JERUSALEM, May 18 (UPI) -- A U.S. professor denied entry into Israel to speak at a university in the West Bank has decided to hold his lecture by video conference, officials say.
Linguist Noam Chomsky of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology will speak to students at Birzeit University near Ramallah from Amman, Jordan, rather than try to enter Israel a second time, Haaretz reported Tuesday.
Israel's refusal to allow Chomsky, who is Jewish, to travel to the West Bank Sunday has received considerable coverage in the foreign media and blogosphere.
One news source quoted Chomsky as saying Israeli officials didn't let him in because "the government did not like the kinds of things I say and they did not like that I was only talking at Birzeit and not an Israeli university too."
In 2009, Chomsky called supporters of Israel "supporters of its moral degeneration."
Chomsky's lecture will also be broadcast by al-Jazeera television.
