Tag: Academic Freedom

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Censoring Palestine: human rights, academic freedom and the IHRA by Lana Tatour

PLEASE TAKE ACTION RIGHT NOW AND SEND YOUR LETTER TO THE UN OFFICE OF THE SPECIAL ADVISER ON THE PREVENTION OF GENOCIDE AND THE INTERNATIONAL CRIMINAL COURT PROSECUTOR.

  1. The racial logic of the IHRA that conflates calls for justice for Palestine with antisemitism, and the McCarthyist environment it has created, is further demonstrated in the recent responses to and the handling of student encampments on our campuses. Inspired by the global student solidarity movement for Palestinian liberation, eleven encampments have been recorded across Australia, demanding that universities divest from companies that benefit from the genocide of Palestinians and boycott Israeli universities and institutions. This immediately triggered an orchestrated right-wing campaign calling the encampments antisemitic and Nazi and labelling the students as terrorism supporters and terrorists.Footnote36 Rather than focusing on the students’ demands, accusations of antisemitism dominated much of the public conversation in the media, by politicians, and in universities about the legitimacy of the encampments. 

Continue reading at https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/1323238X.2024.2385504#abstract

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BDS and Our Movements for Justice: The Academic Boycott at the American Anthropological Association on Jadaliyya

PLEASE TAKE ACTION RIGHT NOW AND SEND YOUR LETTER TO THE UN OFFICE OF THE SPECIAL ADVISER ON THE PREVENTION OF GENOCIDE AND THE INTERNATIONAL CRIMINAL COURT PROSECUTOR.

Sarah Ihmoud: “BDS is one such opportunity for feminist praxis. As Israel’s ongoing settler project remains an enactment of genocidal violence against an indigenous people, through technologies of war, capture, and militarized dispossession… Feminist organizing in Palestine has been deeply invested in dismantling structures of settler colonialism and apartheid that place women and queer folk disproportionately in marginal positions. Like in other colonial and genocidal contexts, Israel has targeted the bodies and sexualities of Palestinian women, as symbolic peripheries of the Palestinian nation.”

Continue watching at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_0E5Io9eqv8

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Can Corporatized Universities Allow Criticism of Israel? by David Swanson

Please TAKE ACTION RIGHT NOW and send your letter to the UN Office of the Special Adviser on the Prevention of Genocide and the International Criminal Court Prosecutor.

Why, in a country that stretches “freedom of speech” to the point of covering the bribery of politicians, should it be acceptable to criticize the United States but not a tiny, distant country only just created in 1948? And why should such censorship reach even into institutions that usually pile “academic freedom” on top of “freedom of speech” as an argument against censorship?

First and foremost, I think, is the nature of Israel. It’s a nation practicing apartheid and genocide in the twenty-first century using U.S. funding and weaponry. It can’t persuade people of the acceptability of these policies in open debate. It can only continue its crimes by insisting that — precisely as a government serving one ethnic group only — any criticism amounts to the threat of apartheid and genocide known as “anti-Semitism.”

Continue reading at http://davidswanson.org/node/4932