The backlash against the American Studies Association’s (ASA) decision to boycott Israel has started to migrate from the ivory tower to the halls of state power.
The most powerful state legislator in Albany, Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver, announced Friday that he plans to introduce a bill that would target the ASA. His bill would seek to prohibit state funding from going to the academic group. And a Congressional letter circulating in Washington that condemns the academic boycott of Israel has garnered the support of over four dozen politicians. It amounts to a full-on assault against the ASA over its December decision to boycott Israeli academic institutions over their complicity with human rights abuses against Palestinians.
The Silver bill was publicized about two weeks after an even more punitive bill against the ASA was announced by two separate New York state Democrats, Dov Hikind and Jeff Klein.
The legislation set to be introduced by Silver will prohibit colleges and universities from giving state aid to organizations that support “discriminatory boycotts,” Capital’s Jessica Bakeman reports.
“Actions such as the American Studies Association’s discriminatory boycott of Israel and its academic institutions are a blatant assault on the academic freedoms that New York and its students have come to hold dear,” Silver said in a statement released Friday. “Colleges should not use taxpayer funds to support boycotts, resolutions or any similar actions that are discriminatory and limit academic opportunities.” Silver’s press release announcing the bill added that “colleges violating the ban would not be eligible for state aid during the academic year in which the violation occurs.”
But the ASA does not receive direct funding from states, Curtis Marez, the ASA’s current president, told me in an e-mail. While some students and faculty at state schools may use university funding to travel to ASA conventions, the amount is minimal. Under Silver’s bill, though, even that minimal funding would be cut off.
“Silver seems to be taking a page from disgraced former Harvard President Lawrence Summers who finds the boycott abhorrent and then turns around and proposes a boycott of the ASA,” said Marez.
The bill is similar in spirit to the one introduced by Hikind and Klein, who announced plans to pass a bill that would cut off state aid to schools that retain membership in the ASA. (The bill’s logic is faulty, though: institutional membership in the ASA is usually limited to a specific department, not an entire school.)
The Hikind-Klein bill was criticized by universities, even if the schools are against the ASA boycott. “The solution to an ill-conceived boycott should not be legislation which itself appears to tread on academic freedom,” New York University spokesman John Beckman told the New York Daily News.
Efforts to condemn the ASA’s boycott of Israel are also picking up steam at the federal level, though no legislation targeting the ASA has been introduced. Instead, a bipartisan letter criticizing the academic boycott has gained a number of signatures. The missive is being circulated by Reps. Ted Deutch (D-FL), Peter Roskam (R-IL), Doug Collins (R-GA) and Bradley Schneider (D-IL), the Times of Israel‘s Rebecca Shimoni Stoil reports.
“While ASA has every right to express its views on policies pursued by any nation or government, we believe that the decision to blacklist Israeli academic institutions for Israeli government policies with which ASA disagrees demonstrates a blatant disregard for academic freedom,” the letter reads in part. “Even more concerning is the singular targeting of Israel for boycott, which suggests thinly-veiled bigotry and bias against the Jewish State.”
The American Jewish Committee’s Government Affairs Twitter account sent out a number of “thank yous” to legislators who signed onto the letter:
Thank you @RepSteveIsrael for signing the @PeterRoskam @RepTedDeutch letter opposing #ASA decision to boycott Israeli academic institutions!
— AJC Gov Affairs (@AJCgov) January 13, 2014
Thank you @RepTrentFranks for signing the @PeterRoskam @RepTedDeutch letter opposing #ASA decision to boycott Israeli academic institutions!
— AJC Gov Affairs (@AJCgov) January 13, 2014
Figures, meanwhile, the wakeup of America continues on the Scott Horton show: http://scotthorton.org/interviews/2014/01/13/011314-reza-marashi/
Is the ASA a private organisation financed by the subscriptions of its members or is it in receipt of public funds? Would the legislative attack have the effect of prohibiting ASA meetings on the premises of publicly -funded institutions?
Thank you!!!
…say I to these stupid bought and paid for politicians – and their patrons – who don’t understand that any publicity for or against BDS these days is good publicity.
We have nothing to hide, whenever even vaguely reasonable people start to look into the situation in Israel/Palestine the full horror of it all unfolds. The hasbara comes crashing down, often followed by intense anger. People don’t like being lied to.
I tend to doubt any of these initiatives by these lawmakers are going to pass muster and become law. It sounds like they want to punish the universities for hosting an organization that receives little or no financial support from the state, so it probably won’t make a dent. I think of greater concern would be if some of these lawmakers attempt to expand the Title VI clause on antisemitism to include speech or displays somehow deemed ‘anti-Israel’, although I don’t see how they would go about doing that without violating basic principles of free speech protections.
RE: “The Hikind-Klein bill was criticized by universities, even if the schools are against the ASA boycott. ‘The solution to an ill-conceived boycott should not be legislation which itself appears to tread on academic freedom,’ New York University spokesman John Beckman told the New York Daily News.” ~ Kane
MY COMMENT: Treading on academic freedom comes quite naturally to proto-fascists like Hikind!
SEE: “New McCarthyism: Brooklyn College fires teacher who dared to speak out for Palestinian self-determination”, by Philip Weiss, Mondoweiss, 1/31/11
SOURCE – https://mondoweiss.mystagingwebsite.com/2011/01/new-mccarthyism-brooklyn-college-fires-asst-prof-who-dared-to-speak-out-for-palestinian-self-determination.html
P.S. FROM Anonymous @- Mondoweiss on May 11, 2011:
SOURCE – https://mondoweiss.mystagingwebsite.com/2011/05/jeffrey-wiesenfelds-political-nexus.html