American Jewish organizations on Monday slammed a recent report by the National Communication Association’s Task Force on Academic Freedom and Tenure in which Israel is portrayed as a “settler-colonial state” engaged in “genocidal violence,” saying the report peddles “antisemitic conspiracy theories.”

In a joint statement, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), American Jewish Committee (AJC) and Academic Engagement Network (AEN) called the suggestion in the academic organization’s report that ‘Zionists’ are engaging alongside white supremacists in efforts to undermine academic freedom “outrageous.”

The NCA, a not-for-profit academic association founded in 1914, says it works with thousands of communication scholars and teachers from the US and worldwide.

Israel has been the target of a flurry of academic boycotts since Hamas launched the October 7, 2023, assault on southern Israel, and the subsequent war in Gaza. More than a thousand boycotts of Israeli researchers and institutions have been tallied over the past two years by an Association of Israeli Universities task force dedicated to combating boycotts.

The war also sparked widespread anti-Israel protests on campuses across the US, with many of them featuring antisemitism and targeting of Jewish students. US President Donald Trump has led a crackdown on schools that tolerated antisemitism, although critics have charged that he is using the issue as an excuse to undermine the colleges.

However, the NCA report represented “an egregious moral lapse” that “resorts to antisemitic conspiracy theories in order to account for the current state of academic freedom at American universities,” the........

© The Times of Israel