cravatts..
frontpagemag.com..
08 January '14..
Characterized by the same paroxysms of self-righteousness as were evident in the much-maligned and tendentious academic boycott by the American Studies Association (ASA) last month, members of the Modern Language Association (MLA) head to Chicago during the first week of January for the organization’s 129th convention. The annual meeting, which is generally attended by a third of the MLA’s 30,000 members, has, as
New Criterion editor, Roger Kimball, wryly noted, customarily “provided observers of the academic scene with a spectacle as appalling as it is rich in unintended comedy,” complete with a “full range of barbarous jargon, intellectual posturing, and aggressive politicization that has infected the academic study of the humanities in this country . . . .”
But this year’s conference promises even more intellectual acting out, given that the MLA’s Radical Caucus has proposed a resolution that will call on the U.S. State Department “to contest Israel’s arbitrary denials of entry to Gaza and the West Bank by U.S. academics who have been invited to teach, confer, or do research at Palestinian universities.” Why the focus on Israel by these scholars of the English language and humanities? Because, as presiding officer Samer M. Ali smugly put it, as far as the MLA is concerned, Israel deserves to be demonized for its perceived transgressions, and the “question that [attendees] will be debating is not whether Israel is violating the rights of Palestinians, but what to do about it.”
The lure of Palestinianism has proven to be positivity irresistible to left-leaning humanists and literary scholars who burrow into Western thought to uncover the dark underpinnings of imperialism, militarism, colonialism, oppression, racism, and, as a result of one of the MLA’s notorious past presidents, Edward Said, the theory of “Orientalism,” a mode of thought which claimed to reveal the inherent racism and imperialism imbedded in Western scholarship and politics. The fascination with Third-world victimism, identity politics, and multiculturalism, coupled with harsh critiques of both the U.S. and its proxy in the Middle East, Israel, have all led academics like those in the ASA and the MLA—whose fields are, in a normal world, unrelated to these issues—to involve themselves aggressively in answering calls for boycotts, divestment, and sanctions solely against the Jewish state.
As a result of this obsessive reverence for the purported victims of Israeli policies, one panel planned for the MLA meeting has drawn considerable attention, “Academic Boycotts: A Conversation about Israel and Palestine,” which, as the MLA website put it, “addresses the political movement Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions against Israel, seen by its defenders as a viable means to end the Palestinian occupation.” Besides its seeming irrelevancy at a conference for scholars of language and humanities, this odious panel has been condemned for its blatant one-sidedness: each of the four panelists is a vocal and avowed ideological enemy of, and proponent of boycotts against, Israel.
One of them, Omar Barghouti, ironically also a doctoral student at Tel Aviv University, is the co-founder of the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI), which has been relentlessly urging academic associations to institute boycotts against Israel. Barghouti apologizes for and condones the murder of Jews by Arab terrorists, having mistakenly asserted that “International law does give people under occupation the right to resist in any way, including armed resistance.” He also, as is characteristic of those in the BDS movement, accuses Israel of being a racist entity, suggesting that apartheid is “alive and well inside Israel . . ; it is legalized and institutionalized racism and that’s what makes it apartheid.”
Another panelist, University of California’s David C. Lloyd, is one of BDS’s original supporters, whose belief it is that “If there has been anywhere a systematic denial of academic freedom to a whole population, rather than to specific individuals or to institutions, it is surely in Palestine under Israeli occupation.” Moreover, Lloyd has proclaimed, Israel is committing something he calls “scholasticide” on the hapless Palestinians, since, as he wrote, “Palestinian education, like Palestinian culture and civil society, has been systematically and maliciously targeted for destruction, and “in the time-honored manner of settler colonialism, a powerful and well-armed state seeks to extinguish the cultural life and identity of an indigenous people.”
The fulminations against Israel expected from this panel are not surprising given the MLA’s ideological history, nor is the fact that its members have collectively already determined that this panel will be a monologue of vitriol aimed at the Jewish state, not an academic debate, and that there is one oppressor, Israel, and one victim, the Palestinians. When it comes to Israel, even academics, people who have chosen as their life’s work scholarly discussion and open inquiry, are perfectly willing to vitiate what the academy is supposed to represent and abandon even the pretense of honest debate. The PACBI’s own language not only confirms its disdain for Israel’s side of the conversation, it specifically calls for suppressing opposing views, since Israel, in its view, is illegitimate for being a racist oppressor in the first place—exactly what is taking place on the MLA panel. “Events and projects,” PACBI guidelines read, “involving Palestinians and/or Arabs and Israelis that promote ‘balance’ between the ‘two sides’ in presenting their respective narratives or ‘traumas,’ as if on par, or are otherwise based on the false premise that the colonizers and the colonized, the oppressors and the oppressed, are equally responsible for the ‘conflict,’ are intentionally deceptive, intellectually dishonest and morally reprehensible.” In other words, the default position is that Israel is to blame, and that the Palestinians are blameless victims.
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