(Not) A Laughing Matter?

Professor Steven Plaut sent me his latest:

Hebrew University - The Leftwing McCarthyism of Prof. Itzhak Galnoor (Dept of Political Science)

Some excerpts - (but you have to read it all):-

Itzhak Galnoor is a left-leaning (generally non-extremist) professor of political science at the Hebrew University, and he also has long been associated with the semi-Marxist Van Leer Institute, a think tank in Jerusalem. He has a PhD in political science from Syracuse University [and is a Meretz sympathizer. i used to debate him in the 1980s, he as a Peace Now rep and me as rep of Gush Emunim]...

Prof. Galnoor thinks Israeli academic freedom is being threatened by Israel.s non-leftists. In his view the ultimate manifestation of academic freedom is when far-leftist academics can build careers on political advocacy of extremist ideology without anyone being allowed to criticize them. In particular, Galnoor thinks that leftist academic extremists are entitled to unlimited freedom of speech, but watchdog monitoring groups like Isracampus.org.il and Campus-Watch.org should be prohibited from citing and documenting the public political activity of academic extremists in a critical manner. Galnoor insists that such monitoring groups are themselves McCarthyist [sic].. He writes: This is the first step to apparently clean the universities from academic saboteurs who are capable of treason. This is not very far from the blacklisting practices in the United States during the McCarthy era...

Galnoor recently published a non-academic ideological article attacking the exercise of academic freedom by critics of leftists in Israel...it is an ideological attack against the exercise of freedom of speech by critics of Israel.s tenured radicals and its far-leftist anti-Israel faculty members. Galnoor evidently thinks such people should be exempt from public and private criticism. Expressing criticism and denunciations of the anti-Israel political activities of such radicals is itself an intolerable assault against academic freedom, insists Galnoor in his article. Academic freedom should be defended for those who attack Israel and seek its destruction, but not for anyone criticizing such people or questioning their motives.

The article is 19 pages in its final published form in the journal. It begins by retelling the history of the development of institutions of higher education in Israel. But the main theme of the article is that non-leftists in Israel are terrorizing and suppressing academic freedom in Israel...Galnoor proceeds to demonizing Israeli non-leftists in general.

...Postscript: There is a chat list for Israeli academics in the social sciences called .Social Science List,. run by the leftist Prof. David Faur-Levi, http://poli.haifa.ac.il/~levi/, an anti-democratic political science academic in the same department with Galnoor. Faur-Levi ran Galnoor's article on his chat list but refused to run my commentary and response to Galnoor, printed above. The Hebrew University's First Amendment strikes again.

But Steve forgot something.

A book Galnoor wrote.

Here:

No Laughing Matter: Collection of Political Jokes, eds. Steven Lukes, Itzhak Galnoor.
Penguin Books Ltd; New edition edition 1987, 1st edition 1986

Steve, maybe Galnoor is a satirist?