Divest this! via CIF Watch: The ASA's decision to boycott Israel

Recently, the American Studies Association (ASA) voted on and adopted a highly biased and contentious resolution supporting an academic boycott of Israeli academic institutions.  The vote represented less than 20 percent of membership and was  rejected by eight former ASA presidents.

The incomparable Divest this! has written some excellent commentary on the American Studies Association vote over at CIF Watch. Check it out

 How ASA Became RASA (Racist American Studies Association)

ASA President Marez told the New York Times that Israel was chosen to be the group’s human rights pariah because “you have to start somewhere.”  But the chances that the organization will continue from this starting point to act on human rights issues regarding other countries is nil since, as noted above, the ASA’s leaders are not human rights activists but anti-Israeli partisans first and last.  And given that they have forced the organization to throw academic freedom on the pyre in the name of their cause, I think it’s fair to say they should no longer even be considered scholars.

Anyway, as night follows day the script will play out.  Anger and recrimination by the 75% of members who didn’t vote on the issue (possibly because they – like a friend of mine who is in the organization – didn’t get the postcard voter reminder from the ASA leadership until a day after the vote had closed) will escalate once people realize that a group of people they have never met with no connection to the field is now speaking in their name.  Resignations will both shrink the organization while concentrating the radicals within it.  Real scholars (like those of AAUP) will continue to pour their scorn on the group which the BDSers will ignore as they travel the globe trying to find the next academic organization to corrupt in the name of ASA.

 Proposed ASA boycott of Israeli academics is a guaranteed moral fail

the BDSers took no chances when they stacked the deck of the committees responsible for the original decision and ensured a lopsided number of voices heard during that debate supported the leadership’s preferred outcome, they then went on to minimize chances that the hoi polloi of the American Studies Association (i.e., the scholars they were elected to represent) get in the way of their political crusade.

Exhibit A: While the ASA leadership gave themselves months to manage discussion of the boycott to ensure their desired results, they have given members just fifteen days to ratify the decision (fifteen days that – by a strange coincidence – coincides with finals period, the busiest time of the year for academics).

Exhibit B: While most normal votes about highly contentious issues would be accompanied by Pro and Anti arguments to give members a sense of the stakes involved and different points of view regarding a charged matter, the leadership decided all the members needed to hear was their own full-throated encouragement of a Yes vote.

 American Studies Association purges their Facebook page of critical comments     

Under normal circumstances, I’d take solace in the notion of hypocrisy being the complement vice pays to virtue.  But what are we to make of an organization that, in attempting to shut down inquiry with their Israeli colleagues is ready to first shut it down among its own members while simultaneously sending out e-mails urging people to participate in “discussion and healthy debate”?

American Studies Association ‘boycott Israel’ motion: The Justification

  ...The people claiming that their role as scholars gives them and their proposed boycott special meaning have chosen to act like garden variety propagandists – hiding facts, substituting gut emotion for rational debate, limiting rather than encouraging inquiry and debate – to get what they want.  And if they manage to eke out a victory, they will immediately try to use the virtues of scholarship they had so recently jettisoned to give their decision extra moral weight.

American Studies Association leaders to members: Dear Mindless Sheep

   ...the BDSers took no chances when they stacked the deck of the committees responsible for the original decision and ensured a lopsided number of voices heard during that debate supported the leadership’s preferred outcome, they then went on to minimize chances that the hoi polloi of the American Studies Association (i.e., the scholars they were elected to represent) get in the way of their political crusade.

    Exhibit A: While the ASA leadership gave themselves months to manage discussion of the boycott to ensure their desired results, they have given members just fifteen days to ratify the decision (fifteen days that – by a strange coincidence – coincides with finals period, the busiest time of the year for academics).

    Exhibit B: While most normal votes about highly contentious issues would be accompanied by Pro and Anti arguments to give members a sense of the stakes involved and different points of view regarding a charged matter, the leadership decided all the members needed to hear was their own full-throated encouragement of a Yes vote.

 Divest This! A modest proposal to the American Studies Association

 Most recently, a vote by the American Studies Association (ASA) to boycott Israeli academic institutions was passed the same way other votes have gone the BDSers way in recent months: by stacking decision-making committees with people who are BDSers first, academics second, whose fanatic devotion to “the cause” means they are ready to pass politicized motions they had no mandate to even discuss.  And like stacked student council votes that passed on a few campuses in the Spring, the notion that these measures represent student or academic opinion is laughable.