Hating Israel at New York University

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The recent call by NYU’s chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) for TIAA-CREF to divest holdings in targeted companies doing business in Israel is part of a troubling trend that exposes dangerous radicalism on campuses disguised as efforts at achieving social justice. In 2010, for instance, student-led groups at both UC San Diego and UC Berkeley introduced initiatives to demonize Israel once again in the court of world opinion. One effort, disingenuously named “UCSD Divest for Peace,” was aimed at divesting university funds from U.S. companies which benefit Israel and which take a “non-neutral financial stance in the occupation of Palestinian territories.” The Berkeley initiative, endorsed by 41 student groups in March 2010 and cynically named “A Bill In Support of UC Divestment From [Israeli] War Crimes ​,” was promoted by a broader anti-Israel effort named the “U.S. Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel.”

The latest NYU effort, an “Open Letter to TIAA-CREF CEO and President Roger W. Ferguson from NYU Faculty and Staff,” signed by over 70 members of the NYU community, has as its purpose “to pressure TIAA-CREF into divesting its holdings in 5 key companies which profit from the illegal Israeli occupation and oppression of the Palestinians.” It has at its core the same baseless accusations and libels against Israel, namely, that Caterpillar “sells the bulldozers used by the IDF to destroy Palestinian homes, infrastructure, and fruit and olive trees;” Elbit Systems ​ provides “drones used to kill Palestinian and Lebanese civilians;” Northrop Grumman builds weaponry that “Israel needs to defend itself from crowds of children throwing stones;” Veolia “operates a light-rail system linking Israel’s illegal settlements to Jerusalem;” and Motorola “manufactures surveillance equipment for Israeli checkpoints” [emphasis added].

These companies, it is asserted by SJP, are not only complicit in the slaughter and oppression of the completely innocent Palestinians, but the firms profit, in an immoral and rapacious way, from the suffering caused by their occupation and dispossession. Clearly, there is no historical context to these outrageous claims, no moral balance, no acknowledgement of Israel’s existential threats from Hamas, Hezbollah, and its other genocidal neighbors-only condemnation for being an oppressive, racist, murderous colonial settler state, illegal, in the view of activists, under international law.

This core sentiment has come to define the Boycotts, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement; the notion that the repeated defamation of Israel will result in its eventual expulsion from the supposed civilized community of nations. But the call for divestment is merely a tactic through which Israel will be marginalized, and eventually extirpated, as a pariah state with no moral justification for existing. Thus, Students for Justice in Palestine – which gives public expression to notions of “social justice” for everyone in the Middle East but actually means justice for the Palestinians alone, and not to Israelis – admit, when pushed, that the sole underlying purpose of their calls for divestment is not, as is frequently though falsely described, to create a Palestinian state that will exist “side by side with Israel in peace,” but actually as a new entity that will either economically, militarily, or demographically subsume Israel.

The moral benefit to casting the Palestinians as the perennial victims, of course, is that it makes it easy for SJP and other apologists for terror to justify homicidal aggression against Jewish targets as a legitimate means of “resistance” to occupation-a legitimacy they claim as a right under the intellectually-contorted precepts of international law, which has given NGOs, stateless actors, and radical movements the same rights as democracies engaging in self-defense. SJP and others repeatedly use this intellectual ploy to promiscuously demonize Israel, not to mention to justify terrorism as an acceptable tool in the Palestinian struggle for self-determination. “Resistance is justified when people are occupied!” screamed SJP demonstrators at an NYU rally held last April.

“Divestment campaigns and requests for institutional divestment,” a University of Wisconsin ​ guide for BDS radicals reveals, “provide debate material that places Palestine solidarity groups in the most favorable position to present their case. No other form of activism has generated as much debate and attention towards the plight of the Palestinians as does divestment. No other approach has presented the Palestinian struggle in a more positive light than does divestment.” Divestment activists, the guide instructs, should insure that “the argument is more directed towards questioning the nature of the exclusively-Jewish nature of Israel and the racist policies that allow the existence of such a project.

“This argument is far more effective and winnable than that of debating specific events and facts.”

But if NYU’s Students for Justice in Palestine insists on pushing a call for divestment while ignoring the actual “events and facts” of the Israeli/Palestinian debate, they can never hope to be successful in creating a viable Palestinian state only through the debasement and eventual extirpation of Israel.

http://frontpagemag.com/2011/10/19/the-disingenuity-of-divestment/

Hating Israel at New York University

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AUTHOR

Richard L. Cravatts

Richard L. Cravatts, Ph.D., author of six books, including Dispatches From the Campus War Against Israel and Jews, Jew Hatred Rising: The Perversities of the Campus War Against Israel & Jews, and Weaponizing Our Schools: Critical Race Theory and the Racist Assault on America’s Students is President Emeritus of Scholars for Peace in the Middle East (SPME).

He is currently a Freedom Center Journalism Fellow in Academic Free Speech.

The creator and founding director of Boston University's Program in Publishing & Digital Media at BU’s Center for Professional Education and former Professor of Practice and Director of the master’s program in Communications Management at Simmons College’s School of Management, Dr. Cravatts has also taught more than 20 courses in advertising, marketing, consumer behavior, advertising, and other areas at Tufts University, UMass/ Boston, Suffolk University, Babson College, Boston University, Wentworth Institute, Emerson College, Northeastern University, Florida Atlantic University, Emmanuel College, and others.

Dr. Cravatts has published over 550 articles and book chapters on campus anti-Semitism, the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, campus free speech, terrorism, Constitutional law, Middle East politics, and social policy in the Boston Globe, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Newsweek, Chicago Tribune, Palm Beach Post, Baltimore Sun, Boston Herald, Orange County Register, American Thinker, Jewish Press, Human Events, Harvard Crimson, FrontPage Magazine, Times of Israel, and many others.

He also lectures nationally on the topic of higher education, academic freedom, and the Middle East, and has spoken at, among others, Columbia University, UCLA Law School, Harvard University, Brandeis University, University of Toronto, Stanford University, UC Berkeley, University of Haifa, NYU Law School, Tel Aviv University, and University of Miami.

In addition to serving as a member of the board of directors of Scholars for Peace in the Middle East, Dr. Cravatts is also a board member of The Journal for the Study of Antisemitism, The AMCHA Initiative, The Israel Group, The Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law, Alliance for Israel, and the Florida chapter of the Zionist Organization of America, an advisory board member of the Endowment for Middle East Truth, the Abraham Global Peace Initiative, and The Gross Family Center for the Study of Antisemitism and the Holocaust, and a member of SPME’s Council of Scholars.


Read all stories by Richard L. Cravatts