Firing Frauds in Israeli Academia

Kislev 6, 5770, 23 November 09 03:06

by from "Back to Sanity" - Arutz 7 Analysts

(Israelnationalnews.com) The real news concerning Prof. Ariel Toaff is that Bar-Ilan University has shown that it is unwilling to take disciplinary action against a crackpot professor publishing fraudulent materials and lies about Jews.

There are, after all, numerous precedents from all over the democratic world of universities firing tenured professors for both fraud and for open promotion of lunatic, crackpot, obviously-false "theories". Several Holocaust Deniers have been fired from tenured jobs in the democratic world, with France's Robert Faurrison perhaps the most notorious. Professors promoting unacceptable offensive ideas or exhibiting behavior offensive to their employers have been fired in the US. Tenured professors have been stripped of tenure for the mere expression of lunatic ideas in the US and for embarrassing their own employers.

Similarly, academics being caught conducting explicit fraud have also been canned. Luk van Parijs was fired from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for fraud. Outside the democratic world, professors engaged in fraudulent research have also been fired. Even people willing to defend the most offensive campus opinions in the name of "academic freedom", such as those of University of Colorado's Ward Churchill, have agreed that he should be fired if he actually committed fraud. Western Professors endorsing or collaborating with terrorism have also been fired. There is some precedence for firing tenured faculty in Israel when fraud has been detected.

All of which brings us to the case of Bar-Ilan University professor Ariel Toaff, son of Italian Rabbi Elio Toaff. As every neo-nazi web site on the planet has already publicized in jubilation, this Italian-Israeli "scholar" has published work claiming that Jews in the Middle Ages used Christian blood, including for Passover, and engaged in ritual murders. His "book", called Bloody Passovers, is a complete fraud. It gives credence to medieval "reports" that Jews murdered Christian children to use their blood for ritual purposes. It "confirms" that some Ashkenazi Jews indeed engaged in human sacrifices.

Bar-Ilan's officials, facing a worldwide explosion of rage, have politely distanced themselves from Toaff. But they have not taken any action against him, have not stripped him of tenure for fraud nor fired him, and in fact have been going out of their way to circle their wagons and defend Toaff's "academic freedom." Suddenly fraud is protected academic scholarship.

Toaff has generously offered to pull the book off the shelves for a little while in order to insert some "clarifications". The problem of course is not insufficient clarity but rather anti-Semitic outright fraud. Toaff is sticking to his guns, even if it means "he gets crucified" (in his words). Accusing Jews of being behind crucifixion is of course entirely consistent with his "scholarship."

Meanwhile, Toaff's shenanigans illustrate better than any other why Israeli universities are sinking into a quagmire of mediocrity and how the unwillingness to act against crackpots and fraud are destroying Israeli academia.

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