Original articles on Israel and related issues written by Steven Plaut, a professor at an Israeli university.
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Finish his BA; Model Hebrew University Student
http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/149051
Freed Terrorist: I Want to Finish My University Degree
Hamas terrorist who directed the murders of two IDF soldiers: I don't
regret what I did. I want to finish the university degree I started.
By Elad Benari
First Publish: 10/25/2011, 6:09 AM
Hamas terrorists
Israel news photo: Flash 90
One of the 477 terrorists who were freed last week in exchange for
Gilad Shalit said on Monday that he has absolutely no regrets for what
he did.
Mohammed Sharatha directed the kidnapping and murders of IDF soldiers
Avi Sasportas and Ilan Saadon in 1989. Both soldiers were kidnapped by
Hamas terrorists as they were hitchhiking on their way back home from
their military bases.
Sasportas was kidnapped and murdered in February of 1989 and his body
was found three months later, in May. Saadon was murdered in May of
1989 but his body was not found until seven years later, in 1996.
Sharatha was captured by the IDF in Gaza shortly after Saadon's
murder. He was sentenced to three life sentences.
Interviewed by Israel's Channel 10 News just six days after his
release from prison and his return to Gaza, Sharatha said, "I did what
I did and I do not regret it."
Sharatha, who refused to cooperate with Israeli investigators and
reveal where Saadon's body had been buried, even after he was captured
and sentenced, said that the kidnapping and murder of the two soldiers
was a direct order from Hamas leader Sheikh Ahmed Yassin (who was
killed in an IDF air strike in 2004).
He explained why he refused to reveal the location of Saadon's body.
"Why did the enemy not show us the burial place of people whom we are
just now starting to look for? These are people who have been missing
since 1967," he said, adding: "Israel has secret prisons where there
are detainees whose identity is unknown."
Sharatha said that his one request of Israel now that he has been
released is to be allowed to finish the university degree from the
Hebrew University in Jerusalem, which he began while in prison.
Allowing terrorist prisoners to study while in prison is just one of
many benefits given to them by Israel. In comparison, Gilad Shalit
spent five and a half years in Hamas captivity and was not allowed one
single visit from the International Red Cross.
At the end of the interview, Sharatha encouraged future terrorists who
will commit murderous acts towards Israelis.
"They have a great experience and greater power, and their fighting
spirit is greater than ours," he said. "We are proud to have created a
generation that will continue with the battle and go further, and
Allah willing they will achieve victory."
(Seems he was not accepted to Ben Gurion University's Politics
department because he was not anti-Israel enough for them!!)
2. The Boyfriend of Tali Fahima (Israeli Left's Poster Girl) re-arrested:
http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/151225
Top Terrorist Turns Himself In after Pardon Cancelled
Fatah terrorist Zakaria Zubeidi turns himself in after the IDF cancels
his pardon.
By Gil Ronen & Elad Benari
First Publish: 12/29/2011, 8:42 PM / Last Update: 12/29/2011, 11:33 PM
Jenin
Israel news photo: Flash 90
Zakaria Zubeidi, the former Fatah leader in Jenin, turned himself to
the Palestinian Authority on Thursday evening.
Earlier, Zubeidi told the Ma'an news agency that Israel had canceled
his pardon and instructed him to hand himself in to the Palestinian
Authority (PA).
Zubeidi, who headed the Al-Aqsa Brigades during the murderous terror
war launched by the PLO in 2000, told the PA-based news agency he had
stuck to all the conditions of the amnesty deal granted him by Israel
three years ago.
However, he said, Israel informed PA security forces on Thursday that
Zubeidi's pardon had been revoked, and that Israeli forces would
detain him if he did not turn himself in.
Zubeidi was admired by an Israeli woman, Tali Fahima, who crossed the
lines to accompany him when he was wanted by the IDF. Fahima, who
served jail time for treasonous activities in the service of Fatah,
has since been released and converted into Islam.
3. Auld Lang Zion
Should auld accomplice be forgot,
And never brought to trial?
Should auld Osloids, friend, be forgot,
In days of auld lang Zion?
For betraying auld lang Zion, my dear,
For abasing auld lang Zion.
Should their accomplice be forgot,
In days of auld lang Zion?
We yids ha'e run aboot the world,
Under fire the whole time.
We've wandered mony a weary foot,
To reach auld lang Zion.
Save auld lang Zion, my dear,
Save auld lang Zion,
Indict those Oslo blaggards, dear,
For the sake of auld lang Zion!!!
Women's Rights and Double Standards
Posted By Steven Plaut On December 30, 2011
Well, it seems the Obama team lately was running short of things over
which to bash Israel and so it decided that the treatment of women in
Israel is something that needs condemnation. Led by Hillary Clinton,
the Obama administration thinks that Israel does not treat its women
nicely or respectfully enough. This is the same Hillary Clinton who
never had much to say about the treatment of women in the Clinton
White House. Other administration bashers of Israel joined the feeding
frenzy.
This is the same Obama team that rarely has had anything to say about
the treatment of women in the Muslim world, without a doubt the very
worst such treatment that can be found on the planet. Hillary
insisted that Israel's treatment of women is as bad as that in Iran,
although Obama people do not exactly speak out against the treatment
of women in Iran before breakfast each day. Hillary also used the
same opportunity to condemn Israel for considering the adoption of
transparency laws that would require disclosure of foreign funding to
political NGOs operating inside Israel, laws that are similar to what
the United States and many other democratic countries already have.
After all, how will those who desire Israel's annihilation be able to
finance picayune treasonous radical anti-Israel propaganda NGOs inside
Israel if such transparency ever takes effect?
So when Hillary Clinton recently decided to speak out against the
mistreatment of Middle Eastern women, she singled out Israel for
condemnation, and then turned around to welcome a delegation of Saudi
feudalists with cordiality. If Hillary considers Israel a force of
anti-feminine darkness and repression, just imagine how awful she must
regard Scandinavia. She compared Israel's treatment of women with the
racial segregation that once was so common in the American South.
Israeli public figures, led by the secularist non-Orthodox Minister of
Finance Yuval Steinitz, denounced Hillary's comments as absurd and
incorrect. He was joined by numerous other secularist Israelis.
The Obama administration is largely silent when it comes to the plight
of women in the Muslim world, but keeps condemning the only country in
the Middle East that has a woman chief justice, plenty of women in its
parliament, more women MDs and than men, countless women army officers
and court judges, and which has had a woman as head of state,
something the US has never had. Israel is also the only country in
the world where a panel of judges, two of them women, put a former
president in prison for alleged rape and sexual abuse of women. But
perhaps that is what really has Bill Clinton's wife so hostile to and
suspicious of Israel.
Women university students in Israel have been the majority out of all
undergraduate Israeli students since 1980, reaching 58% of students in
1999. That is without including teachers colleges in the computation,
where women are a far larger share. Women students are the majority
of students, not just in the fields of education and humanities, but
also in such "non-traditional" fields for women as biological sciences
and agriculture. Women are a majority of medical students, 48.3% of
law students, and 39% of physics students, according to the latest
survey. There are also oodles of women students in math, engineering,
and computer sciences. Women students are also a small majority of
those pursuing MA and PhD studies.
So just what got Hillary and the Obama team so upset? Well, it seems
that Israel has been debating the behavior of some small
ultra-religious Jewish sects, groups that believe in strict gender
separation, especially in public spaces. Known as the chareidim,
these are religious radicals, best known for their black clothing,
long sidecurls, anti-modern life styles, and especially for their
ideas about "modesty" for women. No Jew anywhere has to belong to
such communities and women in those communities unhappy with the life
style may leave at any time.
In some communities of these chareidim, there have been initiatives to
introduce a small number of special bus lines in which women and men
do not sit together. When a secularist Israeli woman rider challenged
the initiative and sat in the "men's section" of one such bus Israel's
ultra-secularist leftist media proclaimed her the Israeli Rosa Parks,
and Hillary picked up the cue. In another incident, some religious
soldiers requested not to be required to attend a concert in which
women were singing, on grounds that according to their religious
outlook such singing is erotic and immodest. And in yet other
incidents, some signs were put up in the neighborhoods of chareidim
asking women not to congregate on a street next to a synagogue, or
calling on men and women in the name of modesty to walk on opposing
sides of some streets in those neighborhoods.
Of course Hillary and the secularist media never object to signs in
mosques and churches in Israel and elsewhere that ask people not to
enter in immodest dress. Hillary and her Obama colleagues have never
condemned the Amish for their own pre-modern life styles and opinions
and gender roles. The enlightened media regard the Amish as downright
endearing, a charming tourist attraction. And you would never know it
from reading Hillary's statements, but one can find some neighborhoods
and communities of chareidim inside the United States, mainly in
Brooklyn and upstate New York, in which similar forms of gender
separation in the name of "modesty" are practiced. No one seems to
think this is grounds for a public outcry by politicians.
The enormous majority of Israelis reject the life style and opinions
of the chareidim, much as the bulk of Americans have no interest in
living the Amish life style. But the Amish generally are
beneficiaries of a "live and let live" attitude on the part of the
bulk of Americans. Most of the "conflicts" in Israel regarding the
"gender separation" sought by the chareidim would go away with similar
tolerance. The religious soldiers who asked to be excused from
listening to women singing did not demand that the singing event be
cancelled, and they were happy to do kitchen duty or guard duty
instead of attending. But their officers and secularist politicians
attempted to coerce them into attending to make a political point.
The chareidim who were denounced for requesting bus lines with
separate seating have now decided to finance their own independent
small bus company without public funding, in whose busses they can sit
in the manner they please. No one disturbed by those seating
arrangements need use those private bus lines or minibuses.
And no one really needs to heed any of those signs on those few
Israeli streets in chareidi neighborhoods that call upon people to
behave in manners the chareidim consider "modest." I have walked
through such neighborhoods with my wife dressed in pants and otherwise
"immodest" secularist dress and with my daughter wearing her army
uniform, and not a single resident said a single word to us about it.
Even when my daughter was not carrying her gun.
The Israeli media managed to uncover a tiny handful of cases in which
local chareidi residents spoke disrespectfully to some women or girls.
Well, I am a native Pennsylvanian and I have to tell you that I have
seen a few Pennsylvania Dutch hotheads speak disrespectfully to other
people. So what? Why is this news? The media rarely report cursing
or disrespectful speech by radical secularists.
The Israeli chareidi attitudes towards women and gender separation are
actually not any more "pre-modern" or feminist-challenged than are
those among Israeli Moslems, Druse, and some other non-Jewish minority
populations. It was rather curious that Hillary and the rest of the
Obama team did not denounce Israeli Moslems and Druse for also
practicing gender separation in public spaces in the name of
"modesty." Condemning non-Jews for gender segregation is just not
politically correct.
In a sense, Hillary was just following the lead of numerous
Bash-Israel leftist feminist organizations. Radical feminists and
their organizations have never been able to identify any mistreatment
of women in Arab countries beyond the supposed "suffering" of those
women due to Israeli "occupation." The feminists cannot conceive of a
better way to promote the interests of Moslem women than annihilation
of Israel and the accompanying genocide of Israel's Jewish population.
Feminist groups have rarely spoken out against Arab anti-Israel
terrorism, even though many of the victims of that terrorism are
themselves women. Even most of the feminist groups operating inside
Israel are radically pro-"Palestinian," pro-terror, anti-Israel, and
some are fronts for the Israeli communist party. They do not seem to
feel uncomfortable in the role of streetwalkers on behalf of
Islamofascism.
The treatment of women in Arab and Moslem countries is so atrocious
that space here would not allow for even a superficial survey. In the
very same week that Iran announced that a woman convicted of adultery
would be mercifully hanged to death instead of stoned to death, the
Obama team could find nothing more deserving of condemnation than the
treatment of women in the only country in the Middle East in which
women are treated as humans deserving of equal rights.
(See also http://frontpagemag.com/2011/12/30/israel-stands-up-to-gender-extremists/)
endorses the Calls for The Complete Shutting Down of the Department of
Politics at Ben Gurion University; Insists it is a bunch of
substandard pseudo-academics
By Steven Plaut
I must tell you that I am not generally a fan of Prof. Ze'ev Maoz. He
is a leftist and his written some obnoxious anti-Israel articles and
expressed some anti-Israel opinions (here is one:
http://www.haaretz.com/print-edition/opinion/morality-is-not-on-our-side-1.193739
I will cite some others below). He is currently on the faculty of
the University of California at Davis and teaches at the Herzliya
Interdisciplinary Center. He used to be a professor at Tel Aviv
University and at the University of Haifa.
But the fact that he is left of center makes what he has published
today even more important and newsworthy. Maoz has an Op-Ed in
Haaretz today endorsing the calls for the shutting down of the
Department of Politics at Ben Gurion University!
As you know, a recent international panel appointed by Israel's
Council on Higher Education denounced the Department of Politics at
Ben Gurion University for being a radical anti-Israel indoctrination
center and a Bash-Israel propaganda operation, with no serious
academic credentials and standards, an "unbalanced" (meaning
anti-Israel) group of pseudo-scholars. The panel proposed shutting
the department down altogether. Israel's radical anti-Israel tenured
Left and their foreign Bash-Israel amen chorus raced to defend the
department, while a rising chorus of pro-Israel voices have echoed the
call of the international panel.
Well, Prof. Maoz has chimed in on the controversy and he has issued
his own unambiguous call for closing the entire department of politics
at Ben Gurion University.
You can see Maoz' Op-Ed (in Hebrew) here:
http://www.haaretz.co.il/opinions/1.1602889 . Haaretz is not running
the piece in English (we wonder why) but I will sum it up for you
here.
His Op-Ed is entitled, "Yes, Shut it Down!"
He begins by proclaiming that he is a proud member of the Israeli
Left. He then goes on to tell how the tenured Left has been lobbying
him to oppose the recommendations of the panel, and asking him to
recruit international support behind the Department of Politics at BGU
in the name of "academic freedom."
He then reveals that he himself had been recruited nine years ago by
the Council on Higher Education to evaluate the very same department
at BGU. At the time he proposed shutting down the entire department
for essentially the same reasons as those in the new panel report. He
claims his reasons were entirely academic, not political, just as the
current panel's recommendations are academic.
Back then, Maoz found that there are no serious academic standards in
place in that department. Most of the faculty members have no serious
credentials in political science. He says that not only was the
Council on Higher Education not conducting a witch-hunt against the
Politics department at BGU, but it even refused to implement Maoz' own
recommendations, treated the department with permissive (his word) kid
gloves, allowed it to go on functioning and even to develop new
programs for students, and refused to apply the same rigorous
standards to the department of Neve Gordon and David Newman that it
was applying to all other departments across the board.
He concludes that the Department of Politics at BGU is an academic
disgrace and the petitions of support for it are motivated by the most
dubious of motives. Translation: those petitions consist of
anti-Israel extremists seeking to defend other anti-Israel
pseudo-academic extremists from criticism and accountability.
Here are some previous items I posted about Ze'ev Maoz, to convince
you that he is no raving Right-winger:
Ze'ev Maoz, Tel Aviv University
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/742257.html
"There's practically a holy consensus right now that the war in the North
is a just war and that morality is on our side. The bitter truth must be
said: this holy consensus is based on short-range selective memory, an
introverted worldview, and double standards.
This war is not a just war. Israel is using excessive force without
distinguishing between civilian population and enemy, whose sole purpose
is extortion. That is not to say that morality and justice are on
Hezbollah's side. Most certainly not. But the fact that Hezbollah "started
it" when it kidnapped soldiers from across an international border does
not even begin to tilt the scales of justice toward our side."
Some more pearls from the mouth of Ze'ev Maoz: In October, 1996 he said:
"chance of army coup now possible." And in August 1996: "If the political
deadlock continues for a long time, and Syria reaches the conclusion that
there is no solution in the political option, it may reconsider the
military option as a viable one," he [Ze'ev Maoz] wrote.
In March 2002 he was interviewed saying: "Any initiative that comes from
the Arab world makes me considerably more optimistic," says Ze'ev Maoz, an
Israeli political scientist, "because it has the potential ... to lower
the psychological barriers that many Israelis have in terms of making
concessions for peace." At the same article it said: "Tel Aviv University
professor Maoz says Israeli supporters of a negotiated solution are
"regrouping because they are starting to realize that a policy of applying
force just for the sake of applying force, without any sort of political
vision, doesn't lead anywhere."
Further reading on Ze'ev Maoz:
http://www.jewishsf.com/content/2-0-/module/displaystory/story_id/4768/edition_id/87/format/html/displaystory.html
c
http://www.jewishsf.com/content/2-0-/module/displaystory/story_id/4316/edition_id/78/format/html/displaystory.html
http://www.csmonitor.com/2002/0308/p06s01-wome.html
http://www.freeman.org/m_online/sep96/basch.htm (half way down the page)
are all in FAVOR of it!
Hundreds of Israeli academics are issuing calls and signing
petitions demanding that a book containing unfashionable comments
about homosexuality be censored and barred from any use in academic
institutions. Not a single one of these tenured sheep ever condemned
the "book" by Tel Aviv University's Shlomo Sand that claimed that
there is no such thing as a Jewish people and that today's Jews are
merely descendents from converted Khazars and Berbers, having no
rights at all to self-determination and statehood. Not a single
participant in the campaign for censorship this week ever offered the
opinion that Sand's book should be removed from library shelves and
course syllabi. And not a single crusader for censorship this week
thinks that minority dissenting opinions about homosexuality have the
right to be aired in classrooms and textbooks.
The ruckus this week over homosexuality involves a standard
Hebrew textbook in psychiatry entitled, "Prakim nivharim
b'psichiatria" ("Select Chapters in Psychiatry") the most recent
edition of was published in 2010. It expresses some unfashionable and
"politically incorrect" opinions about homosexuality. It describes
homosexuality as a disorder, insisting it is curable, and endorses
"conversion therapy," which is vehemently opposed by homosexual
militant organizations. The chapter that today's censors are upset
over was written by Prof. Shmuel Tiano, former director of the Geha
Psychiatric Hospital in Petah Tikva.
You can see the Haaretz report on the ruckus in English here:
http://www.haaretz.com/print-edition/news/israeli-textbook-slammed-for-calling-homosexuality-a-disorder-1.403572
A number of homosexual activist academics started a campaign
against the book, and the chat lists of Israeli faculty are filled
with calls for suppression of the book and censorship of "incorrect"
ideas about homosexuality. The book contains "incorrect
information," insist the censors. Suppose that it does. But so does
the book by Shlomo Sand. Since when does the fact that a book
contains incorrect information entitle the leftist thought police to
suppress and censor it?
The tenured censors insist that students be prevented from hearing
the opinion that homosexuality is a disorder, and a treatable one at
that. Their vehement insistence that homosexuality is NOT a disorder
might be more easily marketable if these were not the very same people
also insisting that "transgendered" people (transvestites and those
who undergo genital mutilation) are ALSO "normal" people suffering
from no disorders at all. Without getting into a whole debate here
about homosexuality in general, let me just say that it is my opinion
that by adding that "T" to the "LGB" to construct "LGBT," the
politicized homosexual militant movement (which is almost always
anti-Semitic and pro-terror, by the way) has also shot itself in its
own foot and undercut any chances it ever had of persuading the
general public of its case for legitimizing homosexuality.
And by leading the jihad for censorship, Israel's own militant
homosexuals, led by its tenured pinks, is showing its own fundamental
hostility to freedom of speech, academic freedom, and democracy.
(reprint)
December 15, 2006
Hannuka Among the Hellenists
By Steven Plaut
Of all the Jewish holidays, the one that I think best captures the
contemporary Jewish zeitgeist, the one that is the most relevant to
the current (and, if certain trends are not reversed, the last?)
chapter in Jewish history, is Hannuka.
Hannuka is, of course, the story of Jewish national liberation. It is
the story of the military victory of the few against the many, of the
champions of Judaism against the pagan barbarians.
But it is more than this. It is the saga of the heroic struggle of
Jewish survivalists (those one would today label "Zionists") against
the assimilationists and self-hating Hellenists of the second century
BCE.
Hannuka is less a story about the battle against the Greeks than it is
about the battle against the predominant assimilationist paradigm at
the time among the Jews. It is about the battle against the
anti-survivalists, those who hated themselves for being Jews, those
who seek to be "progressive", "modern", and "in", through rejecting,
abasing, disgracing and degrading themselves and their people. The
Hellenists who fought the Hasmoneans were struggling against Jewish
survival. Sound familiar?
In the United States, the main movement of Hellenistic assimilationism
has been the school of "Political Liberalism as Judaism", the
pseudo-religion that holds that all of Judaism can be reduced to the
pursuit of this week's liberal political fads. But the global avante
garde of Jewish self-hatred these days is the Israeli Left.
The Israeli Left is the main manifestation today of Jewish anti-Semitism.
It not only promotes "plans" and policies designed to end Israel's
existence, increasingly endorsing the one-state, bi-national Rwanda
solution to the "problem" of Israeli national existence, but it also
regularly attacks every symbol and concept of traditional Judaism.
You think I am exaggerating? Well just consider the Op-Ed a few years
back in the Israeli anti-Zionist daily Haaretz, penned by one Yehiam
Shorek, a "historian" who teaches at the Beit Berl College in Israel.
Beit Berl is a college run by the kibbutz movement.
The "historian" Shorek devoted his Haaretz column to proving that the
Maccabees were fascist and racist hooligans, bloodthirsty zealots, and
downright Likudniks. His column was entitled "Bloodthirsty Zealots".
His thesis was that Jews should stop celebrating Hannuka and the
exploits of the Maccabees, and should instead feel sympathy for the
poor occupied and mistreated Greeks and Hellenists.
His article was not a spoof.
The evil Maccabees were plotting to perpetrate population "transfer",
wrote Shorek, that most evil of all crimes in the "minds" of Israel's
fundamentalist Leftists. Population "transfer" is far worse than, say,
mass murdering 2000 Jews after signing with them a series of peace
accords, or turning the West Bank and Gaza over to barbarian fascists
to allow them to carry out such mass murders. Shorek is a member of
that same Fundamentalist Left that will not rest until all Jews have
been expelled from the West Bank and Gaza in an act of ethnic
cleansing, and until no Israeli armed forces are left behind to
interfere with the terrorist activities of the "Palestinians."
Matityahu, the father of Judah Maccabee and his brothers, was a
lunatic, wrote Shorek. He was a warmonger who dragged his country into
an unnecessary "war of choice", one that was not a legitimate "war of
self-defense". (Never mind that there is nothing at all in Judaism
that says Jews should refrain from conquering their lands unless it is
part of a war of self-defense.) The Maccabees were the aggressors,
insisted Shorek. And they suppressed the free speech of those who
supported the Greeks; how undemocratic of them!
Judah Maccabee was guilty of causing many families to lose their loved
ones by leading people to war, wrote Shorek, instead of pursuing some
sort of Hellenistic Oslo appeasement and capitulation, the sort the
"enlightened Left" seeks today to impose upon Israel. All Judah
Maccabee really wanted to do was to Occupy, Occupy, Occupy, insists
Shorek. No better than the West Bank settlers today! And not only
that, but Judah and his hooligans were Orthodox Jews, which every
leftist knows must make them primitive and barbaric; you know, unlike
the enlightened Marxist historians who live on nice kibbutzim or teach
at the Beit Berl college.
Unfortunately, Shorek is hardly a lone phenomenon. Israel's
anti-Jewish leftists have been launching similar jihads against every
other symbol of Jewish valor. Masada was a cesspool of non-tolerant
fanatics, according to them. The Bible is a backward document full of
fabrications. Schools should stop teaching it altogether, they demand,
and instead teach something really useful, like the works of
Palestinian "poets". Archeology proves the Bible is nothing but lies
and fantasy, they insist. One wag labeled such people Pentateuch
Deniers (intended as a play on "Holocaust Deniers").
In Israel, the country's politics - particularly its
cultural/educational elite and its chattering classes - are now
largely dominated by those motivated by the desire for their country
to commit national suicide. They scorn themselves, their own country
and their own people, the same way that the Hellenized Jews did at the
time of the Maccabees. Many endorse boycotts of Israel by anti-Semites
abroad. Like the Hellenized Jews, they are convinced that
traditionalist Jews are reactionary and primitive, and that the
greatest national priority should be renunciation of Jewish
peculiarity and the striving to assimilate amongst the cosmopolitan
progressive "Greeks" of the world. They are ashamed of their
Jewishness and convinced that the only path to peace is to renounce
it. They insist that a Seleucid "narrative" should replace the Jews'
own reactionary national one.
Israel's universities are by and large the Occupied Territories of
these Hellenists. The Israeli media is to almost the same extent.
Hellenists dominate much of the Israeli military and, somewhat
incredibly, the intelligence services. (It is doubtful the country
could have undergone the Oslo debacle had these intelligence services
not operated as lap dogs for the Beilinized Israeli Left.)
Hellenists have attempted to rewrite the Israeli school curriculum, to
teach Israeli Jewish children to despise themselves. Their message is
that Jews must feel ashamed, because they are mean, selfish, evil and
immoral people. Surely, there would be no anti-Semitism on the planet
were not the Jews such racist and insensitive people.
Their aim is to convince the Jews that the only way they may become
accepted in the world is to adapt to paganism, to stop seeking to
exist as a separate national entity, to commit national suicide.
Moreover, their campaign is aimed at challenging the moral existence
of the Jews. They realize this is the weakest chink in the armor of
the Jews. If Jews can be convinced that they are morally in the wrong,
then no Maccabees will emerge. The aim of the Jewish Hellenists is the
delegitimization of the Jews as a nation, discrediting the moral
position of Jewish survivalism.
The message of the contemporary Hellenists is unambiguous: Those who
wish to purify the Temple, who seek pure oil for the Temple lamp, who
wish to evict the barbarians from Jerusalem, are the enemies of peace.
The Maccabees must be arrested for incitement. The Jews must provide
Antiochus with concessions and arms and funds and a Road Map. Under no
circumstances should the Jews seek to defend themselves militarily
against the Seleucids, for there is no military solution to the
problem of Seleucid aggression. If the barbarians murder the Jews, it
is because the Jews are evil, selfish people and because they have
been too reluctant to abandon their primitive survivalism.
If the Israeli anti-Jewish Left has its way, the Post-Hasmonean,
post-survivalist era will be upon us.
2. Ben Gurion University's leading "thinker" - comments on the true Maccabees:
http://isracampus.org.il/third%20level%20pages/BGU%20-%20Lev%20Grinberg%20-%20real%20Maccabis.htm
Pseudo-Academic anti-Israel Dean of Social Sciences and Humanities,
David Newman
Karsh in Hudson NY: "Betraying Ben-Gurion"
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Betraying Ben-Gurion
by Efraim Karsh
Hudson New York
December 22, 2011
It is ironic that Ben-Gurion University of the Negev (BGU), Israel's
only university bearing the name of the Jewish state's founding
father, and established in the ancient desert he dreamt of reviving,
has become a hotbed of anti-Israel propaganda at the expense of proper
scholarly endeavor.
So much so that an international committee of scholars, appointed by
Israel's Council for Higher Education to evaluate political science
and international relations programs in Israeli universities, recently
recommended that BGU "consider closing the Department of Politics and
Government" unless it abandoned its "strong emphasis on political
activism," improved its research performance, and redressed the
endemic weakness "in its core discipline of political science." In
other words, they asked that the Department return to accurate
scholarship rather than indoctrinate the students with libel.
The same day the committee's recommendation was revealed, Professor
David Newman -- who founded that department and bequeathed it such a
problematic ethos, for which "achievement" he was presumably rewarded
with a promotion to Deanship of the Faculty of Humanities and Social
Sciences, from where he can shape other departments in a similar way
-- penned an op-ed in the Jerusalem Post in which he compared Israel's
present political culture to that of Nazi Germany. "I will no doubt be
strongly criticized for compared making such a comparison," he wrote,
but we would do well to paraphrase the famous words of Pastor
Niemoller, writing in 1946 about Germany of the 1930s and 1940s: "When
the government denied the sovereign rights of the Palestinians, I
remained silent; I was not a Palestinian.
When they discriminated against the Arab citizens of the country, I
remained silent; I was not an Arab. When they expelled the hapless
refugees, I remained at home; I was no longer a refugee. When they
came for the human rights activists, I did not speak out; I was not an
activist. When they came for me, there was no one left to speak out."
Even if every single charge in this paraphrase were true, Israel would
still be light years apart from Nazi Germany. But one need not be a
politics professor or faculty dean to see the delusion in these
assertions.
To begin with, which Israeli government has denied "the sovereign
rights of the Palestinians"? That of David Ben-Gurion which accepted
the 1947 partition resolution with alacrity? Or those headed by Shimon
Peres, Ehud Barak, Ariel Sharon, Ehud Olmert, and Benjamin Netanyahu,
which explicitly endorsed the two-state solution? Has Newman perhaps
mistaken Israel's founding father for Hajj Amin Husseini, leader of
the Palestinian Arabs from the early 1920s to the 1940s, who
tirelessly toiled to ethnically cleanse Palestine's Jewish community
and destroy the nascent state of Israel? Or possibly for Husseini's
successors, from Yasser Arafat, to Ahmad Yassin, to Mahmoud Abbas,
whose commitment to Israel's destruction has been equally unwavering?
There is no moral equivalence whatever between the Nazi persecution,
exclusion, segregation, and eventually industrial slaughter of
European Jewry, and Israel's treatment of its Arab population. Not
only do the Arabs in Israel enjoy full equality before the law, but
from the designation of Arabic as an official language, to the
recognition of non-Jewish religious holidays as legal resting days for
their respective communities, Arabs in Israel have enjoyed more
prerogatives than ethnic minorities anywhere in the democratic world.
To put it more bluntly, while six million Jews, three quarters of
European Jewry, died at the hands of the Nazis in the six years that
Hitler dominated Europe, Israel's Arab population has not only leapt
tenfold during the Jewish state's 63 years of existence - from 156,000
in 1948 to 1.57 million in 2010 - but its rate of social and economic
progress has often surpassed that of the Jewish sector, with the
result that the gap between the two communities has steadily narrowed.
It is precisely this exemplary, if by no means flawless, treatment of
its Arab citizens that underlies their clear preference of Israeli
citizenship to that of one in a prospective Palestinian state (a
sentiment shared by most East Jerusalem Palestinians). This preference
has also recently driven tens of thousands of African Muslims
illegally to breach the Jewish state's border in search of employment,
rather than to stay in Egypt, whose territory they have to cross on
the way. The treatment of mass illegal immigration (hardly the hapless
refugees presented by Newman) is a major problem confronting most
democracies in the West these days, where there is an ongoing debate
about what are the basic responsibilities of governments for their
citizens' wellbeing and the right of nations to determine the identity
of those entering their territory.
Even more mind-boggling is Newman's equating Israel's attempt to
prevent foreign funding of Israeli nongovernmental organizations
(NGOs) involved in the international Israel de-legitimization campaign
-- along the lines of the US Foreign Agents Legislation Act -- with
repressing political opponents by the Nazi regime. What "human rights
activists" have been unlawfully detained by the Israeli government,
let alone rounded up and thrown into concentration camps? On what
planet does the Ben-Gurion University faculty dean live?
But Newman is not someone to be bothered by the facts. His is the
standard "colonialist paradigm" prevalent among Israeli and Western
academics, which views Zionism, and by extension the state of Israel,
not as a legitimate expression of national self-determination but as
"a colonizing and expansionist ideology and movement" (in the words of
another BGU professor) - an offshoot of European imperialism at its
most rapacious.
And therein, no doubt, lies the problem with BGU's Politics and
Government Department: the only Israeli department singled out by the
international committee for the unprecedented recommendation of
closure. For if its founder and long-time member, who continues to
wield decisive influence over its direction, views Israel as a
present-day reincarnation of Nazi Germany in several key respects, how
conceivably can the department ensure the "sustained commitment to
providing balance and an essential range of viewpoints and
perspectives on the great issues of politics" required for its
continued existence?
Efraim Karsh is research professor of Middle East and Mediterranean
Studies at King's College London, director of the Middle East Forum
(Philadelphia) and author, most recently, of Palestine Betrayed.
http://www.meforum.org/3136/ben-gurion-university
Related Topics: Academia, Israel & Zionism | Efraim Karsh This text
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The Middle East Forum
1. Abu Dawud was the guerilla pseudonym of Muhammed Dahud Udeh, the
uber-terrorhoid who planned and organized the 1972 massacre of Israeli
athletes at the Munich Olympics. He died last year, much too late and
much too easily. His widow is still alive and waddling. She was
allowed by Israel this past week, a bit foolishly, to enter the
country from Syria in order to attend a funeral. She fainted after
the funeral and was hospitalized in Ramallah by the "Palestinians."
Before her medical team had a chance to kill her with their
incompetence, she asked to be treated in Tel Aviv at the city's
fanciest private hospital, Assuta. Israel agreed and she was. You
and I are shouldering her costs.
2. This week three Jewish teenagers were arrested on suspicion of
having attacked Arab teenagers and yelling at them "Arabs, get out."
The police wanted them remanded and charged with racism, even though
the mother of one of the Arabs who claims he was attacked insists that
the background to the quarrel was not ethnic but just teenage
hooliganism. When they were brought before the judge, he assigned to
the Jewish teenagers the public defenders who were on duty that day.
They were Arab lawyers. They defended the Jewish teenagers and in
fact got them released. When asked how they felt about having
successfully released Jewish teenagers accused of attacking Arab
teenagers, the public defenders said Just Fine. (Story in Yediot
Ahronot today.) So as you can see, Israeli apartheid is all alive and
kicking.
3. You may recall that hundreds of Israel's tenured leftists signed
petitions and organized caravans of solidarity to a small Galilee
mosque that was vandalized a few months back, apparently by Jewish
vandals. Well, today's headline is
http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/150924
Police Silent on Synagogue Fire in Ramle
A member of Ramle's Jewish community say police are trying to hide the
rise of attacks on Jews in the city after a synagogue is "Torched"
Quick, guess how many of those same tenured leftists who signed the
earlier petition or who made pilgrimages to the village in the Galilee
with the vandalized mosque have signed petitions or spoken out about
this new incident!
While you are computing your answer, here is a followup question:
Baaa Baaa Tenured Sheep, have you any wool?
Yassir, Yassir, two bags full.
One for the mosque, sir, and one for the church,
But none for the little shul that burned down the lane.
By Steven Plaut
In Israel there are two schools of thought as to what a university
should be. The first school of thought, a shrinking minority opinion
on Israeli campuses, holds that universities should be centers of
scholastic inquiry, research, scientific exploration and analysis, and
teaching. The second school of thought, which is the growing
majority position, holds that universities should be indoctrination
centers in which radical leftist anti-Israel and sometimes Marxist
ideology is drummed into students by tenured thought police. Under
the second school of thought, faculty leftists bully students into
toeing the ideological line and agreeing with the ideological
positions of the lecturers, a bit like re-education camps in North
Korea. Student grades often depend upon their endorsing and agreeing
with the leftist anti-Israel positions of faculty members. Faculty
members are hired and promoted in many departments based on their
leftist ideological purity. Bashing Israel has become both a
necessary and a sufficient condition for being hired in many
university departments in Israel.
The comparative prevalence of the two schools of thought varies by
disciplines. Natural sciences and engineering usually are dominated
by the first school. Social sciences, humanities, education and law
schools are dominated by the second. The political biases are well
documented at the web site of Isracampus (www.isracampus.org.il ).
The first school of thought is very strong at all four of Israel's
liberal-arts universities (Tel Aviv University, Ben Gurion University,
Hebrew University, University of Haifa), and is weaker at the
science-engineering institutions (Technion and Weizmann) and at the
nominally religious Bar-Ilan University.
In many ways Ben Gurion University is the very worst offender. The
most infamous of the "academic" units in Israel in which the second
school of thought dominates is the department of political science at
Ben Gurion University. There no Zionist or non-leftist is permitted
to teach. The one single dissenting pro-Israel faculty member who
once taught there was fired by the university for incorrect thinking.
The department was largely erected by one David Newman, currently Dean
of social sciences and humanities at Ben Gurion University, a
geographer (and Jerusalem Post columnist) who believes that academic
freedom means critics of the Left should be silenced and suppressed.
In the politics department he built, far-leftist anti-Israel faculty
members get evaluated for hiring and promotion by appointing
evaluation committees consisting of other far-leftist anti-Israel
extremists who then solicit evaluation letters from still other
far-leftist anti-Israel radical academics from around the world. The
results of these politicized and corrupt "evaluation procedures" of
faculty members is visible to all.
The conversion of the department of politics at Ben Gurion University
into an anti-Israel indoctrination camp has by now become well known
around the world and to everyone in Israel. Last year Israel's
Council on Higher Education, which oversees and funds Israel's
universities (and is composed of representatives of those same
universities) appointed a special commission to investigate and
evaluate the Department of Politics at Ben Gurion University. That
commission found what everyone already knew, that the department is a
radical monolithic politicized incitement camp, not a serious academic
department, one in which anti-Israel activism had replaced serious
scholarship, and in which serious academic standards have been
trashed. The commission proposed that the entire department be shut
down unless radical reform and restructuring takes place, including
complete de-politicization of and introduction of real pluralism into
the department.
Since that CHE report was issued, Israel's radical Left, led by its
tenured Left, has been leading a campaign to defend the anti-Israel
indoctrination camp calling itself the Department of Politics at Ben
Gurion University. They have been joined by the President of Ben
Gurion University, Rivka Carmi, who sees nothing wrong with a
university department engaged in anti-Israel agitation in which no
pro-Israel person may teach. And they are also being championed by
Haaretz, the radical anti-Israel leftist "newspaper," better thought
of as a Palestinian newspaper published in Hebrew. These people
insist that preserving the second school of thought in Israeli
academia is the country's highest priority. Universities must
continue to serve to indoctrinate students into correct leftist
anti-Israel ideology. All attempts at interfering with this sacred
mission must be resisted and defeated.
Now the tenured Left in Israel is organizing petitions of like-minded
radical tenured leftists in Israel and around the world to express
their support and solidarity with the Ben Gurion University
indoctrination camp. Here is the report in Haaretz about this:
http://www.haaretz.com/print-edition/news/academics-seek-to-keep-biased-ben-gurion-department-open-1.402450
. An actual examination of those signing the petitions shows that
they are themselves radical Marxist and anti-Israel pseudo-academics.
So naturally they identify with the sacred need to preserve and defend
leftist pseudo-academic indoctrination at Ben Gurion University.
While one could go through the lists of signers of the petition name
by name to document their own anti-Israel far-leftist biases, it is
sufficient to illustrate the point with one of the leading signers,
Berkeley's Judith Butler. She is a notorious collaborator with
anti-Semites and supporter of Israel annihilation. An analysis of the
academic credentials and political bias of Butler appears here:
http://frontpagemag.com/2010/03/09/collaborators-in-the-war-against-the-jews-judith-butler/
The full piece is reprinted here:
Collaborators in the War against the Jews: Judith Butler
Posted By Steven Plaut On March 9, 2010
Professor Judith Butler from Berkeley's Department of Rhetoric and
Comparative Literature is not just your ordinary deconstructionist
feminist anti-Semite. A self-proclaimed leading scholar in the
pseudo-discipline of "Queer Studies," she is also one of the leading
academic defenders of anti-Semitism, which she insists is not
anti-Semitic at all. She has devoted much of her academic career to
the struggle to see Israel eliminated. While often posturing as a
free speech absolutist, she is also absolutely opposed to Israelis
having any academic freedom and is a leader in the attempt to impose a
world boycott against Israeli universities. Naturally, she has never
come out in favor of an academic boycott of Syria, Libya, Iran, Cuba,
or the Hamas. Hamas and Hezbollah may seek the extermination of every
Jew on the planet and not just of Israel, but Butler still likes to
wave her "Jewish roots" when she serves as an apologist for them.
Butler is perhaps best remembered as one of the most strident
attackers against Lawrence Summers, the ex-President of Harvard. She
was horrified when Summers proclaimed: "Profoundly anti-Israel views
are increasingly finding support in progressive intellectual
communities. Serious and thoughtful people are advocating and taking
actions that are anti-Semitic in their effect if not their intent
(September 17, 2002)." Butler venomously denounced Summers for
telling the truth, arguing that telling the truth threatens academic
freedom: "Summers has struck a blow against academic freedom, in
effect, if not in intent."
Edward Alexander, who is also a professor of comparative literature,
explains that Butler's hysterical attacks on Summers stemmed from
something more than her girlish enthusiasm:
"Butler had herself signed the divestment (against Israel) petition at
its place of origin, Berkeley, where it had circulated in February
2001. She therefore found Summers' remarks not only wrong but
personally 'hurtful' since they implicated Judith Butler herself in
the newly resurgent campus anti-Semitism. Butler could hardly have
failed to notice that the Berkeley divestment petition had supplied
the impetus and inspiration for anti-Israel mob violence on her own
campus on 24 April 2001, a few weeks after it had been circulated, and
for more explicitly anti-Jewish mobs at San Francisco State University
in May of the following year."
Summers insists that people who oppose Israel's very existence are
anti-Semitic. The fact that a second Jewish Holocaust would result
from Israel's annihilation does not seem to matter to his attackers
like Butler. She writes, "A challenge to the right of Israel to exist
can be construed as a challenge to the existence of the Jewish people
only if one believes that Israel alone keeps the Jewish people alive
or that all Jews invest their sense of perpetuity in the state of
Israel in its current or traditional forms." The fact that the very
people calling for Israel to be annihilated are not calling for the
elimination of any other country, not even a single one of the 22
fascist Arab states, cannot possibly have anything to do with
anti-Semitism, she insists.
Butler's proof that anti-Israel radicals are not really anti-Semites?
It is that she manages to find some anti-Israel extremists among
Israelis, the Israeli equivalents to Taliban John, Lord Haw-Haw, and
Noam Chomsky. She writes, "Identifying Israel with Jewry obscures the
existence of the small but important post-Zionist movement in Israel,
including the philosophers Adi Ophir and Anat Biletzki, the
sociologist Uri Ram, the professor of theatre Avraham Oz and the poet
Yitzhak Laor. Are we to say that Israelis who are critical of Israeli
policy are self-hating Jews, or insensitive to the ways in which
criticism may fan the flames of anti-Semitism?" The proper answer to
her question is often: yes.
Butler recently showed up in the Middle East, to strut her support for
the intifada. As a militant feminist, however, she was on a bizarre
mission. In February, 2010, she spent her time in the West Bank
shilling for the very same Palestinian Islamic terrorist groups who
make a point out of torturing and murdering homosexuals and who insist
that the place of women in Muslim society is somewhere out back and
out of sight, barefoot and scarved. Like so many apologists for
Islamofascism, the only "oppression" of Palestinian women Butler could
find was their supposed mistreatment by the Zionist "occupiers." You
know, the same ones who have a woman Chief Justice in their Supreme
Court, who have more women doctors than men, and who have elected a
woman as Prime Minister. Butler denounced Israel at length for its
"mistreatment" of Arab women, and never mind that they are treated at
least a thousand times better by Israel than they are inside any Arab
regime. Meanwhile, Islamic religious figures in Egypt have been
proclaiming that Muslims have the natural right to rape all Jewish
women. Butler has yet to issue a response to that.
To remove all doubt, Butler made it clear that she objects to Israel's
presence not only in the West Bank, where she was doing her Terrorism
Grand Tour. She also wants Israel removed from within Israel's
pre-1967 borders. Butler has long supported a worldwide boycott of
Israel, and not simply because Israel "occupies" the West Bank. She
has made it clear that she demands that Israel allow millions of Arabs
claiming to be Palestinian "refugees" to flood into Israel and convert
it into yet another Palestinian Arab state. She wants this even after
the creation of some Palestinian state.
While in the West Bank, Butler went to visit a "theater" in the
terrorist stronghold of Jenin. Theatrics is largely what Jenin is all
about. During Israel's battle against terrorists there in April of
2002, the Bash-Israel Left invented fictional tales about Israel
carrying out a "massacre," some even calling it a "genocide." As it
turned out, after days of Jenin street-to-street gun battles, launched
by the Palestinians intentionally in built-up urban areas, 23 Israeli
soldiers were killed along with a few dozen terrorists. Less than 20
Palestinian civilians died in the intense urban firefight, largely
because Israel foreswore reducing the town to rubble using artillery
to spare civilian collateral damage. It sacrificed the lives of its
own soldiers for that reason. And this was called "genocide." A
propaganda film about the battle called "Jenin, Jenin" was later
produced by Israeli Arab pro-terror director Mohammed Bakri, who
himself publicly admitted that his film was a tissue of lies. Bakri
is now being sued by some Israeli soldiers for libel.
Butler explained to her terrorist hosts that she opposes the existence
of a Jewish state even alongside some future Palestinian Arab state.
Instead, she favors what she calls a bi-national state, something
along the lines of Rwanda. She claims to be some sort of authority
on Hannah Arendt and promotes her anti-Israel "bi-nationalism" by
obsessively citing Arendt's ancient writings on bi-nationalism (at
Berkeley Butler is officially the "Hannah Arendt Professor"). Of
course, no one knows just what Arendt would have to say about the
Arab-Israeli conflict in the twenty-first century. But one suspects
that anyone like Arendt who spent so much time studying the
totalitarian mindset would retch at the willingness of people like
Butler to vouch and shill for Palestinian violence.
Butler writes: "And if we have a bi-national state, it's expressing
two nations. Only when bi-nationalism deconstructs the idea of a
nation can we hope to think about what a state, what a polity might
look like that would actually extend equality." Come to think of it,
the genocidal consequences of bi-nationalism in Rwanda are pretty
close to what Butler seems to have in mind for the Israeli Jews. Among
the terrorists who hosted her in Jenin was Zakaria Zabeidi, a head of
the genocidal "Al Aqsa" Brigades. Assaf Wohl, a columnist in Israel's
leading daily Yediot Ahronot, dismissed Butler as a Jewish
anti-Semite.
According to Professor Edward Alexander,
"Prior to the autumn of 2003, this University of California professor
of rhetoric and comparative literature was, like many members of
Berkeley's 'progressive' Jewish community with which she habitually
identifies herself, somebody who defined her 'Jewishness' (not exactly
Judaism) in opposition to the State of Israel. She was mainly a signer
of petitions harshly critical of the Jewish state, full of mean spite
towards its alleged 'apartheid' and 'bantustan' practices, oily
sycophancy towards such Palestinian figures as Sari Nusseibeh, and a
habit of covering over the brutality of Arab terror with the soft snow
of Latinized euphemisms. She was one of the 3700 American Jews opposed
to 'occupation' (Israeli, not Syrian or Chinese or any other) who
signed an 'Open Letter' urging the American government to cut
financial aid to Israel; later she expressed misgiving about signing
that particular petition–it 'was not nearly strong enough…it did not
call for the end of Zionism.'"
Butler, whose PhD is actually in philosophy, is a walking illustration
of the very worst things wrong with the humanities. She is a leading
American proponent of "Queer Theory" (which is what she calls it.)
You will never discover in "Queer Theory" any scientific hypotheses
about what produces homosexuality. Instead, it serves as the umbrella
term for politicized militant homosexuals seeking the annihilation of
America, Israel, and capitalism. Whether such people seriously think
that homosexuals are treated better in non-capitalist regimes and in
the Islamic sections of the Third World is doubtful.
Butler's favorite prefix is "post." She uses it more often than the
Cliff-the-Mailman character on "Cheers." She proudly describes
herself a "Post-Zionist," by which she means she is anti-Zionist.
Butler likes to describe herself as a "poststructuralist," and
sometimes also as a "Post-Marxist," which – as far as we can tell –
seems to mean a Marxist. (The Marxist New Left Review is one of
Butler's favorite venues.) She claims to reject "dialectics" as her
political theology because it is too "phallogocentric," and that has
upset some of the members of the academic Comintern.
Like so many members of the tenured Left – her favorite methodology of
analysis is the silly polysyllable. Her writings ooze
"Deconstructionist" jive and are exercises in the worst forms of
pseudo-academic NewSpeak. And that is when she is sticking to her
actual "discipline," not pontificating about the Middle East, about
which she has no expertise or training at all. "Deconstruction" is
the nonsensical infantile "philosophy" that argues that words have no
meaning, there are no facts nor truth, and the only thing we can
really be absolutely certain about are that the US and capitalism and
Israel are evil and must be eliminated. Language is the ultimate form
of tyranny and source of control over us oppressed folks by those evil
elites. There are no false narratives, just different subjectivities.
Deconstructionism has become something of a pseudo-intellectual
orthodoxy among certain of our academic colleagues, especially those
in the academic professions that never quite found out where's the
beef.
Butler's "theories" about feminism include her argument that sexual
relations are "performative," and are based on "regulatory discourse."
The "system" attempts to impose "constructions of binary asymmetric
gender." She has even devoted time to celebrating drag queens:
"There is no original or primary gender a drag imitates, but gender is
a kind of imitation for which there is no original." A fuller
collection of some of her bizarre pronouncements can be read here.
She insists, "Masculine and feminine roles are not biologically fixed
but socially constructed," which seems to prove that she never took
any biology courses back at Yale.
A typical Butler bloviation is this:
"Performativity cannot be understood outside of a process of
iterability, a regularized and constrained repetition of norms. And
this repetition is not performed by a subject; this repetition is what
enables a subject and constitutes the temporal condition for the
subject. This iterability implies that 'performance' is not a singular
'act' or event, but a ritualized production, a ritual reiterated under
and through constraint, under and through the force of prohibition and
taboo, with the threat of ostracism and even death controlling and
compelling the shape of the production, but not, I will insist,
determining it fully in advance." (From Butler, Judith 1993; Bodies
That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of "Sex". New York: Routledge.
pp. 95. )
It is almost impossible to read a sentence by Butler without reacting
with a loud "Huh?" So much of it sounds like a parody of an academic
being concocted by "The Onion" or "National Lampoon." In 1998 she won
first-prize in the Bad Writing Contest sponsored by the academic
journal Philosophy and Literature. She won for this sentence:
"The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood
to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view
of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition,
convergence, and rearticulation brought the question of temporality
into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from a form of
Althusserian theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical
objects to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility
of structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up
with the contingent sites and strategies of the rearticulation of
power."
So much of what Butler writes is so mindless and filled with so many
grammatical flaws that one wonders how her text survives a word
processing program. Butler's take on the 9-11 attacks on America was
that "the violent acts of 9/11 is (sic) exacerbated by the inability
of Americans to recognize the precariousness of non-American
(particularly Muslim) lives. They are always already dead, and
therefore cannot be killed." Huh? She insists that the West is guilty
of this: "These excluded are brutally subjected to the "violence of
derealization." Huh? She "claims that the War on Terror has provided
a climate where the sexual freedoms she and others fought for are now
misused to symbolize (sic) the shining, gleaming modernity of the
West. The backwardness and inferiority of 'others' is counterposed
(sic) and underscored against this." Huh?
In an interview she explains how her feminism differs from that of
some of the others, like Catharine MacKinnon or Andrea Dworkin: "I'm
not always calling into question who's a man and who's not, and am I a
man? Maybe I'm a man [laughs]." She is not one of those folks in favor
of homosexual marriage, by the way. In fact she is opposed to
marriage: "It's very hard to speak freely right now, but many gay
people are uncomfortable with all this, because they feel their sense
of an alternative movement is dying. Sexual politics was supposed to
be about finding alternatives to marriage."
Butler was one of the noisiest people denouncing the Campus-Watch
website for daring to criticize anti-Israel radical Middle East
Studies faculty members. Naturally, Butler thinks that critics of
anti-Israel radicals are not entitled to freedom of speech and that
their criticism is "McCarthyism."
While she likes to beat on her drum about supposedly growing up in a
Jewish home, there is no evidence that she knows the slightest thing
about Judaism. She claims her "Jewish values" are what drive her to
embrace Palestinian anti-Semites and barbarians. Here she sums up
her own knowledge of Judaism: "As a Jew, I was taught that it was
ethically imperative to speak up and to speak out against arbitrary
state violence." There is no such Jewish ethical imperative. She
clarifies: "There were those who would and could speak out against
state racism and state violence, and it was imperative that we be able
to speak out. Not just for Jews, but for any number of people."
Needless to say, the only "state violence" she feels obliged to
denounce is that supposedly practiced by Israel when it defends its
civilians. She is not exactly outspoken when it comes to the state
violence practiced by Iran or Syria.
As part of Butler's campaign on behalf of Palestinian terrorism, she
likes to wave about the fact that she herself grew up as a "Reform"
Jew. There are very few things wrong with the world that she does not
attribute to the unforgivable desire by Jews for self-determination.
Her attitude towards the Jewish homeland was summed up by her thus:
"The argument that all Jews have a heartfelt investment in the state
of Israel is untrue. Some have a heartfelt investment in corned beef
sandwiches."
When it comes to academic streetwalking on behalf of anti-Semitism and
Palestinian violence, that old adage is true: the Butler did it.
Isracampus Invites you to send Condolences
As you no doubt have heard, Kim Jong II, the goosestepping Stalinist
brat who had been running the North Korean gulag in recent years, just
croaked. Isracampus would like to invite you to send an e-note of
condolence to Noam Chomsky; his email address is chomsky@MIT.edu
Then, please send similar letters of condolence to Israel's own
leading hardcore communists and Stalinists. These include TAU
"historian" Shlomo Sand: shlomosa@post.tau.ac.il; his sidekicks Gadi
Algazi at gadi.algazi@gmail.com and Yoav Peled at pol1@post.tau.ac.il;
Oded Lowenheim, who teaches international relations at the Hebrew
University, at oded.lowenheim@huji.ac.il; Jacob Katriel, retired
Technion Stalinist, at jkatriel@techunix.technion.ac.il; Eyal Nir from
Ben Gurion University, an active communist party member, at
eyalnir@bgu.ac.il; Ofer Cassif, central committee member, at
ofercass@mta.ac.il; and Yuri Pines from the Hebrew University, at
pinesy@mscc.huji.ac.il (if you do not think he is a Stalinist, se his
web page at http://www.eacenter.huji.ac.il/Pines).
PS. As you know, the suffix to web addresses for Israel always end in
.IL. Well, it occurred to me that there are so many communists at
Tel Aviv University that perhaps it should use as its web address
www.Kim.Jong.IL
2. Many on the American Right are pouring out tears at the passing of
Christopher Hitchens. I am one who thinks he was an evil little
bigot. A long-time far-leftist he moved well to the right on many
things. But at the same time he developed from a radical atheist into
a gutter hater of Judaism and Jews, a hater of Israel, and even a
chummy associate of Holocaust Deniers. (There is some debate as to
whether he himself was one.) You can see more about him here:
http://www.jewishideasdaily.com/content/module/2010/12/13/main-feature/1/christopher-hitchenss-jewish-problem
3. Israel's worst academic bimbo:
http://isracampus.org.il/third%20level%20pages/Editorial%20-%20Lee%20Kaplan%20-%20Haifa%20U%20-%20Dalit%20Baum%20-%20BDS%20and%20lies%20of%20omission.htm
4. Another great scholar from Tel Aviv University:
http://isracampus.org.il/third%20level%20pages/TAU%20-%20Chen%20Misgav%20-%20figure%20in%20Queer%20Geography.htm
And yet another one:
http://isracampus.org.il/third%20level%20pages/TAU%20-%20Aeyal%20Gross%20-%20pinkwashing%20claims%20basis%20for%20NYT%20Israel-bashing.htm
he fell victim to Israel's politicized dual judicial system.
Mizrachi lives in Kiryat Arba, the Jewish town on the outskirts of
Hebron. Five years ago, Mizrachi's daughter, who was the mother of
small children, was mortally injured by a bullet that was accidentally
fired from a weapon. For several weeks she hung on to life, as
Mizrachi nursed her, but in the end died from the injury. Two years
later Mizrachi's own son, who had been born to him when Mizrachi was
quite advanced in age, died in a traffic accident. The cave of
Mahpela in Hebron, not far from his home, is where another Jew is
buried who gave birth to a son only at an advanced age.
After both tragedies, Mizrachi and his wife set up a shop inside a gas
station at the entrance to Kiryat Arba.
Two years ago, just a few months after they lost their son in the
accident, Mizrachi was napping at home when the phone rang. He picked
up the phone and heard hysterical screams from his wife that she was
being attacked and stabbed. A "Palestinian" terrorist had entered the
gas station and stabbed his wife in the neck. Mizrachi raced to the
station, but did not see his wife, and feared for the worst, that she
had been killed. He saw the terrorist who had attacked his wife,
captured and in the custody of several soldiers. Mizrachi climbed
into his car and drove straight at the terrorist, running him over and
injuring his legs. The soldiers took the terrorist to the hospital
and he recovered. Mizrachi's wife also was treated and recovered.
Mizrachi had a nervous breakdown and was incapacitated, unable to
continue to work or run the shop.
Ah, but then in stepped the Israeli Attorney General's office and
decided to prosecute Mizrachi for "attempted homicide." For running
over the terrorist who had just stabbed his own wife. Let us bear in
mind that there have been cases in which Arabs lynched Jewish killers
after they were disarmed and the Arabs were never prosecuted for so
much as jaywalking. The two most famous cases that come to mind are
Baruch Goldstein, who was lynched and killed after being disarmed
following his murderous attack against Arabs in the same Mahpela
shrine, and Eden Natan-Zada, a mentally ill young Jew who killed
several Arabs or Druse in Shfar'am and then was lynched by the mob.
But Mizrachi's case was different. Arabs attacking Jews in Israel are
like dogs biting mailmen and are of little interest to the Prosecution
or to the leftist media. When a Jew attacks an Arab terrorist in
Israel, he (or she) must be prosecuted.
There was some internal debate among the prosecutors. Some wanted
Mizrachi charged with attempted homicide, but he was eventually
formally charged "only" with causing grievous bodily injury. Still
others wanted his emotional state and breakdown taken into account so
he would not be indicted at all. His wife begged in court that he not
be sent to prison, lest it destroy what was left of the man. The
prosecution demanded that he serve a full year of hard prison time.
One of the judges on the panel of three denounced the prosecution for
indicting Mizrachi at all. In the end Mizrachi was sentenced to three
months in prison.
Mizrachi should instead have been granted a medal and the Israel
Prize, maybe even a Nobel Peace Prize. Terrorists should be executed.
They should be lynched. They should be shot and have their carcasses
dumped from choppers into the sea. They should be targeted by drones.
When terrorists are attacked by civilians, especially when those
civilians are themselves victims or relatives of victims of those
terrorists, the "attackers" should have statues erected in their
honor. If a terrorist stabbed a member of my family, I would drive my
car in such a way that "causing injury" would never be a relevant
count in my indictment. My car would NOT have run over the
terrorist's LEGS.
(Above based in part on news story in Besheva weekly newspaper)
2. In another matter of gross judicial stupidity and incompetence,
many of you have perhaps heard of the verdict a few days back against
Israeli writer Naomi Ragen. Let me say that, while I have never met
Naomi face to face, I consider her a great writer, a great Israeli,
and a great Jew. She may be best known for her fiction, but she also
writes some of the best publicist articles coming out of Israel. I am
not exactly the best judge of literary achievement, but she is
generally regarded as one of the best English-language authors of
fiction in Israel (her books have also been translated into Hebrew and
probably other languages). Her books are often about women's roles in
Judaism, and also rich in portrayals of traditional Judaism. Some of
you may be on Naomi's email distribution list for her articles. She
made aliyah from the US 40 years ago and lives in Jerusalem.
Several years back Naomi was sued by one Sarah Shapiro, an
ultra-Orthodox (charedit) woman writer in the US. Shapiro claimed
that Ragen plagiarized material from an earlier book manuscript
written by Shapira. The book by Ragen in question, in which the
"plagiarism" allegedly appears, is something like 450 pages, out of
which there were perhaps 3 or 4 sentences that closely resembled
sentences that appeared in the earlier manuscript by Shapiro. The
"plagiarized" sentences have appeared in the press so I suppose
everyone can read them to make up his or her own mind about them. To
me they look like 3 or 4 similar sentences out of a 450 page book. I
imagine that if you went searching through all the publicist postings
I have posted over the years you could probably find 3 or 4 sentences
that closely resemble sentences in the Koran and conclude that I have
been plagiarizing from the Koran.
Shapiro hired a lawyer. She was later joined by a second plaintiff
making similar charges. The wheels of judicial injustice spin slowly
in Israel, and it took years, until last week, before the court
reached a verdict. It found against Naomi. Of course this is the
same court system that found damages in favor of anti-Semite Neve
Gordon. The court has not yet ruled on how much "damages" it will
order Ragen to pay.
Accusations of "plagiarism" against well known people on the basis of
similarities in phrases, sentences, or themes in writing are not
uncommon. Among other people who have been accused of such
"plagiarisms" have been Alan Dershowitz, whose "plagiarism" has long
been a cause celebre of the radical Left (and for which he was long
ago officially cleared by Harvard), writer Dan Brown, and other
writers and songwriters. The ruling in the Ragen case came out the
very same week in which a Dutch architect designing buildings in South
Korea was accused of designing them as "plagiarized" representation of
the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center being destroyed by
terrorists.
The Ragen court case was complex and I do not pretend to know all of
its details. Nevertheless it is my opinion that the court ruling
against her was a gross injustice and the ruling judge was a fool.
Ragen seems to believe that the entire suit was politically motivated
by some chareidim who were offended by Ragen's own critical portrayal
of chareidi life. Those plaintiffs then found a foolish or
incompetent judge to side with them. Among the reasons for my
skepticism about the motives of the plaintiffs is the fact that the
plaintiffs filed criminal complaints with the police against Naomi's
own husband after he sent them a newspaper clipping about how those
who had sued author Dan Brown for "plagiarism" eventually suffered
significant losses to their estates when the verdict clearing Brown
was issued AFTER the plaintiffs had died, where the damages were
deducted from the property they bequeathed. What is criminal about
sending a newspaper news clipping?
Naomi could use some words of encouragement, so – if you are of such a
mind – you can send her some at nragen@netvision.net.il.
By Steven Plaut
She's unforgettable, she's a legend though...
It's kinda incredible
--- From "Mona Lisa" by Britney Spears
Meet Israel's secret weapon against terrorism, code named "Mona
Lisa." Not only is Mona Lisa an effective weapon against Arab
anti-Israel terrorism and Islamofascism, but also is one of the most
effective weapons in the Israeli arsenal against the guttersnipes
screaming about imaginary "Israel Apartheid." Let us sit back and
watch in amusement as Hitlerjugend from the "Boycott and Divest from
Israel" movement and their fellow jihad travelers try to cope with our
Mona.
There are two critical things you need to know about this new
secret weapon. The first is that Mona Lisa is the real name of an
Israeli woman combat soldier. At her parents' suggestion - she writes
it as a single word, Monalisa (Nat King Cole did the same!). The
second thing you need to know is that she is an Arab.
Monalisa Abdo is a nineteen year old combat soldier in the
Israeli Defense Forces. She serves in one of Israel's elite
anti-terror units. Moreover she wears the legendary red army boots
that only Israel's most elite fighting units wear, the Israeli
equivalents of the American SEALS and green berets. My own military
experiences are timid in comparison with what soldiers do and no one
would ever think of letting me even get near a pair of red combat
boots.
Monalisa grew up in Haifa. Most Israeli Arabs are not
conscripted into the Israeli military, but they may volunteer to serve
if they wish. Some do so out of patriotism and loyalty to the state,
and some do so because of the career benefits and training that will
help them later in the workplace. Monalisa is clearly among the
former. Her story and an interview with her appear in the December 2,
2011 issue of Israel's Yediot Ahronot newspaper.
She describes the nasty comments some Arabs made to her and her
family members when she signed up. She dismisses them. And her
parents are squarely behind her. "Israeli Arabs need to serve in the
Israeli military," she insists in the interview, "to give to the
country and not just take." Israel is our country and we need to
serve it, she believes. And military service is beneficial for those
who serve, she adds, teaching them discipline and responsibility.
Monalisa's older sister Michelin, age 21, has also decided to enlist
and will start her service in a few days. In the same unit as Mona.
Monalisa not only asked to enlist in the Israeli Defense Forces
but signed up for an elite combat unit named "Karkel," in which both
men and women serve side by side on the front lines. Karkel is the
name of a wild desert cat that lives in Israel's south. The unit is
station in the Arava desert close to the border with Egypt. Hunting
down terrorist infiltrators is its specialty.
She describes her first day in uniform, when she was being
outfitted with equipment and fatigues. The orderlies gave her the
ordinary black combat boots that non-elite soldiers wear. "You gave
me the wrong boots," she insisted, "I demand the red combat boots."
And she got them. She says that when she first put them on, she felt
like a super-model. And while old men like myself are not supposed to
notice such things in 19 year olds, from her photo it is clear she
really could pass for a model if she decided to pursue that instead of
military service.
Since starting her tour of duty, she has taken the
non-commissioned officer training course and is already a NCO. When
asked in the interview how she gets along with the Jewish women
soldiers, she says just great. "There are no differences among us, we
support and help one another."
And about her name. Where did it come from? "My father wanted
me to always walk with pride with my head erect, and it had just that
effect upon me," she explains.
Come to think of it, maybe we have here the most effect
countermeasure yet against the Western campus bashers of Israel, the
anti-Semitic professors, and the jihadi wannabes holding their
anti-Israel protests and whining about Israeli "apartheid." In
reality, Israel is of course the only Middle East state that is NOT an
apartheid regime. Maybe Israel should let loose Monalisa, Michelin,
and the rest of the red-booted fighting tigresses and invite them to
apply those boots to some anti-Israel protester posteriors with
extreme prejudice!