On my most recent trips to the United States in 2019 and 2020, I saw that the academic environment had changed tremendously since my time at school. I saw a lot of egregious examples of cancel culture and imposing uniformity of opinion in academia.
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The two examples that I witnessed show the domination of the Left in American academia, from two different perspectives: one is the coalition between the Left and Islamists and the other is the insistence on systemic racism, fighting anybody who dares to question this claim. Both these examples prompted me to ask, is the same thing happening in Israel? Are the leftists dominating the universities in Israel or is the situation quite different?
The first example that I experienced was at the 105th annual convention of the National Communication Association (NCA) in Baltimore, Marylandת in 2019. One of the panels that my friends and I attended was called, "Deconstructing Anti-Muslim Rhetoric in the Contemporary Political Climate: Beyond Survival, Toward Thriving" – a series of six lectures by female academics hailing from different Muslim-majority countries (including Syria, Iran and the Palestinian Authority) who teach at universities across the US. These presenters described themselves as feminists, but sounded more like Islamist conservatives or apologists.
In the Q&A session, I commented that Muslims are not the homogeneous group that the panelists made them out to be, but rather individuals who do not all share the same political or religious ideology. I also added that Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib whom they vehemently defended are not well-liked by all Muslims and many are even embarrassed by their rhetoric, how they conduct and their affiliation with the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), an organization with ties to Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood.
I hadn't anticipated that my comments would elicit such a harsh response on the part of the panelists and would silence the discussion. The situation worsened when one of the panelists, at a dinner organized by the NCA that was held afterward, assaulted my friend Irina Tsukerman, and called her a "racist bitch". Rather than NCA executives and hosts standing up for us and protecting us from this indefensible, unprovoked attack, my friends and I were expelled from the conference.
The other example was the firing of my friend, Professor Charles Negy, from the University of Central Florida (UCF) for questioning the systemic racism of white privilege asserting that black privilege is real too. His crime was illustrated in his tweets in 2020 and one of them, which is no longer is available, said, "Black privilege is real: Besides affirmative action, special scholarships and other set-asides, being shielded from legitimate criticism is a privilege. But as a group, they're missing out on much-needed feedback."
Rather than debate the merits or lack thereof of his opinions, a particularly aggressive attempt to get Negy fired ensued.
Both these appalling examples prompted me to ask, what does the academic environment look like in Israel? Is it the same as the United States or not? One of the professors who was involved with Professor Charles Negy's case is a professor of mathematics at the University of Haifa and she said that even "In Israel today we still have freedom of speech, but I am very worried that the faculties of education are dominated by the same woke crowd like in the US." The professor also explained how the universities in Israel started to be infiltrated by leftist American professors trying to infuse their ideologies into academia.
Even if we assume that the dominance of the Left in Israeli academia has yet to reach American levels, we must remember that this left-wing occupation of American academia happened gradually and not all at once. The generations that will graduate from such academic institutions will have been brainwashed into accepting one belief and be intolerant of others. These same generations will one day monopolize ideas and political tastes.
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