LOL... Chill out!! Joe, how about a little seminar on Irish poetry? In the cozy precincts of Harvard University:
Irish poet's Israel views cause a stir at Harvard
The New York Times
Friday, November 22, 2002
Citing concerns about freedom of speech, Harvard University's English department has renewed an invitation to the Irish poet Tom Paulin to give a lecture, just a week after he was disinvited for expressing strongly anti-Israeli views.
The new invitation, on Tuesday night, drew sharply differing responses from faculty members and students at Harvard, which has been troubled by heated debates and demonstrations about Israel in the past year. Some expressed relief, saying that the university had crossed the line by disinviting a poet because of his political views. Others were outraged and said that the decision would lead to renewed protests.
"I hope that those who choose to attend the planned reading will respect the rights of those who wish to hear the speaker," Harvard's president, Lawrence Summers, said Wednesday in a statement.
Paulin's invitation was rescinded Nov. 12 after students, faculty and alumni expressed outrage about comments the poet made to an Egyptian newspaper in April. He had said that Brooklyn-born Jews who settled in the West Bank "should be shot dead," adding: "I think they are Nazis, racists, I feel nothing but hatred for them."
Paulin did not respond to messages left at Columbia University, where he is a visiting faculty member this autumn. But he has said that his views have been distorted and that he does not support attacks on Israeli citizens under any circumstances.
Summers released an approving statement after the invitation was rescinded last week. But the decision to disinvite Paulin prompted a rebuke from three professors at Harvard Law School - Alan Dershowitz, Laurence Tribe and Charles Fried - in a joint letter published in The Harvard Crimson.Paulin is likely to accept the invitation, said James Shapiro, a professor at Columbia who knows him.
iht.com
Even I never called Israelis Nazis --I merely called them what they are: Judeofascists. |
