NOTE: The author above wrote the bottom two paragraphs. The rest is from a form letter is for anyone to send to email UCSB Chancellor Henry Yang and cc’d to the faculty and administrators involved in the case, anyone to add a personal note of support for Professor Robinson, the form letter can be found at: http://sb4af.wordpress.com/how-can-i-help/. The bulk of the letter was written by The Committee to Defend Academic Freedom at UCSB (CDAF-SB) http://sb4af.wordpress.com/.

To Chancellor Henry Yang, UCSB,

I am a dismayed and concerned Southern California resident writing you to express support for Sociology and Global Studies Professor William I. Robinson. As you may know, Professor Robinson and academic freedom have come under recent attack on the UCSB campus.

Toward the end of February 2009, Professor Robinson received notice from the Academic Senate’s Charges Committee that two of his students had filed charges against him. The students alleged that an email forward he’d circulated to his class, criticizing Israel’s then-ongoing siege on Gaza, comprised anti-Semitism. These charges are patently absurd and should be dismissed out of hand before further damage is done to the university’s purpose and reputation.

I demand the immediate dismissal of all of the charges against Professor Robinson as frivolous, unfounded, and malicious. Any further consideration of these baseless attacks is unacceptable. I join other students and faculty in pledging that we will not accept any resolution of this matter that is unfavorable to Professor Robinson and academic freedom.

I also insist that the attack on Professor Robinson’s academic freedom, one that ominously recalls similar campaigns against other critical academics across the nation, be publicly condemned. This condemnation is essential to preserve full and fair discussion within the most important of the U.S.’s civic institutions. Any genuine consideration of these absurd attacks will have a severe chilling effect on the production and dissemination of scholarly research in all disciplines. Further, the attacks must be condemned to protect faculty and students from wasting valuable time and energy defending themselves against frivolous allegations and political repression.

In fact, a critique of the Israeli state, its policies, and the leaders responsible is not and should not be considered an affront to Jewish people as a collective, the Jewish religion, or Jewish heritage. Conflating the state of Israel with the Jewish people essentializes the assorted political opinions of a diverse religious group by reducing them to the set of policies espoused by the prevailing regime. The charge of anti-Semitism is made in bad faith; its real purpose is to automatically vilify and stifle any honest critiques of the state of Israel’s policies and practices.

Because I am a Jew, grand-daughter of a survivor of Bergen-Belsen, with 150-200 extended my Dutch family members killed in the camps, I too sent out to friends, family, and colleagues, a similar visual comparison graphic images of Jews in the Holocaust to pictures of Palestinians caught up in Israel's recent Gaza offensive. I sent it because I was so disturbed and ashamed by the Israeli assault on Gaza in the name of Jewish people.

I learned about the plight and the pain of the displaced Palestinian people from my survivor Grandfather, a deeply religious man, who was firmly committed to making a distinction between anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism until his dying day. If he was still alive he would be horrified by UCSB's actions against Professor Robinson and even more horrified by Israel's reenactment of the Warsaw Ghetto on the people of Gaza.

Sincerely,

Karen Pomer

Los Angeles, CA