Politics of intolerance

FURTHER to Rowan Polovin’s excellent letter (“Anti-Semitic foothold at UCT”), it is interesting to read that the New York State Senate passed a landmark bill earlier this year stripping public funding for universities that support the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel.

It is common cause that BDS calls for the total boycott and destruction of Israel.

The bill, which passed by a landslide vote of 51-4, is a specific response to the smear campaign against Israel launched by the American Studies Association (ASA), which recently singled out Israel for criticism and voted to boycott the Jewish state, “in solidarity with scholars and students deprived of their academic freedom, including Palestinians”.

This boycott move was deemed to be a blatant abuse of academic freedom. Not a single university has come out in support and several top universities… including Johns Hopkins, Harvard, Yale, Cornell, Princeton, Boston, Pennsylvania, Connecticut and Texas – have already slammed the boycott.

It is instructive to learn the reasons given by the Senate: “Make no mistake: the ASA’s boycott is targeted discrimination against Israel that betrays the values of academic freedom that we hold dear.

“No other nation – not even those with far worse records on human rights and academic freedom than Israel – is subject to a similar boycott by the ASA.”

This principled stand sends a very powerful message that holds relevance in our country, which is that we should never in a democracy, and especially in a university, support intolerance and discrimination hiding behind a cover of manipulating academic associations.

There is a need to combat the politics of intolerance whenever it rears its ugly head.

We should not allow the real enemies of true academic freedom to gain an inch at South African universities.