 The most outrageous assault by the Israeli authorities against academic freedom of speech took place in recent days in what is becoming known as the Bukay Affair. The affair combines leftist undermining of democracy, the attempt at thought control by governmental officials and the police, harassment of a university lecturer by an over-zealous anti-democratic prosecutor, and an attempt to create in Israel a political Inquisition against incorrect thinking. The entire saga revolves around Dr. David Bukay, a lecturer in Middle East Studies at the University of Haifa, with expertise in Arab history.
Bukay speaks Arabic better than I speak English. He has conservative points of view and is very outspoken about them. His articles are carried by numerous journals. About five years ago, Bukay was the victim of a smear campaign of demonization at the University of Haifa.
At the time, an Arab student who was active in the university branch of the communist party sat in on one of Bukay’s lectures without being registered in the class. The student then ran to the Arabic press in Israel and claimed that in his lecture Bukay had repeatedly made racist derogatory comments about Arabs. The student claimed that Bukay had said in class that all Arabs should be shot. After the story ran in the Arabic press, it was also reported in the Hebrew press and web. It turned out that the story was planted there and spread by an Israeli “Trotskyite” named David Merhav, who later issued a retraction and apology to Bukay, admitting the entire story had been a tissue of lies. But the retraction did not help.
Today anti-Semitic internet web sites carry the story of Bukay’s alleged racist statements against Arabs. Once the story began to spread, it turned out that none of the other students in the classroom had heard Bukay make any of the “racist” statements the communist student had alleged that he made.
Many of these students went public and claimed that the Arab student had fabricated the entire story. Hundreds of Bukay’s students backed Bukay in the case. Many wrote the Haifa University chiefs to give their side of the story. In any case, because of the uproar, the Rector at the University of Haifa, himself no right-winger (he was a founder of Peace Now), appointed a committee of investigation to look into the charges against Bukay. They found that they were lies. But in response to the media uproar, the Israel state Deputy Prosecutor, Shai Nitzan, decided to open a criminal investigation against Bukay for the “crime” of “incitement.” More at FPM 
 By Cinnamon Stillwell What a difference a popular uprising makes. It seems like just yesterday that the Middle East studies establishment was busy defending Iran’s theocratic regime and its president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad from the alleged predations of U.S. and Israeli foreign policy. Yet in the wake of the unrest in response to the stolen election, suddenly American academics have succumbed to intellectual honesty and moral clarity. Despite the best efforts of the Iranian regime to drum up conspiracy theories blaming the West for the uprising, the Iranians themselves have taken center stage. This signals quite a shift. When Ahmadinejad, the supposedly elected leader at the heart of the current crisis in Iran, spoke at Columbia University in September 2007, his appearance was applauded by many academic apologists as a means of “reaching out.” Columbia University Islamic studies professor Richard Bulliet went so far as to act as an intermediary between the university and the Iranian regime in arranging the appearance. As reported by the New York Sun in September 2007: In a meeting of the Columbia faculty senate on December 8, 2006, before the university extended and then rescinded an invitation to the Iranian president to speak on campus, Mr. Bulliet argued in favor of providing him a platform. Mr. Bulliet said he attended a breakfast meeting with the Iranian and found him to be a “very reasonable speaker, a very effective debater.” Read more ... Source: FPM
 By Edward Olshaker Imagine it's 1940, and picture Adolf Hitler speaking at a US university, receiving a polite reception, while Winston Churchill is barred from speaking because his safety cannot be guaranteed. It's unthinkable, yet the very same pro-fascist dynamic is a reality in 21st Century America. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu comes to America knowing he is a second-class citizen who is denied the free-speech rights enjoyed even by prominent jihadists, having been violently prevented from speaking on campuses in the US and Canada in recent years. Protestors at Berkeley, the campus once synonymous with the term "free speech," forced the cancellation of Netanyahu's speech there, as well as two subsequent speeches, in November 2000. The Jewish Bulletin of Northern California reported: Hundreds of protesters shouting "Support the Palestinians, choose a side" and "No free speech for war criminals" blocked the gate leading to the Berkeley Community Theatre Tuesday evening, forcing the cancellation of a scheduled speech by former Israeli prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu.
Additional talks by Netanyahu that were scheduled Wednesday and Thursday in San Mateo and San Rafael were subsequently cancelled.
Waving banners reading "Zionism=Nazism" and "End U.S. aid to Israel," the crowd was estimated at more than 500 by the Berkeley Police Department and at 200 to 250 by observers... Read more ... Source: American ThinkerAmerican Academia
Latest recipient of The Dhimmi Award
 By Robert Spencer Three American academics flew to Tehran last week to accept awards from Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. In Tehran, Carl Ernst, a professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, was honored along with William Chittick, a scholar of Islamic mysticism and a professor at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, and Miriam Galston, a lawyer at George Washington University who made significant contributions to the presidential campaigns of Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. Thorp and Ernst seemed anxious to stress that this was an academic, non-political award -- as if Tehran these days were crawling with disinterested academics who are in no way co-opted by the regime. Even though Ernst reportedly “cringes” at some of Ahmadinejad’s “policies,” UNC-CH Chancellor Holden Thorp decided that this was an “academic honor,” not a political one, and so had no objection to Ernst’s trip. Ernst himself explained, “it would have looked strange if I declined an academic award.” Are Thorp and Ernst hopelessly naive, or do they believe that we are? In any case, they have little cause to worry that anyone will get upset about this in Chapel Hill, where the academic Left holds comfortable sway -- you know, the kind of people who thought it would be a great idea for Ahmadinejad to give an address at Columbia University and to present a Christmas message on British television. But meanwhile, has it even crossed Carl Ernst’s mind that his work is useful to the Iranian regime, whatever the nature of this award, and that his traveling to Tehran to accept it is even more useful to them? Has this not occurred to him even after his trip to Tehran earlier this month, during which he made a “strong plea for improved academic and cultural relations between Iran and the United States”? Read more ...Source: FrontPage MagazineCarl Ernst
William Chittick
Miriam Galston
Latest recipients of The Dhimmi Award
 Jamie Walker | September 22, 2008
A UNIVERSITY has washed its hands of feuding academics who are waging their own culture war over the teaching of terrorism subjects, insisting it is an issue for scholarly debate, not disciplinary action.
As reported in The Weekend Australian, Anthony Burke, an associate professor at the Canberra-based Australian Defence Force Academy, last week demanded that James Cook University investigate his chief adversary, senior lecturer Merv Bendle, for academic misconduct.
Dr Bendle had taken up the cudgels on behalf of researchers and security analysts who believe university terrorism studies have been hijacked by left-leaning academics pursuing an apologist, postmodernist agenda.
Dr Burke, 42, fumed that Dr Bendle had improperly suggested he was pro-terrorist and called for JCU to investigate whether this amounted to "serious academic misconduct". However, he last Friday withdrew his demand to vice-chancellor Sandra Harding for an investigation, conceding "it may be that administrative action is not the best way to address the problem".
In a statement to The Australian, the north Queensland university said Professor Harding had sought advice from its human resources department on Dr Burke's complaint.
"But it was decided this was a matter of debate between academics putting their views and opinions forward in the interests of discourse and dialogue," a university spokesman said.
The argument is set to rage on, after Dr Burke revealed he had written to Quadrant magazine, the conservative quarterly that published Dr Bendle's attack on the supposed hijacking of terror studies, to rebut the Townsville academic. Dr Burke said he was yet to hear whether Quadrant would publish him.
Another prominent academic, Paul Wilson, chair of criminology at Bond University, weighed in on Dr Bendle's side. Professor Wilson wrote to Professor Harding last week to defend the JCU man, even though he said he was known to be more "liberal" than Dr Bendle on terrorism issues.
Welcoming the decision by JCU to bow out of the feud, Professor Wilson said yesterday: "I think universities have to be very careful about repressing academic debate on contentious social issues and sanctioning academics who speak out with unpopular positions."
ADFA, which offers degree courses to military officer cadets through the University of NSW, has backed Dr Burke. A second Canberra academic, Paul Pickering, of the Australian National University, complained to JCU about Dr Bendle's Quadrant article, but stopped short of demanding action.
The row has touched raw nerves within the defence-security academic establishment, with its implications for the training of the next generation of ADFA's leadership.
Dr Bendle, 57, wrote in the current issue of Quadrant that universities had become a battleground in the war on terror, "where Islamist groups openly recruit members, while an updated, post-9/11 version of the old neo-Marxist, postmodernist orthodoxy on terrorism dominates among academics".
Dr Burke, who describes his political orientation as "liberal-left", rejected Dr Bendle's claim that he had overreacted by seeking a university investigation.
"It's a funny situation when you have people utilising academic freedom in a sense to attack it," Dr Burke said.
"But you have got to stand up for your own position ... I just don't like people saying that I support terrorism, when I don't." Source: The Australian
 LONDON - Jonathan Evans, the director-general of MI5, has warned the government that donations of hundreds of millions of pounds from Saudi Arabia and powerful Muslim organizations in Pakistan, Indonesia and the Gulf Straits have led to a "dangerous increase in the spread of extremism in leading university campuses," according to Joseph Farah's G2 Bulletin. Eight of Britain's leading universities, including Oxford and Cambridge, have accepted more than 236 million pounds sterling, about $460 million, in donations from Muslim organizations, "many of which are known to have ties to extremist groups, some have links to terrorist organizations." The bulk of the donations have come in the past five years during a period when terrorist activities in Britain have increased. Home Secretary Jacqui Smith announced over the weekend that MI5 was now investigating "42 current terror threats and the possibility of attacks is increasingly real." Universities that have accepted the money also include the London School of Economics, the City of London, Exeter and Dundee universities. All have a growing number of Muslim students. Read more ...Source: WND
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The most outrageous assault by the Israeli authorities against academic freedom of speech took place in recent days in what is becoming known as the Bukay Affair. 
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