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Norwegian Academic Boycott of “Israel” Averted!

Norwegian Academic Boycott of “Israel” Averted!
folder_openInternational News access_time15 years ago
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Sara Ibrahim

An academic boycott of "Israel" in Norway was abruptly rejected last week, when the executive board of the University of Trondheim fully decided to rebuff the controversial move.

After several weeks of continuous local and International support for the anti-"Israel" academic boycott campaign at Norway's Trondheim University, Professor Bjorn Alsberg, a member of the board the Trondheim-based Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU), led a campaign against the boycott, claiming that a boycott would be harmful to NTNU, and that Norwegian universities should not make their own foreign policies.

Professor Alsberg wasn't the only one to initiate actions against the campaign, the American Association of University Proffesors (AAUP), along with a number of advocacy groups launched a petition against the academic boycott, claiming that they've always opposed focused boycotts of academic institutions, and that free discussion among all faculty members worldwide should be encouraged, not inhibited.

This isn't the first stand against an anti-"Israel" boycott; in 2006 US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice threatened Norway with "serious political consequences" after Finance Minister and Socialist Left Party leader Krisin Halvorsen admitted to supporting a boycott of "Israeli" goods.

Despite the fact that the academic boycott was refused and fought by several groups, many insisted on going on with it. More than 30 professors had called for a seize on academic and cultural cooperation with "Israel" until Palestine is liberated.

"It is time that academic institutions contributed to an international pressure against "Israel", so that real negotiations between "Israel", democratically elected Palestinian authorities and the international society can begin," the letter said, adding that the "Israeli" universities play a key role in the policy of oppression, and that our silence and inaction makes us all complicit in this "Israeli"-Palestine tragedy, for neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim.

All of this reminds us of what a British Historian Arnold Toynbee once said--"Right and wrong are the same in Palestine as anywhere else. What is peculiar about the Palestine conflict is that the world has listened to the party that has committed the offence and has turned a deaf ear to the victims."

Comments

person Ibrahim Fakih

Very Good Article (Norwegian Academic Boycott of “Israel” Averted!)

I like this article. It is a pain to see some people who are thousands of miles away supporting our case, whereas some of us are keeping silence and inaction. I like the author "Sara Ibrahim" when she writes that "Neutrality helps the oppressor". This statement should ring a bell in everyone's mind. Bravo for Sara Ibrahim for such very good article.