Israel bars prisoner studies on grounds that most popular course is ‘Genocide’
Philip Weiss, MondoWeiss, Dec 26 2012
More than a year ago, Israel decided to end course instruction for prisoners at the Open University of Israel in an effort to pressure Hamas to release Gilad Shalit. Then Shalit was released in an exchange, but Israel has maintained the policy, no courses for prisoners. The Association for Civil Rights in Israel has been fighting the decision. And below is the translation of a comment by Dan Yakir of ACRI, thanks to Ofer Neiman:On Dec 24, the Supreme Court rejected an appeal by prisoners classified as “security prisoners” against the decision to deny them studies at the Israeli Open University. At first the decision was applied only in the case of Palestinian security prisoners (residents of the OT, as well as Israeli citizens), 200 of whom are studying at the Open University. When the Israeli Prison Service realized it would be impossible to defend the discrimination between Palestinian security prisoners and Jewish prisoners in court, it terminated the studies of the only Jewish security prisoner who was studying at the time. In a response submitted by the State Attorney Office, one of the arguments was that the most popular course among security prisoners was “Genocide”, and that this spoke for itself. I asked the Open University’s attorney after the hearing whether it was true that the course taught its students how to commit genocide, and she denied this vigorously.It is a well-written course which many students at the Open University praise. Here is the syllabus:Thoughts of the inconceivable: Theoretical aspects in the study of Genocide Genocide in the land of freedom – North American Indians, 1776-1890/The Armenian genocide – denial and deliberate oblivion/Nazi Germany and the Gypsies/Rwanda 1994: genocide in the “land of 1000 hills”
Tibet 1950-2000 : the destruction of a culture/Political and ethnic purges in the USSR, 1918-1953
Destruction: the annihilation of the Jews by Nazi Germany/I shall not be among those who keep silent: opposition, prevention and salvation/Genocide against the Indian nations of Spanish America.