Original articles on Israel and related issues written by Steven Plaut, a professor at an Israeli university.
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what I call "asslibs") whose highest aspiration is to be liked by
genocidal anti-Semitic murderers. What better way to prove how nice
and tolerant and accepted you are!
Frank Sinatra has a song whose lyrics go, "Come Fly with me." These
self-hating "Jews" have changed those lyrics to be, "Come Murder Me."
The newest version of the "Organized Jewish Pilgrimage to the Nazis"
has been a project of the far-leftist "Jewish" group calling itself
the Olive Tree Initiative. It sends groups of Jewish youths, mainly
from California, to Israel in order to meet with Hamas terrorists.
This is not a spoof.
Evidently Olive Tree Initiative wants these young Jews to seek peace
by begging the Hamas to murder more Jews, other Jews. The full story
can be read here: http://www.ha-emet.com/oti_students_meet_hamas.html
Please open that web page and read the documentation for yourself. It
must be read to be believed. It has been uncovered as part of a
California "Sunshine Act" disclosure.
These are assimilationist Jews whose biggest regret in life seems to
be that they were born too late to beg the Germans to kill more Jews.
2. I fear that there is no alternative to officially changing the
name of Ben Gurion University to the "University of Treason." Nary a
day goes by without some new atrocity coming out of the Ben Gurion
University chapter of the Israeli academic fifth column. But the
litany of treason that came out of Ben Gurion University in the past
24 hours makes most of the previous track record pale in comparison.
First, we have BGU's Neve Gordon, the tenured tanzin from BGU's
politics department, proclaim to his students in a required course
that the kidnapping and holding of Gilad Shalit by the Hamas is NOT
terrorism. Not a bit. In fact, it is entirely justified!! After
all, didn't allied troops capture and hold enemy soldiers during World
War II? So isn't the Hamas just doing the same thing?
Never mind that the Hamas is not an army but a gang of genocidal
terrorists. Never mind that Shalit was kidnapped and not captured in
battle, and that Shalit has been held incommunicado for years by his
Nazi captors. Gordon's quote appears in full, alas only in Hebrew,
here: http://www.mynet.co.il/articles/0,7340,L-4049822,00.html but
Hebrew readers should also check out the talkbacks there. 500 were
posted in the first hours, almost all of them denouncing Gordon as a
traitor.
As it turns out, Ben Gurion University students are not taking
Gordon's campaign on behalf of the Hamas lying down. A group of BGU
students has called upon the University authorities to take action at
long last against Gordon. The details, again in Hebrew, are reported
by the Galei Zahal news service here:
http://glz.co.il/NewsArticle.aspx?newsid=80358
What triggered the student petition was the fact that a university in
South Africa just announced that they are going to boycott Ben Gurion
University specifically, as part of the efforts of these South African
beneficiaries of South African apartheid against "Israeli apartheid."
The students claim correctly that the numerous BGU professors, led by
Gordon, who call for a world boycott against Israel, are directly
responsible for this newest development. After all, The South
Africans were just listening to Neve Gordon!
Now BGU President likes to claim that in all of BGU there is only one
treasonous moonbat and that is Neve Gordon, but the rest of the
university is filled with wise and Zionist patriots. She is lying.
There are scores of tenured traitors at BGU. They are backed,
defended, and endorsed by hundreds of other BGU leftists, led by the
BGU President and Rector themselves, who maintain lower political
profiles.
What is amazing is that far-leftist anti-Zionism is so COMMON at BGU
that it spills out from the usual cesspools of radicalism in the
social sciences and humanities, and even effects the real sciences.
As witness to this, take the newest jihad coming out of Ben Gurion
University by Professor Karla Kedem. She is professor of computer
sciences at BGU. Today she appears in the media (in English this
time, see http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-4049619,00.html)
where she denounces her own university for holding a special concert
open only to Israeli reserve soldiers (and companions). This is
racism and sexism, she bleats! Why? Because Arabs and women can't
attend.
Can't attend, she moos? Well, actually some Bedouins and some women
DO serve in the reserves. But that is hardly the point. Komrade
Karla sees racism and discrimination in a concert meant for reserve
soldiers. But the REAL racism and discrimination is in the fact that
ISRAEL STILL CONSCRIPTS ONLY JEWS AND DOES NOT CONSCRIPT ARABS, EVEN
FOR CIVILIAN NATIONAL SERVICE.
THAT is NOT discrimination, according to this BGU dingbette. (Again,
check out the talkbacks)
Finally we have Dr. Michal Givoni, who was a postdoc "researcher" from
Tel Aviv University in sociology (what else?) and the semi-Marxist
"Van Leer Institute," who just issued a paper that compares Gaza Arabs
to Holocaust survivors. She is this year at Berkeley in case anyone
wants to teach her about American baseball bats. See
http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/Flash.aspx/207316
3. A letter from my buddy Prof. Alexander to the WSJ, regarding an
article posted here:
Alan Dershowitz's column (29 March) on the latest eruption of
Jew-hatred in Norway calls to mind the following passage from Philip
Roth's novel THE COUNTERLIFE: "I am in Norway on business for my
product and written on a wall I read, 'Down with Israel.' I
think,'What did Israel ever do to Norway?' I know Israel is a terrible
country, but after all, there are countries even more terrible....Why
don't you read on Norwegian walls,'Down with Russia,' 'Down with
Chile,' 'Down with Libya'? Because Hitler didn't murder six million
Libyans? I am walking in Norway and I am thinking 'If only he had.'
Because then they would write on Norwegian walls, 'Down with Libya,'
and leave Israel alone."
Edward Alexander
Seattle Washington
tel. 206-524-7086
4. The ZOA speaks out against the new chief "Reform Rabbi":
http://www.zoa.org/sitedocuments/pressrelease_view.asp?pressreleaseID=2021
5. http://www.nationalpost.com/todays-paper/lesbian+activists+support+Palestinians/4518835/story.html
Phylis Chesler on Why lesbian activists support Palestinians
National Post . Mar. 29, 2011 Re: The 'Palestinization' Of Lesbian
Activism, Phyllis Chesler, March 22.
6. You may recall that I mentioned that the Israel entry to the
horrible "Eurovision" song contest this year is a song entitled "Ding
Dong," written and performed by the "transgendered" Israeli singer
"Dana International." It is hard to escape the obnoxious song, being
played nonstop on Israeli radio. Anyhow, it occurs to me how ironic
it is that "Dana" is singing in the contest a song called "Ding Dong,"
given that the singer is actually most famous for having sliced off
"her" own ding dong.
in the southern Syrian town of Daraa (spelled some other ways as
well). As you know, the riots there began when Asad's stormtroopers
opened fire on teenagers who were engaged in writing graffiti on
walls. After they were murdered, their clans and families took to the
streets and attacked the stormtroopers. From there the violence
spread elsewhere in Syria.
But what about that town, Daraa? It turns out that Daraa has some
interesting history.
In the Book of Numbers in the Bible there is a detailed description of
how Moses and the Israelite tribes were challenged by two Canaanite
Kings east of the Jordan river and how the good guys defeated the
Canaanites in bloody battle. The stronger of the two pagan kings was
Og the King of the Bashan. His capital was a city in Bashan (the area
that encompasses southern Syria and northern Jordan) named Edrei or
Edrey. That city was taken by the Israelites and then held and
populated by them even after the 12 tribes (or to be more precise the
9 and a half tribes) settled on the west bank of the Jordan river.
The tribes of Reuben, Gad and half the tribe of Menasha then returned
to the Bashan and the city of Edrei. They fortified the town and made
it their home.
Edrei is Daraa. Its name changed, but it is the very same city
conquered by Moses and the tribes, before Joshua took over command.
And it belongs to the Jews.
Maybe Israel is not laying claims to it. Maybe it never will. Even
so, it is still ours. We have a rightful claim to it, far more
legitimate than Bashar Asad has. Our rights are documented in the
Bible itself. These are rights OLDER than our claims to Jerusalem
itself.
And under the circumstances transpiring this week, I can imagine there
could be quite a few residents of Daraa who would be happy to have
Israel exercise its legitimate sovereignty over Daraa!!
Bashan Liberation Organization (BLO), anyone?
Bashin' Bashar in Bashan???
2. The Creative "Logic" of David Newman, BGU Dean of Social Sciences
and Humanities
The South African Boycott of Ben Gurion University is all the fault of
BGU's Own Donors and Zionist students from Im Tirtzu!
http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Columnists/Article.aspx?id=214194
blurb:
Meanwhile Ben-Gurion University will continue to develop. Its 20,000
students and almost 1,000 teaching and research faculty will continue
to push the frontiers of science. Its politically aware (meaning
leftist -- Isracampus) faculty will continue to take part in the
vibrant debate about the nature of Israeli society. The boycotters,
whether they be anti-Israel activists such as UJ, or the
anti-democracy activists of Im Tirtzu and the right-wing donors, will
become forgotten footnotes of history, remembered only for their
attempt to manipulate science for their own narrow aims. A plague on
both of their discriminatory houses.
3. Please pass on to all those fighting the "Israel Apartheid Week"
Hitlerjugend: http://frontpagemag.com/2011/03/29/the-grand-marching-song-of-the-crusaders-against-israeli-apartheid/
4. Four Cheers for the "Nakba Law":
http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-4048707,00.html
• 5. From the Wall Street Journal OPINION EUROPE
• MARCH 29, 2011
Israel and the Occupation Myth
The hatred and violence that killed five members of the Fogel family
existed before the Jewish state did.
By DANNY AYALON
The recent murder of a family of five in Itamar shocked Israelis to
their core. A terrorist broke into the Fogels' home before stabbing
and garroting to death the two parents, Udi and Ruth, and their
children Yoav, 11 years old, Elad, 4, and almost decapitating Hadas,
who was only three months old.
There has since been very little outcry from the international
community. Many nations who are so used to condemning the building of
apartment units beyond the Green Line remained silent on this sadistic
murder. Meanwhile, the few international correspondents to have
covered the massacre have placed it in the context of ongoing
settlement-building and Israel's so-called "occupation."
However, regardless of one's views on which people have greater title
to Judea and Samaria, or the West Bank, it is a historically
inaccurate distortion to claim that the occupation that breeds this
type of violence. If this mantra were true, then it must be the case
that before the occupation there was no violence. This defies the
historical record.
In 1929, the Jewish community of Hebron—which stretches back
millennia, long before the creation of Islam and the Arab conquest and
subsequent occupation of the area—was brutally attacked. The Jews who
had been living peacefully with their Muslim neighbors were set upon
in a bloody rampage, inspired by Palestinian Mufti Haj Amin
al-Husseini, who later became notorious as Hitler's genocidal acolyte
during the Holocaust. In two days, 67 Jews were hacked or bludgeoned
to death. Jewish infants were beheaded and Jewish women were
disemboweled. Limbs were hacked off the dead as well as those who
managed to survive.
On visiting the scene shortly after the massacre, Britain's High
Commissioner for Palestine John Chancellor wrote to his son "I do not
think that history records many worse horrors in the last few hundred
years."
This and other similar pogroms happened, not only before the
"occupation" of Judea and Samaria, but even two decades before the
state of Israel was reestablished. From 1948 to 1967, Judea and
Samaria were illegally occupied by Jordan, which renamed the area the
West Bank, in reference to the East Bank of the Kingdom of Jordan that
fell beyond the Jordan River. Not one Israeli was allowed into this
area, yet nor did Israel know one day of peace in that time, during
which it saw brutal attacks launched from the West Bank against
Israeli civilians.
Further evidence against the mantra that the occupation breeds
violence can be culled from Palestinian sources. Take Hamas's founding
charter, for instance, which does not mention occupation or
settlements. What is does contain are calls for the complete
destruction of Israel, down to its last inch, such as: "Israel will
exist and will continue to exist until Islam will obliterate it, just
as it obliterated others before it." The charter goes even further,
aspiring to a point in time when there will be no Jews left anywhere
in the world.
Meanwhile, the Palestine Liberation Organization, currently headed by
President Mahmoud Abbas, notes in its founding charter that "this
organization does not exercise any regional sovereignty over the West
Bank," while still calling for a "liberation of its homeland." This
was written in 1964, fully three years before Israel conquered the
West Bank during the Six Day War.
It's safe to say that the violence and terror visited upon Israelis
has little connection to "occupation" or settlements. This myth has no
historical foundation, but is easy to proclaim for those who have
little understanding of the conflict.
Yet these fatuous canards only make our conflict harder to solve. The
recent massacre in Itamar highlighted the Palestinian Authority's
ongoing incitement to violence through its media, mosques and
educational system. At this point, the basic parameters of the peace
process need an overhaul. If our aim is to reach a peaceful
resolution, then merely ending the "occupation" would far from
guarantee that, as history has shown.
Israel was assured in the past by the international community that if
it just retreated from Gaza and Lebanon, peace would flourish and
violence would come to an end. In both cases, this hope proved deadly
wrong, and millions of Israelis have been subjected to incessant
attacks from these territories since the retreat.
This is not about "occupation" or territory; it is about meaningful
coexistence. Only when the root ideological causes of our conflict are
solved can Israelis and Palestinians make the painful concessions
necessary for peace.
Mr. Ayalon is the deputy foreign minister of Israel.
6. (from the Wall St Journal) Norway to Jews: You're Not Welcome Here
Anti-Semitism doesn't even mask itself as anti-Zionism.
By ALAN M. DERSHOWITZ
I recently completed a tour of Norwegian universities, where I spoke
about international law as applied to the Israeli-Palestinian
conflict. But the tour nearly never happened.
Its sponsor, a Norwegian pro-Israel group, offered to have me lecture
without any charge to the three major universities. Norwegian
universities generally jump at any opportunity to invite lecturers
from elsewhere. When my Harvard colleague Stephen Walt, co-author of
"The Israel Lobby," came to Norway, he was immediately invited to
present a lecture at the Norwegian University of Science and
Technology in Trondheim. Likewise with Ilan Pappe, a demonizer of
Israel who teaches at Oxford.
My hosts expected, therefore, that their offer to have me present a
different academic perspective on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict
would be eagerly accepted. I have written half a dozen books on the
subject presenting a centrist view in support of the two-state
solution. But the universities refused.
The dean of the law faculty at Bergen University said he would be
"honored" to have me present a lecture "on the O.J. Simpson case," as
long as I was willing to promise not to mention Israel. An
administrator at the Trondheim school said that Israel was too
"controversial."
The University of Oslo simply said "no" without offering an excuse.
That led one journalist to wonder whether the Norwegian universities
believe that I am "not entirely house-trained."
Only once before have I been prevented from lecturing at universities
in a country. The other country was Apartheid South Africa.
Despite the faculties' refusals to invite me, I delivered three
lectures to packed auditoriums at the invitation of student groups. I
received sustained applause both before and after the talks.
It was then that I realized why all this happened. At all of the
Norwegian universities, there have been efforts to enact academic and
cultural boycotts of Jewish Israeli academics. This boycott is
directed against Israel's "occupation" of Palestinian land—but the
occupation that the boycott supporters have in mind is not of the West
Bank but rather of Israel itself. Here is the first line of their
petition: "Since 1948 the state of Israel has occupied Palestinian
land . . ."
The administrations of the universities have refused to go along with
this form of collective punishment of all Israeli academics, so the
formal demand for a boycott failed. But in practice it exists. Jewish
pro-Israel speakers are subject to a de facto boycott.
The first boycott signatory was Trond Adresen, a professor at
Trondheim. About Jews, he has written: "There is something immensely
self-satisfied and self-centered at the tribal mentality that is so
prevalent among Jews. . . . [They] as a whole, are characterized by
this mentality. . . . It is no less legitimate to say such a thing
about Jews in 2008-2009 than it was to make the same point about the
Germans around 1938."
This line of talk—directed at Jews, not Israel—is apparently
acceptable among many in Norway's elite. Consider former Prime
Minister Kare Willock's reaction to President Obama's selection of
Rahm Emanuel as his first chief of staff: "It does not look too
promising, he has chosen a chief of staff who is Jewish." Mr. Willock
didn't know anything about Mr. Emanuel's views—he based his criticism
on the sole fact that Mr. Emanuel is a Jew. Perhaps unsurprisingly,
fewer than 1,000 Jews live in Norway today.
The country's foreign minister recently wrote an article justifying
his contacts with Hamas. He said that the essential philosophy of
Norway is "dialogue." That dialogue, it turns out, is one-sided. Hamas
and its supporters are invited into the dialogue, but supporters of
Israel are excluded by an implicit, yet very real, boycott against
pro-Israel views.
Mr. Dershowitz is a law professor at Harvard. His latest novel is "The
Trials of Zion" (Grand Central Publishing, 2010).
by Steven Plaut
Just when you thought things could not get sillier at Tel Aviv
University, along comes the newest TAU Soap Opera revolving around the
Women's Studies Department there.
The very fact that there exists a "Women's Studies" Department at Tel
Aviv University may tell you most of what you need to know about the
background to all this. While one can argue over whether there could
hypothetically be an interesting avenue of scholarly inquiry involving
gender issues, this is obviously never (or almost never) what is done
in such "Women's Studies" departments. Instead, "Women's Studies"
consists of full-time advocacy and propagandizing. In Israel, all
"Women's Studies" departments are far leftist and anti-Israel. It is
not the only department in which advocacy is the raison d'etre.
The "Women's Studies" department at Tel Aviv University is suddenly in
the headlines. And the events there make the best soap opera3s you
have seen on daytime TV look quite tame. Its Queen Bee is one Orly
Lubin, a radical anti-Israel leftist whose political pedigree is
exposed here: http://www.isracampus.org.il/third%20level%20pages/Editorial%20-%20Lee%20Kaplan%20-%20TAU%20-%20Orly%20Lubin.htm
She is almost as hostile to "American colonialism" as she is to
Zionism.
Well, Sister Orly got her petticoat in a twist when she was attacked
for inviting an alleged rapist to an "academic conference" that she
and her Women's Studies princesses were about to host. The alleged
rapist in question is Yitzhak Laor, an ultra-leftist Haaretz columnist
who used to teach at Tel Aviv University. Some of his students from
TAU claimed he raped and molested them. The conference was organized
in memory of a radical Israel-hating moonbette at Tel Aviv University
named Inbal Perelson. Perelson had been active in the pro-terrorist
group "Alternative Information Center" when she was not teaching
"literature" at TAU. While hiking with some other AIC terrorists in
the Judean desert, the group was washed away by a cleansing flash
flood sent by the Great Zionist of the Sky.
Sister Orly's conference, which was to take place today (March 28),
was to include Benny Zipper, another ultra columnist from Haaretz.
But Zipper's inclusion set off some feminist fang flashings. Some
women objected to Zipper being included in the program, because Zipper
is not only a Haaretz columnist colleague of alleged rapist Laor, but
because Zipper has also attacked in his blog the women who have
accused Laor of rape and molestation. In particular, Ashkar (that is
really her name) Elron-Cohen, an Israeli artist, who filed a police
complaint against Laor for rape, had a conniption and directed it
against Sister Orly.
Zipper had smeared Elron-Cohen in his blog. How dare you invite
Zipper to your feminist festival?, screamed Elron-Cohen. Sister Orly
refused to drop Zipper, on grounds that this would be "censorship."
Of course, preventing any anti-feminist or pro-Israel article or book
from appearing on the course syllabi in "Women's Studies" would
clearly NOT be considered censorship!!
Not to be deterred, Elron-Cohen then turned to the mother of Perelson
herself, the woman the entire conference was supposed to be
commemorating, and Mom also asked Lubin to drop Zipper. At a loss
about how to keep the nativettes happy, Sister Lubin then simply
called off the entire conference. Orly and her allies then denounced
Elron-Cohen for engaging in "verbal violence" against them and the
conference. Meanwhile, Elron-Cohen had already organized a petition
of feminists and fellow travelers to demand that Zipper not be
included in the conference. Sister Orly had a prissy fit when she saw
this, and sent her own personal letter to every name on the petition
announcing to them that she was hereby resigning from Tel Aviv
University!!
Now as tearful as we would be to see such a fine scholar resign from
Tel Aviv University, the officials at TAU claim they never got any
such letter of resignation from her. Sister Orly says she is
"resigning" because she is upset that the "discipline" of "Women's
Studies" is being bad-mouthed. Lubin's announcement of her
resignation, like similar announcements regularly made back when by
Abdul Nasser, evidently were designed to drum up feminist support for
herself. Three feminist groups that had signed the petition against
Zipper backed off and begged Sister Orly to stay.
I have no doubt that Sister Orly will hold on to her perqs and cushy
job at TAU and will NOT really go ahead with her resignation.
But I would be happy to be proven wrong!!
2. In recent months there has been a series of attempts to introduce
bills in the Knesset that defend Israel against its far-leftist
traitors. Or what the Left calls Fascism laws. The most important
was the financial disclosure bill, which would require disclosure of
funding of leftist anti-Israel NGOs. It was scuttled by the left wing
of the Likud led by Netanyahu. But some others have passed. The
Knesset has now passed a law that would strip funding from any group
commemorating Israel's existence as a Nakba or Catastrophe. It is
passing a law that would strip Israeli citizenship from those engaged
in anti-Israel espionage. It may pass a bill requiring an oath of
loyalty from Arabs applying for Israeli citizenship. As you can see,
these are all terribly "fascist" ideas.
Well, now one more such "fascist" law has been proposed. See this:
http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-4048650,00.html :
"Right-wing MKs launched a new attack against leftist organizations
Monday with a bill limiting their right to petition the High Court of
Justice.
"MKs Danny Danon and Yariv Levin from the Likud Party explain that the
bill, which is aimed at preventing court rulings from exacting
influence in the name of organizations that have no direct connection
to the matters at hand, government policy, or the Knesset."
3. Students strike back against the evil empire: Kenneth Marcus has
written an excellent essay about the civil rights case at UC Berkeley
and UC Santa Cruz:
http://www.mindingthecampus.com/originals/2011/03/fighting_back_against_campus_a.html
By Steven Plaut
We are fighters against Israeli apartheid. We support BDS (boycotts,
divestment, and sanctions) against Israel. We are progressive,
caring, socially advanced, egalitarian and freedom-loving
Anti-Zionists. Here we present to you our Grand Marching Song. Set to
John Philip Sousa music.
All together now:
We despise apartheid.
And that is why we demand that the only state in the Middle East that
is NOT an apartheid regime be boycotted and destroyed!!
We believe in enlightened government and progress.
And that is why we support Arab fascism.
We believe in peace.
And that is why we support all military aggression against Israel.
We believe in democracy.
And that is why we believe that the only country in the Middle East
that has elections, a free press, free courts, and freedom of speech
must be destroyed.
We believe in freedom.
And that is why we support Iran, Syria, the Taliban and the Hamas.
We believe in the freedom of speech and of the press.
And that is why we support the Palestinian Authority and the Hamas.
We believe in self-determination and self-definition for all.
But not for Jews.
We oppose violence.
And that is why we support Palestinian terror.
We believe in human dignity.
And that is why we applaud when Arabs blow up Jewish women and children.
We believe in human rights.
And for this reason we support Arab atrocities.
We believe in fraternity and the brotherhood of nations.
Except when it involves Jews.
We favor equality.
But the kind to be found in Turkey, Syria and Saudi Arabia.
We favor minority rights.
But not for Jews, Kurds, Southern Sudanese, Bahais, Iranian Sunnis,
Egyptian Copts, or any other politically incorrect groups.
We believe in freedom.
But do not mind that slavery still exists in Sudan, Saudi Arabia and
elsewhere among Arab states.
We believe in a free press.
And so we support censorship by the Hamas and the PLO.
We believe in freedom to practice religion.
But only for Moslems.
We believe in affirmative action preferences for those who suffered
from past discrimination.
But not for Jews.
We believe in progress and enlightenment.
And so we support Islamofascism, Jihad and pogroms.
We believe in egalitarianism.
And so we support demands for ethnic cleansing of the Middle East to
drive out the Jews.
We love children and living things.
And this is why we applaud suicide bombers.
We hate it when people blame the victims.
Which is why all terrorism is always the Jews' fault.
We believe in education.
As long as we never have to read any books.
We believe in multiculturalism.
As long as no one ever has to learn respect for the Jews or for the
West or for Amerika.
We believe in prosperity.
And that is why we support Arab feudalism and kleptocratic regimes.
We believe in equal citizenship.
Just as long as Israel never conscripts its Arabs or makes them obey the law.
We believe in freedom of expression.
Which is why people who do not agree with us must be censored and shouted down!
.
We believe the human rights of Arabs must be protected.
But not in Arab countries.
We are upset by illiteracy.
And that is why we practice it.
We believe in women's dignity and equality.
But not among Arabs.
Juan Cole, I thought I would repost this older exchange concerning
some of the same matters.
My first expose of Cole was here:
http://archive.frontpagemag.com/readArticle.aspx?ARTID=9198
Here is Cole's original "statement."
http://hnn.us/roundup/entries/11071.html
My response to that follows:
Historians in the News
Steve Plaut: Response to Juan Cole's Response
http://hnn.us/roundup/entries/11070.html
Steven Plaut, at frontpagemag.com (3-29-05):
The new head of the Middle East Studies Association, Professor Juan
Cole from the University of Michigan, has responded on his own web
page to the in-depth expose of his bias I published recently in
Frontpage Magazine. In that article, Cole's long history of
distortion, ignorance, and bias was carefully documented. In
particular, I challenged the Cole Doctrine, which holds that all
terrorism is due to "occupation." I showed that most terrorism has
nothing to do with "occupation," that most occupation does not cause
terrorism, and that terrorism is more often the cause than the
consequence of "occupation."
Cole is apparently unable to defend his record against the criticism
contained in my piece and instead complains, in a column on his own
web page, that he was a "victim" of a "GoogleSmear." By this he means
critical analysis of what he writes, which then gets cited and
reposted on the web, something he dislikes (but can't answer). He is
upset when web commentators publish correctives to his extremist and
unfounded views, and then these show up whenever someone googles his
name in the web's best known search engine.
But more importantly, this is all a bit like the libelous pot calling
the kettle black. Cole's habitual response whenever anyone exposes his
errors and bias is to whine that he is being "smeared." But Cole has a
long history of smearing and threatening respected scholars like
Daniel Pipes and Martin Kramer, who – unlike Cole – are careful with
the facts. "Googlesmearing" -- as opposed to the fact-filled
documented analysis I wrote in the above FPM article -- is hardly a
"new way of discrediting a political opponent," as Cole described it.
Indeed, Cole and his leftist friends have been doing it for years.
In his attempt to defend his indefensible record, Cole writes, "The
GoogleSmear depends on subtle changes of wording that make the
individual sound like an idiot." In all candor, we do not think anyone
needs word changes nor Google to assist in making Juan Cole sound like
an idiot. Noam Chomsky has said, "Juan Cole is a very serious and
knowledgeable analyst." Need we say more.
Cole's "idiot" reference is actually meant to refer to a small piece
of my original article (before I corrected it), which mistook a spoof
of what Cole writes for the real thing. But what does it say about
Cole that's hard to tell the difference? In any case, unlike Cole, I
am happy to acknowledge an error when I make it, since it is not – as
it is with him – the very substance of my discourse.
No sooner does Cole complain about "dubious facts" in the Frontpage
piece about him and about his being a victim of "GoogleSmear" than he
himself decides to illustrate GoogleSmear for his readers by
performing it against me. Thus, his first and main defense of his good
name is to repeat a lie about myself invented earlier this week by his
crony, superior ship's officer, and editor at antiwar.com, Dennis
"Justin" Raimondo. Cole clearly regards Raimondo as a legitimate,
authoritative source of information, while complaining that his
critics rely on dubious sources. We counted 14,400 web pages in which
the names Juan Cole and Justin Raimondo appear together.
One is known by the company that one keeps and Cole keeps intimate
company with Raimondo, who is best known for fabricating a conspiracy
theory reprinted on neonazi web sites all over the Internet about how
Jews supposedly knocked down the World Trade Center to make poor bin
Laden look bad. Raimondo has even self-published this theory as a
"book." Cole obviously has no problems being associated with a
crackpot like Raimondo nor with citing his libelous ravings as
"authoritative." And then he complains that we at Frontpage Magazine
are responsible for his own damaged reputation.
Cole rests the better part of his "self-defense" on labeling me "an
Israeli defender of the terrorists (sic) around the late extremist
Rabbi Meir Kahane," the fellow who set up the Jewish Defense League.
So what is the source of this invention reported with scholarly
seriousness by Professor Juan Cole? Why, it is Justin Raimondo
himself, of course! In fact, Cole thanks Raimondo profusely on his web
page for smearing me as a supposed Kahanist.
The only problem is that I am not. Raimondo's evidence for this smear
against me is that he googled my name and the word "Kahanist"
together, and discovered two articles of mine in which I used the word
"Kahanist" in the text. But that was all he found. In neither article
did I express any support for the Kahanists or Kahanism. Talk about
Googlesmears! Cole, also accuses me of posting comments under a false
name on a web bulletin board and accuses me of using illegal drugs,
which is equally fanciful and absurd.
Not only have I never been a Kahanist, but - on the contrary - I have
been a critic of Kahane and his organization for well over 30 years,
and have been attacked by the Kahane movement on more than one
occasion. But such facts cannot be expected to deter the scholarly
head of the Middle East Studies Association, Juan Cole, and his
conspiracist mentor Raimondo in their zeal to discredit my analysis of
Cole's actual positions and performance. Cole, by the way, is as fond
of infantile conspiracist "theories" as Raimondo, and – again like his
mentor – likes to spread anti-Jewish libels. Both Raimondo and Cole
have a habit of responding to any documentation of their lies by
shrieks and slanders and with threats.
Cole never quite gets around to addressing the main criticism against
him that appeared in my FPM article, namely that his theory that
"terrorism is caused by occupation" is without empirical foundation.
In his column, he simply repeats his "theory" that occupation produces
terrorism, whereas in fact the reverse is more commonly the case.
If the Cole Doctrine were true, why did the illegal Chinese occupation
of Tibet not produce terrorism? – that was one of the many questions I
asked in my column attacking Cole's "theory"! Cole responds on his web
page: because "the Tibetan population was not socially mobilized,"
adding, "the Chinese government certainly saw the Kampa revolt of 1959
to be a terrorist action." Actually, a handful of Kampas struggled
against the Maoist colonialists, starting in 1951. Leave it up to a
socially-mobilized apologist for Maoism like Cole to denounce these
Kampa rebels, who never targeted civilians, as terrorists, while
Hizbollah and Hamas – real terrorist organizations that embrace
Osama's jihad – are legitimate anti-occupation protest movements in
Juan Cole's eyes.
Cole then adds: "The Zionist Right maintains that you can't criticize
Israeli violations of basic human rights and international law until
you first criticize all the other 188 countries in the world." Cole is
not too far off this time. Human rights are a hundred times better
respected and protected in Israel than in the next-best Middle East
countries and better than in close to 188 others. Someone who harps
constantly on supposed human rights abuses by Israel – which is a way
to demonize and delegitimize Israel, a country under threat of
annihilation from the Arab dictatorships Cole supports - while
ignoring human rights in other countries is acting in behalf of
malevolent political agendas.
It is exactly like those who shrieked in the late 1930s about human
rights abuses of ethnic Germans in Czechoslovakia, while ignoring the
fact the human rights record of Czechoslovakia was far better than in
the countries seeking to delegitimize and destroy it. Professor Cole
resents anyone questioning his real motives. Does he really imagine
that his bluster against the "Zionist Right" will hide his attempts to
promote the agendas of the anti-Semitic Left?
Cole takes sanctimonious exception to the fact that I referred to the
Sudanese murdering people in southern Sudan as "Arabs" and noted that
those being massacred in Sudan are black Africans. The ruling classes
in Sudan consist of people who speak Arabic, are Moslems, run a
program of coerced "Arabization" in the country, and Sudan is a member
of the Arab League. Their victims are black Africans, even if much of
the Sudanese murdering class is also black.
After raising the Sudan race issue, which was never mentioned at all
in the Frontpage piece criticizing him, Cole insists that this proves
that "The rightwing Zionists want to racialize the Sudan conflict." We
wonder how many people are capable of reading Cole's web site without
the constant need to shout "Huh??!!" By the way, lots of Israeli Jews
are black also. What does that make them, Professor Cole, well -
besides right-wing Zionists?
Standing back to view the man whom the leftwing Middle Eastern experts
on America's college campuses have made the quarterback of their
anti-American game plan, here is Cole's view of bin Laden and 9-11 and
the war on terror, taken from Raimondo's site, where Cole has
published many articles:
"The attack on the World Trade Center was exactly analogous to Pearl
Harbor. The Japanese generals had to neutralize the U.S. fleet so that
they could sweep into Southeast Asia and appropriate Indonesian
petroleum.... Likewise, al-Qaeda was attempting to push the United
States out of the Middle East so that Egypt, Jordan, Israel and Saudi
Arabia would become more vulnerable to overthrow, lacking a superpower
patron. Secondarily, the attack was conceived as revenge on the United
States and American Jews for supporting Israel and the severe
oppression of the Palestinians.... Ironically, however, the Bush
administration then went on to invade Iraq for no good reason."
He then adds:
"Al-Qaeda has succeeded in several of its main goals. It had been
trying to convince Muslims that the United States wanted to invade
Muslim lands, humiliate Muslim men, and rape Muslim women. Most
Muslims found this charge hard to accept. The Bush administration's
Iraq invasion, along with the Abu Ghraib prison torture scandal, was
perceived by many Muslims to validate bin Laden's wisdom and
foresight.... The U.S. is not winning the war on terror. Al-Qaeda also
has by no means won. But across a whole range of objectives, al-Qaeda
has accomplished more of its goals than the U.S. has of its."
In sum, the more Cole complains about those who criticize his
extremist political agenda, his undeniable bias, and his general
absence of scholarship, the more he proves how correct in fact they
are.
Comment
http://hnn.us/readcomment.php?id=57596&bheaders=1#57596
Another Scholarly Associate of Prof. Cole (#57596)
by steven plaut on March 30, 2005 at 3:44 AM
ANOTHER Scholarly Source and Colleague of Juan Cole
We recently documented the deep involvement, identification, and
collaboration of Prof. Juan Cole, who is serving as reigning "Rais" of
the Middle East Studies Association, with one Dennis "Justin"
Raimondo, who edits the anti-American pro-terror antiwar.com. Raimondo
fabricated a conspiracy "theory" about how supposedly dem Joos were
the real ones who knocked down the World Trade Center all to make bin
Laden and his 19 Saudi hijackers look bad. This theory is now staple
lard on all neonazi web sites and some Stalinist ones too, like
Pravda, where Raimondo writes a regular column. Raimondo seems to be
determined to act out in his own life the script from Kevin Abrams'
book.
Now Raimondo and his ravings are ordinarily not worth discussing
outside the clinic, and are of interest here only in the fact that
Prof. Juan Cole is a follower and admirer of Raimondo, publicly thanks
and compliments Raiomondo, and publishes his own articles on
Raimondo's web site.
At first, we assumed this was just a singular slip in judgment on the
part of our learned professor of Middle East political correctness.
Surely Cole does not know what sort of crackpot Raimondo really is,
right?
Wrong!
It turns out that Raimondo is NOT the only far-left-neofascist
conspiracist crackpot with which Cole makes common cause and is on
intimate collegial terms. We checked out the links on Juan Cole's own
personal web site and blog. There we discovered among Cole's list of
"Political and Academic Weblogs" the weblog of Kurt Nimmo.
"Academic" weblog? You may recall that Nimmo is the
employment-challenged New Mexico photographer-wannabe who may or may
not have been canned from a job at his local Walmart's photo lab, who
may or may not have finished high school, the fellow who insists that
because of "the neocons" (by which he means Dem Joos) he just cannot
find a job - unlike the many millions of illegal immigrants who cannot
speak English and all find jobs. Nimmo is a regular columnist for
Alexander Cockburn's Counterpunch, and has been moonlighting as a
columnist for Uruknet, the web site base of Iraqi pro-Saddam exiled
Ba'athists.
Nimmo, who makes Raimondo look like a Harvard Dean, claims he is not
really a columnist for the Ba'athist site because he only publishes
his columns there. We counted 40 Nimmo columns on Uruknet. Nimmo also
insists the pro-Saddam site is really run by Italian peace lovers and
not Ba'athist Iraqis, and my guess is his evidence is that his friends
there say "Marhaban, We arrrr Italian Beoble Insh'Allah". And yes, the
Saddamist Uruknet also comes out to endorse Professor Cole, Raimondo
and Nimmo, the merry threesome.
Nimmo has as long a track record of justifying terror, spin doctoring
al-Qaeda, and promoting crackpot conspiracy theories as Raimondo, and
Nimmo is just as openly anti-Semitic.
So the big question for the University of Michigan is how can it be
that one of its profs is someone who regards Nimmo as one of his bona
fide "academic" colleagues and links his personal page to such a
critter, a prof who openly identifies with Justin Raimondo, a prof who
is the hero of the week for the Iraqi Ba'athists. We would ask the
Middle East Studies Association a similar question, about how can Cole
be its President under these circumstances, but we fear we have
already answered out own question.
We are wondering if the next academic weblog and academic source for
his research that Prof. Cole will name will be Rense.com or David
Irving's web site.
world is by means of boycotting leftists. What better way to
eliminate apartheid from the planet than by boycotting leftists?
And that is why I was so moved to tears by this story:
http://www.haaretz.com/print-edition/news/hospital-cancels-conference-after-top-physician-objects-to-amos-oz-attending-1.351466
Hospital cancels conference after top physician objects to Amos Oz attending
The doctor said he was outraged that Oz had sent a copy of his book "A
Tale Of Love and Darkness" to Palestinian activist Marwan Barghouti,
who is currently serving five life sentences and 40 years in jail for
his involvement in murdering Israelis in a terror attack.
Well, speaking of being moved to tears, Reuven Rivlin, the speaker of
the Knesset, was moved to tears yesterday, or so Haaretz reports. No,
not by that bomb in Jerusalem or by those rockets fired into the Negev
or even by the phosphorus shell fired by the Hamas yesterday at the
Jews. (Hey, remember when the bleeding hearts thought it was inhumane
to fire phosphorus shells?) It was not even because his own party,
the Likud, is freezing construction in Jerusalem.
No, it was because Haim Oron retired. Oron is a Marxist geezer who
had been the last MAPAM politician still serving in the Knesset as
part of the Meretz faction. As I say, Rivlin from the Likud broke
into tears because Oron was going back to his kolkhoz.
2. J Street jihad:
http://www.haaretz.com/jewish-world/mk-j-street-is-not-zionist-but-a-leftist-extremist-group-1.351371
3. Da answer is coming in da wind:
http://www.haaretz.com/print-edition/news/it-s-official-bob-dylan-to-perform-in-israel-on-june-20-1.351457
4. RE-CAST LEAD!!
5. Hillel idiots:
http://frontpagemag.com/2011/03/24/suicidal-jews-and-the-anti-semites-they-ignore-and-sometimes-embrace/
6. Let's all hate the Left:
http://frontpagemag.com/2011/03/23/why-israelis-hate-the-left/
7. TAU's Ran HaCohen on why the Itamar murderers were really ok:
http://isracampus.org.il/third%20level%20pages/TAU%20-%20Ran%20HaCohen%20-%20OKs%20the%20murderers%20of%20Itamar%20babies.htm
http://frontpagemag.com/2011/03/23/juan-cole%e2%80%99s-map-of-lies/
(Learn the Truth about the "Apartheid Maps" being spread by the Axis
of Evil – please pass on to activists fighting the BDS and Israel
Apartheid Week Klans)
Juan Cole's Map of Lies
Posted By Steven Plaut On March 23, 2011
Juan Cole is the Richard P. Mitchell Professor of History. He claims
to be a Middle East historian and expert. He has served as the
president of the "Middle East Studies Association." At least one
scholar has accused him of being personally responsible for the
intellectual bankruptcy plaguing Middle East studies. Cole is an
anti-Israel and anti-American extremist, and his extremism prevented
him from getting a job offer from Yale a few years back. He is
probably best known for his professing beliefs in grand Jewish
conspiracies. He tosses around the term "Zionofascists" when he means
"Jews." He led the pro-Saddam lobby and is a Hamas apologist. He
loves to spread anti-Jewish blood libels. He is bosom buddies with
Neo-Nazi anti-Semitic conspiracist nuts, like Justin Raimondo (who
claims the Jews and not al-Qaeda were behind the 9-11 attacks on the
US).
For those who think that the fascist method of The Big Lie must be
restricted to slogans or phrases, you should never underestimate the
value of a false map. Perhaps the world title for telling a Big Lie by
means of a map, or rather a pseudo-map, now belongs to the
pseudo-academic Cole, regarding "Palestinian lands." He has decided
that lands owned by the British imperial mandatory governing in
control of "Palestine" between the world wars were "Palestinian land."
Those are the "Palestinian lands" he claims were stolen by Israel.
Now, as it turns out, those were "Palestinian lands" only in the sense
that they were state land owned by the British "Palestine" mandatory
government. They were by and large not lands owned by "Palestinian"
Arabs. And they were by and large completely empty.
Those were the lands taken over by Israel when it became independent
that Cole maps as "Palestinian lands." Today Juan Cole is the daddy
of the world's most absurd propaganda pseudo-map, which purports to
tell the history of "Palestine." The map can be viewed here and is
entitled "Palestinian Loss of Land 1946 to 2000." It consists of four
frames.
The first frame is labeled "Palestinian and Jewish Land 1946." It
shows "Palestinian land" in green comprising more than 90% of
"Palestine" (defined as the area later forming Israel, the West Bank
and Gaza). Most of this "Palestinian" land was "Palestinian" only in
the sense that it was public land owned by the British mandatory
government of "Palestine."
The second frame shows the UN partition plan 1947, under which roughly
equal slices of land in Mandatory Palestine were assigned to a
proposed Jewish state and a proposed Palestinian Arab state.
Unwittingly, the map prepared by Cole makes the Israeli case. Readers
might want to ask of Cole and his friends embarrassing questions, such
as why that Arab Palestinian state never arose. After all, the Jews
accepted the compromise proposal. The answer that Cole does not want
you to know is that the Arab states invaded the territory militarily
and gobbled up most of the what had been earmarked for a Palestinian
state. Readers might also wonder how come half the segment of Western
Palestine that had been reserved for the Jews after Transjordan had
been truncated from Palestine was being offered to the Arabs.
In the same map, what are shown in Cole's second frame as "Palestinian
lands" were also by and large public lands controlled by the British
Mandatory government and not lands owned by "Palestinian" Arabs. The
third frame shows Israel's borders after Independence and the last
frame shows Israel's borders today together, again with lands in the
West Bank and Gaza defined by Cole as "Palestinian lands."
The Big Lie is most visibly and viciously concentrated in Cole's first
frame. After World War I, all of Western Palestine was governed by
Britain under a Mandate granted to it by the League of Nations. Its
mandate was to develop the area as a Jewish homeland. The eastern
part of Palestine was truncated and illegally turned by Britain into
the independent Arab kingdom of Transjordan. The rump segment of
Palestine was reserved for the Jews. None of this was earmarked for
creation of yet another Arab state. The bulk of land within the
Palestinian Mandate was state-owned land, governed by the British
Mandatory government. It had also been state-owned land previously
under the Ottoman imperial government, before Britain liberated
"Palestine" from the Turks. [Before World War I, land in Palestine
was owned by the Ottoman state and a feudalistic class of absentee
landlords. The few "Palestinian" Arabs who lived in the country at
the time seldom owned any land. They farmed it as sharecroppers.]
The Cole map of "Palestinian lands" gives the impression that before
Israel's creation 90% of the land of Palestinian was owned by
"Palestinian" Arabs. In reality, almost none of it was. It was
mainly land owned by feudal aristocrats and by the imperial
government. Most of it was empty. When the Zionist migrations began,
the Jews started buying up lands from their feudal landlords, who were
happy to turn a quick profit. Almost no "Palestinian" Arabs were
forced off those lands as the ownership changed and the Jewish
immigrants arrived. The anti-Israel Lobby, which loves to accuse the
Zionists of "colonialism," is invited to find any other case in human
history in which the "colonialists" came and paid in full at (and
often well above) market prices for the lands they were "colonizing."
As Jewish capital flowed into the country, bringing with it rising
wages, health and educational standards, Arabs from neighboring
countries, mainly from Lebanon and Syria, flowed in to "Palestine" to
take advantage of the progress. Those Arabs never saw themselves as
"Palestinians" until the fabrication of a mythical "Palestinian
people" became the Arab propaganda line after 1967. The
"Palestinians" were then assigned the same role of the German Sudetens
in the late 1930s, pretending to be oppressed "victims" whose
liberation required annihilation of their democratic "oppressors," or
so their genocidal totalitarian patrons insisted.
The large increase in Jewish land ownership between the late 1800s and
1948 was due to this process of land acquisition by means of Zionist
purchases. Swaths of lands were also purchased by Jews in Syria and
Transjordan. They were later stolen by the respective Arab
governments, a little matter about which the "anti-apartheid" poseurs
and Hillary Clinton have never had much to say. The bulk of the land
in Western "Palestine," including almost the entire Negev in Israel's
south, was state-owned during the British mandatory period. If Cole
and Sullivan had an ounce of integrity, they would have identified
public lands as precisely that.
Then to make matters worse, the pseudo-map and its sponsors paint all
of Israel and large swaths of the West Bank and Gaza as "Jewish
lands." Even when they are owned by Arabs.
Let us note that what Cole and Sullivan call "Jewish lands" or
"Israeli lands" include not only private lands owned by Arabs but also
public lands serving Israeli Jews and Arabs in common. Are highways
and parks used by all Israelis "Jewish lands?" Evidently Cole thinks
so. Are lands upon which Arab schools, mosques, libraries and sports
stadiums sit "Israeli lands?" Maybe Cole has never met an Arab who
uses a park.
In addition, the bulk of land in Israel is publicly owned even today.
As an economist I oppose this anachronistic "socialist ownership."
These holdings include public lands that are used by all Israelis,
Arabs and Jews. Of privately-owned land, Israeli Arabs own more of it
than their share in the Israeli population!
Then we have parts of the Gaza Strip being shown on the Cole map as
"Israeli land." Never mind that there is not a single Israeli
anywhere in the Gaza Strip, ever since Israel – somewhat foolishly –
turned the entire area over to the Hamas years ago. In the West Bank,
Cole shows large swaths of "Palestinian land." What he means of
course is land on which Arabs live today. There are also swaths of
land there on which Jews live. If the very fact of Arabs living on
those lands turns them into "Palestinian lands," then most of the
American Southwest is Mexico.
Let me put this a little differently. If we apply Cole's "logic,"
then we need to note that a hundred years ago there were no properties
at all owned by Juan Cole in Ann Arbor. In contrast, today there are
no properties in Ann Arbor owned by me. Therefore, Cole's house there
must belong to me!
Cole actually took the pseudo-map – as is – from a Bash-the-Jews web
site operating out of Leeds, English. This "borrowing" shows the
reliability of Cole's academic sources and scholarship. A student of
mine who did the same would be brought up on disciplinary charges.
The "Leeds Palestine Solidarity Campaign" is a pro-jihad pro-terrorist
tiny group promoting boycotts of Israel. It reprints the usual
Islamofascist propaganda and it links itself to Aljazeera, Osama bin
Laden's favorite news outlet. In its statement of purpose it lists
battling the "Zionist nature" of Israel as one of its goals. It is
not clear who prepared the map for the Leeds bigots, but it was
obviously not anyone with any interest in facts. This is evidently
why it appealed to Juan Cole.
Cole took the map from the Leeds jihadists and ran it with no editing
at all on his own web site here. It was posted as part of a broader
Bash-Israel posting. That posting is so filled with
pseudo-scholarship and disinformation that, in and of itself, it
raises enormous doubts about Cole's qualifications to serve on the
faculty of any bona fide institution of higher learning. Among other
things, Cole writes there:
"Israelis claim a 'birthright' to do things like colonize Palestinian
territory, based on romantic-nationalist reworkings of biblical
narratives. But Canaan was populated for millenia before some
Canaanite tribes adopted the new religion of Judaism, and it was also
ruled, as Palestine, for centuries by Romans and Greeks, and for 1400
years by Muslims. The Palestinian Jews converted to Christianity and
then to Islam, so they are cousins of the European Jews (who appear to
have gone to Europe voluntarily as male merchants around 800 CE,,
where they took local wives). European Jews are about half European by
parentage and all European by cultural heritage, and it is no more
natural that they be in geographical Palestine than that they be in
Europe (where nearly two-thirds of their mothers were from and about a
third of their fathers). From a Middle Eastern point of view, European
Jews planted in British Mandate Palestine by the British Empire were
no different from the million colons or European colonists brought to
Algeria while it was under French rule from 1830-1962."
Cole's attempt to claim that "Palestinian Arabs" have roots among
Canaanite tribes is laughable charlatanism. His pseudo-history of
Jews resembles those to be found on many Neo-Nazi web sites.
Palestinian Jews did not become Christians and Moslems. Those who did
go to Europe did not do so "voluntarily" but to escape persecution, in
contrast with the Syrian and Lebanese Arabs who migrated into
"Palestine" in the late 19th and early 20th century to morph into
up-and-coming "Palestinians." Jews were hardly "planted" in Palestine
by the British Empire. Jews lived there thousands of years before
London was established. If anything, the British Empire did its best
to mollycoddle Arab fascism during the 1920s and 1930s by preventing
Jewish refugees escaping growing persecution in Europe and immigrating
to "Palestine."
Cole's publication of the "maps" of "Palestinian Lands" was quickly
picked up by Andrew Sullivan, writing in the Atlantic. While in the
past Sullivan was capable of expressing the occasional approving
sentiment about Israel and Jews, he suddenly became a vicious Israel
basher during Israel's "Cast Lead" military campaign against Hamas
terrorism in the Gaza Strip. Israel had patiently sat back during
years of being bombarded by thousands of Palestinian rockets, mortars,
and sniper attacks. When it at long last retaliated, Sullivan went on
a series of rage rants. In several of these he ran Cole's pseudo-map.
Sullivan was called to task on that by Leon Wieseltier, writing in the
New Republic: 'Sullivan is hunting for motives, not reasons; for
conspiracies, which is the surest sign of a mind's bankruptcy.. These
days the self-congratulatory motto above his blog is "Of No Party or
Clique," but in fact Sullivan belongs to the party of Mearsheimer and
the clique of Walt (whom he cites frequently and deferentially), to
the herd of fearless dissidents who proclaim in all seriousness,
without in any way being haunted by the history of such an idea, that
Jews control Washington.' More than one blogger saw the exchange
between Sullivan and Wieseltier as the bubbling out of Sullivan's
latent anti-Semitism.
When Sullivan ran the Cole pseudo-map, he accompanied it with the
caption: 'Joe Biden was kicked in the balls as he came to Israel with
a simultaneous "f**k you" by the Israeli government announcing new
settlements – 1600 houses – in East Jerusalem." Why Israel's
building housing in its capital is an obscenity, while the United
States building housing in Washington, DC is not – is just one more
mystery unexplained by Sullivan.
The Cole pseudo-map would not die, and continues to metastasize.
Jeffrey Goldberg made a valiant attempt at debunking it in the
Atlantic, but missed the most important points. Sullivan then
defended his use of it, out-Cole-ing even Juan Cole.
Since the Cole-Sullivan tag team started promoting the map as
reflecting some sort of historic record, it has been picked up by
countless anti-Semitic and anti-Israel web sites, blogs and magazines
around the world. I found reprints in thousands of web pages. It has
also been debunked by others, such as this web site. But it is now
indelibly part of the anti-Israel canon of the Bash-Israel Left and
the Islamofascists, both beloved by the pseudo-academic, Juan Cole.
2. http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-4046028,00.html
Israel's immoral novelists
Op-ed: Italy journalist says likes of Grossman, Oz promote vicious
distortions about Israel
Giulio Meotti
Israeli authors have never been shy. They have always commented on
their governments and always speak about politics in their novels. But
the best-selling Israeli writers are now captives of a dangerous
syndrome. One can legitimately criticize Israeli governments, their
errors and deafness. But a dark malaise is now driving these authors
to toe the line with the worst emotions of global public opinion.
This is the same public opinion that in essence boycotted the tragic
news about a large, beautiful and caring Jewish family destroyed in a
minute, when terrorists burst into their home in Itamar with one aim
in mind: To murder as many Israelis as possible.
There is now a deep chasm between the pretension of the "good
conscience" of these writers and the crude realism of history. This is
even sander and more significant because we are not talking about
writers who hate Israel or novelists who pontificate against the
Jewish State from abroad, but rather, about locals.
Amos Oz and David Grossman, Israel's most popular authors, have a
track record of genuine Zionist endeavor. But Oz just got in touch
with Marwan Barghouti, the Palestinian terrorist leader convicted of
murdering five Israelis and planning several terrorist attacks. The
Israel Prize recipient sent the Palestinian prisoner one of his books
with a personal inscription wishing him a speedy release from prison:
"This story is our story. I hope you read it and understand us better,
as we attempt to understand you. Hoping to meet soon in peace and
freedom."
Indeed, the gap between these authors and the guillotine threatening
Israel grows larger every day. David Grossman, whose son Uri was
killed in the Second Lebanon War, was the first Israeli writer to
explore the psychology of the Israeli occupation after 1967. Since
then, Grossman's paradigm, simply put, was always the same: Israel
must end its role of occupier and oppressor if the horror of terrorism
is to end.
Israel deserves better
It seems as though Grossman's conscience as an intellectual hasn't
been shaken by the Twin Towers attack, by the 1,600 Israeli civilians
killed in terror attacks, by a decade of rockets on southern Israeli
cities or by Iran's atomic death cult.
Shortly after the Gaza war, Grossman called for an independent inquiry
into the conduct of the IDF, paving the way for the biased Goldstone's
report. He also urged dialogue with Hamas. When Grossman went to
collect a cash prize funded by the Israeli state, he refused to shake
hands with Prime Minister Ehud Olmert.
After the flotilla incident, Grossman charged that Israel behaves like
"a band of pirates." He said the blockade on Gaza was "despicable,"
attacking the Israeli government "which is prepared to embitter the
lives of a million innocent people in the Gaza Strip, in order to
obtain the release of one imprisoned soldier."
Indeed, the morality of Israeli writers is not longer in tune with
reality and its contradictions, Israel's security, very existence,
identity and memory. These authors' publications attract so much
attention abroad because of the baleful influence they have on
Israel's reputation, as they promulgate the most vicious distortions
about Israel.
When Ariel Sharon sent forces into the West Bank to defeat the
terrorists, both Grossman and Oz went to help the Palestinians with
their olive harvest. Their noble generosity didn't stop Hamas from
slaughtering two Jewish girls in a nearby settlement, Linoy Sarussi
and Hadas Turgeman. Now, again, after a new Jewish family was
destroyed in Itamar, the writers chose to send postcards and books to
the terrorists. Israel deserves better bards.
Giulio Meotti, a journalist with Il Foglio, is the author of A New
Shoah: The Untold Story of Israel's Victims of Terrorism
3. Fight the Self-Destruction of American Jews:
http://www.newenglishreview.org/custpage.cfm/frm/85287/sec_id/85287
4. Much too little and much too late:
http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-4046440,00.html
5. Richard the Uber-Loon Falk:
http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/143062
6. Glenn Beck's broadcast on Itamar Massacre:
http://manneli.com/movies/Israel-info/Fogel-Itamar-Fox.html
7. My solution for Libya – put Khaddafi and his sons on a Pan Am jet
with a Libyan air force colonel as pilot and fly them over Scotland.
What's that you say? Pan Am no longer flies?
Exactly!
8. Tel Aviv University's Stalinist of the Day:
http://isracampus.org.il/third%20level%20pages/TAU%20-%20Yoav%20Peled%20-%20Shills%20for%20Hamas.htm
9. More fine Israeli academics:
http://isracampus.org.il/third%20level%20pages/outside%20Israel%20-%20East%20London%20U-%20Haim%20Bereshit%20-%20Demands%20Coen%20Bros%20Boycott%20Israel.htm
and
http://isracampus.org.il/third%20level%20pages/TAU%20-%20Anat%20Matar%20-%20crayons%20new%20book.htm
10. Rubbing Rivka Carmi's nose in it? Professor Geoffrey Alderman,
Michael Gross Professor of Politics & Contemporary History at the
University of Buckingham(UK) and Patron of the UK Council on Academic
Freedom, will address a seminar on "Intellectual Freedom and Academic
Obligation" at Ben Gurion University of the Negev, Israel, on Monday
28 March 2011 at 2.00 pm.Prof. Alderman will lecture on "The limits of
Blackmail, Deligitimisation and Slander (BDS) as Instruments of
Scholarly Discourse" at Ariel University Center, Israel, on Wednesday
30
March at 1.00 pm.
as the latest manifestation of the success of the Oslo Peace Process
and the continuing Peres-ization of Bibi Netanyahu.
It should now obvious even to Bibi that eventually Israel will have
no choice but to re-impose Israeli control over the Gaza Strip, or
what I call R&D or Re-Occupation and Denazification. Everything else
is self-delusion. Accordingly, I though the time might be apt to
repost this:
http://www.jewishpress.com/pageroute.do/37944
LESSONS OF GAZA
By: Steven Plaut
Date: Wednesday, January 28 2009
The great untold story of Operation Cast Lead was the level of
euphoria and national unity that gripped Israel. Those who think the
era of miracles is over will have to explain this sudden wall-to-wall
political consensus in Israel.
In what is arguably the most contentious society on earth, public
opinion polls were showing a 94% approval rating among Israeli Jews
for the military action against Hamas. Almost the same percentage
opposed any cease-fire that did not include the release of kidnapped
soldier Gilad Shalit.
The emergence of this sudden national consensus came against a
backdrop of an international wave of naked anti-Semitism on a level
not seen in decades, and of Israeli Arabs almost uniformly expressing
both opposition to the operation and outright hatred of Jews and the
Jewish state.
The really amazing thing, however, was that the man responsible for
the surge of good feelings and patriotism among Israelis was the most
unpopular and probably the most corrupt politician in modern Israeli
history.
Ehud Olmert already had one foot out the door of the Prime Minister's
Office before the shooting started, and many believed his other foot
was headed straight for prison. Olmert's approval ratings before the
Gaza war were not significantly above zero. Yet within moments of his
ordering the commencement of operations, Israelis were closing ranks
behind him in a way that caught nearly everyone by surprise.
The rest of the world may be united in denouncing Israeli "brutality"
and the supposedly disproportionate level of Palestinian casualties.
But Israel was just as united, at least for the moment, in celebrating
the beginning of the end of its era of national self-debasement and
capitulation.
Israeli television stations and newspapers reported in great detail on
the countless anti-Israel demonstrations all over the world, down to
and including the swastikas and the chants that Hitler had been right.
This only seemed to augment the sense of national unity and
determination among Israelis.
The devotees of Hamas could march on Western campuses all they wanted,
Israelis seemed to be saying, but we will deal with the savages in our
own way.
The new Israeli national unity manifested itself even in the face of
the distorted and maniacal denunciations of Israel for its alleged
insensitivity to the plight of Palestinian civilians.
Of course, the same world media that failed to challenge the lies
surrounding the infamous "death" of the Gaza boy Muhammad al-Dura back
in 2000 kept repeating the Hamas "estimate" as if it were a scientific
finding from an unimpeachable source.
In any case, clearly the bulk of the Palestinian dead were armed
genocidal terrorists. The usual "human rights" organizations, which
have never acknowledged that Jewish civilians in the Negev are
entitled to their human rights, kept claiming that a quarter of the
dead were "children." Of course, they count any 17 year old killed
while firing a bazooka at Jews as a "child."
My youngest son spent most of the war dodging rockets in Netivot, a
town of 26,000 in the Negev near the Gaza Strip best known for serving
as the spiritual center for Moroccan Jewry, with its shrines of
leading Moroccan rabbis. Netivot was hit by more than its fair share
of Hamas rockets.
Home for a weekend, my son watched the televised images of a
Palestinian man sitting on a pile of rubble that had once been his
home and sobbing about how there is no justice.
"You do not like having your house blown up?" my son responded to the
TV screen. "So who told you to start firing rockets at me?" He speaks
for nearly all Israelis.
And then of course there was all the whining by the media about how
Israel was preventing convoys of supplies from entering Gaza, as if
the Allies in World War II had sent convoys of supplies to Berlin when
it was under siege. A caller to an Israeli radio program put it rather
succinctly: "So release Gilad Shalit and stop shooting rockets at us
and you can have all the supplies you want; in fact you can shop in
Israel and use our hospitals and beaches."
Even some - though certainly not all - members of the country's
dwindling far left came out in support of the operation. (I say
"dwindling far left" because half have woken up to the fallacies of
leftist thinking while the other half have morphed into outright
anti-Zionists.)
Consider the following developments, which would have been unthinkable
a month ago and which are a very small sampling of the changed mindset
in Israel:
The novelist A.B. Yehoshua, leader of Israel's leftist literary
soviet, wrote a scathing article telling off an anti-Israel columnist
at the far left anti-Zionist daily Haaretz.
The popular singer Arik Sinai, long associated with Tel Aviv bohemian
leftism, suddenly went on a Zionist crusade, complete with bashing of
leftist anti-Zionists.
Street protests in Israel against the war consisted almost exclusively
of Arab students and Jewish members of the pro-terror HADASH communist
party.
The Israeli national consensus opposing the declaration of a
cease-fire by the Olmert team was almost as broad as the consensus in
support of the actual fighting.
* * *
Within days of the new cease-fire, however, it was becoming clear that
Olmert had blown the whistle before the team had finished its work.
The abandonment of Gilad Shalit was just part of it. The new
cease-fire would allow Hamas to re-stock its armories and replenish
its rocket warehouses.
Hours after the cease-fire went into effect, Hamas's smuggling tunnels
were being repaired and returned to operations. Worst of all, most of
the Hamas leadership remained alive.
Even more worrisome, the Olmert people were reverting to the approach
that had produced the rocket blitz on Israel in the first place. After
eight years of a policy of restraint that had achieved absolutely
nothing, turning the other cheek was being restored as the national
defense policy.
Olmert and Livni were back to offering land for peace, reaffirming
that two decades of giving up land and getting war in return had
taught them nothing. For decades Israeli leaders had agreed to one
unilateral cease-fire after the next. These bought Israel nothing but
demonization in the world media.
After their brief incarnation as fierce Zionist warriors, Olmert and
his pals were once again pretending that Mahmoud Abbas and the PA were
something different from the Hamas; that they were reasonable people
who yearned for peaceful coexistence with Israel and with whom deals
could be struck. And Israel was again offering to release hundreds of
terrorists from captivity.
If there was one lesson Israel should have learned over the past eight
years, it was that Israeli restraint buys neither goodwill for the
country nor moderate behavior on the part of Palestinians. For eight
years Hamas and its affiliates in Gaza fired rockets at Jewish
civilians, while the Israeli government's main response was to turn
the other cheek and order the country just to wait passively for Hamas
to run out of ammunition.
Israeli leaders had deluded themselves into thinking that if only the
world would clearly see unprovoked Palestinian aggression and terror,
Israel would enjoy a public relations Xanadu. Especially after the
Israeli government, for the sake of peace, drove all Jews out of Gaza.
The expectation that restraint would boost Israel's image was among
the stupidest of the delusions of Israel's Osloid leadership. The
world not only ignored the thousands of rockets fired at Jewish
civilians, it went to contorted moral lengths to justify them.
For decades Israel's leaders misunderstood and misjudged anti-Semitism
and they continue to do so now.
Anti-Semites and those with totalitarian ideologies always reverse
cause and effect. For them, every atrocity against Jews is a righteous
protest against Jewish wrongdoing and Israeli misbehavior. Every
retaliation by Israel is an unprovoked criminal act of malice and
Nazi-like aggression. It is exactly like claiming the Japanese were
the victims of American aggression at Pearl Harbor.
The real problem is that the Anti-Israel Lobby does not consider Jews
to be human. Therefore Jewish deaths never matter and Jewish lives are
expendable. Because Jews are not quite human, they can never be
entitled to the right of self-defense or permitted to engage in it.
Anti-Zionism has now been thoroughly Nazified. There can be no other
word for people who insist that Jewish life is worthless and that
Jewish deaths never count.
If Olmert had responded to the firing of thousands of rockets at
Israel by merely sneezing in the general direction of the terrorists,
thousands of protesters would have take to the streets and the
campuses in Europe and America to denounce this as a disproportionate
response and a war crime; many would no doubt describe it as an act of
biological warfare.
Absolutely nothing can ever be gained by Israeli restraint, except to
demonstrate weakness and fan terrorism. But that insight, clear to any
reasonably intelligent seven year old, was too complicated for Israeli
officials who for eight years ordered residents of Sderot and the
other towns of the Negev to sit and take it. Sderot had been turned by
the Israeli government into an undefended Guernica, its children
traumatized, its families reduced to paupers.
* * *
Another delusion that fell victim to Operation Cast Lead was the
notion that Israel's far left, while perhaps dangerously naïve, is not
at all anti-Semitic or self-hating.
Over the past two decades a malignant plague of anti-Semitism has
swept the left, including the Jewish left. It affects Jews in the
United States, in Europe, and even in Israel. While 94 percent of the
Israeli public was solidly behind the soldiers and the attack on the
Hamas infrastructure, the Jewish left was out at the forefront of the
pro-jihad Nuremberg marches, waving Hamas and PLO flags, demanding
international boycotts of Israel, calling for a Hamas victory.
The Jewish-born British Member of Parliament ranting about how Israel
is a Nazi regime was just the tip of the iceberg. While the Arab
regimes themselves were letting everyone know the contempt they felt
for Hamas, Jewish leftists were out displaying their contempt for
Jews, from the members of J Street to the Reconstructionist "rabbi"
leading a pro-Hamas rally in Philadelphia,.
Those who thought that "Jewish anti-Semite" was an oxymoron will have
to think again. Increasingly, the left, and especially the campus
left, produces a mass of Jewish collaborators with the enemy, the
Jewish equivalents of Taliban John. Just about every Israel-bashing
newspaper and Internet site now features anti-Jewish columnists and
writers, many of them Israeli faculty members.
But the rudest awakening of all at the end of Cast Lead came with
regard to the Israeli far left, led by the academic fifth column. For
years, the pursuit of leftist silliness has been just as fashionable
on Israeli campuses as it's been on campuses in the U.S. and Europe.
As Orwell wrote, some ideas are so stupid that only intellectuals can
believe them. As the guns in Gaza began to fall silent, a number of
Israeli leftists emerged from their bunkers with a vengeance,
sabotaging the consensus of patriotism that had filled Israel during
the war.
Ben-Gurion University, the campus with arguably the largest number of
anti-Israel extremist faculty members, was shut down for weeks as
Hamas rockets bathed Beersheba. Several rockets landed close to the
campus. Public-school buildings in Beersheba were destroyed by
rockets. Yet leftist faculty members at BGU went on the warpath
against Israel and in support of Hamas. In an article titled "Black
January," BGU sociologist Lev Grinberg proclaimed Hamas terrorists to
be the true Maccabees, struggling against the evil empire:
I admit that I find the name "Cast Lead" in bad taste because of its
allusion to Chanukah and the Maccabees who fought against a mighty
conqueror. If indeed there is a struggle here of the weak against an
occupying empire, it is the struggle of Hamas against Israel, not the
other way around. Our self-image as the weak victim is utterly surreal
and trapped in the mythology of the Jews as the ultimate victims,
regardless of reality.... The firing of missiles by the prisoners in
protest against their starvation was interpreted as aggression, while
their oppression by their jailers was interpreted as self-defense.
Grinberg had earlier denounced Israel's targeting of terrorist leaders
as "symbolic genocide."
Neve Gordon, a BGU lecturer now serving as the chairman of political
science at the university, turned out one pro-terror anti-Israel
article after the next for anti-Semitic and neo-Nazi websites,
denouncing Israel as a criminal entity. In one, he excoriated Israel
for bombing the Islamic "university" in Gaza that was serving as the
storage warehouse for the very same rockets being fired at his own
university campus.
Oren Yiftachel, a professor of geography at Ben Gurion University who
has made a career out of denouncing Israel for being an "apartheid"
regime, cheered the firing of rockets at the children of Sderot and
Netivot as the moral and just response of Palestinians "imprisoned" by
Israel firing at their "jailers."
At my own University of Haifa, left-wing faculty members exploded in a
wave of outraged protests when the campus heads decided to fly Israeli
flags as a gesture of solidarity with the embattled residents of the
Negev towns. The leftists claimed this would be insensitive because it
would offend the pro-jihad Arab students who fill the campus.
The most important lesson of the past eight years, at this late stage
understood by everyone except university leftists and most Israeli
politicians, is that nothing will really put an end to the terror and
rockets other than some good old-fashioned R&D - Reoccupation and
Denazification.
Everything else is a delusion.
See also this:
http://christianactionforisrael.org/isreport/jan02/facing.html
2. I have been trying to think of some appropriate Purim gag
headlines to post. This year's reality is so absurd – I posted that
item a few days ago about Ilan Pappe being nominated as Hero of
Humanity by the "Raelian" UFO cult - it is not easy coming up with
things that people will understand as gags or spoofs.
Anyway, here are a few pathetic attempts at decent Purim gag headlines:
A. The fashion designer John Galliano, who was recently fired by the
Dior fashion house for proclaiming that he loves Hitler and thinks the
Jews deserve to be murdered has been appointed the new president of
Ben Gurion University. Rivka Carmi has stepped down so that Galliano
can take over. "He is much more appropriate a leader of Ben Gurion
University than I am," she confessed. The politics department at BGU
is still debating over whether Galliano is anti-Zionist enough to be
allowed to teach there.
B. One of the Tomahawk cruise missiles fired at Libya has gone off
course and struck the editorial offices building of Haaretz!
C. Muammar Kaddafi gets an official letter from Tel Aviv University
offering him a tenured position teaching philosophy.
D. The Hebrew University has ordered that the sexual harassment of
students in the sociology department be ended once and for all by
requiring that all sociology professors undergo reparative therapy to
turn them into homosexuals.
E. Barry Chamish has gotten a job!
F. The Reconstructionist Yom Kippur prayer book has been published
and all prayers in it are in ebonics.
G. Michael Lerner did not smoke any pot yesterday. He had a stomach flu.
H. Gideon Levy from Haaretz has published a love poem to Muammar
Kaddafi based on Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, and begins, "Muammar
Muammar whereforth art thou Muammar!"
I. The court has issued its sentencing for ex-President Moshe Katsav
and it is that he has to move into the bedroom at Shulamit Aloni's
house.
J. The Reform synagogue movement disowns the "Religious Action
Center," and the Center immediately merges with the Raelians.
K. Alexander Cockburn will be starring as Tevya in the Broadway
revival of Fiddler on the Roof.
L. Norman Finkelstein turns 58 without ever having been out on a date
so Dana International agrees to go out on a mercy date with him.
M. After being offered their own state by the UN, the Palestinian
announce that they all want to move to southern Libya, since there was
never any such thing as a Palestinian people.
university is under unprecedented attack thanks to the "treasonous
article" published by Neve Gordon in the Los Angeles Times
The letter was sent en masse to the entire faculty of BGU (august 23, 2009
Isracampus Translation of the Letter:
From: Rivka Carmi, President, Ben Gurion University, The President's Office
To all faculty members of Ben Gurion University, Shalom!
It is my desire to share with you my thoughts about a very serious
matter that has been developing in recent days, one carrying the most
severe consequences for the University.
This past Thursday I returned from a trip to the US. Following a
year of dramatic decreases in the levels of contributions and
donations to BGU because of the global financial crisis, this time I
definitely sensed some optimistic glimmerings of signs of recovery,
willingness to pursue cooperation, and to discuss the needs of the
University and its plans. In all of my discussions, the academic and
social (sic) reputation of the University, as well as its role in the
development of the Negev and of all of Israel, was saluted and
appreciated.
But less than an hour after my landing in Israel I received a
panicky phone call from the US, in which I was informed that a faculty
member at BGU, Dr. Neve Gordon (since promoted under Rivka's guiding
hand and with her blessings to Associate Professor --- Isracampus) had
just published an article in the Los Angeles Times. This article
calls upon the entire world to boycott the state of Israel, which
Gordon there terms an apartheid regime. From that point and onwards,
I received and continue to receive an unprecedented storm of angry
messages and outraged letters from donors and supporters of the
University, as well as from others who merely heard about the article.
I also was forced to take enraged phone calls from donors and Jewish
public figures in Israel and abroad.
This was not the first time that I and other officials at BGU have
been subjected to similar frontal assaults. I never shared
information about these attacks with you, the faculty, because I
believe that dealing with them is part of my job. Nevertheless, this
time the attack is unprecedented in its severity and scope. This is
due to the extremist message comprising the article in question,
regarded by many readers as outright treason against the state of
Israel, and also because it appeared in a newspaper of such wide
circulation, especially among the Jewish community. I have real and
concrete reasons to suspect that this article will produce massive
destructive damages to the ability of the University to raise funds,
and it will cause enormous harm to the fiscal condition of the
University, facing its worst budgetary crisis in history.
I feel the necessity of sharing with you my fears of these
enormous damages and their impact upon the economic condition of the
University, on its academic and social (sic) reputation, on its
professional levels, and on the loyalty of all of us.
The university officials and many of you members of the faculty
work hard at raising funding for the University. Unfortunately,
without these donations we simply do not have life (sic), and
certainly not development and progress. This work is particularly
difficult during a period of global financial strife and of
intensified competition for funding from other public bodies,
especially other universities. An article such as this brands our
University as an institution undeserving of global Jewish support.
Many of those contacting me stated that they would never again support
any Israeli university employing people who harm Israel in this way,
and indeed that they would encourage their friends and associates to
likewise withhold donations. I am citing the bottom line from so many
letters and messages that I am receiving these days.
Colleagues, I am not addressing here the actual contents of that
article by Gordon, in spite of the fact that I personally find it
deeply repulsive. All I wish to do is convey to you the hardship that
the University now finds itself facing, to let you know what the cause
of that hardship is, and – as I said – to convey to you my fears of
what the future brings regarding the prospects of the University.
Cordially,
Prof. Rivka Carmi
2. Michael Lerner, the editor of the pro-LSD pro-jihad "Tikkun
Magazine," is sort of permanently fixated in Purim. He spends every
day of the year in his Purim costume pretending to be a Rabbi. As it
turns out, he does not have ANY rabbinic ordination at all, of any
sort. Not even a Reform or a Reconstruction-deconstructionist one.
Well, it seems some valiant heroic protesters from the Bay Area Jewish
community keep expressing their unhappiness with Lerner's campaigns on
behalf of the Hamas and other anti-Semites. A few days ago, Mikey
gave a big honor to the Israel-bashing UN "Judge", Richard Goldstone.
The nexte day, claims Mikey, his home was "vandalized" for the third
time. (Here is a report regarding the first of the three times:
http://frontpagemag.com/2010/05/07/poor-michael-lerner%E2%80%99s-petunias/
I especially like the last of the talkbacks on that page!) Now,
"vandalizing" for Reb Mikey means that someone tapes a leaflet
protesting Lerner's anti-Israel activities onto to Mikey's door.
Mikey owns a great big expensive house up in the bourgeois Berkeley
Hills, the funding for which has never been publicly revealed.
Here is Mikey's version of what happened
(http://www.tikkun.org/nextgen/rabbi-lerners-house-attacked-3rd-time-day-after-we-gave-south-african-justice-richard-goldstone-the-tikkun-award
): "Only one day after Rabbi Lerner presented the Tikkun Award to
South African Justice Richard Goldstone, at a celebration of Tikkun's
25th Anniversary attended by over 600 people at the University of
California, Berkeley, Rabbi Lerner's home was again assaulted by
extremist Zionist haters who plastered posters over his home once
again. This is the 3rd assault on his home since Lerner announced the
award to Justice Goldstone whose report on Israel's human rights
violations during the Israeli assault on Gaza in Dec. 2008 and
Jan.2009 was denounced by the State of Israel and by the
AIPAC-dominated House of Representatives last year. You would not have
known about the 2nd attack, which was reported to the police but not
to the media because Lerner had been advised that not giving the
attackers attention might make future attacks less likely. That
strategy failed. Each time the posters have sought to display Lerner
as either a tool of an evil Goldstone trying to hurt Israel."
So no need for you to waste any time on those Jewish babies murdered
in Itamar. The REAL atrocity Tikkun wants you to get upset over is
the malicious scotch taping of a leaflet on Mikey's door. Let us note
that the perps did not so much as trample upon Mikey's petunias!
3. Haaretz this week reports that the Hebrew University is finally
getting serious about dealing with sexual predator Eyal Ben-Ari, the
far-leftist professor of sociology who supervised that thesis that
"proved" that the reason Jewish soldiers do not rape Arab women is
that the Jews are such racists. Ben-Ari has been suspended without pay
for two years because of his molestation and harassment of his female
students. Now the Hebrew University administration is appealing the
previous disciplinary measures against Ben-Ari and is seeking his
complete dismissal. This is revolutionary because Ben-Ari has tenure,
thanks mainly to his far-leftist diatribes, and ordinarily professors
do not get stripped of tenure simply because they are criminals.
Here is the latest:
http://www.haaretz.com/print-edition/news/both-sides-appeal-in-case-of-lecturer-suspended-for-relations-with-student-1.349902
Meanwhile, the OTHER leftist professor of sociology at the Hebrew
University to be found guilty of "inappropriate sexual relations" with
his student is Gideon Aran. He is suddenly the focus of attention by
the Berkeley student newspaper
(http://www.dailycal.org/article/112410/campus_officials_unaware_of_visiting_professor_s_p
) - he is on leave at Berkeley this spring.
4. At long last – the right way to deal with the "Israel Apartheid
Week" fascists. Sue their asses. See what a Queens University
student has done:
http://www.jewishtribune.ca/TribuneV2/index.php/201103164120/Queen-s-students-push-for-rector-s-impeachment.html
5. First the Pappe, now Nazi Normie: the "Raelians" find yet another
hero of humanity:
http://news.yahoo.com/s/usnw/20110316/pl_usnw/DC66763
6. Ahmadinejad sent into space:
http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-4043976,00.html
7. The ultimate form of Israeli Leftwing Fascism is Settlerphobia:
http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Columnists/Article.aspx?id=212473
and http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Op-EdContributors/Article.aspx?id=212475
Settlerphobia produces murder:
http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-4043930,00.html
8. Remember that old song, Froggy goes a courtin'!!
This week the Israeli media report that Amos Oz, Israel's leading
writer and also a leftwing moonbat, decided to send a signed personal
copy of his latest book to the jailed mass murderer Marwan Barghouti,
rotting in a cushy Israeli prison. See this:
http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-4043248,00.html Oz in the
inscription wishes Barghouti a speedy release from prison so he can
resume his campaign to annihilate all Jews.
Israeli attorney Yoram Sheftel claims Oz, known in these quarters as
the brainless scarecrow of Oz, is himself personally culpable for the
murders of settlers. See
http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/142981
Barghouti has become the favorite terrorist of the Israeli Left. Here
is a friend of the literary scarecrow: "I've visited him many times,"
MK Oron said on Tuesday, adding "those who think that (Palestinian
President Mahmoud Abbas) Abu Mazen and (Palestinian Prime Minister)
Salam Fayyad are partners to peace need to know that Barghouti
supports their position, and I therefore also consider him to be a
partner."
Here is an older item on the Scarecrow:
http://www.jewishpress.com/pageroute.do/31855