In the wake of the failed attempt to overthrow him, Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has revoked the accreditation of tens of thousands of school teachers, ordered the resignation of the deans of all of his country’s universities, and forbidden professors from traveling abroad. And yet none of the American scholarly organizations advocating or endorsing academic boycotts of Israel is considering a boycott of Turkey. Liel Leibovitz comments:
Curtis Marez, the president of the American Studies Association, . . . when asked why his organization was singling Israel out for calumny and not, say, Russia or China or Turkey, replied “one has to start somewhere.” Well, professor, you’ve started somewhere, and now you have to keep going. Because if you criticize Israel alone, if you fail to speak when actual assaults on academic freedom are keeping actual educators and scholars from engaging in teaching and research, if you reserve moral outrage for the Jewish state alone and have none to show the true tyrants everywhere quashing the ideals we hold dear, then you and your colleagues will have proved yourselves to be nothing more than puny anti-Semites worthy of neither our respect nor our tuition dollars.
Read more on Tablet: http://www.tabletmag.com/scroll/208712/hey-bds-loving-professors-watching-the-assault-on-academic-freedom-in-turkey-why-so-quiet