SPME
This membership-wide vote will be the second time that the AAA has considered whether the organization and its members should sever ties with Israeli academic institutions. Back in 2016, the AAA’s full membership was also asked to endorse a similarly…
read moreIntroduction April saw the BDS movement launch multiple assaults on Israel and its supporters, via ‘human rights’ organizations and the United Nations, students and faculty on campus, and DEI bureaucracies. These many fronts are designed to manufacture a narrative and…
read moreIntroduction March was characterized by repeated accusations from the BDS movement that it was being ‘silenced.’ These came as campuses were subjected to ‘Israel Apartheid Week’ and an onslaught of anti-Israel programming. The incongruence of these claims point to the…
read moreIntroduction As 2023 begins several BDS related trends have become clear. On the one hand ‘human rights’ industry leaders and their acolytes in academia and the media who obsess over Israel expect institutions to grant sinecures without question in the…
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The movement to delegitimize and pressure Israel economically (known as Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions, or BDS) has promoted the idea that boycotts are a type of speech protected by the First Amendment. A new paper exploring the history of American boycotts disputes…
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The recent Harvard brouhaha over Kenneth Roth’s human rights fellowship at the Kennedy School, has the anti-Israel crowd falsely proclaiming a victory for academic freedom. They bullied the Kennedy School dean, Douglas Elmendorf, after he vetoed Roth’s appointment, by claiming that the…
read moreCommittee A on Academic Freedom and Tenure of the AAUP just published a problematic “Statement” in which it denounced the threat to academic freedom from two – it claims – closely related efforts by “conservative” legislation to suppress freedom of…
read morePhiladelphia, PA (April 6, 2022) – SPME joined three additional leading organizations in urging a dozen U.S. universities to withdraw institutional membership from the Middle East Studies Association (MESA) after the association endorsed an academic boycott of Israel. Failure to…
read moreIntroduction With universities slow to reopen due to COVID the focus on BDS activity in January was suddenly shifted to the Texas synagogue hostage crisis. Calls from Muslim organizations to free convicted terrorist Aafia Siddiqui, including those supporting BDS, was…
read moreIntroduction The fall semester ended with a new study of social media demonstrating that campus ‘diversity, equity, and inclusion’ staffers are important promoters of anti-Israel bias. These staffers are part of a pipeline that extends from student governments through higher…
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