Friday, May 07, 2010

Jewish "Academic" Agitators to Watch

From Ynet News, 6 May 2010, byYitzhak Benhorin:

... Boston Science Museum's  ...week-long exhibit surveying ground-breaking Israeli innovations and inventions in the fields of clean energy, medicine, and technology ...known as Israel Innovation Week (IIW) ...opened ...on Sunday with an event attended by many members of the city's heavy-hitting academic community. Many were also invited to speak alongside Israeli experts.

The exhibit included displays on Better Place, an Israeli company responsible for manufacturing electric vehicles and displays presented by the Foreign Ministry detailing its agricultural aid programs offered to developing countries.

However, this display of Israeli pride was received with little enthusiasm among some members of the academia, including Jewish linguist Noam Chomsky, and faculty members hailing from Israeli institutes of higher education – Dr. Kobi Snitz from the Weizmann Institute of Science, Prof. Rachel Giora and Dr. Anat Matar, both from Tel Aviv University.

"IIW is far from an innocent educational endeavor. It is part of a propaganda campaign by the State of Israel to present itself as a beacon of progress in a desert of backwardness and deflect attention from its atrocious human rights record and fundamentally discriminatory policies," [their] letter claimed.

The letter protested the show of Israeli technology in part because it is, according to the signatories, inseparable from what they call Israel's aggression.

For instance, they labeled the Technion, a source of many of Israel's technological innovations, "an institution with a long track record of developing technologies of death used by Israel’s military. These include remote-controlled bulldozers for demolishing Palestinian homes and drones for picking off Palestinians from the air."

...The Consul General of Israel to New England Nadav Tamir responded to the letter: "From our perspective, this is proof of the event's success and the importance of such an exhibit in a location so central to science and technology."

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