As explained by me today at Real Clear Education. Here is the gist:
The Squeaky Wheel of the Boycott Israel Movement
By Steven Lubet
March 14, 2022
The great advantage of a conspiracy theory is that everything counts as proof. Even the absence of evidence only shows that a secret cabal is lying in wait, while seemingly mundane events can be stitched together into a forbidding web of oppressive intrigue. This is never more true than for the claims of the BDS (boycott, divest, sanctions) movement against Israel, as recently seen in a Chronicle of Higher Education article by University of Michigan professor Silke-Maria Weineck, misleadingly titled “When University Marketing Suppresses Academic Freedom.” The incident Weineck describes involves no suppression of anyone’s academic freedom, but it does provide a good example of how baseless suspicions can consume even well-educated and otherwise reasonable people among the Israel boycotters, reinforcing fantasies of their own persecution.
The essay details Weineck’s difficulty getting her school’s marketing department to produce accurate promotional materials for an endowed lecture by Palestine Legal’s Dima Khalidi, titled “A New McCarthyism: Academic Freedom and Palestine.” I do not question the broad outline of Weineck’s story, including the “many hours” it took her to convince the university’s social media team to prominently feature the full title of the lecture on a poster and in tweets, with “Palestine” in an appropriately large font. But her conspiracy-mindedness surfaces in her characterization of an extended exchange – essentially a disagreement over graphic design – as an attempted “erasure” of Palestine and an effort to depress attendance at the event. Weineck is apparently unaware of the principle of Hanlon’s Razor, which has a special application to university functionaries: “Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by incompetence.”
Although no administrator objected to, much less suppressed, either the “New McCarthyism” lecture or the speaker, Weineck jumps to the conclusion that Michigan’s social media team was surreptitiously attempting to blunt Palestinian voices in the guise of digital aesthetics, presumably under the baleful influence of you-know-who’s well-oiled machine.
It is still more ironic that she bemoans the “new McCarthyism” – evoking an era when alleged Communists were imagined everywhere – even as she imagines sinister forces of erasure lurking behind every digital door.
You can read the entire essay here.