A podcast from KPFK on the threats to academic freedom emanating from the Israel lobby, including comments from Laurie Brand (chair of the Committee on Academic Freedom at the Middle East Studies Association); and a firsthand account of what happened to Desmond Tutu at the University of St. Thomas.
If you have your own blog, it would be a service if someone would type out a transcript of the segment concerning Tutu and post it. Please don’t send me transcripts, since a general appeal like this to thousands of people will produce too many responses. But I’ll link to the first URL I get with a transcript.
Richard Silverstein in The Guardian on “preemptive censorship” in the US of public comment critical of Israeli policies toward the Palestinians.
See also Mitchell Plitnick and Cecilie Surasky, “A Disservice to Jews,”, which also corrects the disinformation in the Zionist Organization of America’s misrepresentation of what Tutu said about the Israeli occupation of the Palestinians.
For more on the smear issue see Suraski here.
A kind reader writes:
‘A transcript of the Desmond Tutu speech which caused his invitation to speak to be be rescinded by the University of St. Thomas is available in document format here.
An html version from a Google archive is here.
The Associated Press writeup of the University of St. Thomas incident is online at the International Herald Tribune site here. ‘
I know about the smear technique myself. When I was being considered for a job at Yale, John Fund of the Wall Street Journal charged that I had called Israel “the most dangerous country in the Middle East.” I had never said anything like that. And how would you convince people that the WSJ was just making things up?
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