Israel Matzav

What Im Tirtzu is fighting for

Some of you may have heard about threats by Pastor John Hagee to cut off his funding of Im Tirtzu, the Zionist group that exposed the connection between the New Israel Fund and the Goldstone Report, and which last week started following up on an ultimatum given to Ben Gurion University to balance their political science faculty. It would be a pity if Hagee were to stop funding Im Tirtzu. Caroline Glick describes some of the good that Im Tirtzu is doing.

As Ma'ariv's Ben Dror Yemini reported this week, at Hebrew University's law school, Prof. Yehuda Shenhav teaches a class called "Bureaucracy, Governance and Human Rights." In the course of their studies, the students are expected to participate in the work of anti-Zionist organizations including Machsom Watch and Yesh Din. At the end of the year, the participants - who will be paid NIS 1,450 for their activism - are expected to write an article describing their experiences which will be turned into a booklet edited by Shenhav and anti-Zionist activists Michael Sfard and Yael Barda and published by their anti-Zionist NGOs.

The situation at Ben-Gurion University's Politics and Government Department is particularly distressing. It is headed by Dr. Neve Gordon, an anti-Zionist activist who has written that Israel is a "proto-fascist state," has castigated it as an "apartheid state" and has signed petitions calling for international academic, scientific, economic and cultural boycotts of the country.

Responding to complaints from students, Im Tirtzu undertook an examination of the Politics and Government Department faculty. It discovered that among the department's 11 tenured instructors, nine are involved in extreme leftist political activity. Led by Gordon, six of the 11 signed a letter supporting soldiers who refuse to serve in the IDF.

Both of the department's research fellows are notorious among their students for their anti-Zionist views. Eight of the department's 19 adjunct lecturers publicly espouse radical leftist views. Three of the department's six doctoral candidates have signed letters in support of Gordon's calls for international boycotts.

AS EREZ Tadmor, Im Tirtzu's research director, noted in a television interview last week, these views represent the politics of but a smattering of the public. And yet, they are the predominant view of the department. In a place where the most radical, dogmatic views - views that reject the state's very right to exist - predominate, it is impossible to imagine that the average student feels comfortable exploring and researching other thought streams. Consequently, it is reasonable to fear that far from educating students, the department engages in wholesale indoctrination of students.

Indeed, as Makor Rishon's Yishai Friedman reported last Friday, the department pays them and gives them academic credit for participation in radical leftist NGOs. As Friedman exposed, students who volunteer at post-Zionist NGOs funded by the New Israel Fund receive academic credit for their efforts and the NIF provides them with generous NIS 7,400 scholarships for their activism.

Read the whole thing.

Fair and balanced they are not.

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 4:24 AM