Taxpayer‐Funded Spanish University Under Fire for Pushing ‘Palestinian Propaganda’ in Summer Program
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by Algemeiner Staff
An interior view of the Public University of Navarra, in Spain. Photo: Public University of Navarra.
A pro-Israel advocacy group in Spain has accused one of the country’s largest universities of teaching “Palestinian propaganda…masquerading as another option in the cycle of summer courses” at the school.
In a statement on Wednesday, ACOM — a group which conducts political and media advocacy for Israel — highlighted a course with the title “Apartheid in Palestine and the Criminalization of Solidarity” that is being offered by the Public University of Navarra, a government-funded institution in northern Spanish city of Pamplona.
“The title of the course reveals its biased and evidently propagandistic nature,” ACOM said. “The program is just a part of an intense campaign that, following the antisemitic narrative in universities, intends to falsify facts, hide data, and justify terrorist and Jew-hating violence that the legitimate state of Israel has had to face since it came into existence.”
The five weekly lectures that compose the course, which runs between Sept. 7 and Oct. 9, are all being delivered by leading activists in the BDS movement, which seeks to subject the Jewish state to cultural, economic and political isolation.
The founder of the BDS movement, Omar Barghouti, is scheduled to speak on Sept. 16 on the topic of the “criminalization of solidarity with the Palestinian people.”
Meanwhile, Alys Samson Estapé — the European coordinator of the BDS movement — will give a talk titled, “The BDS movement in Europe: victories and challenges ahead,” the following week.
ACOM asserted that it was “despicable to give a public voice and money to an extremist [BDS] discourse, prohibited in many countries around the world for its irrefutable antisemitism.”
The group also pointed out that legal challenges to BDS campaigning on the grounds of discrimination against Jews had been successful in several countries — including in Spain, where a boycott of Israel adopted by the city council in Pamplona was declared illegal by a local court in September 2019.
