College Refuses to Condemn Marxist Anti-Semitic Holocaust Denying BDS Professor Alessio Lerro
Posted By Daniel Greenfield On May 29, 2014 @ 10:13 pm In The Point | No Comments
Adjunct Temple University’s Marxist Professor Alessio Lerro endorsed an MLA resolution targeting the Jewish State by claiming that the Jews have too much power. And he engaged in some Holocaust denial.
But Temple University is standing behind him.
Lerro accused “Jewish scholars” of having “humungous influence” over the entirety of academia and stated, “It is time that Zionists are asked to finally account for their support to the illegal occupation of Palestine since 1967,” according to message left on the listserv.
It further came to light that Lerro, in a now deleted Facebook posting, also questioned the deaths of 6 million Jewish people in the Holocaust.
Asked to comment on Lerro’s discourse and accusations by Jewish leaders that the rhetoric amounts to anti-Semitism, Temple University spokesman Brandon Lausch told the Free Beacon that the university welcomed his controversial views on campus.
“Temple University promotes open discussion and expression among its diverse community of scholars,” Lausch said after being informed of Lerro’s comments. “The exercise of academic freedom necessarily results in a vigorous exchange of ideas.”
The problem with this one-sided tolerance is that BDS explicitly exists to not only promote a boycott, but to shut down any exchange of ideas.
That’s the whole point of an academic boycott.
You can’t have academic freedom and BDS on the same time, because BDS, aside from being racist, is also against academic freedom. BDS advocates have attempted to package their attack on academic freedom involving Jewish and Israeli scholars by claiming that they are defending the academic freedom of faculty from terrorist affiliated universities in the West Bank.
So they’re fighting academic freedom by attacking academic freedom.
Any discussion about BDS has to begin by acknowledging that its methodology in academic settings is based on attacking academic freedom. And its advocates therefore can’t hide behind the liberal society and exchange of ideas they are trying to demolish.
Lerro, who uses Marx’s picture as his Facebook header, appears to be rather interested in Karl Marx.
He is a fan of a number of Marx’s books, is currently reading “Seventeen Contradictions and the End of Capitalism”. One of his reviews of Marx’s tracts states that, “Indispensable not only as caveat to Marx but also and foremost for understanding the contemporary relevance of Marx’s model of circulation and reproduction.”
Lerro even made his comments about the Holocaust on a Facebook group dedicated to Marxism.
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