The Israeli Students Combating Anti-Semitism (ISCA), a project by The National Union of Israeli Students (NUIS), recently released a media report examining Adolf Hitler’s presence online. They noted that glorifying Hitler is “a widespread trend” on the internet, with a wide range of content promoting Hitler’s ideology readily available on national-socialist, neo-Nazi, and white supremacist websites, as well as on social media platforms, such as Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, and Instagram. ISCA stated that such websites not only “glorify Hitler through History,” but also “draw a complete outline of Hitler’s ideology, interpreting Hitler’s thought and presenting him as a visionary”, in addition to providing their visitors with “alternative ideological tools to understand and interpret the present.” There are many such websites online, each aiming to perpetuate Hitler’s hateful ideology by glorifying it and by attempting to “educate” their visitors with biased, distorted information by claiming freedom of speech. Many of the sites noted by ISCA as examples in their report praised Hitler and his ideology, one site claiming him to be an “inspiration” and another listing 10 reasons why he was “one of the good guys.” In addition, ISCA also noted that some of the websites, “often related to far-right or neo-fascist movements”, are dedicated to the merchandising of Nazi and Hitler’s “souvenirs.” Such “relics” include Nazi paraphernalia, pins and flags, and other such merchandising consists of copies of Mein Kampf and other books and DVDs supporting Hitler’s ideology, clothing with various Nazi inspired emblems, and a even a bust of Hitler. Such bigoted content is not limited to lone websites, and is also present in various social networking platforms. ISCA noted that Facebook, being the largest social networking site, has a multitude of pages and profiles that are “racist or promote racial hatred.” These pages can be public group pages or personal profiles. While Facebook does offer its “community of users the possibility to report such pages and profiles so the network deletes them”, they do not catch or delete everything so one can still find content glorifying Hitler and the Nazis on the site. When these pages or profiles are eventually deleted, there is the problem that the creator of the page or profile can easily re-create it. (more…)
On January 14, 2016, the Board of Directors of the Association of American Universities reissued a 2013 statement opposing boycotts of Israeli academic institutions. The statement proclaims that “any such boycott of academic institutions directly violates academic freedom, which a fundamental principle of AAU universities and of American higher education in general.” The AAU reissued their statement after other U.S. scholarly organizations passed anti-Israel resolutions. The AAU statement addresses the violation of academic freedom stating, “restrictions imposed on the ability of scholars of any particular country to work with their fellow academics in other countries, participate in meetings and organizations, or otherwise carry out their scholarly activities violate academic freedom.” It is important to defend all of our freedoms, especially academic freedoms, because an education is the most valuable thing anyone can have. The AAU was founded in 1900 by a group of 14 Ph.D.-granting institutions and has since grown to 60 U.S. and two Canadian research universities including Harvard, Yale, and Princeton. The primary purpose of the AAU is to provide a forum for the development and implementation of institutional and national policies. According to the AAU website, the major activities of the association include federal government relations, policy studies, and public affairs. Brandeis Center President Kenneth L. Marcus has argued that it is no coincidence that faculty anti-Semitism and campus anti-Semitism are swelling at the same time. “The professors are giving an air of legitimacy to the virulent anti-Israel hostility that sometimes spills over into outright Jew-hatred. It is like they are providing a moral justification, or permission, for hatreds that have otherwise been considered socially unacceptable.” Jeff Robins adds, “The proliferation of faculty-sponsored condemnations of the Jewish state by those who stay silent about grotesque regimes with incomparably worse human rights records than Israel has occurred contemporaneously with spreading anti-Semitism on American college campuses.” You can read the 2013 statement in full by following this link.