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Norway university rebuffs motion for Israel boycott
12.11.2009
/ Author: CAA
An academic boycott of Israel in Norway was averted on Thursday, when the executive board of the University of Trondheim unanimously decided to reject the controversial move.
"The vote resulted in total victory," said Professor Bjorn Alsberg, a member of the board of the Trondheim-based Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU). Alsberg, a chemistry professor, led a campaigned at the Norwegian city against the boycott.
He said that the vote to boycott Israel - which drew condemnations from Jewish organizations in Israel and elsewhere - was rejected after none of the 11 board members objected when NTNU Dean Torbjorn Digernes suggested scrapping the motion from the board meeting's agenda.
"..."The main arguments raised were that Norwegian universities should not [make] their own foreign policies, and that a boycott would be harmful to NTNU."
But Erez Uriely, director of the Oslo-based Center against Anti-Semitism, said the boycott was prevented largely thanks to Alsberg's petition.
"Norwegian politicians often take anti-Israeli positions and then renege when this creates an outcry," he said. "The petition against a boycott of Israel at NTNU is an unusual event which tipped the scale."
(...) More
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12.08.2009
/ Av: David Bedin
10.08.2009
/ Av: David Bedein
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Author: CAA
SIMON WIESENTHAL CENTRE - EUROPE
Tel. +33-147237637 - Fax: +33-147208401
e-mail: csweurope@gmail.com
Mr. Jens Stoltenberg
Prime Minister
Oslo,Norway
Paris, 22 June 2010
Mr. Prime Minister,
Two days ago, on 20 June, much of Europe marked "International Refugee
Day" to celebrate the contribution made by refugees and migrants to
their host countries and also the injustices they face.
United for Intercultural Action issued a special report for the occasion
entitled, '13,824 Deaths: Blood on European Hands' a litany including
286 drownings and harrowing stories at detention facilities across the
continent.
Most strangely, Norway the country of the Nobel Peace Prize and donor
of huge subsidies to ostensible human rights defence agencies remained
silent regarding atrocities visited on defenceless refugees in Europe.
Yet tomorrow, 23 June, the University of Oslo intends to vote on a full
academic boycott of Israeli institutions of Higher Education.
Mr. Prime Minister, among your academics, trade unionists and much of
your media, are some who may be suffering from Obsessive Compulsive
Disorder (OCD). In this case, the national defence mechanism in response
to pangs of guilt for the deportation of Norwegian Jews what I would
call "the Quisling syndrome" for the Nazi-collaborator who ruled your
country during the Holocaust. This has led to a default fixation upon
the Jewish survivor state.
Through a role reversal - by demonizing the contemporary Jew as
perpetrator Norwegian collective memory may achieve a catharsis. So
much simpler and cleaner than confronting the deaths of 13,824 refugees
on European soil or in international waters flowing near the coast of
Norway and its neighbours.
Should Oslo University choose to expiate its hard-to-find conscience by
isolating Israeli scholars, it will have diminished its own reputation
for independent scholarship, conducted a collective punishment and
breached European anti-discrimination provisions, based upon religious,
ethnic or national origins. The University may, arguably, thus expose
itself to legal counter-measures.
Above all, Norway will have demonstrated its priorities in human rights
concerns, while 13,824 refugees - and counting - die on your very
doorstep. We urge you to invoke your moral standing and honour to
readjust these priorities and to see this mischievous Motion withdrawn
definitively.
Most respectfully,
Dr. Shimon Samuels
Director for International Relations
CC:
Rabbi Marvin Hier, Dean and Founder, Simon Wiesenthal Centre, Los Angeles
Rabbi Abraham Cooper, Associate Dean, Simon Wiesenthal Centre, Los Angeles
SIMON WIESENTHAL CENTRE - EUROPE
66 rue Laugier - 75017 Paris
Tel. +33-147237637 - Fax: +33-147208401
e-mail: csweurope@gmail.com
Author: CAA
 A letter from Professor Samuel M. Edelman, Ph.D. Executive Director, SPME was sent to the Rector at The University of Oslo prior to the university's administration's addressing of a proposal about boycotting Israeli academic institutions and culture. The proposal was promoted by Helle Linné Eriksen.
The letter may be read by clicking at the SPME logo to the right (pfd).
Author: Shimon Samuels
Wiesenthal Centre Open Letter to UN Human Rights Commissioner:
"The Goldstone Syndrome Inverts Justice, Turning the Victim into the Perpetrator Already Sentenced Before Proceedings Begin"
Paris, 2 June 2010
In a letter to the United Nations Human Rights Commissioner, Navi Pillay, the Simon Wiesenthal Centre's Director for International Relations, Dr.Shimon Samuels, stated:
-"Madam High Commissioner,
Your office is a Palace named for American President Woodrow Wilson, who believed his post World War I settlement would make that "a war to end all wars" - a settlement that included "a Jewish national home" in its ancestral land, then known as Palestine.
You sit on the throne of human rights envisioned by Rene Cassin, a French Jew who crafted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and Raphael Lemkin, a Polish Jew who forged the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. Both were convinced that their labours would ensure that the Holocaust would never be repeated and that the first line of that defence would be Jewish sovereignty in the renascent State of Israel.
The United Nations and your High Commission were born in the aftermath of that unprecedented global bloodletting as instruments of "the sons of light", the Atlantic Alliance, that had crushed the Nazi-Fascist "sons of darkness".
Author: CAA
The Center Against Antisemitism (SMA) is a voluntary non-
political non-profit organization. SMA’s main activity is to fight
against Jew-hatred in Norway. Since today’s form of Jew-hatred is
first and foremost directed towards the Jewish state, SMA strives
hard to balance it by spreading corrective information.
Author: CAA
Shalom, dear friends,
We have again come to one of Norway’s important days, the Independence Day, 17 May. It is 196 years since Norway got its Constitution. The joy and happiness in being an independent nation in a free country have to be remembered and cherished. Let us fight to keep it that way.
We have every reason to rejoice over all this. It is on this day we remind ourselves how lucky we are whom are to live here in Norway, one of the best democracies, whose Constitution was based on our precious Judeo-Christian Heritage, a foundation that we appreciate and protect against an increasing pressure from both external and internal forces.
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