Intellectual Freedom at the University of Sydney, “Offensive to Israel”: Prof. Tim Anderson

By trying to expel me over anti-war statements, University of Sydney Provost Stephen Garton has widened the free speech debate and deepened on campus fears. Since the main criterion for his attack on me was public comments considered ‘offensive’, more students and staff are likely to hesitate before raising their voices on any controversial topic.

On 4 December Stephen Garton suspended me from my position as a senior lecturer and banned me from entering the university I have worked at for more than 20 years. The complaints were over a series of public statements which he saw as ‘offensive’ to Israel, to university managers and to pro-war journalists.

A Review Committee (and possibly a Fair Work Tribunal) will examine his decisions, considering two important and inter-related matters: should ‘offensive’ statements, including criticisms of the state of Israel, be subject to sanction?

This article explains some detail of the vilification and censorship campaigns run against me over 2017-2018. It supplements my academic writings in this area, including my 2010 paper on the US Studies Centre (‘Hegemony, Big Money and Academic Independence’. Australian Universities’ Review, 52:2), several recent chapters and articles on the colonial media and war propaganda and a forthcoming journal article titled ‘War and the Corporate University’.

I have written of my motivations and anti-war track record in a recent essay titled ‘War, abuse and other peoples’ (see this), while many others including Ali Kazak (see this) and Michael Brull (see this) have tried to explain why there is such a poor level of public debate over Palestine in Australia. In my long essay ‘The Future of Palestine’ (see this) I emphasis both the distinctions and the parallels between the European crimes against the Jewish people and the crimes of the Jewish colony in Palestine against the Palestinian people.

Both the ‘offensive’ criterion for university sanctions and the attempt to ban criticisms of the state of Israel have been rejected by more than 60 of my University of Sydney colleagues. Their joint letter states:

“Academic freedom is meaningless if it is suspended when its exercise is deemed offensive … There can be no better-known or more banal occurrence in intellectual history than the suppression of ideas on the grounds of their offensiveness to powerful interests. In instilling a fear of arbitrary reprisal, this suppression stifles the very freedom of debate and of thought that education requires … [further] we insist that the drawing of historical comparisons between the actions of states is essential to intellectual and educational work, and must not be subject to a priori constraints”

While deepening the free speech debate, Stephen Garton has also linked Australia’s oldest university with the zionist demand to equate criticism of the state of Israel with anti-Jewish racism. I say this is an extreme and unjustifiable stance, for which Provost Garton has no mandate and which our university cannot support.

Let me illustrate the point. One of my photo posts subject to management criticism, of friends at lunch in Beijing (bottom left in Graphic 1), showed a friend wearing a jacket which had several badges. One of those was from Yemen, with an Arabic text which said, amongst other things: ‘Death to Israel’.

https://www.globalresearch.ca/intellectual-freedom-at-the-university-of-sydney-offensive-to-israel-prof-tim-anderson/5662656

Time’s “Person of the Year Hypocrisy”

https://www.globalresearch.ca/times-person-of-the-year-hypocrisy/5662674

>>4284663

>>4284648

Business Aims to Outsource 420K U.S. Jobs to Foreign Workers in 2018

Businesses in Fiscal Year 2018 aimed to outsource nearly 420,000 American jobs to foreign workers, a total that outpaces the total population of Tampa, Florida.

Every year, more than 100,000 foreign workers are brought to the U.S. on the H-1B visa and are allowed to stay for up to six years. There are about 650,000 H-1B visa foreign workers in the U.S. at any given moment. Americans are often laid off in the process and forced to train their foreign replacements, as highlighted by Breitbart News. More than 85,000 Americans annually potentially lose their jobs to foreign labor through the H-1B visa program.

Data from the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) reveals that in the last Fiscal Year, between October 2017 and September 2018, U.S. businesses attempted to outsource 419,637 American jobs to foreign workers that they asked to import through the H-1B visa.

The number of American jobs business tried to outsource to foreign workers this year is more than the number of residents living in Tampa, Florida, where about 385,000 people live.

Of those roughly 420,000 foreign workers that businesses requested to import, nearly 74 percent were from India and more than 74 percent were male foreign workers. Of those Indian nationals businesses requested, nearly 80 percent were men.

The USCIS data also finds that even foreign workers, billed by the business lobby as “high-skilled workers,” from some of the world’s lowest educational regions have been requested to be brought to the U.S. to take high-paying, white-collar American jobs.

For instance, a handful of nationals from Eritrea, Burkina Faso, Chad, Guinea, Sierra Leone, Mali, Sudan, and Ethiopia, all of which have the worst education rates in the world, were requested by businesses to be brought to the U.S., creating a possible brain-drain in those regions of the world.

As Breitbart News previously reported, more than 2.7 million H-1B foreign workers have been approved to come to the U.S. to take American jobs between 2007 and 2017. During that same period, businesses tried to outsource almost 3.5 million American jobs to foreign workers instead of hiring Americans.

About four million young Americans enter the workforce each year, many looking for white-collar jobs in the STEM fields. Those Americans’ prospects of finding work are crippled by the country’s legal immigration process, which admits more than 1.5 million immigrants and hundreds of thousands of foreign visa workers annually. Already, the wage-cutting business scheme has led to foreign-born workers overwhelmingly outnumbering Americans in the tech industry in Silicon Valley, California.

https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2018/12/12/business-aims-to-outsource-420k-u-s-jobs-to-foreign-workers-in-2018/