...The décor in a major tourist hotel was representative of the now-compulsory and trivial nod to Judaism in America's secular and commercial culture. Inside the hotel, the Middle East Studies Association of North America hosted a panel on the rectitude of a boycott against academic institutions within the Jewish state as part of its annual meeting. The panel, formally titled "Academic Freedom and Academic Boycotts: A Symposium," offered two proponents of such a boycott, Lawrence Davidson of West Chester University and Omar Barghouti, a Palestinian researcher, and two opponents, Joan Scott of the Institute for Advanced Study and Joe Stork of Human Rights Watch...

...The debate provided by MESA, which came out against the boycott of Israeli academics in May 2005, was narrowly drawn. It pitted a pair of academics who urged an immediate ban on doing business with Israeli counterparts against another pair of Israel's critics who argued academic freedom ought to be preserved. At times abstruse, the vocal argumentation evoked the heated discussions among the various shades of leftist at the CCNY Alcoves in the 1930s.

" Israel's research institutions have granted legitimacy on those that recognize … apartheid, ethnic cleansing," Mr. Davidson, who is pro-boycott, said. "The Zionist near-monopoly has allowed Israelis to build support for the racist stereotype of Arab." Mr. Barghouti charged that the acceptance of Israeli academics brings legitimacy to the nation as a whole. " Israel's academy plays a major role in sustaining the apartheid system and colonialism … academic institutions are more important to Israel than academic institutions in the U.S."

While both Ms. Scott and Mr. Stork vocally opposed the boycott on a number of philosophical and tactical grounds — among them, the idea that the best response to a disliked idea is more speech, an unwillingness to hurt those Israeli academics who might oppose the policies of Israel's government, a desire to maintain the principle of academic freedom — neither offered words of defense of Israel overall. Ms. Scott, for example, reminded the more than 100 audience members of the importance the idea of academic freedom held in debates with David Horowitz, a conservative activist who has targeted leftist extremism in academia...

...The conference was not called off because of the inadvertent inclusion of an anti-Semitic article in a packet of reading materials. That was the last straw in a carefully orchestrated campaign to abort the conference by a lobby of people (pro-Israel occupation)who believe that any representation of a point of view other than theirs is ananthema...He fails to identify the “critics” as lobbyists on behalf of the current Israeli regime (or fellow travellers of those lobbyists)...