Dear Friend of SPME:
Anti-Israel bias is rife in the media’s reporting of the conflict in the Middle East. Unfortunately, this bias has found a place in the academy as well, where its proponents influence faculty, students, and the public. Right now Steven Walt and John Mearsheimer are touring Europe, publicizing their inflammatory and inaccurate book “The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy.” Norman Finkelstein questions the existence of the new anti-Semitism and calls Dershowitz’s “A Case for Israel” a “collection of fraud, falsification, plagiarism and nonsense.” Noam Chomsky and others are promoting an extremist leftist ideology that equates Zionism with racism and colonialism and demonizes Israel, bringing the extreme left into ideological contact with anti-Semites on the extreme right. Scholars for Peace in the Middle East was founded to provide effective scholarly responses to these dangerous ideologies. We need your support.
In the five years of its existence SPME has evolved from a small listserv into an international organization with more than 19,000 scholars from nearly 1,000 Universities around the world who are receiving our publication, the “Faculty Forum,” on a regular basis. These scholars come from different disciplines, faith-groups and nationalities.
SPME has nearly 40 regional and local Chapters, most of them in the United States and has also started organizational work in Europe: a Chapter was formed in Austria in 2006 and another will be established in Germany in the near future. Since spring 2007 a separate German edition of ” Faculty Forum” has been offered to German speaking readers.
In October 2005 SPME organized a scholarly conference “Postcolonial Theory and the Middle Eas t.” The conference proceedings, “Postcolonial Theory and the Arab-Israel Conflict,” published by Routledge, can be ordered through SPME Mart. Next year an SPME conference will deal with “Professors and Presidents with Jewish Problems: Mearsheimer-Walt and Jimmy Carter On Power In America.”
Last year and this spring the British teachers union called for a boycott of Israeli academic institutions. One of SPME’s most important accomplishments was its petition campaign that was instrumental in ending this proposed boycott.
There are good reasons to support SPME financially and to help this organization grow and continue its work:
- With your contribution to SPME you help find answers to anti-Israelism and anti-Semitism in academia on the basis of scholarly research and argumentation, enhancing a fact-based dialogue in academia.
- With your contribution you help SPME organize international scholarly conferences and promulgate their results in scholarly publications.
- With your contribution you help SPME monitor anti-Semitic intimidation on campus and in scholarly publications.
- With your contribution you help publish SPME’s Newsletter, “Faculty Forum,” a service for a continuously growing audience.
- With your contribution you help expand SPME’s network and establish more local or regional Chapters.
- With your contribution you help SPME become an internationally respected voice for academic freedom and cultural and scientific co-operation.
Learn more about SPME and visit our website at spme.org . Be generous and support SPMEat spme.org/donation.html
