Academic Activism on Display in Berkeley: Bazian, Zunes, and "Friends of Sabeel"

My latest Campus Watch blog post looks at the involvement of two California Middle East studies professors in an upcoming conference in Berkeley that, to put it mildly, hardly provides an unbiased perspective on the Middle East:

UC Berkeley Near Eastern studies lecturer Hatem Bazian and University of San Francisco (USF) politics and international studies professor Stephen Zunes are among the speakers at a Friends of Sabeel – North America regional conference taking place on August 24-45 at St. John's Presbyterian Church in Berkeley.

Friends of Sabeel – North America is a branch of Sabeel International, which claims to be "an international peace movement initiated by Palestinian Christians in the Holy Land." The Sabeel Ecumenical Liberation Theology Center may be based in Jerusalem, but there is nothing peaceful about the organization's propagandistic and one-sided approach to the Mideast conflict.

Sabeel's ultimate goal, as stated at its website, is a "bi-national state" in which Israel no longer exists as such. To this end, the group seeks to enlist the aid of Western Christians and others in the "interfaith community" in isolating Israel through boycotts and, ultimately, by ending U.S. support for, as they put it, its "illegal military occupation."

Tireless champions of any "cause" that implicates Israel and the United States in alleged wrongdoing, Bazian and Zunes should fit in perfectly at the Sabeel conference, which is titled, ironically, "Breaking Down the Wall of Silence: Voices We Need To Hear."

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