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For the first time since 1961, the City University of New York (CUNY) has rejected a candidate for an honorary degree. Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Tony Kushner’s nomination was tabled at a meeting of the board of trustees at member college John Jay on Monday, when board member Jeffrey Wiesenfeld objected. “If his libelous statements against Israel were made by anyone outside the Jewish community, that person would be correctly labeled an anti-Semite…when you spew libel against our sole regional democratic ally for ‘crimes’ concocted by delegitimizers, you are an anti-Semite,” explained Wiesenfeld. “I would no differently oppose a racist for an honorary degree who personifies himself by calumny against a people,” he added. Kushner, an unapologetic Israel-basher and notorious propagandist for the genocidal Palestinian campaign against the Jewish State, characterized the rejection as “McCarthyite nonsense.”
It’s hardly nonsense. Kushner has been engaged in activities with Jewish Voice for Peace, an organization whose principal strategy hinges around economic warfare (boycott, divestment and sanctions) against Israel “to end the Israeli occupation of Gaza and West Bank, including East Jerusalem.” Kushner claims he does not support the boycott, but such claims ring utterly hollow given the playwright’s outrageous statements and background. Even in his letter to the board of trustees in response to his rejection, Kushner accused Israel of “ethnic cleansing” and, in an even greater departure from reality, also asserted that the “brunt” of the “ongoing horror in the Middle East..has been borne by the Palestinian people.”
But this only scratches the surface. Kushner is currently out in the sympathetic press peddling the worst of his obscurantist rhetoric. In an interview with Jewish Week nine days ago, Kushner claimed there “has never been a moment in my entire life when I haven’t expressed complete and full support of the State of Israel.” Evidently, one can be a supporter of Israel’s existence while also having “a problem with the idea of a Jewish state. It would have been better if it never happened,” as he told the New York Sun. In 2002, he told the Chicago Tribune that it’s “the shame of American Jews” for “failing to denounce Israel.” In 2004, Ha’aretz quoted Kushner saying that “[E]stablishing a state means f***ing people over,” and reiterated his contention that the creation of Israel was “mistake.”
Kushner has also rarely missed a moment to promulgate the false narrative perpetrated by Palestinian Nazis, whose charges of Israeli ethnic cleansing, racism, apartheid, imperialism, etc. are used to justify their terror and legitimize their desire to annihilate Israel. He has claimed in the New York Sun that “[Israel is involved in] a deliberate destruction of Palestinian culture and a systematic attempt to destroy the identity of the Palestinian people.” He told the Baltimore Jewish Times that “[T]he Israeli-built security wall should come down, the homeland for the Palestinians should be built up, with a strictly enforced peace, not enforced by the Israel Defense Forces, but by the United Nations.” In a book entitled “Tony Kushner in Conversation” (1998), the playwright offered up this assessment: “The biggest supporters of Israel are the most repulsive members of the Jewish community and Israel itself has got this disgraceful record…Israel is a creation of the U.S., bought and paid for[.]”
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