The College Fix

Via The Daily Pennsylvanian, this reminder that some anti-Israel rhetoric is too much for even Israel critics to tolerate.

Former New York Times reporter Chris Hedges has been disinvited from a conference at the University of Pennsylvania after he penned a column calling the terrorists of the Islamic State “the new Israel,” the Jerusalem Post reports:

Hedges, now a columnist for the Truthdig.com website, was to speak at an April forum on prospects for peace in the Middle East sponsored by the university’s International Affairs Association.

Zachary Michael Belnavis, a student leader of the association, wrote to the lecture agency that his group didn’t see Hedges as a “suitable fit” for the conference. …

“In light of this comparison, we don’t believe he would be suitable to a co-existence speaker based on this stance he’s taken.”

Hedges wrote a followup column after his disinvitation, calling himself a victim of the campus push for “civility” – the same tack that anti-Israel academic Steven Salaita took after his job offer was revoked at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign:

“Being banned from speaking about the conflict between Israel and Palestine, especially at universities, is familiar to anyone who attempts to challenge the narrative of the Israel lobby,” he wrote. “This is not the first time one of my speaking offers has been revoked and it will not be the last.”

In the original column, Hedges said the Islamic State’s “quest for an ethnically pure Sunni state mirrors the quest for a Jewish state eventually carved out of Palestine in 1948”:

Its tactics are much like those of the Jewish guerrillas who used violence, terrorism, foreign fighters, clandestine arms shipments and foreign money, along with horrific ethnic cleansing and the massacre of hundreds of Arab civilians, to create Israel.

Read the Jerusalem Post story.

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