According to Tim Anderson, who was sacked from the University of Sydney last month, academic freedom entitles him to display, as teaching material, the flag of the state of Israel with a swastika superimposed on it.
Anderson is not alone in objecting to the university’s decision to terminate his employment: his protests are backed by a swag of colleagues who portray him as the latest victim of the vast right-wing conspiracy they believe spawned the Ramsay Centre’s proposed program of study on Western civilisation.
And the expressions of concern go beyond the paranoid fringe: the Institute of Public Affairs, which hardly sympathises with Anderson’s views, has criticised his dismissal in these pages and lists it among the actions by the university that are “hostile to freedom of speech”.
But Anderson’s assimilation of Israel to the Nazi state is not just a grotesque distortion of the historical record, which in and of itself would warrant his dismissal for conduct inconsistent with scholarly ethics. It is also, as the university concluded, “disrespectful and offensive” — or, to put it more straightforwardly, anti-Semitic.
It therefore breaches the obligation public institutions have to show equal respect to all Australians, regardless of their race, religion or ethnicity.
There are, for sure, many difficulties involved in distinguishing hostility to Zionism and legitimate criticisms of Israeli governments, on the one hand, from anti-Semitism on the other: the close association between Jews and the state of Israel makes the distinctions all the harder to draw.
However, the difficulties are not an all-purpose alibi, providing a get-out-of-jail card for those who cross the line. On the contrary, precisely because of the risks involved, teachers, and especially those funded by taxpayers, have a special duty of care when they venture into the area where criticism of Israel might veer into hatred of Jews.
They must, for example, avoid applying one standard to the state of Israel and another to its counterparts, which would amount to singling out for special and discriminatory treatment the country with which Jews are most closely associated.
That Anderson, in his rush to demonise and delegitimise Israel, cavalierly disregarded that requirement — accusing Israel of crimes that parallel the Holocaust, while presenting Bashar al-Assad, who has been responsible for the death, often by torture, of more than 400,000 Syrians, as a “mild-mannered eye doctor” whose country is the innocent victim of a Western plot “to destroy an independent nation” — is beyond dispute.
Read the article by Henry Ergas in The Australian.