In Unprecedented Event, Academic Gives Anti-Israel Opinion As Fact

Professor Roelle has become the target of literally three calls for apology and correction, a veritable torrent of criticism.

Urbana-Champaign, Illinois, March 10 – In an unprecedented occurrence, a left-wing professor at a prestigious university has used her limited knowledge of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to portray her negative assessment of Israeli policies as established fact, departing from the norm of such pronouncements as the product of sober, objective consideration.

University of Illinois Professor of Sociology and Ethnic Studies Soneyess Roelle gave an address last week in which she likened Israel to Apartheid-era South Africa, betraying gross ignorance of both milieus. Such conflations of empirical facts and politically-motivated opinion rarely occur in academia, especially in the social sciences, making the incident a glaring exception to the otherwise politically neutral, ideologically tolerant set of disciplines. As a result of the address, Professor Roelle has become the target of literally three calls for apology and correction, a veritable torrent of criticism. When presented with the negative reaction, she immediately apologized for failing to adequately uphold academic standards that demand a modicum of sociology jargon to help hide antisemitism and a priori anti-Israel bias, which itself is a rarity in academe.

“It’s pretty difficult to find liberal Liberal Arts faculty in American colleges and universities who harbor antipathy toward Israel,” explains Seno Evel, who edits the educational journal Bias, Opinion, and Gender in University Settings (BOGUS). “There definitely have been such people, since this is such a big country with so much a variety and diversity, but you have to look pretty hard to find an American liberal academic who isn’t a die-hard Zionist. On top of that, here we have the exceedingly rare case of a ‘soft sciences’ professor treating her interpretation of events as factual. You can see why such occurrences happen only rarely.”

The most recent issue of BOGUS examines that subject, noting that US and Canadian secondary education seldom becomes mired in politics, and students only infrequently encounter on-campus rhetoric tainted by bias. Even more uncommon in the academic environment is anti-Israel bias, which the BOGUS article deems “such a scarce phenomenon on US campuses that one wonders whether antisemitic tropes have ever been encountered there.”

BOGUS notes that entire movements have sprung up on US college campuses to promote boycotts, divestment and sanctions against countries and international organizations that engage in policies that give Islam a bad name: mass murder, genocide, forced conversions, kidnappings, torture of “infidels,” forcing underage girls to marry, and the systematic trampling of all human rights. Mass demonstrations have taken place across, for example, the university of California system, calling for the university to strip itself of investments in companies that do business with the Islamic State, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Sudan, as well as other countries that systematically violate human rights, such as North Korea, Russia, China, and the state of Missouri.