New website “Know the Anti-Israel Israeli Professor” details the anti-Israel records of academics who preach boycotts and actions against Israel.
By Yakir Benzion, United With Israel
A new Israeli website “Know the Anti-Israel Israeli Professor” has been launched to help students worldwide and the general public get detailed information on academics who push an anti-Israel agenda, the Im Tirtzu organization announced Sunday.
The website will give people a better understanding of the challenges facing Israel by showing how members of the academic community are abusing their positions to push the international BDS (boycott, divestment, sanctions) campaign and the delegitimization of Israel. The organization wants the public to know that anti-Israel sentiment “does not exist in a vacuum,” but instead is often created, encouraged and spearheaded by a few radical Israeli academics.
Anti-Israel NGOs and pro-Palestinian organizations seize on the views of a small group of radical Israeli professors, no matter how bizarre or factually wrong they are. The anti-Israel academics are then quoted by outside observers who pretend they are neutral and credible authorities on matters concerning Israel, not because they are right, but simply because they are Israelis.
This so-called credibility is then used repeatedly by Israel-haters worldwide to attack Israel, justifying their bigotry with the logic, “Israelis themselves are the ones saying these things, not me!”
In the most bizarre cases, several Israeli professors say they support the BDS call for an academic boycott of Israel, even though it means they they themselves will be boycotted.
One example is Prof. Ilan Pappé, a rabidly anti-Israel academic who fled Israel and now lectures in the Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies at the University of Exeter in the UK.
Anti-Israel activists have for years quoted Pappé, who wrote a book “The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine” despite the fact that the Palestine Central Bureau of Statistics show there are now more Arabs living under Israeli rule than ever before in the history of the planet. The fact that it is impossible for there to be “ethnic cleansing” if the population is increasing is not relevant to anti-Israel activists, who simply trot out factually incorrect quotes from Pappé.
With the new website, people can quickly check the record of academics to see their history of anti-Israel bias.