Tel Aviv Professor Calls Introduction Of Right-Wing Bills ‘Microaggression’

“It is the duty of the State to protect its citizens from harm,” wrote Smolanibakhyan in the journal Cloister.

Tel Aviv, November 14 – A professor of political science at Tel Aviv University warned today that the mere introduction of legislation by lawmakers to the right of Labor on the political spectrum constitutes a microaggression against part of the country’s population, and must therefore be restricted.

Anna Smolanibakhyan, an adjunct professor of political theory at the university, wrote in the institution’s internal social sciences journal that members of Knesset from the Likud, Jewish Home, and Yisrael Beiteinu parties must be prohibited from submitting legislative proposals, given that the very encounter with the right-wing mindset represented by those parties is liable to induce low-level trauma in anyone unaccustomed to treating that mindset with anything but horror.

“It is the duty of the State to protect its citizens from harm,” wrote Smolanibakhyan in the journal Cloister. “In keeping with that obligation, the State must institute protocols that forestall or prevent hazards such as the uncritical portrayal of right-wing values or measures, values and measures that run counter to the tolerant, open, accepting ethos that our society should be cultivating.”

Professor Smolanibakhyan wrote further that failure to insulate the public from encountering dangerous, non-progressive ideas that do not by default assume right-wing mendacity and left-wing virtue places Israel in the company of such backward, intolerant societies as the United States, Britain, France, and even Canada, where barely any restrictions exist on political expression.

Reaction to Professor Smolanibakhyan’s article have been mixed. Online comments on the journal have been closed since this morning as a result of volume, but the majority of respondents supported her call. The minority that posted misgivings shared concerns ranging from the exclusion of several hawkish Labor Party MKs from the proposed restrictions to the observation that such restrictions in and of themselves would be ineffective without a broader devotion to eliminating microaggressions of the same nature. A serious effort, they argued, would have to include an outright ban on the Israeli flag on government buildings and the elimination of Hebrew as an official language of the country, not to mention more obvious measures such as a cessation to automatic citizenship for immigrating Jews and the establishment of a national day of mourning to replace Independence Day.

The university administration found itself in hot water today as a consequence of the closed comments section, after dozens of people attempting to submit further online comments were thwarted, and accused the university of censorship.

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