Back in April the BBC World Service weighed in on the topic of Professor Mohammed Dajani’s visit to Auschwitz together with some of his Palestinian students.
Since his return, Professor Dajani has suffered repeated intimidation which culminated in his recent resignation from his posts at Al Quds University.
“Following the Auschwitz trip, Dajani was denounced as a “traitor” and “collaborator” by Palestinian critics and expelled from a university staff union. […]
Dajani submitted a letter of resignation on May 18, hoping the university authorities would reject it and denounce the campaign against him. Instead, he received a response from the university personnel department that his resignation would take effect on June 1.
“I wanted the president of the university to take a stand by not accepting my resignation and in doing so to send a clear and loud message to the university employees and students, and in general, to the Palestinian community, that the university supports academic freedom and considers my trip as an educational journey in search of knowledge by which I broke no university policy, rules, or regulations,” Dajani said. […]
“I put my job on the line to expose the double-talk we live,” Dajani told Haaretz. “We say something and do the opposite. We say we are for democracy and we practice autocracy, we say we are for freedom of speech and academic freedom, yet we deny people to practice it.”
“The university ignited and escalated the hate campaign against the trip and me by issuing upon our return its statement distancing itself from the trip saying it had nothing to do with it and that I was on leave. No such statement was issued when the military parades were held on university campus,” he said.”
In that last sentence, Professor Dajani is referring to events such as this one.
To date there has been no follow-up from the BBC on this story; no reporting of Professor Dajani’s resignation and certainly no ‘analysis’ of what his experiences signify with regard to the Palestinian Authority’s two decade failure to prepare its citizens for a peace agreement with Israel.
Update:
BBC Watch has been contacted by Al Quds University with a request to publish their response – available here and in the comments below.
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