umkahlil

Excerpt:

What makes these anti-scholarship attacks possible and popular is the
existence of a major discrepancy, even a radical disconnect, between popular
knowledge and media coverage about the Palestine/Israel conundrum and
established scholarly knowledge about the topic. It is this disconnect that
the witch hunters mobilise against scholarship as proof that it is not media
and popular knowledge, which defends Israeli policy and Zionism's axioms,
that is ideological, but rather academic scholarship which has largely
uncovered unsavory facts about both. Thus when young American students who
come from ideologically charged homes, schools, and environments, attend
university classes about the subject, they mistake established scholarship
as pro- Palestinian propaganda, a conclusion that is propped up by the likes
of Campus Watch, the David Project, and the Anti- Defamation League, all
three organisations who make it part or all their business to attack
scholarly criticisms of Israeli policy.