In the San Jose Mercury News today: Professor fights portrayal as supporter of terrorism.
Beinin, a 58-year-old Jewish professor [at Stanford] who supports Palestinian rights, knows he has enemies. Secure in his tenured position at an elite university, he routinely criticizes U.S. leaders for failing to understand why Americans are hated in the Arab world. He decries the humanitarian costs of the Palestinian occupation.
The Ivy League-educated Beinin, former president of the prestigious Middle East Studies Association, favors peaceful coexistence of Palestinians and Israelis, and seeks a solution to the conflict based on the principles of human rights and international law. His work has triggered death threats; one caller said, ``You know what happened to Daniel Pearl. . . . The people who are sympathetic are the first ones to go.''
Crazy American - favoring Human Rights! What precedent is their in our legal system for the idea that people have inalienable rights and that governmental systems should support that?
But without irony: If thought leaders in research institutions can't explore all aspects of human endeavor in an environment that's safe, and if people studying at the top academic institutions in our country aren't intellectually skeptical enough to be able to judge their faculty's teaching with a critical eye, then the United States has truly lost any hope at intellectual leadership.
Here's an old blog entry in Informed Comment that discusses the people in question. Note the persistence of the persecutory activities of this group led by Pipes and Horowitz, and the enormous funding from a single donor for the purposes of harassing individuals.
As a liberal Jew from Los Angeles, I appreciate Juan Cole's exhortation that moderate or liberal Jews need to be as careful that their religious charity supports the secular vision they have as any moderate or liberal of any religion.
(By the way, I'd like to explicitly mention Sourcewatch.)
