Leftist Professors and Double Standards

by Jamie Glazov, FrontPage:

Frontpage Interview’s guest today is Dr. Fred Gottheil, a professor of Economics at the University of Illinois.

FP: Dr. Fred Gottheil, welcome to Frontpage Interview.

I would like to discuss with you today a recent experiment you did — The Statement of Concern — which exposed the hypocrisy of leftist academics who pretend they care about women’s rights and the rights of gays and lesbians.

Tell us about the Statement of Concern, what motivated you to do it and what its results have been.

Gotteil: My “Statement of Concern” came about more by accident than by design. I was searching for someone or some subject on Google.com — can’t remember exactly — when I chanced upon multiple listings of Professor David Lloyd’s anti-Israel petition. That was in early January, 2009, just after the Gaza war. Lloyd’s petition, addressed to incoming President Obama, asked for a US abandonment of Israel. His four-page argument read as if it were written by Ahmadinejad himself. Of course, that wasn’t really interesting, considering the source. But it was the lead-in heading on so many of these petition-carrying sites that drew my attention. It read something like “900 Academics Sign Petition Against Israel …” I became more curious about who these 900 academics were than about the substance of the petition and found myself going carefully through the list of those 900. Did I recognize any? Indeed I did. Six were on faculty at the University of Illinois and one actually affiliated with its Jewish Studies Program! A few more were “the usual suspects” types but I couldn’t help but wonder who the others were and why they would sign onto such a distorted account of Israel.

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