Tolerance. Understanding. Two values progressives claim but lack.
And when one of their own steps out of line, there’s hell to pay.
The Telegraph reports:
A Palestinian professor who took his students on a field trip to Auschwitz has resigned from his post following a months-long campaign of death threats, campus riots and intimidation against him.
Prof Mohammed Dajani, head of the American Studies Department and director of the library at Al Quds University, was denounced as a “traitor” and “collaborator” by some of his colleagues, students and members of the public, after he organized a trip to the site of the Nazi concentration camp in Poland. It was announced that Prof Dajani was also “fired” from the university staff union, despite never having joined the organization in the first place.
27 Palestinian students attended the trip in March as part of a project to learn more about the Holocaust and teach tolerance and empathy. The programme, run in conjunction with an Israeli and a German university, also took Israeli students on trips to meet Palestinians living in refugee camps.
Prof Dajani condemned the campaign of “incitement” directed against him in an interview with the Israeli daily Haaretz, saying that he submitted his resignation as “a litmus test to see whether the university administration supports academic freedom and freedom of action and of expression as they claim, or not.” He said he had hoped the university president would “take a stand” by refusing to accept his resignation.
“I put my job on the line to expose the double-talk we live”, Prof Dajani told Haaretz. “We say we are for democracy and we practice autocracy, we say we are for freedom of speech and academic freedom, yet we deny people to practice it.”
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