Another Target of Leftist Campus McCarthyism

My own home university, the University of Haifa, has been the scene in recent days of a saga of leftist campus McCarthyism. It all began when a professor of Middle East political science, David Bukay, was accused by an Arab student activist, one who was not even formally registered in Bukay’s class (a student active in a communist student organization), of making derogatory comments in class about Arabs.

The allegations were planted in a local newspaper, then reported in the Arab press. After this, one of the Cockburn Cockroaches, a regular columnist on Counterpunch with views about Jews resembling those of neonazis, started spreading the allegations about the internet. Kurt Nimmo is an unemployed New Mexico photographer-wannabe (he blames neocons for his inability to find employment) who writes crackpot articles for Counterpunch and also for the neonazi web site Rense.com. Nimmo routinely refers to all Jews as “Zionists”, such as the new director of the World Bank, and Nimmo clearly thinks all “Zionists” need to be shipped off in cattle cars to nice camps. Nimmo spread the libel around on anti-Semitic web sites.

The only problem with the story about Bukay’s alleged dissing of Arabs was that none of the other students in his class heard him say any such things. Bukay, who speaks Arabic better than I speak English, has taught students, including many Arab students, Middle East politics for many years. An investigation by the authorities at the university concluded that Bukay never said what the student had alleged. Nevertheless, some leftist professors have been operating a campaign of vilification against Bukay.

Meanwhile, the leftist press continues to “pitbull” against Bukay, and Israel’s leftist Attorney General has ordered an “investigation” of Bukay and his alleged comments. In the newspaper Maariv columnist and editor Ben-Dror Yemini takes all such people to task for their double standards and hypocrisy. Where are all the people hounding Bukay over alleged insensitive comments when academic leftist open traitors endorse anti-Semitism and Arab terrorism, or spread anti-Jewish blood libels, he wonders? How come Bukay is not entitled to academic free speech, while the tenured traitors are never subject to similar “investigations”?