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#20... May 15,
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P. 6, AMERICAN
FREE PRESS * May 15, 2006 News
From the Foundation to Defend the First Amendment
Congress
Acts to
Censor Academics Who Criticize Government Policy
Assault on free speech,
thought
ignored by mainstream
By Michael Collins Piper
 |
With
little notice — except in Israel and in the pages of a handful
of small but highly influential pro-Israel newspapers across the
United States — the U.S. House of representatives passed “thought
control” legislation that would set up a mechanism to punish
American universities that permit on-campus academics and students
to criticize Israel.
The bill establishes a seven-member federal advisory review board
in the U.S. department of Education. Although its advocates formally
deny it — but everyone knows better — the purpose of
this board is to curtail academic dissent against U.S. foreign policy,
particularly in the realm of American policy in the Middle East.
The overall process sets the stage for the Department of Education
to deny federal funding to colleges and universities which are determined
to be harboring critics of Israel on their faculties.
While the measure does not directly permit the board to direct what
any professor can or cannot say, the bottom line is that if a professor
is determined to have a bias against Israel, the Department of Education
has the authority to pull federal funding from the university where
the professor teaches. In other words, this is a “backdoor”
method of censorship, holding the threat of funding cuts over the
heads of professors and their universities.
This police-state-style measure — enthusiastically endorsed
by the pro-Israel lobby in Washington — was incorporated into
a larger legislative package passed by the House on March 30 under
the innocuous-sounding title “To Amend and Extend the Higher
Education Act of 1965” (H.R. 609). The chief sponsor of the
scheme was Rep. Patrick Tiberi (R-Ohio). The initiative is contained
in section 601 of the massive bill under the heading “International
And Foreign Language Studies.”
Although this particular thought-control measure was, at one point,
numbered H.R. 509 — when its dangerous intent was first reported
by American Free Press — the bill
underwent several numerical changes during the time it was being
considered by the House. This added confusion to the matter and
certainly hindered the efforts of those who were interested in blocking
the legislation.
On the other hand, according to the April 12 issue of the Washington-based
Jewish Week newspaper, “The American Jewish Congress, which
led lobbying for the advisory board, blitzed Congress members in
the days before its passage.”
The House bill has now been referred to the Senate which has already
approved legislation giving the secretary of education considerable
authority to slash funding at universities charged with “anti-Semitism”
— that is, having open on-campus criticism of Israel or expressing
sympathy for the Christian and Muslim Palestinian people.
However, the Senate version of this authoritarian measure is marginally
less dangerous than the House version, if only because the Senate
version does not include the provision for the federal advisory
board. The House and the Senate will now begin hammering out differences
between the measures for final consideration.
The current House legislation is a disguised reincarnation of an
even earlier pernicious proposal by two White-House-hungry Republican
senators, Rick Santorum (Pa.) and Sam Brownback (Kan.), who were
clearly pandering to the Israeli lobby (and pro-Israel campaign
contributors) by promoting such measures.
After AFP learned of the scheme by Santorum and Brownback and focused
on their intention of introducing so-called “ideological diversity”
legislation designed to curtail criticism of Israel on American
college campuses, the resulting negative publicity forced the duo
to back off.
Angry that the scheme had been derailed, the New York-based Jewish
Week published a story about the controversy generated
by AFP’s reportage saying AFP’s revelation of the Santorum-Brownback
scheme was “a dangerous urban legend, deliberate disinformation
at worst” concocted by “several leading conspiracy theorists
and Holocaust revisionists,” which had become “an article
of faith throughout the Arab world and in some U.S. left-wing circles.”
In fact, the first and little-noticed report about the Santorum-Brownback
scheme, (which later spawned the House measures) was first mentioned
in the April 15, 2003, in the small-circulation New
York Sun, a stridently pro-Israel “neo-conservative”
daily. The Sun revealed that the two senators and several of their
colleagues had discussed such legislation in the company of representatives
of a number of powerful pro-Israel organization at a private meeting
on Capitol Hill.
In any event, the Santorum-Brownback proposal has — like the
proverbial “bad penny” — popped up again, in new
guise, and is now before Congress.
(Issue #20, May 15, 2006, AMERICAN
FREE PRESS)
