Mark LeVine is a professor of Middle Eastern History at University of California, Irvine, and a Distinguished Visiting Professor at Lund University. His new book is One Land, Two States: Israel and Palestine as Parallel States, co-edited with Ambassador Mathias Mossberg.
From AlJazeera.com
NOTE: I find this article deeply disturbing. Maybe its me, but I sense a snarky undertone. There is no doubt that stifling debate is ultimately morally and intellectually dangerous, but that's based on the assumption that the debate will consist of folks who are being intellectually and morally honest. Read this closely and feel free to comment below.
The New Republic literary editor Leon Wieseltier clearly believes himself to be a good man. One of those who put principles before emotions and politics. One who will fight for the right of even the most bigoted people and views to have a public hearing. Say, Nazis marching in Slokie, Illinois in the 1970s. Or rabidly anti-gay Christians protesting outside soldiers' funerals during the Iraq war. Or an anti-Zionist Jewish scholar lecturing about Franz Kafka's literary work at a Jewish museum.
Okay, perhaps the last example isn't quite on the order of the first two, is it? Apparently, for Wieseltier, and for much of the American Jewish establishment, it is. So much so that even the thought of allowing a Jewish academic who believes in a democratic Israeli state in which Palestinians and Jews have the same political, economic and civil rights is cause for existential angst and anger.
The scholar in question is Judith Butler, the literary critic and philosopher whose criticism of Israel and support for the Boycott, Divest and Sanctions (BDS) movement have recently defined her in the public eye far more than her seminal research on feminist, queer, literary theory and political philosophy. The pressure on Butler and the Jewish Museum of New York, where she was scheduled to deliver a talk on March 6, was so great that Butler cancelled it.
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Judith Butler and Rashid Khalidi, both well-known academics and high-profile supporters of the BDS movement campaigning for “boycotts, divestment and sanctions” against Israel, have issued a statementthat was originally circulated under the dramatic title “Support Freedom of Expression! Oppose Intimidation!” They claim that there are “accelerating efforts to curtail speech, to exercise censorship, and to carry out retaliatory action against individuals on the basis of their political views or associations, notably support for BDS.”