Israel and Breast-Feeding

A blogger knows that there are two words that will attract crowds of visitors and commenters if you put them in the subject line of a post: breast-feeding and Israel. It isn’t necessary to write anything on the subject because just the words themselves make people want to argue.

I’m not a person who pursues hits for the sake of hits, but I have just discovered something very curious that relates to Israel:

Illinois State Senate Bill 3017 would deny funding to public universities that support faculty members’ participation in professional associations that boycott Israeli academic institutions.  It would, for example, prohibit a faculty member from getting funds to travel to an American Studies Association (ASA) meeting, even if that meeting is unrelated to the boycott, or the professor herself is opposed to the boycott. A college that violates the prohibition would lose all public funds for that academic year.

To say that I’m shocked and disgusted is an understatement. If you happen to pass somebody in the street who might have stood next to somebody who might have participated in ASA, you will lose all funding forever. I now have to investigate all of my colleagues and known associates just in case they expressed a criticism of Israel at some point in their lives. It would be useful if we could pin yellow stars on them to make them more easily recognizable.

I don’t really have anything to say about breast-feeding right now, but more hits are always nice.