this seems to relate to a number of issues; among other things, there was an
article in the NYT last week about a book accusing israeli was influencing
US foreign policy, and how various public meetings with the authors kept
getting cancelled...
on the one hand, this book may have just been another variation on the
propaganda the nazis & czarist secret police used to support some case that
the jews have some secret plan to take over the world; on the other, as the
authors were arguing in the article, and some people who wrote letters to
the NYT agreed, any criticism of israel, however justified, seems to be
automatically discounted as "anti-semitism"
this can get ridiculous: i remember a small article in the "jerusalem post"
years ago which accused the BBC of "anti-semitism" because a food review
article said something along the lines of "israeli cuisine is not that
great"...
which is more or less true: if israeli cuisine was as good as classical
french, the best italian or chinese, etc., then i'm sure we would see more
israeli restaurants around the world...
in this case, it seems that pointing out something fairly obvious (to the
extent that it is probably used as a text-book example), i.e. isreal's use
of archaeology (i.e. massada, hebrew inscriptions, early synagogues, etc.)
as a means for establishing their right to occupy or exist within a given
geographical space, is causing controversy; that pointing this out is
equated with "anti-semitism"...
there may be legitimate reasons for disagreeing with this argument/belief,
but that isn't the issue here...
& if this was just the usual academic fight, fine; but it looks like the
limits of academic discourse have already been left far behind...
there may be more to this: maybe the research really is flawed; but that
should be for the dep't or someone's scientific peers to decide, not a pile
of ill-informed alumni blindly waving possibly unjustified accusations of
"anti-semitism"...
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