Israel Academic Monitor

The scandal of anti-Israeli, anti-Zionist, and sometimes anti-Semitic radicalism among Israeli academics is now highlighted on a new website. Modeled after Campus Watch, Daniel Pipes’s site for monitoring Middle East studies on North American campuses, Israel Academic Monitor was created by a group of academics, journalists, donors, students, and others with the aim of monitoring abuses of academic freedom in Israel’s universities. These abuses include not only writings and statements that deny Israel’s legitimacy, advocate its destruction, or compare it with the Nazi and other worst regimes in history, but also calls for widespread insurrection and mutiny by Israeli soldiers and support for international efforts at boycotting Israel and ostracizing the teachers and students of these universities themselves.

Important as Campus Watch and other sites monitoring abuses on North American campuses undoubtedly are, Israel’s situation as a lone democracy amid a sea of Arab and Muslim hatred, and a target of growing anti-Semitic movements in Europe and all over the globe, is especially precarious. Having its young minds poisoned is a “luxury” Israel cannot afford. The ideas taught by the radicals that Israel is a criminal “colonial” entity responsible for the Arab violence against it, that the Arabs are the victims, and that Israel can end the violence by satisfying Arab demands¡ have already penetrated Israel’s more mainstream Left as represented by the Labor and Yahad parties. It was such ideas that led to the disastrous Oslo accords, which glorified Yasser Arafat as a peacemaker and brought a rain of death and destruction on Israel that continues to this day.

Israel’s academic institutions are, indeed, a crucial resource for the state, but if they become nests for people who identify with Israel’s enemies and promote their causes, they risk harming the Jewish state more than they benefit it and, ultimately, contributing to its destruction. These universities are highly dependent on overseas donors and contributors. The IAM site seeks to bring to these people’s attention some of the atrocious things being done with their money, hoping they will condition their future contributions more carefully.

IAM, for its part, will continue to expose, monitor, and counter Israel’s tenured insurgents.

Exposed: Israel's Tenured Radicals