Posted on 06/05/2002 5:16:02 AM PDT by randita
UC professors join call to divest in companies supplying Israel
By Dana Hull
Mercury News
More than 140 University of California professors have signed a petition urging the university to divest in American companies that sell arms to Israel, and similar faculty petitions are circulating at Harvard, MIT, Princeton and Tufts.
The divestment drive borrows a page from the popular anti-apartheid campaigns of the 1980s, when students and professors persuaded universities to sell millions of dollars worth of holdings in companies that did business with South Africa.
``Apartheid is one form of occupation and domination, and what's happening in the West Bank and Gaza is also occupation and domination,'' said L. Ling-chi Wang, a professor of ethnic studies at the University of California-Berkeley. But critics say that comparing Israel to South Africa under apartheid is deeply disturbing, and fear the ``South Africanization'' of the Palestinian cause will widen the already volatile gulf between pro-Israeli and pro-Palestinian student groups on many college campuses.
``It's a massive misinformation campaign that won't help the conflict or the suffering of the Palestinians,'' said Laurie Zoloth, director of the Jewish Studies program at San Francisco State and an activist in the anti-apartheid movement.
``But these are the ways that academics wage war. To turn the struggle of apartheid, and that language, against the people of Israel, and to have it done by Jewish faculty in particular, is an extremely disturbing trend in the American left.''
As of Tuesday afternoon, the petition, available at www.ucdivest.org, had been signed by 141 professors, many of whom teach at the Berkeley campus. The UC system employs 7,599 tenure-track faculty members.
The campaign calls for U.S. and UC divestment until the withdrawal of Israeli armed forces from the occupied territories, the end of the use of torture and of building new settlements, and it calls for Palestinian refugees to either return to their former lands or be compensated for their losses.
So far, the petition does not list specific companies that will be targeted. The ``UC Faculty Divestment Campaign'' was announced Tuesday afternoon at a news conference held at the Berkeley campus's Faculty Club.
A Berkeley student group called Students for Justice in Palestine began organizing its own divestment campaign last year. On April 9, SJP kicked off a national divestment movement, and demonstrations were held at 40 college campuses across the country. Faculty support has lent some credibility to their effort.
``The professors came to us after our April 9 action,'' said Hoang Phan, a doctoral student in the English department who is active in SJP. ``We recognize that divestment doesn't come quickly, but South African divestment didn't come quickly either. It's a big project.''
In Cambridge, Mass., about 400 people -- including faculty members like linguist Noam Chomsky, students and alumni -- have signed a joint Harvard-MIT Petition for Divestment in Israel, at http://harvardmitdivest.org/.
By contrast, hundreds more have signed a counter-petition, which is also circulating on the Internet at http://harvardmit justice.org/.
``The divestment petition does not support peace negotiations between Israelis and Palestinians -- indeed, the word `peace' does not even appear in it; it does not support the citizens of Israel in the face of an endless stream of suicide bombings,'' says the counter-petition.
Investment analysts warn that while divestment campaigns can be politically popular on campus, they are hard to implement.
``You have a sizable group of students and professors who are very supportive of Israel,'' said Simon Billenness, a senior analyst at Trillium Asset Management, an investment firm. ``There was no faculty on the other side who supported South Africa and, politically, that makes this very different.''
Contact Dana Hull at dhull@sjmercury.com or (510) 790-7311.
Time to take out the trash.
Tear down the top guys/gals and you would smear the CVs of every one of their disciples. I for one would love to see Said and the rest of his Arab apologist spawn thrown in the gutter.
Thomas Sowell, in his book Knowledge and Decisions made reference to them. If you and the lurking prof Sowell will forgive a paraphrase, (my copy is not handy at the moment):
He claimed that because their only coin of the realm is their ideas, they adopt positions which are designed to challenge the credibility of those groups who base their claims to authority on other "products" (specifically businessmen who base their authority on wealth, and the military who base it upon use of force)
This would follow then that all "intellectuals" (meaning those who's sole product is information so it would include members of the media) would without fail adopt a position considered to the left of the mainstream.
I can't confirm it at the moment, but it seems to me that if a Russian University professor in 1972 was to take a "radical" position, he would not argue for strengthening the communist party but for a more capitalistic view. This would be viewed as revolutionary, and would still be contrary to those parties in authority.
In my opinion, so much of what Prof. Sowell has stood up to verification, that I'm willing to give his assertions the benefit of the doubt. In other words, ... makes sense to me.
What disturbs me is that two Asians, a Chinese and a Vietnamese, were quoted in this article. The Asians have owed a lot of their success to ignoring politics. I just wonder if this is a fluke or a trend.
Traitors like Noam Chomsky should be deported for at least 6 months to the Palestinean Area to get a reality check.
vaudine
It is unbelievable to me that parents are proud of spending $34,000 a year to send their kids to these socialist/communist sink holes.
I hope every alumni of these schools reads this and keeps their wallets closed when the begging letters come round.
Although I am a great fan of Sowell I have regretfully to yet read any of his books. I do read all his columns that I see and take all other opportunities to see and hear him on TV and radio.
I appreciate your sharing his views on this subject. I have since given it some thought and it may, indeed, be the basis of their beliefs but I still seek something more fundemental, like guilt, greed, desire for power, atonement, etc. Basic gut emotions that afflict us all in different ways. I suspect it may involve all those things and Sowell's "coin of the realm" example may just be another vehicle rather than reason. But, hey, Sowell is much smarter than I am and this is the first I have seen of this idea and it seems a great one.
As for his books, I highly recommend them. For the first time reader I'd recommend The Economics and Politics of Race"
It's hardly his most comprehensive work, but it's a lightning fast read, and doesn't cost too much (relative to his other books). Most of the ideas in it are being recycled in a sort of populist way by Larry Elder in his book "Ten things you can't say in America" but when Larry Elder says it, it lacks that "ring of incontrovertible truth" that comes with all of Dr. Sowell's writing.
Where did these people come from? Why are they called refugee camps? How many of these people are there, and how many are reallt Jordanians?
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