Boston University Set to Hire Professor Who Accuses Israeli Soldiers of 'Rape' and 'Systematic Massacres'

The Women’s Studies department at Boston University is considering hiring a noted academic named Sarah Ihmoud; the offer is “imminent.” It’s easy to see why: Ihmoud would be a plum hire for the department, as she represents the cutting edge in academic thinking today. Her paper, “Sexual Violence, Women’s Bodies, and Israeli Settler Colonialism,” claims that the “rape and killing of Palestinian women was a central aspect of Israeli troops’ systematic massacres and evictions during the destruction of Palestinian villages in 1948.”

What could be trendier or more in demand? As colleges and universities all over the country follow the establishment Left into ever more vicious and open anti-Semitism, it is surprising that Ihmoud isn’t at the center of a bidding war among the nation’s top institutions of far-Left indoctrination, that is, what used to be known as institutions of higher learning.

Even in an environment that increasingly rewards and encourages anti-Semitism, Ihmoud’s venom is striking. “Israeli officials’ repressive policies and incitement against the Palestinian people,” she rages, “work to empower and embolden Israeli settler society to embody the power of the state and viciously attack Palestinians. This is clearly exhibited in the attacks on Palestinian women’s bodies inside Al-Aqsa mosque these last weeks in Jerusalem, by both settler publics empowered by the state’s military protection, and members of the state security forces.”

None of that happened of course. Nor did any of Ihmoud’s other claims. Israeli troops did not engage in “systematic massacres and evictions during the destruction of Palestinian villages in 1948.” As the forthcoming book The Palestinian Delusion: The Catastrophic History of the Middle East Peace Process shows, the Arabs, for the most part, left Israel because they were ordered to do so by Muslim Arab leaders. The Arab Higher Committee actually exhorted Arabs to leave the new State of Israel, and they obeyed in large numbers.

This action had been contemplated for a considerable period: in May 1946, fully two years before the State of Israel proclaimed its independence, Abdul Rahman Hassan Azzam, secretary-general of the Arab League, stated that “Arab circles proposed to evacuate all Arab women and children from Palestine and send them to neighboring countries, to declare ‘Jehad’ and to consider Palestine a war zone.”

When the war came, many of the Arab Muslims left of their own accord, to the consternation of others who were determined to wage jihad. The Arab newspaper Ash Sha’ab, based in Jaffa, lamented on January 30, 1948, that “the first group of our fifth column consists of those who abandon their houses and businesses and go to live else- where.... At the first sign of trouble they take to their heels to escape sharing the burden of struggle [jihad].”

Others left because the plan to get the Arabs out of harm’s way until the Jews were destroyed and Israel was defeated was being implemented. The Economist magazine reported on October 3, 1948: “Of the 62,000 Arabs who formerly lived in Haifa not more than 5,000 or 6,000 remained. Various factors influenced their decision to seek safety in flight. There is but little doubt that the most potent of the factors were the announcements made over the air by the Higher Arab Executive, urging the Arabs to quit.... It was clearly intimated that those Arabs who remained in Haifa and accepted Jewish protection would be regarded as renegades.”

The Jordanian daily Falastin complained on February 19, 1949, that “the Arab state which had encouraged the Palestine Arabs to leave their homes temporarily in order to be out of the way of the Arab invasion armies, have failed to keep their promise to help these refugees.”

The Near East Arabic Broadcasting Station confirmed this on April 3, 1949: “It must not be forgotten that the Arab Higher Committee encouraged the refugees’ flight from their homes in Jaffa, Haifa, and Jerusalem.” The Egyptian daily Akhbar el Yom on October 12, 1963, reported that the grand mufti had issued the same call to Arabs to leave: “The 15th May, 1948, arrived.... On that day the mufti of Jerusalem appealed to the Arabs of Palestine to leave the country, because the Arab armies were about to enter and fight in their stead.”

The Jordanian daily Al Urdun reported on April 9, 1953: “For the flight and fall of the other villages it is our leaders who are responsible because of their dissemination of rumors exaggerating Jewish crimes and describing them as atrocities in order to inflame the Arabs.... By spreading rumors of Jewish atrocities, killings of women and children etc., they instilled fear and terror in the hearts of the Arabs in Palestine, until they fled leaving their homes and properties to the enemy.”

Sarah Ihmoud proves that this rumor-mongering is still alive and well. In a sane world, such a dishonest propagandist wouldn’t be offered any academic position. But this is not a sane world. She will be quite happy among her like-minded colleagues at Boston University.

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What have Germaine Greer, King Alfred and Jacob Rees-Mogg got in common? They've all been vilified by campus thought Stasi
With this month marking the 30th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, I spent the weekend re-watching the film The Lives Of Others, which is set during the final years of East Germany's Communist regime.

In case you haven't seen it, this moving masterpiece tells the story of an operative for the Stasi, the East German secret police.

An expert at bugging dissidents, he begins to have doubts about the morality of his own side.

It is a powerful portrait of a society in which free speech was ruthlessly suppressed, and in which making an ill-judged joke could mean losing your job or ending up in prison.

For those of us who remember the Cold War, films like this offer a nightmarish, Orwellian vision of total conformity, with an intrusive government policing what you say, what you write and even what you think, and with informers, bugs and even police surveillance vans at every turn.

But in today's world, the real threat to free speech comes not from a totalitarian government. It comes from — of all places! — the university campuses that are supposed to be hotbeds of debate and disagreement.

And if you doubt it, just look at the chilling findings of a poll of British students by the think-tank Policy Exchange.

Almost incredibly, fewer than half of students consistently support free speech. A staggering 44 per cent thought Cardiff University was right to ban the feminist writer Germaine Greer after she questioned whether transgender 'women' were really women, while just 35 per cent thought it was wrong.

Similarly, 41 per cent thought Cambridge was right to withdraw a fellowship from best-selling conservative Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson, who divides opinion with his views on topics such as masculinity, political correctness and the gender pay gap, while only 31 per cent supported him.

Perhaps most damningly of all, more than one in four students think the Commons leader Jacob Rees-Mogg should be banned from speaking on campuses, simply because they object to his socially conservative politics.

In some ways, the poll's findings are depressingly predictable. In the past few years, barely a week has gone by without some new example of student intolerance, from protests at visiting speakers to the banning of fancy-dress costumes on the grounds they are 'racist' or 'cultural appropriation'.

Even so, this is the first time a survey has produced hard evidence of the new narrow-mindedness in Britain's universities.

It's true not all students are equally intolerant. But as anybody familiar with our universities knows, it is the loudest, most extreme activists who set the tone, dominating student unions and shouting down those who disagree.

As in Communist East Germany, nobody is safe. Veteran gay rights campaigner Peter Tatchell, who was beaten up by thugs after protesting against the views of Vladimir Putin, and of Robert Mugabe, might have assumed he had banked enough credit with the Left to last him several lifetimes.

Yet when Tatchell was booked to speak at Canterbury Christ Church University, activists tried to get him kicked out on the grounds that he had dared to defend Ms Greer's right to speak.

No parodist could have invented a more bizarre scenario.

To older readers, all this may sound demented. Some may recall the free speech controversies of the Sixties, when thousands of young people at U.S. universities staged sit-ins in support of their right to debate whatever and with whomever they wanted. Yet if you ventured on to campus today and made that argument, student activists would almost certainly condemn you as a racist, sexist, homophobic dinosaur.

As they see it, the priority is to protect their 'safe space'. And if even a handful of students find your views offensive, then you have no right to utter them. Where on earth does this come from? Well, it's tempting to suggest many of today's students are spoiled, entitled, ignorant brats who have no tolerance, no humility and, perhaps above all, no sense of history.

But even if that's true — and let's be honest, it's not entirely false — it's not the whole story.

Sad to say, many academics have effectively colluded in this culture of intolerance. Think, for example, of the disgraceful bullying campaign against Oxford's Regius Professor of Moral Theology, Nigel Biggar, after he had the temerity to suggest the British Empire wasn't entirely bad.

Or take an even more deranged example from just a few days ago: an academic campaign to rename the Anglo-Saxons, the first Englishmen and Englishwomen, on the grounds that the name 'Anglo-Saxon' has become synonymous with 'white supremacy'. Never mind that, say, Alfred the Great called himself an Anglo-Saxon. If you use the word, the academics say, you are exposing your own racist wickedness.

But it would be a mistake to treat all this simply as a joke. This is our history, and if we're not careful, we'll end up losing it to Left-wing bigots.

And it's worth noting that this kind of strident, sanctimonious narrow-mindedness is not confined to Britain's universities.

Only yesterday, novelist Alice O'Keeffe wrote a disturbing article for The Guardian about publishers' refusal to 'reach out beyond the cosy pro-Remain bubble'.

A senior figure at publishing conglomerate Hachette, employing the pious cant that has become so tiresomely familiar, said he would refuse to take on anything that didn't uphold 'social justice' or that 'went against our inclusive ethos'.

And the managing director at publisher Profile even said he would not publish anything that appealed to Leavers: 'What would we be publishing? Fantasy histories of a Britain in which servants doff their caps?'

I hardly need to point out how unimaginative, arrogant, blinkered and downright ignorant such views are.

Sad to say, though, liberal intolerance is becoming increasingly common, and is all the more insidious because it comes from people who see themselves as the only true free thinkers.

The very idea of a frank exchange of views is becoming endangered. Thanks to social media, young people, in particular, just want to hear their views repeated, their prejudices echoed.

When you suggest that they might enjoy hearing somebody they disagree with and, even more shockingly, that they might learn something, they stare at you as if you have just come out as a member of the Ku Klux Klan.

So what to do? Policy Exchange suggests that universities should employ 'academic freedom champions', answering to individual vice chancellors. But that sounds like just another bureaucratic non-job to me.

When the disease is cultural, the solution must be cultural, too. The only way to fight for free speech is to keep insisting on it.

No platforming, safe spaces and snowflake culture should be taboo. And when students say they're offended, university authorities — and other students — should tell them to grow up. That means, of course, that we all need to tolerate views we disagree with. But nobody ever really suffered from listening to contrary arguments.

Indeed, isn't robust argument the lifeblood of a democratic society? Haven't we all learned from somebody we never expected to agree with? And what's the alternative? A 21st-century East Germany in which conformity is enforced, not by government, but by the shrieking of a Twitter mob? A world in which the wrong joke can get you sacked?

We're halfway down that road already. It's not too late to turn back. But if we don't fight for free speech now, it will be gone before we know it.

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Australia: Foreign hack 'wake-up call' prompts overhaul to combat foreign interference at Australian universities

Australian universities will adopt new guidelines to try and combat the threat from "unprecedented" levels of foreign interference.

Education Minister Dan Tehan described a sophisticated cyber attack on the Australian National University, which has not been attributed to any one country, as a "big wake-up call" for the sector.

He said the guidelines would strengthen cyber security and intelligence sharing between universities and the Government.

They also place more responsibility on universities to understand exactly who they are collaborating with and what their research is used for.

"It can be difficult but you can put intellectual property requirements around what that end use should be, and you can also make sure that if you've done the due diligence you understand what the links might be between that professor and certain other institutions in a country, which then might bring up red flags," Mr Tehan said.

"And that's when the collaboration and co-operation kicks in because then can raise those concerns with Government agencies and they might say look, we don't think that that is the type of research that you should be undertaking."

Inside a massive cyber attack on the Australian National University that risks compromising high-ranking officials across the globe.

The announcement follows concerns about the links between Australian universities and the development of mass surveillance and military technologies in China.

Some Government backbenchers have also warned that universities are not doing enough to combat China's influence on campuses.

The guidelines were developed in conjunction with the university sector.

Universities Australia chief executive Catriona Jackson said most of the guidelines were already being implemented.

"This is just a way of putting them all down in a list so that they can be handily and readily accessed by university staff so they can go through the whole list, just to question themselves," she said.

"Universities know very, very clearly that this this is an increasingly complex world and we need to deploy everything we have at our fingertips to make sure that universities and the research inside universities, the students and staff, are as safe as they can be."

Mr Tehan said the guidelines would be reviewed in the middle of next year.

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