Middle East Studies Association to Israelis: “Go to the Back of the Bus”

3) You write: "nor do we see any reasonable grounds for claiming that MESA's actions in this case were disingenuous."

But I was quite specific in what I found disingenuous and that was this sentence in MESA President Fred Donner's letter of apology: "MESA is on the record as opposing academic boycotts like that of the BDS movement and other forms of academic blacklists." It is true there is one 2005 letter from MESA to the British Association of University Teachers (which had voted initially to bar any contacts with scholars from two Israeli universities) in which MESA's CAF states its opposition to the AUT vote and which seems to affirm opposition to academic boycotts of any kind. In 2005, MESA's CAF wrote to the AUT, saying: "We are on record as opposing restrictions against individual scholars except in instances where those individuals have violated clearly established legal and ethical norms. We especially oppose penalizing entire segments of an academic community for any reason whatsoever." This is a good statement as far as it goes, but there has been no statement on MESA's part specifically referring to the BDS movement or to the U.S. Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel, which has been very active on U.S. campuses (most recently at the University of Pennsylvania). MESA opposes the British Association of University Teachers; why doesn't it expressly oppose the U.S. Campaign?

Finally, after I wrote the article on the incident at MESA's meeting to which you responded, I did some further research on MESA's website and I came across a "letter of intervention" to Hamas, the terrorist group that took credit for bombings at Hebrew University in 2002. MESA wrote to Hamas saying: "by targeting a university, the Islamic Resistance Movement grievously assaulted the academic freedom of Hebrew University students and their ability to exercise their right to exchange and receive information without putting themselves at risk of death or serious injury." I guess this means that if Osama bin Laden had bombed Columbia University rather than the World Trade Center, then MESA would have written a letter to him as well. I don't know what to make of such a letter; it is either incredibly arrogant or incredibly naïve, or both.

I hope you will share this letter with your membership.

Sincerely,

Alan H. Luxenberg
President, Foreign Policy Research Institute