Shlonsky, however, is a particularly virulent foe of the Jewish state from his bailiwick in Switzerland, for he not only wants to see Israel in general boycotted, but also all Israeli universities and their academic staff. His writings and comments promoting “divestment” are so malicious that they appear in all manner of pro-Palestinian propaganda websites, including Palestine with Provenance, an Irish pro-terror web site, as well as this ISM website fronting for Arabs in the UK. He has spoken in favor of boycotting Israel at a Michigan college.

University of Geneva: Linguistics Professor Ur Shlonsky speaks with a forked tongue

By Lee Kaplan, www.Isracampus.org.il
8/3/2010

Ur Shlonsky is an adjunct professor of linguistics at the University of Geneva. As a linguist, he joins a long line of Israel-bashing Israeli semanticists and linguists who were influenced by the late Tanya Reinhart (a groupie of the still-living Noam Chomsky), mainly through Tel Aviv University’s Linguistics Department. Shlonsky, however, is a particularly virulent foe of the Jewish state from his bailiwick in Switzerland, for he not only wants to see Israel in general boycotted, but also all Israeli universities and their academic staff. His writings and comments promoting “divestment” are so malicious that they appear in all manner of pro-Palestinian propaganda websites, including Palestine with Provenance, an Irish pro-terror web site, as well as this ISM website fronting for Arabs in the UK. He has spoken in favor of boycotting Israel at a Michigan college.

Shlonsky was among the first Israeli academics to sign a petition calling for the boycott of Israel during the first Al Aksa Intifada, when hundreds of Israeli were murdered in Arab terrorist attacks. It said, inter alia, “We call on the world community to organize and boycott Israeli industrial and agricultural exports and goods, as well as leisure tourism, in the hope that it will have the same positive result that the boycott of South Africa had on Apartheid.” The same petition denied such boycotts are anti-Semitic: “The major role of the Israeli BDS movement has been to support international BDS calls against Israel and legitimize them both as clearly not anti-Semitic, as not working against Israelis but against Israeli governmental policies, and as supporting a legitimate nonviolent means by which Palestinian civil society can reclaim and re-own its people’s rights and freedoms. Alongside solidarity with the Palestinians, the driving force behind the Israeli BDS movement has been the realization that the criminal occupation and repression of the Palestinian people, as practiced by Israeli governments, will not be redressed without significant international pressure.”

In January 2003, Shlonsky turned down an invitation to speak at an academic conference that was to be held at Ben-Gurion University in Beersheba. He explained this as follows: "Participating in an international scientific conference in Israel - anywhere in Israel - is, to my eyes, tantamount at this time to enjoying a good meal in a restaurant which faces the walls of a hungry ghetto." Perhaps Israel should investigate why Ben Gurion University invited such a buffoon to appear there in the first place.

Incredibly, Shlonsky, the supposed expert on words, has written: “…for at least the last 200 years, Jews have demanded equal rights in every country in which they’ve lived – with the remarkable exception of Israel, the Jewish state. Israel has always founded its institutions on the denial of equality to non-Jews. From the beginning, a good half a century before 1948 when the state of Israel was established, Zionist ideology has held strict opposition to equality for non-Jews as a fundamental principle.”

For another example of Shlonsky disinformation, he wrote in the semi-Marxist anti-Semitic magazine, The Nation, “…it seems to me fairly well established that only Jews enjoy real freedom in Israel, and only Jewish students and faculty are really free in Israel's universities. Arab students are subject both to institutional discrimination and to the more or less usual racism which permeates Israeli society. The former includes the near absence of financial aid, the absence of Hebrew-language assistance (which is provided to Jewish immigrants), no housing assistance and no official recognition of Arab student bodies. Finally, Arabs' liberties of expression and congregation are substantially more restricted than those accorded to Jews or Jewish bodies.”

Shlonsky has also pontificated, “I don't see any valid justification to exclude universities and research institutes from a general boycott of Israeli goods and services... I practice the boycott and as such I do not buy Israeli avocados and beauty products or participate in events organized by an Israeli academic institution."

Shlonsky often lies by claiming Arabs are discriminated against in Israel’s university system. In reality thousands of underqualified Arabs are admitted into Israeli universities under affirmative action programs. There are some Arab professors in Israel who openly call for the destruction of the state. They are in fact protected by Israeli law, enforced by the same state they hate so much, while pursuing their totalitarian ideas. Then there are Israeli-Arab professors like Professor Hossam Haick, a doctor at the Technion who developed a cure for lung cancer.

Shlonsky once taught a course at the University of Haifa, to the shame of that institution. He seems to have dreamed up the following imaginary anecdote: “When I taught at Haifa University in the late 1980s, I was appalled by the existence of a two-tier grade system, with different standards for Jews and Arabs. I distinctly recall my department chair pressuring me to give a B+ to a Palestinian student, explaining that while she agreed that the student's work was not worth the paper it was written on, ‘she is only an Arab girl who wants to be a teacher.’” From this you would not know that the same university actually discriminates in FAVOR if Arabs.

We hereby challenge the good Shlonsky to provide the name and details of the University of Haifa professor who said that. Barring that, we urge the University of Haifa to sue Shlonsky for defamation!

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