Category: Columns

Columns

Yanis Varoufakis: My Berlin speech on Palestine that German police entered the venue to ban – and whose publication here led to my being banned from Germany!

Posted on | Yanis Varoufakis

Watch/read the speech that I could not deliver because German police burst into our Berlin venue to disband our Palestine Congress (1930s style) before I could address the meeting. Today, because I dared publish this speech here, the Ministry of Interior issued a “Betätigungsverbot” against me, a ban on any political activity. Not just a ban on visiting Germany but also from participation via Zoom. Judge for yourselves the kind of society Germany is becoming when its police bans the following words:

Columns

Jewish faculty reject the weaponization of antisemitism

Posted on | Columbia Spectator

To President Shafik: “We write as Jewish faculty of Columbia and Barnard in anticipation of your appearance before the House Committee on Education and the Workforce on April 17, where you are expected to answer questions about antisemitism on campus. Based on the committee’s previous hearings, we are gravely concerned about the false narratives that frame these proceedings to entrap witnesses. We urge you, as the University president, to defend our shared commitment to universities as sites of learning, critical thinking, and knowledge production against this new McCarthyism.”

Columns

OPEN LETTER FROM NORTH AMERICAN ACADEMICS CONDEMNING SCHOLASTICIDE IN GAZA

Posted on

Please input your full name, contact information and institutional affiliation (for identification purposes only) in the form below the text of the Open Letter. Email addresses will not be published. Names of signatories (>1,100 to date from >215 higher educational institutions) will be added progressively. If you have any difficulties signing, or any questions, please contact: academicsvsscholasticide@gmail.com.

Columns

Science magazine’s editorial bias against Palestinians

Posted on | Josh Lalonde | Science for the People (SftP)

After reading Science’s absurdly one-sided story (February 28, 2024) on the effect of the genocide in Gaza on Israeli academics, I wrote an email to the news editor to intervene. He responded by offering to publish parts of the email as a “letter” in response to the story. I then reworked the text of the email to prepare it for publication and submitted a draft. The editor sent it back with substantial deletions, notably removing the paragraph describing the deliberate nature of the Israeli military’s destruction of academic life in Gaza. The sentence in which I explained the principles of the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI) was also removed, on the grounds that “[w]e often don’t know the motivations of those calling for or practicing a boycott.” I pointed out to the editor that the initial story had speculated freely about the supposed antisemitic motivations of alleged boycotts of Israeli academics and insisted on retaining the deleted passages. The editor declined to withdraw the deletions and I decided not to allow the text to be published in amputated form. Below is the text, including the passages Science refused to publish.

Columns

Dispute within Max Planck Society over ties to Israel

Posted on | A collective of academics in solidarity with Palestine from The Max Planck Society | Freedom News

Statement from a collective of academics in solidarity with Palestine from The Max Planck Society:

The Max Planck Society (MPS) is a government-funded research organisation in Germany that comprises 85 research institutes (most of which are also based in Germany), and it is one of the most successful such organisations worldwide. Therefore, its academic and non-academic employees come from various backgrounds, and the MPS prides itself on the diversity it fosters. However, this position has not always been reflected in the political statements and stances that the MPS has expressed over the years, its continuous support and collaboration with Israeli research institutions, which partake in the apartheid regime in occupied Palestine, being a prime example of this.