June 9 at 12:41 am
- washingtonpost.com
- Link
Camille H and Sean McBride liked this
The fact that senior scholars are prevented from speaking in well-known forums because they do not toe an official line suggests that the civic culture on which our country was founded has broken down, at least when it comes to Palestine and Israel. - Lilly Irani
"Broken down" doesn't begin to cover it: neoconservatives are working hard to tear down the U.S. Constitution and Bill Rights and construct a permanent dictatorship and police state (see the Military Commissions and Homegrown Terrorism Acts). They simply cannot tolerate opposing points of view -- a classical psychological trait of messianic totalitarians. - Sean McBride
whoa, you sound like a reddit reader. :) - Lilly Irani
Not that I really want to start a flamewar on friendfeed, but I think this author is grasping at straws. There have definitely been cases of authors being 'uninvited' etc for their political views -- when I was at harvard, it happened both to Tom Paulin as well as a senior Israeli politico -- but the vast majority of times it's a non-issue. or is Chomsky having a hard time finding a forum to speak these days? - david hammer
The author of the article makes a strong case that there is enormous pressure on the American scene to censor and silence opinion that deviates from the AIPAC/Israeli lobby party line. Europeans have remarked on this strange distortion in American politics for decades. See Philip Weiss's commentary on this particular case at Mondoweiss http://www.philipweiss.org/ (Phil is also a Harvard grad.) - Sean McBride
The author of the article gives three anecdotes and tries to make a general claim; she provides no evidence to a larger trend. That sort of article will only convince those who are already convinced -- she gives no evidence of a wider-spread problem. More broadly, there are two discourses on Israel -- one academic, one in the media. I can't dispute the media discourse is woefully uninformed, but the academic one in my experience rarely censors views on Palestine -- if anything it's aggressive. - david hammer
I have personally witnessed many incidents of the type she described, and know many people who have witnessed similar incidents -- quite a few of them at Harvard and other reputable universities. Expect to see major books published on the subject in the coming years, particularly as historians try to figure out how the United States stumbled into the disaster in Iraq. - Sean McBride
