Brazil university demands identification of Israeli students and faculty, to give to pro-Palestine group

A Brazil university recently demanded its staff provide identifying information on all current and future Israeli students and faculty, because pro-Palestine campus groups wanted it.

On May 15, The Federal University of Santa Maria sent out a memo “making an ‘urgent’ request for information on Israeli students or faculty members at the institution,” according to InsideHighEd.com.

“I ask you to urgently send us a list of Israeli students and lecturers in the graduate program,, the memo said, according to ynetnews.com.

The information was to be distributed, among others, to the Association of Solidarity with the Palestinian People of southern Brazil, according to ynetnews.com.

The university was accused of anti-Semitism and forced to apologize, but the administrator who issued the memo said the confusion centered around nationality vs. religion.

“The controversy is caused by the deliberate confusion between Israeli nationality and Jewishness,” deputy dean José Fernando Schlosser told InsideHigherEd.com.

The university considered its student information to be part of the public record and believed it was forced by Brazilian law to collect and hand over the data.

The president of the university, Paolo Burmann, said it wasn’t the university’s place to question the demands for information. He said the school was just following the Information Access Act.

But Brazil’s ministry of education said in a statement that its Information Access Act cannot be used to collect data that could be used to discriminate.

“The Ministry of Education expresses its clear position that the Information Access Act can not be used in order to violate the fundamental rights of other citizens. Any request made by the Access to Information Act that leads to any kind of discrimination should be considered unreasonable and therefore should not be answered.”

No list was prepared, Schlosser said. He conceded that the school would have been better off denying the request and “forcing the groups that wanted the information to sue for it, so it would have been clear that the gathering of information was not the university's idea.”

“The request was not in our interest but who requested this information but I repeat, we should have denied and run the risk of being compelled to inform a court order, which could occur.”

Confederacao Israelita do Brasil (CONIB), An umbrella group of Brazil’s Jewish communities denounced the memo and the university’s response.

“It's clearly discriminatory, made ​​by a high-ranking official of the federal education system, that needs to be treated with the seriousness it deserves,"said Fernando Lottenberg, president of CONIB.

Ynetnews and CONIB said the state attorney general is investigating Schlosser and the university on “suspicion of discrimination based on race, color, ethnicity, religion and national origin.”