Lazar insists there's a link between such acts of hate and teaching that overemphasizes Palestinian suffering. "A great number of professors present the Middle East with a biased and misinformed perspective," Lazar says. "It creates an atmosphere that allows hate and anti-Semitism to rise. What we need now from our professors is an even-sided view of the conflict, rather than just to negate one side altogether."

Yet the link that Lazar speaks of -- and which forms the foundation of Pipes' argument -- raises the question of who is to decide what a fair view of the conflict is, since just about any view is going to leave someone feeling ostracized. Where is the line between a professor teaching the painful, contested facts of the occupation and being anti-Israel -- or anti-Jewish? After all, Jewish activists have accused a range of news media that show Israel in a bad light -- including CNN and the New York Times -- of being prejudiced. At the University of Chicago, a student cited the presence of Israeli new historian Benny Morris on a syllabus as an example of a professor's anti-Israel slant, while Lazar admires Morris and teaches him in his Israeli history class. So even students angry about anti-Israel bias can't agree on what that bias entails.

According to Dershowitz, anti-Semitism doesn't lie in what's said about Israel, but in the fact that campus radicals are obsessed with the country while ignoring the crimes of far worse regimes, from China to Iraq. "I want to divest in order of how bad a country's human rights record is," says Dershowitz. "These people don't want to divest from Cuba, they want to invest. They don't want to divest from Libya, they want to invest in Libya. They don't care about human rights. They have countries they support and countries they despise."

In some cases, that's undoubtedly true -- but even that isn't evidence of anti-Semitism. More likely, it derives from the fact that Israel is a first-world Western country intimately connected to the United States. "What's driving it is a very naive version of Marxism which says that if you see somebody who is down, its because somebody who is up has pushed him down," says Peltzman. "In the case of the Middle East, the Israelis are an arm of Western global capitalism, pushing down the downtrodden Palestinians."

Whether the view Peltzman mocks is indeed naive Marxism or a truth obscured by the blinkered mainstream media is exactly the kind of thing that should be debated at universities. Unfortunately, that debate gets more fraught by the week, as official condemnations make far-reaching critiques of Israel professionally perilous.

Speaking at Memorial Church last week, Lawrence Summers, Harvard's president, said that some protests against Israel are "anti-Semitic in their effect if not their intent." Some of the acts he singled out were indeed indefensible, like the firing of Israeli scholars from European journals taking part in an ill-conceived academic boycott. But he went further, defining the campaign to divest from Israel as anti-Semitic, regardless of the motivations of the people behind it.

Such a definition comforts students like Lazar, but it stigmatizes a position that many rational, tolerant people hold. The comparison between Israel and South Africa -- implicit in discussion of divestment -- might not be correct, but it's not crazy.

A May report from the Israeli Human Rights group B'tslem says: "Israel has created in the Occupied Territories a regime of separation based on discrimination, applying two separate systems of law in the same area and basing the rights of individuals on their nationality. This regime is the only one of its kind in the world, and is reminiscent of distasteful regimes from the past, such as the Apartheid regime in South Africa."

Similarly, in an April speech in Boston, Nobel Prize-winning Archbishop Desmond Tutu, who knows a thing or two about apartheid, said: "I've been very deeply distressed in my visit to the Holy Land; it reminded me so much of what happened to us black people in South Africa."

It's perfectly fair for Summers to argue that Tutu, like the 59 Harvard professors who signed the divestment petition, is misguided, even stupid, that Israel is nothing like racist South Africa. But to charge Tutu with anti-Semitism -- to assume that his criticism of Israeli policy can be motivated by nothing but bigotry -- is to say such ideas don't belong in a civilized institution.

Which, in the end, is exactly what Pipes is saying. "I want Noam Chomsky to be taught at universities about as much as I want Hitler's writing or Stalin's writing," he says. "These are wild and extremist ideas that I believe have no place in a university."

Amid all this name-calling, though, hope for academic openness remains. Rather than responding to Pipes' animosity with escalating hysteria, many academics are simply laughing at Pipes' enemies list. "It's truly shameful ... that I'm not yet on the list," deadpans Finkelstein. Dozens of others have written to Pipes saying the same thing.

"In the last analysis, people don't like thought police," says Khalidi, explaining why he thinks Pipes' project is doomed. "The idea of un-Americanism has been discredited in American culture."

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