Mideast crisis in Manhattan,
By Shoshana Kordova, Haaretz (Israel), February 7, 2005
"A controversial movie depicting pro-Israel students' allegations of intimidation at the hands of Columbia University professors is only the first step in a campaign needed to fight the "new anti-Semitism" rampant on American college campuses, Minister Natan Sharansky said at the first Jerusalem screening of "Columbia Unbecoming." Deploring the fact that only a small amount of Jewish students are willing to complain publicly about anti-Semitic and anti-Israel sentiments, the minister of Jerusalem and Diaspora affairs compared today's college students to a group with which he is more familiar: Russian Jews who kept silent because they feared state retaliation if they spoke out about their plight. "The future leaders of American Jewry are becoming 'Jews of Silence,'" Sharansky said Saturday night at the Menachem Begin Heritage Center, where the movie was shown to an audience of about 400. "There are islands of anti-Semitism, and these islands are student campuses," said Sharansky, who has visited 26 American college campuses as part of his "Back to the Campus' initiative. "And all this is done in the name of academic freedom." Indeed, both sides of the intimidation complaints at the Ivy League university in New York are wielding the sword of academic freedom, with each party claiming its own liberties are being suppressed by the other ... But professors say the allegations stifle their freedom to express pro-Palestinian views, with one calling it a campaign against critics of Israel. "This witch-hunt aims to stifle pluralism, academic freedom, and the freedom of expression on university campuses in order to ensure that only one opinion is permitted, that of uncritical support for the State of Israel," Prof. Joseph Massad of the Middle East department wrote on his Web site. The New York Civil Liberties Union recently endorsed the professors' positions. In a December 20 letter to Columbia's president, Lee Bollinger, the organization said "the claims of incivility of professors in their treatment of students seem, in this case, to be inextricably bound to the ideological disputes between certain professors and the students advancing these claims... Thus, the criticism of these academics must be seen for what it is: an assault upon principles of academic freedom and upon political speech."