The BDS campaign against Israeli institutes and individuals has been rolling full steam. Last week, Gerry Leisman, Professor & Research Fellow at the University of Haifa, disclosed a BDS attempt against him. He explained that he recently published a call for paper for the Journal Brain Sciences special issue entitled, “The Brain Goes to School,” where he is a guest editor. He added that they are recruiting “reviews and results of experimental studies relating to human learning, its difficulties, remediation strategies, models, cognitive science, cognitive neuropsychology all essentially attempting to translate 150 years of cognitive neuroscience into classroom applications.” Leisman sent his call to a mailing list in this field where he is a member.

Shortly after, all members of the list received an email from Dr. Karen Froud, Program Director, Neuroscience & Education Columbia University Teachers College, who urged to boycott Leisman: “Dear colleagues – I urge you to consider this request in light of the Boycotts, Divestments and Sanctions Movement for freedom and justice in Palestine. Like many / most academic institutions in Israel, Haifa University is an apartheid institution.” Froud inserted a link to the BDS movement’s website that discusses the University of Haifa. She stated that “I recognize that many of you work within this institution and hope you are also doing your part for academic freedom.” Froud is a member of the Arabic Linguistics Society who also researches Palestinian Arabic.

Clearly, Froud forgot that the BDS movement central command repeated time and again that BDS does not target individual Israelis but rather Israeli institutions.

This is not surprising, given that Froud is a pro-Palestinian activist. She was a signatory of a 2016 petition, “Columbia University in the City of New York Faculty Petition. The signatories stated that they “stand with Columbia University Apartheid Divest, Columbia Students for Justice in Palestine as well as with Jewish Voice for Peace in calling upon the University to take a moral stance against Israel’s violence in all its forms. We demand that the University divest from corporations that supply, perpetuate, and profit… associated with the State of Israel’s military occupation.”

Trace Miller, the managing editor of the NYU student newspaper Washington Square News wrote an opinion piece titled “NYU, shut down the Tel Aviv study abroad site.” He argued that since Amnesty International released a report last month concluding that Israel is guilty of perpetrating apartheid against the Palestinians, NYU’s Tel Aviv University academic center partnership is nothing short of complicity. Miller also provided photos of the security wall between Israel and Palestine that he took, raising the question whether he was given a trip in exchange for articles. Miller self-admittedly stated that “He likes Marx,” so those familiar with the topic would assume he could be Lenin’s “Useful Idiot.”

The other BDS case pertains to an academic conference at the University of Bahrain last week. The faculty of business administration hosted “the Middle East Conference of Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business” on the 2nd and 3rd of March 2022. An Israeli scholar from the Tel Aviv University Coller School of Management presented a paper when a Kuwaiti academic delegation left the conference in protest to the Israeli presenter. The Kuwaiti delegation forgot that BDS does not target individual Israeli scholars.

The announcement of the Kuwaiti delegation leaving the conference was published by the Iranian press and was hailed by Hamas.

The three cases are all connected. BDS should be taken as a threat to Israel’s national security since the Palestinians, with the help of Iran, Qatar and Kuwait, try to mobilize the international community to delegitimize Israel. The Jerusalem Post just published an article “The long-term strategy of those seeking to destroy Israel,” a review of the recently published book Soft Threats to National Security: Antisemitism, BDS, and the De-legitimization of Israel, co-edited by IAM’s CEO, Dr. Dana Barnett, together with Bar-Ilan University BESA Center’s former director, Prof. Efraim Karsh.

The reviewer, David Stone, wrote that the book is a “long-overdue academic review of a relatively neglected phenomenon of the soft threats to Israel’s security.” Stone has argued that Israel is facing a formidable challenge, a “long-term strategy to obliterate the Jewish state’s existence. Her enemies launched their project with conventional warfare (hard power), proceeded to the intifadas (terrorism), and – in light of the limited impact of these approaches – a global campaign of delegitimization (soft power).” According to Stone, “This book should be compulsory reading for every Israeli politician and official with a remit for Israel’s security. By mapping out in forensic detail a growing source of serious danger to the country, one that has been quietly incubating for many decades in the shadows, these authors are sounding the alarm loudly and urgently.”

IAM has been reporting on these issues since 2004. It is important to reiterate Stone’s pleading, “Is anyone listening?”

References
https://www.jpost.com/opinion/article-699226

Jerusalem Post Opinion
The long-term strategy of those seeking to destroy Israel

Editors Dana Barnett and Efraim Karsh have curated a long-overdue academic review of a relatively neglected phenomenon of the soft threats to Israel’s security.

By DAVID STONE Published: MARCH 3, 2022 15:10

Soft Threats to National Security
(photo credit: ROUTLEDGE)

Israel is currently facing a formidable challenge – the latest (third) phase of the long-term strategy to obliterate the Jewish state’s existence.

Her enemies launched their project with conventional warfare (hard power), proceeded to the intifadas (terrorism), and – in light of the limited impact of these approaches – a global campaign of delegitimization (soft power). All three phases overlap and are synergistic.

Originally published as a collection of articles in Israel Affairs (volume 27, issue 21, 2021), editors Dana Barnett and Efraim Karsh have curated a long-overdue academic review of a relatively neglected phenomenon of the soft threats to Israel’s security. These include the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement and its associated tactics of demonization and lawfare.

Gelber sets the scene by describing Israel’s failed struggle to win the propaganda war following the 1967 victory. Two weeks after the war, prime minister Eshkol called a meeting to discuss Israel’s rapidly deteriorating position in world opinion. Director-General of the PM’s Office Yaakov Herzog noted in his diary that the event had been “a totally depressing get-together.” In the ensuing years, state-initiated hasbara efforts were equally dispiriting.

Kramer warns that BDS is at least as much of a problem for diaspora (particularly American) Jews as for Israel. US Jews are a key target of BDS as they are perceived as “over-represented” in American academic specialties that are downsizing. Many Jewish scholars now have to pass a litmus test of acceptability by denouncing Israel and approving of BDS. This is classic antisemitic scapegoating in the guise of human rights.

In a dispassionate but devastating dissection, Steinberg exposes the anti-Israeli agenda of Human Rights Watch with its eye-watering $92 million annual budget. This highly influential NGO, led by Kenneth Roth since 1993, regularly hurls bile-laden accusations against Israel at the expense of far more egregious human rights violators in the MENA region and elsewhere. Roth denies accusations of antisemitism, yet his behavior suggests otherwise, such as his deployment of the old antisemitic eye for an eye trope in condemning Israeli actions.

Friesel’s chapter on Jewish (including Israeli) anti-Israelism is especially disturbing. It demonstrates the extent to which traditional Christian-based Western Jew-hatred has been internalized by many Jewish intellectuals. These self-proclaimed “progressives” appear to have lost the capacity for critical, evidence-based analysis of Zionist history and lack insight into the way their own insecurities are exploited by non-Jewish antisemites. Their negative Jewish identity borders on a collective psychopathology that is neither classically antisemitic nor adequately characterized as Jewish self-hatred.

In three chapters that cluster conveniently together, Gilboa, Mandler and Lutmar, and Derri offer powerful critiques of the ruthless methods Israel’s detractors have employed to misappropriate the foundational values of key international agencies such as the United Nations (notably its Human Rights Council) and the International Criminal Court in pursuit of their relentless and highly productive effort to vilify Israel.

Yahel – in describing the exploitation of Bedouin grievances by a variety of NGOs – reveals the multifaceted drive to portray Israel as a brutal settler apartheid state that purposely discriminates against indigenous residents and systematically violates international law. This has proved so useful to anti-Israel activists that one suspects that the Bedouin issue (now rebranded as Palestinian), like that of the 1948 Palestinian refugees, has been deliberately sustained as a running sore through the rejection of successive attempts by the Israeli government to find an equitable solution.

Stellman’s overview of the various strands of modern antisemitism – far Left, far Right, Islamist – describes how strange bedfellows bury their differences to prioritize their hostility to Jewish sovereignty. He proposes a counter strategy, namely, to turn the age-old accusation of a global Jewish conspiracy on its head by highlighting the synergy and collaboration that disparate groups of antisemitic anti-Zionists pursue in their common goal of defeating Israel through demonization.

In the penultimate chapter, Torpor suggests that those waging this covert war on Israel are attempting to tighten the noose, not only around Israel, but the Jewish world as a whole. The inevitable convergence of BDS with delegitimization and antisemitism completes the circle of hostility to the Zionist roots of the Jewish state at precisely the point at which it began: unbridled hatred of Jews both individually and collectively. Torpor calls for the dark underbelly of the BDS movement to be exposed and for further research into the transformation of legitimate criticism of Israel into antisemitism.

Atlan rounds off proceedings by tracing the history of the modern BDS phenomenon to Russian and then Soviet political warfare that laid the ideological groundwork for much subsequent anti-Israeli propaganda, particularly from the political Left, which is so familiar to us today.

This book should be compulsory reading for every Israeli politician and official with a remit for Israel’s security. By mapping out in forensic detail a growing source of serious danger to the country, one that has been quietly incubating for many decades in the shadows, these authors are sounding the alarm loudly and urgently. Is anyone listening? ■

Soft Threats to National Security
Antisemitism, BDS, and the De-legitimization of Israel

Editors: Dana Barnett, Efraim Karsh

Routledge

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https://www.facebook.com/733206905/posts/10158050543891906/

Gerry Leisman
26 February at 09:41

It is not just tyrannical Russia, “wokism” and “cancel culture” that is creating the decline and fall of western civilization. It is also the tyranny of loss of freedom to think and conclusions drawn on the basis of media soundbites, political agendas, and a general lack of intellectual integrity. I share with you an email sent by a faculty person at Teacher’s College of Columbia University to numerous colleagues of mine who are potential contributors to a project in Neuroeducation. I also include my response to her. I would suggest that each of my friends understand the gravity of this event. As you know, I am Professor & Research Fellow at the University of Haifa and Professor of Restorative Neurology at Universidad de Ciencias Médicas in Cuba.
GL:
Hi,
I am the guest editor of a special issue of the Journal Brain Sciences and we are producing a special issue of the journal entitled, “The Brain Goes to School, details for which can be found at the following link:
https://www.mdpi.com/…/brai…/special_issues/brain_school
We are recruiting both reviews and results of experimental studies that relate to human learning, its difficulties, remediation strategies, models, cognitive science, cognitive neuropsychology all essentially attempting to translate 150 years of cognitive neuroscience into classroom applications…….
Karen Froud, PhD (Columbia University Teacher’s College):
“Dear colleagues –
I urge you to consider this request in light of the Boycotts, Divestments and Sanctions Movement for freedom and justice in Palestine. Like many / most academic institutions in Israel, Haifa University is an apartheid institution. https://bdsmovement.net/tags/haifa-university
I recognize that many of you work within this institution and hope you are also doing your part for academic freedom.
Warm wishes for a peaceful and just world – which after all is where educational neuroscience as a field points us.
Karen Froud, Ph.D.
Program Director, Neuroscience & Education
Columbia University Teachers College”
GL Response:
Dear Karen and the rest of the addressees on the contact list.
You, Karen, have every right to your opinion. Unfortunately, you are playing politics with science and as a science-based individual, you are making a number of assumptions based on something other than fact.
I will deal with your misconceptions in seriatim.

1. Firstly, it is quite audacious of you to claim that you support academic freedom by requesting others to shut down academic freedom. Before I begin, may I call your attention to the UN Declaration of Human Rights (1949) Article 19, which you obviously have not read, that states, “Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression: this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.” (So much for your understanding of Human Rights and Academic Freedom).

2. What you want is not a boycott but rather political pressure on second parties to pressure third parties to affect policy-change by that third party (i.e. the government the State of Israel). That is not even a secondary boycott but rather just simply bullying. So much for academic discourse on your part on an issue that has nothing to do with the project in Neuroeducation. What makes your opinions valid and those of others not? Some website? Do you base your actions on an order on a website? Your actions are inconsistent with the notion of Academic Freedom, but rather with an opinionated individual raming his/her political agenda down the throats of academics on a mailing list. This behavior does not seem to me to be supportive of Academic Freedom, but rather more consistent with the behavior of German schools and Universities of 1930’s. Would you like to ban books too – I think certain school districts in the United States already have (e.g. Maus). This is surely not how we proceed in the world of science and ideas. Now to the facts.

3. Israel is not an “Apartheid” state as you claim. Well over 40 percent of the students at the University of Haifa are of Arab descent. The Arab population of Israel is 21 percent. The enrollment of Arab minorities in higher education is approximately 17 percent – pretty close to the proportion in the population. Had you had the intellectual integrity to fact-check, you might have found that out yourself from OECD data. The same data shows that the number of students who work toward undergraduate and master’s degrees is rising. Does that sound like Apartheid to you? You should probably read a about what happened to non-“white” South Africans under Apartheid before you employ that term.

4. The recently appointed justice to the Supreme Court, Tel Aviv District Court Judge Khaled Kabub, is a Muslim. Bedouins, Israel’s indigenous Arab population, serve in the Army and many have given their lives in that regard. Israel’s population is a tapestry of Arab Muslims, Maronites, Coptics, Arameans, Assyrians, Druse, Caucasians (not the one’s on your university’s diversity forms), Circassians, Samaritans, Vietnamese, not to mention refugees from Eritrea, South Sudan, as well as refugees (non-Jewish) from Bosnia and Kosovo, besides the Jewish population, 60 percent of whom derive from Arab lands and Egypt as well as from non-Arab Muslim countries. Did you not know that?

5. The present government consists of a coalition that includes Dr. Mansour Abbas, leader of the Ra’am party and who de facto serves as a “kingmaker” and could easily bring the government down in a no-confidence vote.

6. Rana Raslan is an Israeli Muslim Arab woman who in 2021 became Miss Israel – that, Karen, does not happen in an Apartheid state.

7. Arab Israeli’s Hossam Haick has successfully developed technologies for sniffing out disease; Kossay Omary and Rabeeh Khoury developed miniature computers; Jamil R. Mazzawi founded Optima Design Automation, a startup developing software for self-driving cars and Mahmoud Huleihel made a breakthrough in the field of male infertility. Oh I could wax on, but investigate yourself.

8. Israel is a multi-ethnic society with its citizens sharing equal rights and hopefully equal opportunity.

9. Sixty percent of the Jewish population were heave-hoed from Arab lands. What do you have to say about that?

10. In 1948 the UN partitioned the area into a Palestinian and Jewish State, the West Bank was occupied by Jordan. I guess you had no problem with that. A year prior, 25 August 1947, the UN did the same when it created West and East Pakistan (later Bangaladesh), Muslim countries, and separated them from India. The largest population move in human history occurred as result. The partition displaced between 10 and 20 million people along religious lines, creating overwhelming refugee crises in the newly constituted dominions. The result of that is still ongoing and violent and it is the Punjab. Got nothing to say?

11. Maybe I should boycott your institution for suppressing the voices and academic freedom of people who oppose your views. Maybe I should boycott US universities because your government has lied since its inception about the ideals of equality to wit, 3/5 human being, Alien and Sedition Act, Jew quotas in universities (including yours), lynchings of ethnic undesirables oh, and slavery. Maybe the USA should start thinking about giving back the Kingdom of Hawaii. Maybe you should boycott the University of Hawaii and all other American universities to pressure the US government to give it back.

12. More importantly right now, you have the audacity to attempt to shut down the free exchange of scientific ideas assuming that I am a full-time member of the faculty of the University of Haifa in Israel. Had you even bothered to look at my affiliation you might have noted that I hold a dual appointment at the University of the Medical Science of Havana in Cuba (appointment letter attached). Please read it and you will note that although Cuba and Israel do not have diplomatic relations, I was appointed by the Cuban Ministry of Health and by the Rectorate of Universidad de Ciencias Médicas de la Habana, of the Communist Republic of Cuba AS AN ISRAELI ACADEMIC (see link). Seems that the Cubans who understand embargo and have tough life largely owing to political forces in the USA, of which you seem to have no interest, especially understand the importance of Academic Freedom and the notion of the need to, “receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.”

13. With the world in the present state that it is in and possibly heading to WW III and nuclear threats coming from Russia, please relate to the concept of proportional thinking.

14. I don’t know if I can change your thinking as it seems that you have fomented opinions already. However, you need to apologize, at the very least, to the individuals on this list, for not dealing with me directly so that you could voice your concerns and I could listen and discuss ideas with you and you with me. That is what we do in academia. I expect nothing less.

Sincerely, Gerry Leisman

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https://nyunews.com/opinion/2022/03/01/shut-down-nyu-tel-aviv/
Opinion: NYU, shut down the Tel Aviv study abroad site
Amnesty International released a report last month concluding that Israel is guilty of perpetrating apartheid and other violations of international law against Palestinians. NYU’s Tel Aviv academic center and partnership with Tel Aviv University is nothing short of complacency and, by extension, complicity.
By Trace Miller, Managing Editor
March 1, 2022

NYU should shut down its Tel Aviv study abroad site. Maintaining an academic center in Israel signals complacency toward — and, thereby, complicity in — the apartheid, crimes against humanity and other violations of international law that the state of Israel perpetrates against Palestinians.

On Feb. 1, Amnesty International joined a U.N. special rapporteur, Human Rights Watch, and the Israeli human rights organizations Yesh Din and B’Tselem in concluding that the state of Israel is guilty of perpetrating these crimes.

This is not a groundbreaking revelation. Palestinians have been detailing the realities of Israeli apartheid and calling for its recognition as such for more than two decades, according to the Amnesty report. In November 2019, a coalition of Palestinian human rights organizations submitted a report to the U.N. Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination concluding that Israel “has created and maintained an apartheid regime.”

More recently, in April 2021, the Palestinian Human Rights Organizations Council submitted an amicus brief to the CERD arguing that Israel’s violations of the U.N. International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination must be analyzed in the context of the convention’s third article, which condemns apartheid and racial segregation and undertakes “to prevent, prohibit and eradicate all practices of this nature in territories under [the signatories’] jurisdiction.” Israel signed ICERD in 1966 and ratified it in 1979. Its infringement of ICERD’s third article — as well as multiple other articles — was reported with concern by the CERD in 2007, 2012 and 2020.

A system of violence and discrimination

The nature and specifics of Israel’s crimes against Palestinians is detailed in all these reports. To summarize these crimes is to pass judgment on which particulars of a totalizing — and arguably totalitarian — system of violence and discrimination are most worthy of mentioning. But summarize we must in order to condemn.

Jerusalem-based author and journalist Nathan Thrall reports in the “London Review of Books,” that “Israelis and Palestinians in the same territory … are tried in different courts, one military, one civilian, for the same crime committed on the same street.” Israel denies Palestinians the freedoms of expression, assembly, movement and habeas corpus.

“The discrimination is not just national — by Israelis against Palestinians who lack citizenship — but ethnic, by Jews against Palestinian subjects and citizens alike,” Thrall writes.

The state of Israel is guilty of grave violations of Palestinians’ most basic human and civil rights: Palestinians are subjected to discrimination, violence, forced displacement and ethnic cleansing. Israel’s status as an apartheid state has been recognized by numerous national and international human rights organizations. Moreover, Israel reserves the right to ban activists involved in Jewish Voice for Peace or the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement — and even to deny entry to foreigners who have called for a boycott of Israel or its settlements. These actions are illegal under international law.

NYU cannot, in good conscience, operate an academic center in an apartheid state while claiming in its non-discrimination and anti-harassment policy to be committed to creating an environment free of harassment and discrimination based on race, color, creed, religion, national origin, ethnicity or citizenship status.

Anti-apartheid action at the university
Taking action against apartheid within NYU is not unprecedented. The NYU Student Senators Council voted unanimously in 1985 to divest from corporations doing business with the state of South Africa “in recognition of the abhorrent discriminatory practices of the government of South Africa.” The Graduate Student Organizing Committee — the graduate student worker union at NYU — voted to join the BDS movement and called for the university to shut down its Tel Aviv campus in 2016.

NYU president Andrew Hamilton responded to the GSOC vote with a statement reading “a boycott of Israeli academics and institutions is contrary to our core principles of academic freedom, [and] antithetical to the free exchange of ideas.” Hamilton flatly stated that “divestment from Israeli-related investments is not under consideration.”

Two years later, in 2018, the NYU student government passed a resolution to divest from corporations “involved in the violation of Palestinian human rights,” including Caterpillar and General Electric, which still equip NYU with power, and Lockheed Martin, a corporate partner of the Tandon School of Engineering. Later that year, the Department of Social and Cultural Analysis pledged non-cooperation with NYU Tel Aviv until Israel grants academic freedom to all regardless of ancestry or political speech. Non-cooperation means the department neither sponsors faculty teaching at the Tel Aviv campus nor utilizes “any of its resources to facilitate faculty exchanges between the department and the [study abroad] program.”

In response to the student government vote, the university administration stated that it would not divest because “the endowment should not be used for making political statements.” Nevertheless, faculty and student groups have continued organizing against the Tel Aviv study away site. Faculty of Color for an Anti-Racist NYU pledged non-cooperation with NYU Tel Aviv in June 2021; their open letter was signed by hundreds of faculty, alumni, staff, and undergraduate and graduate students, as well as multiple student organizations. Just this past year, the NYU Review of Law & Social Change committed to BDS. And in mid-2020, GSOC condemned NYU’s decision to include the academic center in its list of Go Local sites and called for its closure.

GSOC called for the academic center’s closure in 2016, not only because of Israel’s discriminatory entry laws, but also because of NYU Tel Aviv’s partnership with Tel Aviv University, which is built atop the razed Palestinian village of Shaykh Muwannis. This partnership involves internships at TAU’s medical and scientific laboratories for NYU students as well as access to the university’s library. TAU is a well-regarded research university. Not well-reported, however, is the university’s role in collaborating with the Israel Defense Forces and perpetrating the state of Israel’s war crimes against Palestinians.

The Palestine Society at SOAS University of London published a report in February 2009 detailing TAU’s complicity in Israel’s invasions of Lebanon in 2006 and Gaza in 2008, the role of university institutes in writing Israel’s security policies and war tactics, and the involvement of university faculty and researchers in military research and development. According to the Palestine Society, TAU professor Asa Kasher wrote the IDF code of ethics justifying torture and assassination of soldiers and TAU researchers have called for the IDF to target civilians and civilian infrastructure rather than militants and military infrastructure in its wars against Hamas and Hezbollah.

The number of NYU faculty and student organizations and university institutions that have organized against the Tel Aviv academic center is inspiring and indicative. Thousands of members of the NYU community oppose their university’s presence in an apartheid state and its collaboration with an institution complicit in war crimes and other crimes against humanity.

The NYU administration, however, continues to reject petitions to boycott or shutter NYU Tel Aviv because the demands are “at odds with the tenets of academic freedom” and would suppress free speech, debate and exchange of ideas. Regrettably, our university president and spokespeople have failed to recognize that there neither is, nor can be, so-called academic freedom in a nation that denies the freedoms of expression, assembly, movement and habeas corpus to portions of its population because of their race, color, creed, religion, national origin, ethnicity or citizenship status.

Hamilton, like most liberal U.S. academics, has no qualms denouncing violence and violations of human rights when they come from further right on the political spectrum or are directed at white Europeans. However, he draws the line at denouncing this instance of Western imperialist violence against people of color. The words “occupation in Palestine” seemingly fill him with nothing close to dread or sorrow — otherwise he might denounce Israeli apartheid.

The state of Israel is guilty of apartheid, crimes against humanity and other violations of international law. TAU is complicit in war crimes. And yet, NYU maintains an academic center in Israel — thereby discriminating against Palestinians and supporters of BDS — in partnership with TAU, tacitly endorsing the violence of the nation’s colonial project. Such a situation begs the question: Would NYU have maintained a campus in South Africa in the 1980s as its students protested it?

Enough is enough. To NYU senior leadership and the board of trustees, I say, bring the university in line with its own ideals and policies. End the university’s implicit endorsement of apartheid and war crimes. Shut down the Tel Aviv academic center.

Views expressed in the Opinion section do not necessarily reflect those of WSN, and our publication of opinions is not an endorsement of them.

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