AMCHA further points out that on some of the campuses, between one-quarter and one-half of the anthropology department’s core faculty signed the anti-Israel petition. These include the New School for Social Research (50%), Georgetown University (46%), Wesleyan University (45%), Columbia University (41%), the University of Chicago (33%), Johns Hopkins University (30%), Harvard University (29%), and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (25%).
Even the United Nations, one of the world’s most notoriously biased institutions against Israel, has decreed that Israel’s blockade of the Gaza Strip is legal. But the amazing anthro-apologists state as one of their boycott justifications that the Jewish State has “maintained an illegal siege on the Gaza Strip for seven years.”
If we can’t expect intellectual honesty from these academics, how about just the bare minimum of fact-checking?
The American Anthropological Association’s annual meeting is scheduled to take place in Washington, D.C. on Dec. 3 – 7, 2014. The executive director of the AAA, Prof. Ed Liebow, said that no boycott motion has been submitted, and that the AAA has never engaged in academic boycotting.
Liebow’s reassuring claim, however, is undermined by the assertions of David Rosen, a professor of anthropology at Fairleigh Dickinson University. Rosen noted in a comment on the excellent site Legal Insurrection: four roundtables are scheduled for the AAA meeting, three of which are filled with hard-core BDS activists and supporters. The key panel will include such Israel boycott “professionals” (and non-anthropologists) as Omar Barghouti, Rebecca Vilkomerson, head of the most vituperatively anti-Israel Jewish Voice for Peace, Richard Falk of UN anti-Israel fame, and Noura Erekat, BDS activist.