Israeli university boycott ‘legitimate response’
Dear Editors,
Principal Karen Hitchcock’s denunciation of the academic boycott of Israel is short-sighted and ill-informed.
Israeli universities are not the bastions of freedom of speech and inquiry that Principal Hitchcock imagines. They have abdicated a crucial role that all universities ought to play in society—that of analyzing and explaining the world in ways that promote justice and equality and acting as centres for critical examination of dominant ideologies and social policies.
Instead they play both active and ive roles in legitimizing repression, colonialism and military rule, supplemented with discriminatory research grant and issions policies and punitive actions against dissident academics.
Principal Hitchcock would accord academic respect to Israeli academics that they themselves do not accord to their Palestinian colleagues. The vast majority of Israeli academics have been carrying on business as usual for the past 35 years, oblivious to what has been happening to their Palestinian counterparts and to the Palestinians as a whole.
Professor Ilan Pappé, who used to teach at Haifa University until he was forced out earlier this year, estimates that the number of Israeli academics who have raised their voices against the occupation of Palestinian land is “roughly 100 out of 9000.”
Hitchcock is apparently unaware of the persistent and blatant denials of academic freedom to Palestinian academics.
According to Laura Ribeiro of Birzeit University, all 11 Palestinian universities have been closed from time to time under Israeli occupation– the longest being Birzeit between 1988 and 1992.
Faculty at these universities who have foreign ports have no job security, let alone tenure; they have to leave the country every three months and re-apply for new visas.
Ribeiro says they have no guarantees they will be able to keep their jobs from one visa application to the next. Bleating about academic freedom for Israelis, given these circumstances, exhibits a lot of chutzpah.
An academic and cultural boycott is a legitimate response. There is a clear precedent for such a boycott; universities worldwide boycotted the racist apartheid universities of South Africa in the 1980s, as part of the international campaign that eventually helped to force that illegitimate outlaw regime out of existence.
Hardly anybody back then tried to argue that ‘academic freedom’ trumped opposition to academic complicity and silence in the face of an oppressive regime.
Jeff White
Arts ‘67
Queen’s Bands apologizes for ‘offensive’ ads
Dear Editors:
The Queen’s Bands would like to apologize to the Queen’s and Kingston community for inappropriate, offensive, and sexual content of the flyers distributed around campus. Queen’s Bands is taking full responsibility. We are concerned with the environment it creates with current and future . We are looking into the incident and the appropriate steps will be taken to ensure that the bands’ environment is one of inclusivity and respect.
Stephanie Vos, Nurs ’08
Adam Gaudry, ArtSci ’07, M.A. ’09
Financial and Operations
Managers of the Queen’s Bands
Football reporting inaccurate
Dear Editors,
Re: “Football starts in high gear” (Journal, Sept. 7, 2007)
Contrary to what was reported in the Journal, the second Queen’s touchdown in their game against Western was scored by Mike Giffin, not Marty Gordon.
Furthermore, the Journal inaccurately reported that a Western field goal attempt in overtime was blocked. In fact, it was missed wide and nearly returned for a touchdown by Jimmy Allin in one of the game’s most exciting plays, a near game-winner that the Journal bafflingly omitted.
It was in the fourth quarter, with zero seconds remaining on the clock, that a game-winning field goal attempt by Western’s Derek Schiavone was blocked by the Gaels; an incredible and game-breaking occurence that for whatever reason went with absolutely no mention in the Journal’s article, which opted instead for quotes like the mind-numbingly obvious, “Mike Giffin had a great day.”
Official box scores for OUA football games are regularly available on the internet, and the aforementioned errors were not present in other sources like the Kingston Whig-Standard. If students can’t rely on their campus newspaper to accurately report the details of the school’s most popular team, it will be an unfortunate season for football fans.
Tyler King
ArtSci ‘09
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