*Updated December 18, 2023
Jay Greene, a Senior Fellow in the Center for Education Policy at The Heritage Foundation, joins Conduit News to talk about an upcoming event happening at the University of Arkansas.
The event is a panel on the Hamas-Israel War and is being organized by the Honors College. The panel features as the only presenters two professors in the University’s King Fahd Middle East Studies Center.
“The problem with this event is that the two panelists for this event are both among the most radical members of the faculty, the most hostile to Israel and the most hostile to Jews. To hold an event that’s incredibly imbalanced on a volatile topic is irresponsible and potentially dangerous. We are seeing on campuses around the country, that students are getting mobilized by radical elements and begin to engage in some very dangerous activity — threatening other students, physically assaulting them. We did see at a protest last night in Los Angeles that an older Jewish man was killed at a protest by a pro-Hamas protester who beat him on the head with a megaphone. And so these things can get out of control.
And the University, while it has a responsibility to educate its students about current issues, it also has a responsibility to do so in a scholarly way and a balanced way. And neither of those things are present here,” says Greene.
A number of Jewish faculty members and students have raised objections to this event. Conduit News reached out to the University for comment, but our calls have not been returned.
Below is a letter from one UofA Jewish Professor, Robert Costrell. He contacted Chancellor Robinson and Provost Martin on November 3, 2023.
November 3, 2023
Dear Chancellor Robinson and Provost Martin,
I was disconcerted, to say the least, to read in yesterday’s UA News release that the Honors College will be hosting a highly imbalanced discussion of the Israel-Hamas War next Wednesday. As I will explain in this letter, there are two compelling reasons that the University should also be highly concerned about this ill-structured panel:
(1) it appears to violate the State of Arkansas’ legal commitment to “Educate, not Indoctrinate,” let alone the University’s professional ethics;
(2) there is reason to believe that the framing of this panel violates the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) working definition of antisemitism, which was legally adopted by the State of Arkansas (as well as the U.S. Departments of State, Education, and Justice, and the President’s National Strategy to Counter Antisemitism ).
At a time of rising antisemitism on the nation’s campuses the ill-considered structure of this panel seems to recklessly risk inciting those who would bring this alarming phenomenon to Arkansas, a scourge we have been spared to this point. In so doing, the framers of this event may well expose the University to potential sanctions and liability for creating a hostile environment and endangering the safety of Jewish and Israeli students and faculty.
Contrary to UA’s commitment to “Educate, not Indoctrinate,” the only two panelists — Professor Swedenburg and Professor Gordon, of the King Fahd Center for Middle East Studies — have long and well-established records as anti-Israel activist-scholars, with demonstrative intolerance of the Zionist viewpoint, to the point of suppressing such views. Their previous panels over the years have been highly biased, similarly devoid of pro-Israel facts and perspectives, and have, indeed, attempted to silence opposing evidence, provided by audience members. In addition, these two panelists have previously exposed the University to very public embarrassment for cancelation of an invited scholar they opposed. Details provided below.
With regard to past UA panels where these two professors not only excluded but actively tried to silence alternative views and evidence, I speak from personal experience, both for myself and for my late wife Rochelle Costrell. In April 2008, my wife attempted to speak from the audience to dispute with factual information a number of calumnies that had been leveled against the state of Israel (“apartheid” state, etc.). The panel’s organizer threatened to call the police. As my wife’s written account of this event added, Professor Swedenborg told her to “get your own event.”
In addition, I can personally testify to a second such instance of these Professors attempting to silence alternative voices to their highly imbalanced forums. I attended such a forum at the time of another Hamas war. The panelists, notably Professor Gordon, whitewashed the genocidal nature of Hamas (which, as always, targeted Israeli civilians with indiscriminate rocket fire). When I rose to read to the audience sections of the Hamas charter which call for genocide against the Jews, Professor Gordon specifically tried to silence me.
In addition, Professors Gordon and Swedenborg have a public record that is well-known of attempting – and succeeding – in canceling the scheduled participation in a 2017 UA Law School forum on “world-wide trends in honor killings” by Phyllis Chesler, one of the world’s experts on the topic. The pressure they exerted upon then-director of the King Fahd Center (Professor Paradise) led to Dr. Chesler’s cancellation, which in turn caused significant embarrassment for the University. Dr. Paradise was suspended, as the scapegoat for bowing to the pressures of Professors Gordon and Swedenborg, as Dr. Chesler explained. (I wrote about this at the time to Chancellor Steinmetz and Provost Coleman.) Clearly these professors have a well-established track record in silencing voices and evidence that run counter to their efforts at indoctrination.
Inciting Antisemitism
We need not rely solely on past performance to appreciate the dangers of this panel. The announcement itself makes it clear that this panel will frame the issue in ways that appear to violate the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) working definition of antisemitism, which has been adopted by the State of Arkansas. I will elaborate on this below.
The first indication that this panel may violate IHRA is the highly woke fashion in which it is framed, centering around the concept of decolonization. To assert that the conflict is an “unresolved case of 19th and 20th century colonialism,” as Professors Swedenburg and Gordon state, denies Jewish indigeneity to the Land of Israel. It is not only intellectually dishonest to compare the millennia-long presence of Jews in their homeland to the French colonization of Algeria (the subject of Frantz Fanon’s canonical discourse on decolonization); this framing appears to violate the IHRA definition by “denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination.”
The second indication of potential violation of IHRA is the opening paragraph of the UA announcement which clearly traffics in moral equivalence between terrorist atrocities intentionally aimed at civilians and the unintended, but unavoidable civilian casualties in the just war to eliminate the terrorist organization Hamas (so deemed by the U.S. and many other countries, both European and Arab). To cast the casualties of a defensive war against an organization that uses human shields in such terms is to deny Israel the same legitimacy of self-defense that the civilized world used against ISIS and al Qaeda. This violates IHRA by “Applying double standards by requiring of it a behavior not expected or demanded of any other democratic nation.”
At a time of rising antisemitism on the nation’s campuses I believe the citizens of Arkansas are entitled to some accountability of how the responsible authorities organized such an imbalanced panel, recklessly and dishonestly framing the civilizational issues before us.
Sincerely,
Robert M. Costrell
Professor of Education Reform and Economics (by courtesy)
Endowed Chair in Education Accountability
Department of Education Reform
200 Graduate Education Building
University of Arkansas
Fayetteville, AR 72701
https://edre.uark.edu/people/faculty/uid/costrell/name/Robert-Costrell/
*the opinions of this guest are not necessarily the opinions of Conduit News.
