Newsgroup: it.politica.internazionale
Titolo: Liberta' accademica a rischio negli USA... II

Un'ottimo documentario:  
http://youtube.com/watch?v=YCVzbGEoAzU
http://www.jta.org/cgi-bin/iowa/news/article/20071016finkelsteinmearsheimer.html
Critics of pro-Israel lobby hold parley
Several of the pro-Israel lobby's strongest critics gathered in
Chicago to fight what they described as Jewish efforts to stifle
academic freedom.
10.16.2007 | Jewish Telegraphic Agency (JTA)
By Ben Harris
CHICAGO (JTA) -- Collectively they have published more than a hundred
books and countless articles. Four are tenured professors at elite
American universities. Internet searches reveal them to be widely
cited experts on international affairs and American foreign policy.
In short, it's difficult to imagine a collection of academics more
secure in their posts or more prominent.
But there they were -- Noam Chomsky, John Mearsheimer, Tony Judt and
fellow travelers -- at a conference last week hosted by the University
of Chicago warning that pressure from American Jewish groups is having
a chilling effect on unpopular scholarship and free-wheeling debate on
university campuses.
"Universities are the one place in the United States where Israel
tends to get treated like a normal country," said Mearsheimer, the
University of Chicago professor and co-author of "The Israel Lobby,"
which asserts that the pro-Israel community stifles debate over U.S.
policy in the Middle East.
"Some find this situation intolerable," he told a nearly packed 1,500-
seat auditorium, "which causes them to work hard to stifle criticism
of Israel and to instead promote a positive image of Israel on
campuses."
Barely a month into the academic year, university campuses are beset
by controversies related to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the
related issue of American policy in the Middle East.
Last week, anti-Muslim posters were found at George Washington
University in an apparent promotion for Islamo-Fascism Week, a week of
events across the country that organizers are billing as the largest
conservative campus protest ever.
The week before, the cancellation of an appearance by Archbishop
Desmond Tutu at a Minnesota university caused an uproar, leading the
university to reverse itself and reinvite Tutu to campus.
To many in the pro-Israel community, the Chicago conference featured a
rogue's gallery of Israel's most vehement critics, a group that
opponents say lavishes attention on the supposed crimes of the Jewish
state while ignoring the terrorism directed at its citizens.
That many of the speakers are Jewish themselves hasn't muted
criticisms of their writings as anti-Semitic, self-hating and Nazi-
sympathizing.
On Sunday, the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in
America, a pro-Israel media watchdog, will host a daylong conference
on the subject titled "Israel's Jewish Defamers."
The Oct. 12 conference, titled "In Defense of Academic Freedom,"
brought together not only Jews and non-Jews, but professors whose
ideological differences are so vast they likely agree on little else
than the notion that Jewish groups have degraded the quality and
breadth of discussion in the media and in Washington.
Mearsheimer is a proponent of the realist school of international
relations, which resists the intrusion of moral considerations into
cold calculations of national interest. Chomsky's belief that American
policy in the Middle East is motivated solely by imperialist
aggression is greatly informed by the moral consequences of American
behavior.
Nevertheless, they came together around the view that universities are
the final redoubts of robust criticism of Israel. Naturally, they
added, these institutions are now coming under assault.
"It's a reversal of the real situation," said Daniel Pipes, director
of Campus Watch, an academic watchdog group that was cited several
times by conference speakers as one of the forces allegedly
suppressing academic freedom.
Pipes noted that when he speaks at universities, he does so under
intense police protection and is frequently interrupted by hecklers.
"When I go on universities, I can barely give a talk," Pipes told JTA.
"Whose academic freedom is being infringed? Noam Chomsky doesn't have
this problem, I do. David Horowitz does. Ann Coulter does. Benjamin
Netanyahu does."
The Chicago parley was most immediately inspired by the case of Norman
Finkelstein, a vigorous critic of Israeli policy and the author of the
controversial books "The Holocaust Industry" and "Image and Reality of
the Israel-Palestine Conflict."
Finkelstein was recommended for tenure at DePaul University by his
department and the college-level tenure committee, but the school's
dean overruled them following a concerted campaign against him led by
prominent Harvard Law Professor Alan Dershowitz.
Mearsheimer professed to not always seeing eye to eye with Finkelstein
on Israel, but nevertheless supported his application for tenure and
delivered an impassioned defense of his scholarly credentials. Denial
of tenure, Mearsheimer claimed in his speech last week, only has one
possible explanation: outside pressure from the pro-Israel community.
"There's no other plausible explanation for the top administrator's
decision to override the recommendations of the political science
department and the college-wide tenure committee," Mearsheimer said.
For those at the conference, Finkelstein has become Exhibit A in the
case against what they see as the pernicious effect of Jewish pressure
on universities. Speakers mentioned other tenure battles, including
the one now being fought over Nadia Abu El-Haj at Barnard College in
New York City, and plenty of instances of failed attempts to have
controversial professors fired.
No other examples were presented, however, to buttress the claim that
pro-Israel groups had made any significant headway in blocking
professorial appointments.
Akeel Bilgrami, a tenured professor of philosophy at Columbia,
reviewed the furor that descended upon his university a few years ago
when Jewish students and "McCarthyite" groups accused several
professors of intimidating and harassing pro-Israel students. A
committee concluded there was no evidence of anti-Semitism, and the
accused professors continue to teach at Columbia.
Neve Gordon, a tenured professor of politics at Ben Gurion University
in Israel, said professors in his country enjoyed much greater freedom
to discuss Middle East issues than their counterparts in the United
States. He further observed that had Finkelstein been teaching at Ben
Gurion, he would have received tenure.
Gordon said the main pressure involving his own controversial words
came from outside Israel. In a letter to the university's president at
the time, the Zionist Organization of America urged Avishay Braverman
to withdraw support for Gordon, citing several examples of his
writings, including those in which he called Israel's separation
barrier an "apartheid wall."
The ZOA warned that it intends "to make our members -- many of whom
are supporters of Ben-Gurion University -- aware of Neve Gordon's
activities and of his position on the faculty of the university."
Gordon is a visiting professor this academic year at the University of
Michigan.
Mearsheimer and Judt both said their universities generally have been
supportive and not caved to outside pressures.
Chomsky, a tenured professor of linguistics at the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology, was unable to attend in person because of his
wife's illness. In videotaped remarks to open the conference, Chomsky
offered his own explanation for what he described as efforts to
suppress Middle East and peace studies departments.
"State power is focused on the war in the Middle East, so impediments
have to be removed and conformist subservience to those in power has
to be ensured in these areas," Chomsky said. Middle East and peace
studies departments are targets since they are "inherently subversive
if they?re at all serious."
Judt, a tenured professor at New York University and author of the
controversial essay "Israel: The Alternative"-- it called the idea of
a Jewish state an "anachronism" -- cited two examples in which he was
disinvited to speak at universities because of his views on the Middle
East.
In one instance, Judt said he was asked not to mention Israel in his
speech -- he turned down the invitation rather than comply. In the
other, the Jewish studies instructor who issued the invitation backed
out, saying that if the event went forward, the instructor's tenure
might be at risk as a result of outside pressure on the the
university.
"Universities are very vulnerable -- that's clear," Judt said.
Judt also dismissed the argument made often by Israel's defenders that
the pro-Israel lobby is but one of many interest groups in Washington.
The pro-Israel lobby is the only one, Judt suggested, that denies its
own existence.
"That makes it a different kind of lobby," he said. "It exists in part
to silence as well as to voice. And it operates, of course, through a
particularly unpleasant moral leverage -- the leverage that comes out
of being able to accuse someone of anti-Semitism."
The conference, held inside the University of Chicago's soaring
Rockefeller Memorial Chapel, was sponsored by the DePaul Academic
Freedom Committee, a group set up amid the controversy over
Finkelstein. Its pews were filled nearly to capacity throughout the
five-hour conference.
The Chicago chapter of Jewish Voices for Peace, listed as one of 10
other co-sponsors, was given a special mention by Tariq Ali, the
conference chair.
Finkelstein, who spoke last and received a standing ovation as he
approached the podium, chose not to discuss the conference topic but
to defend his occasional recourse to uncivil speech -- a transgression
of which he has often been accused and one that even his regular
defenders acknowledge sometimes gets him in trouble.
Finkelstein said there is never an excuse for incivility in the
classroom; professors should seek to teach, not argue for a position.
But outside the university they have the same rights as anyone else,
including the right to outraged expression.
"My own experience has been that young people in particular, they
yearn for persons in authority to speak the unvarnished truth and give
expression to the moral indignation warranted by the occasion,"
Finkelstein said. "There are moments that require breaking out of
constraints of polite discourse to sound the alarm that innocent
people are being butchered while we speak due to the actions of our
government."
Still, Finkelstein called the whole argument over civility a "red
herring," considering "indubitable war criminals" like Henry Kissinger
and Donald Rumsfeld have been offered posts at prestigious
universities.
Focusing on civility is a "meaningless sideshow, or just a transparent
pretext for denying a person the right to teach on account of his
political beliefs."

academic freedom.
Toh!  "JEWISH efforts"!
Che siano un branco di *COGLIONI ANTISEMITI* che il buon Torrieri vuole
portarci in evidenza? :)
-Stefano