Press Release: The launching of "Israel Academia Monitor"

From the www.monabaker.com archive (legacy material)

Israel Academia Monitor | November 2004

It is with great pleasure that we announce the official opening of the web site for Israel Academia Monitor, at the web address: http://israel-academia-monitor.com/
Israel Academia Monitor is an Israeli watchdog group that monitors abuses of academic freedom and politicalization of Israeli campuses by extremists and radicals in Israeli academia who probably damage Israel because they want to be accepted by the enemy or by some of Israel’s worst adversaries. We have modeled ourselves in part on the highly successful “Campus Watch” organization and monitoring group in the United States.
The purpose of Israel Academia Monitor is to bring to light abuses of academic freedom in Israel. Israeli academic institutions have been misused in recent years as platforms for radical anti-Israel and even anti-Semitic propagandizing, often by tenured radicals with embarrassing academic records and dubious research credentials. Israeli universities have been politicized, with hiring and promotion decisions subordinated to political bias. Israeli extremist academics have misused their podiums to spread anti-Israel libel and venom and to aid haters of Israel and of Jews around the world, including those seeking to boycott and delegitimize Israel and Jews.
The campus extremists have used their comfortable and protected positions in academia to promote insurrection and lawbreaking. They have done so while pocketing the subsidies and budget allocations of Israeli taxpayers and the financial gifts to the universities of donors and contributors. And while Israeli academic extremists insist that their seditious and anti-patriotic behavior must be protected as “academic freedom”, they also believe that no one else should be permitted to monitor, nor criticize them as part of that same freedom. They believe in freedom of speech for leftist radicals and haters of Israel alone, but not for the critics of the radicals, not for the donors and contributors to universities, and not for politicians critical of the abuses inside the universities. Criticism of an anti-Zionist Israeli leftist is, in their opinion, “McCarthyism”.
Israel Academia Monitor was founded and is operated by a group of donors, concerned academics, students, researchers, and others. We bring to light statements and articles written by and about the academic extremists and university anti-Zionists. It is our purpose to expose the activities and statements of Israel’s academic extremists. We encourage students, scholars, and others to submit to us materials, and we will post and publish those that are appropriate and relevant.
We believe it is essential to document and monitor abuses of the cap and gown in Israel and call upon readers to support our efforts and assist us in all ways.
Our web site is filled with citations of anti-Israel extremism, endorsements of Israel’s destruction, rationalizations of anti-Israel terrorism, defamation of Israel and of Jews, all the doings of extremist faculty members at Israeli universities. The citations are arranged by university and by faculty member name. While it would be hard to judge across the institutions, Ben Gurion University is no doubt leading the field, with the worst and largest numbers of anti-Israel fanatics on its faculty. The University of Haifa, Tel Aviv University, and Hebrew University are not far behind. Only the Technion and Bar Ilan University faculty have produced only small amounts of anti-Israel venom.
Among the many rogues featured on the Israel Academia Monitor web site are Oren Yiftachel from Ben-Gurion University, denouncing Israel repeatedly as an apartheid state, Neve Gordon, also from BGU, declaring that Israel is becoming fascist and is a terrorist state worse than the Hamas, Moshe Zimmerman from the Hebrew University comparing the Torah to Mein Kampf, Tanya Reinhart and Paul Wexler from Tel Aviv University calling for a worldwide boycott of Israeli universities, Ran HaCohen from Tel Aviv University endorsing Hizbullah attacks on Israel, and many, many more. We document the Israeli university faculty members who promote mutiny and insurrection by soldiers, who collaborate with anti-Semites and enemies of Israel, who sign petitions defaming Israel and Jews, who support lawlessness and terror.
We encourage reader support and contribution of new materials on the misbehavior of Israeli academic extremists, which will be posted on our web site, and of course financial support as well.
“One day, when historians scratch their heads and wonder just how Israel could have adopted the policies it did in the Oslo era of the 1990s, they will likely devote considerable attention to the role of the country’s academics. In amazement, they will look back on how a number of radicals actively legitimated the agenda of the country’s enemies, thereby doing much to demoralize their fellow nationals.” — Middle East Quarterly