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	<title>FrontPage Magazine &#187; Richard L. Cravatts</title>
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		<title>The Lethality of De-Judaizing Jerusalem</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/richard-l-cravatts/the-lethality-of-de-judaizing-jerusalem/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-lethality-of-de-judaizing-jerusalem</link>
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		<pubDate>Tue, 02 Dec 2014 05:02:25 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Richard L. Cravatts]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[abbas]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[holiest city]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Israel]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Jerusalem]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[palestinians]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=246372</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Abbas's unrelenting campaign to erase the Jewish presence and history in the world's holiest city.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/jr.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-246373" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/jr-409x350.jpg" alt="jr" width="271" height="232" /></a>As an example of what the insightful commentator Melanie Phillips referred to as a “dialogue of the demented” in her book <em>The World Turned Upside Down</em>, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas is continuing a long tradition of attempting to de-Judaize Jerusalem by expressing his mendacious notion that, as he put it, “Jerusalem has a special flavor and taste not only in our hearts, but also in the hearts of all Arabs and Muslims and Christians,” and “Jerusalem is the eternal capital of the Palestinian state and without it there will be no state.” The same scholar of history who wrote a doctoral dissertation that questioned the extent and truthfulness of the Holocaust was now making his own historical claim that there had never been a Jewish presence and history in the world&#8217;s holiest city.</p>
<p>In recent weeks, Abbas has been at it again, adding new layers of rhetoric to his tactical campaign to de-Judaize Jerusalem, in general, and to the Temple Mount, specifically. In an October PA TV broadcast, Abbas made the breathtakingly absurd claim that Jews not only had no historic claim to the Temple Mount, but they also should never even be allowed to have their presence known at that location. “The settlers have arrived . . . ,” he said. “This is our Sanctuary, our Al-Aqsa and our Church [of the Holy Sepulchre]. They have no right to enter it . . . [or] right to defile it. We must prevent them . . . .”</p>
<p>Only in an alternate, Orwellian universe could only one group of people on earth—Jews—be enjoined from praying on the single site most holy to their faith, and, moreover, be told that their presence there is not only provocative but is repugnant and befouls the very ground on which those of another faith—Muslims—have staked a triumphalist religious claim and now wish gather and pray.</p>
<p>This attempt to airbrush out a Jewish presence from Jerusalem—in fact, all of historic Palestine—is not a new message for Abbas, of course. In 2000 he expressed similar contempt for the idea that a Jewish temple had ever existed on the Temple Mount and that, even if it had existed, the offenses committed by Israel against the Palestinians negated any claim Jews might have enjoyed, absent their perfidy. “Anyone who wants to forget the past [i.e., the Israelis] cannot come and claim that the [Jewish] temple is situated beneath the Haram,” Abbas absurdly asserted in an article in <em>Kul Al-Arab</em>, an Israeli Arabic-language weekly newspaper. “ . . . But even if it is so, we do not accept it, because it is not logical for someone who wants a practical peace.”</p>
<p>Judging by the October 30<sup>th</sup> statement by U.S. State Department spokesperson Jen Psaki, forgetting the past is something in which the John Kerry’s office is also complicit. “We&#8217;re extremely concerned by escalating tensions across Jerusalem and particularly surrounding the Haram al-Sharif, Temple Mount,” Psaki said, pointedly, and dangerously, referring to the Temple Mount by its Arab name first and thereby fortifying, and seeming to lend equal weight to, the Palestinian’s spurious claim to spiritual and territorial rights to the site, and to the wider area described now as East Jerusalem.</p>
<p>“It is actually critical that all sides exercise restraint, refrain from provocative actions and rhetoric and preserve the status quo,” she added, suggesting that Jews not be allowed to pray on the Mount and that the status quo prohibiting Jews from praying on the site be ordered to continue so as to not incite Muslim sensibilities.</p>
<p>But in characterizing East Jerusalem —or any part of Jerusalem, for that matter —as territory that Israel “occupies” but over which it enjoys no sovereignty, Abbas (and U.S. State Department, too) is misreading, once again, the content and purpose of 1967&#8242;s U.N. Security Council Resolution 242 that suggested an Israeli withdrawal “from <em>territories</em> [not <em>all</em> territories]” it acquired in the Six-Day War. Critics of Israeli policy who either willfully misread or deliberately obscure the resolution&#8217;s purpose say that the Jewish State is in violation of 242 by continuing to occupy the West Bank and Jerusalem, including what is spuriously now referred to as “Arab” East Jerusalem.  But the drafters of Resolution 242 were very precise in creating the statute’s language, and they never considered Jerusalem to have been occupied by Israel after the Six-Day War.  Former U.S. ambassador to the U.N., Arthur Goldberg, one of the resolution&#8217;s authors, made this very clear when he wrote some years later that “Resolution 242 in no way refers to Jerusalem, and this omission was deliberate[.] . . . At no time in [my] many speeches [before the U.N.] did I refer to East Jerusalem as occupied territory.”</p>
<p>But the true danger of the Palestinian thinking about Jerusalem—and, indeed, about all of the Palestine that they covet, including Israel itself—was revealed in Yasser Arafat&#8217;s own view that he expressed in a July 2000 edition of <em>al-Hayat al-Jadida</em> when he threatened that “They can occupy us by force, because we are weaker now, but in two years, ten years, or one hundred years, there will be someone who will liberate Jerusalem [from them].”</p>
<p>“Liberating” Jerusalem, of course, does not mean transforming it into a pluralistic, open city where members of three major faiths can live freely and practice their religions openly. Liberating Jerusalem for the Palestinians would be more in keeping with the type of liberation that Transjordan&#8217;s Arab League effected when they burned and looted the Jewish Quarter in Jerusalem in 1948; expelled and killed its hapless Jewish population; destroyed some 58 synagogues, many hundreds of years old; unearthed gravestones from the history-laden Jewish cemetery on the Mount of Olives and used them for latrine pavers; and barred any Jew from praying at the Western Wall or entering the Temple Mount.</p>
<p>But false irredentist claims, Islamic supremacism which compels Jews and Christians to live in dhimmitude under Muslim control, and an evident cultural and theological disregard for other faiths— while troubling in the battle over sovereignty in Jerusalem—are not, according to Dore Gold, Israel’s former ambassador to the United Nations, the most dangerous aspects of a diplomatic capitulation which would allow the Palestinians to claim a shared Jerusalem. In his engaging book, <em>The Fight for Jerusalem: Radical Islam, the West, and the Future of the Holy City</em>, Gold pointed to a far more troubling aspect: in their desire to accede to Arab requests for a presence and religious sovereignty in Jerusalem, the State Department, EU, UN member states, and Islamic apologists in the Middle East and worldwide may actually ignite jihadist impulses they seek to dampen with their well-intentioned, but defective, diplomacy.</p>
<p>Why? Because, as Gold explained, “In the world of apocalyptic speculation, Jerusalem has many other associations—it is the place where the messianic Mahdi [the redeemer of Islam] is to establish his capital. For that reason, some argue that it also should become the seat of the new caliphate that most Islamic groups—from the Muslim Brotherhood to al-Qaeda—seek to establish.”</p>
<p>When Yasser Arafat in July 2000 gave expression to the eventual “liberation” of Jerusalem as a sacred and unending ambition for the Palestinian cause, he defined it as a recapture of what had been, and should be, in his view, Muslim land, just as the eventual extirpation of Israel and the reclamation of all of historic Palestine would accomplish. The establishment of the Palestinian capital in East Jerusalem is the first important step in the long-term strategy to rid the Levant of Jews and reestablish the House of Islam in Palestine. “Jerusalem’s recapture is seen by some as one of the signs that ‘the Hour’ and the end of times are about to occur,” Gold suggested. “And most importantly, because of these associations, it is the launching pad for a new global jihad powered by the conviction that this time the war will unfold according to a pre-planned religious script, and hence must succeed.”</p>
<p>So far from creating a political situation in which both parties—Israelis and the Palestinians—feel they have sought and received equal benefits, such negotiations and final agreements would have precisely the opposite effect: destabilizing the region and creating, not the oft-hoped for Israel and Palestine “living side by side in peace,” but an incendiary cauldron about to explode into an annihilatory, jihadist rage. Those in the West who are urging Israel “to redivide Jerusalem by relinquishing its holy sites,” Dore cautioned, “may well believe that they are lowering the flames of radical Islamic rage, but in fact they will only be turning up those flames to heights that have not been seen before.” If the State Department and other Western diplomats are intent on mollifying the Arab street by pressuring Israel to divide Jerusalem as a peace offering to the Palestinians, it may well be setting into motion the exact opposite result—a jihadist, apocalyptic movement invigorated by the misguided diplomacy of the West that, once more, asks Israel to sacrifice its security and nationhood so that Islamists can realize their own imperial and theological ambitions at the Jewish state’s expense.</p>
<p><em>Richard L. Cravatts, PhD, president of Scholars for Peace in the Middle East, is the author of </em>Genocidal Liberalism: The University’s Jihad Against Israel &amp; Jews.</p>
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		<title>The Ivory Tower’s Nazification of Israel</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/richard-l-cravatts/the-ivory-towers-nazification-of-israel/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-ivory-towers-nazification-of-israel</link>
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		<pubDate>Mon, 17 Nov 2014 05:50:09 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Richard L. Cravatts]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Anti-Semitism]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[apartheid]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Israel]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[judaism]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Nazi]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Palestinian]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Zionism]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=245327</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The Left's lethal narrative. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/israeli-flag-turned-swastika-4453720158_3f639a1ea52.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-245328" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/israeli-flag-turned-swastika-4453720158_3f639a1ea52-450x299.jpg" alt="israeli-flag-turned-swastika-4453720158_3f639a1ea52" width="343" height="228" /></a>“What if the Jews themselves were Nazis?” mused French philosopher, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vladimir_Jank%C3%A9l%C3%A9vitch"><span style="color: #ed2324;">Vladimir Jankélévitch</span></a> in 1986. “That would be great. We would no longer have to feel sorry for them; they would have deserved what they got.”</p>
<p>The recasting of Israelis, and, by extension, Jews as Nazis has, in fact, taken place, just as Jankélévitch envisioned. This summer’s Israeli incursion, Operation Protective Edge, provided anti-Semites and loathers of the Jewish state with resurgent justifications for assigning the epithet of Nazi on the Jews yet another time, together with oft-heard accusations of “crimes against humanity, “massacres,” genocide,” and, according to recent comments by Turkey’s prime minister <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recep_Tayyip_Erdo%C4%9Fan"><span style="color: #ed2324;">Tayyip Erdoğan</span></a>, in their treatment of the Palestinians, Israel has demonstrated that “. . . their barbarism has surpassed even Hitler’s.”</p>
<p>The Nazification of Israelis—and by extension Jews—is both breathtaking in its moral inversion and cruel in the way it makes the actual victims of the Third Reich’s horrors a modern-day reincarnation of that same barbarity. It is, in the words of Boston University’s Richard Landes, “moral sadism,” a salient example of Holocaust inversion that is at once ahistorical, disingenuous, and grotesque in its moral and factual inaccuracy.</p>
<p>In reflecting on the current trend he perceived in the burgeoning of anti-Israelism around the world, Canadian Member of Parliament, Irwin Cotler, once <a href="http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Op-Ed-Contributors/Making-the-world-Judenstaatrein"><span style="color: #ed2324;">observed</span></a> that conventional strains of anti-Semitism had been masked, so that those who directed enmity towards Jews were now able to transfer that opprobrium to the Jew of nations, Israel. How had they effected that? According to Cotler, they did so by redefining Israel as the most glaring example of those human predations, what he called “the embodiment of all evil” of the Twentieth Century: apartheid and Nazism. He defined the process of grafting this opprobrium on Israel as “ideological anti-Semitism,” one which “involves the characterization of Israel not only as an apartheid state—and one that must be dismantled as part of the struggle against racism—but as a Nazi one.”</p>
<p>Most important for the anti-Israel cause, Cotler contended, once Israel had been tarred with the libels of racism and Nazism, the Jewish state had been made an international outlaw, a pariah, losing its moral right to even exist—exactly, of course, what its foes have consistently sought. “These very labels of Zionism and Israel as ‘racist, apartheid and Nazi’ supply the criminal indictment,” said Cotler. “No further debate is required. The conviction that this triple racism warrants the dismantling of Israel as a moral obligation has been secured. For who would deny that a ‘racist, apartheid, Nazi’ state should not have any right to exist today?”</p>
<p>What is more troubling is that the characterization of the Israeli as Nazi is a trope now promulgated by Western elites and so-called intellectuals, including a broad contingent of academics who are complicit in, and in fact intellectual enablers of, the campaign to defame Israel by Nazifying its people and accusing Jews again as being the world’s moral and existential enemies as demonstrated by their oppression and brutality toward the long-suffering Palestinians. Thus, campus anti-Israel hate-fests sponsored by radical student groups have such repellant names as “Holocaust in the Holy Land,” “Israel: The Politics of Genocide,” or “Israel: The Fourth Reich,” creating a clear, though mendacious, linkage between Nazism and Zionism.</p>
<p>One of the early academic voices to have assigned the Nazi epithet to Israel was heard in a November 2000 speech by Francis A. Boyle, a law professor at the University of Illinois and one of the principal promoters of the global Boycott, Divest, and Sanctions (BDS) movement. In that speech, Boyle made the exact linkage to which Cotler alluded, conflating Israel’s alleged racism with apartheid-like behavior and suggesting, even more ominously, that the ongoing “genocide” against the Palestinians had parallels with the Nazi’s own heinous offenses. “The paradigmatic example of a crime against humanity is what Hitler and the Nazis did to the Jewish People,” Boyle <a href="http://www.mediamonitors.net/francis7.html"><span style="color: #ed2324;">said</span></a>. “This is where the concept of crime against humanity was formulated and came from. And this is what the U.N. Human Rights Commission is now saying that Israel is doing to the Palestinian People. A crime against humanity.”</p>
<p>That same trope is repeated and reinforced by other academics, such as Richard Falk, professor emeritus of International Law and Policy at Princeton University and the UN’s former, preposterously-titled “Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967,” who wondered aloud if it was “an irresponsible overstatement to associate the treatment of Palestinians with this criminalized Nazi record of collective atrocity?” on the part of Israel, and then quickly answered his own question by saying, “I think not.”</p>
<p>In the morally-defective pantheon of the academic defamers of Israel, perhaps no single individual has emerged as the paradigmatic libeler, the most vitriolic and widely-followed character in an inglorious retinue as <a href="http://normanfinkelstein.com/"><span style="color: #ed2324;">Norman Finkelstein</span></a>, late of DePaul University. Finkelstein has loudly and notoriously pronounced his extreme views on the Middle East, not to mention his loathing of what he has called the Holocaust “industry,” something he has called an “outright extortion racket;” in fact, he blames Jews themselves for anti-Semitism.</p>
<p>Hamas, designated a terrorist organization by the U.S. State Department, has pure political intentions and passively yearns for truces and safe borders, according to Mr. Finkelstein, while the invidious state of Israel, fearing moderate Arab foes who will force it into peace, is obdurate, conniving, and bellicose. In fact, Finkelstein <a href="http://www.todayszaman.com/interviews_norman-finkelstein-israel-is-committing-a-holocaust-in-gaza_164483.html"><span style="color: #ed2324;">suggested</span></a>, Israel is collectively going mad, while everyone else in the rational world yearns for Middle Eastern peace:<b> “</b>I think Israel, as a number of commentators pointed out, is becoming an insane state. . . In the first week of the massacres, there were reports in the Israeli press that Israel did not want to put all its ground forces in Gaza because it was preparing attacks on Iran. Then there were reports it was planning attacks on Lebanon. It is a lunatic state.”</p>
<p>If Finkelstein lives in an academic netherworld of political fantasies, conspiracies, and intellectually-imbecilic distortions of history and fact, his spiritual mentor, MIT’s professor emeritus of linguistics <a href="http://www.chomsky.info/"><span style="color: #ed2324;">Noam Chomsky</span></a>, has inhabited a similar ideological sphere, but has become an even more widely-known, eagerly-followed creature of the Israel-hating, America-hating Left.</p>
<p>While he is happy to, and regularly does, ignore the murder of Jews by Palestinians, Chomsky never hesitates to point to the perfidy of Israel, and its barbarous assault on their Arab neighbors who, in his socialist fantasies, wish for nothing more than to live in peace. He draws the perverse parallel between Israelis and Nazis so frequently in his writings that, to paraphrase the wry Professor Edward Alexander, he would be rendered nearly speechless if he was unable to use the epithet of Nazi against Israel in every sentence he utters. The rogue state of “Israel has tried killing, beating, gassing, mass arrests, deportation, destruction of houses, curfews and other forms of harsh collective punishment,” Chomsky <a href="http://www.chomsky.info/articles/198807--.htm"><span style="color: #ed2324;">wrote</span></a>, and yet, even in the face of this hideous, Nazi-like behavior by Israel, “nothing has succeeded in enforcing obedience or eliciting a violent response.”</p>
<p>In January of 2009, a tenured sociology professor, William I. Robinson, of the University of California, Santa Barbara, sent an odious email to the 80 students in his “Sociology 130SG: The Sociology of Globalization” course with the explicit message that Israelis are the new Nazis.  Under the heading “Parallel images of Nazis and Israelis,” the email displayed a photo-collage of 42 side-by-side, grisly photographs meant to suggest an historical equivalence between Israel’s treatment of Palestinians in its occupation of Gaza and the Third Reich’s subjugation of the Warsaw Ghetto and its treatment of Jews during the Holocaust. Robinson sent the email without supplying any context for it, nor did it seemingly have any specific relevance to or connection with the course’s content.</p>
<p>At Columbia University’s department of Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies (MESAAS), an academic division with a long history of anti-Israel, anti-American bias and politicized scholarship, Joseph Massad, an associate professor of modern Arab politics, regularly espouses his loathing of Israel in fringe, anti-Semitic publications like <i>Counterpunch</i> and <i>The Electronic Intifada, </i>or in the Arab press, and never misses an opportunity to denigrate the Jewish state as a racist, colonial enterprise, a moral stain on the world without any semblance of legitimacy. In his perfervid imagination, Israelis, as he never tires as mentioning, have become the new Nazis and the Palestinians the Jews. “As Palestinians are murdered and injured in the thousands,” he <a href="http://electronicintifada.net/content/gaza-ghetto-uprising/7919"><span style="color: #ed2324;">wrote</span></a> after Operation Cast Lead in January of 2009 when Israel was defending itself against some 6000 rockets attacks from Gaza, “world powers are cheering on . . , and it even happened during World War II as the Nazi genocide was proceeding.” Perversely likening the barbaric aggression of Hamas from within Gaza to the efforts of Warsaw Jews to repel imminent extermination by the Nazis, Massad obscenely suggested that “The Gaza Ghetto Uprising will mark both the latest chapter in Palestinian resistance to colonialism and the latest Israeli colonial brutality in a region whose peoples will never accept the legitimacy of a racist European colonial settlement in their midst.”</p>
<p>It is Israel&#8217;s actions alone―that and the support of the United States―which are the root cause of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, and the Jewish state’s behavior is murderous, unethical, and brutal, according to University of Wisconsin-Madison&#8217;s Jennifer Loewenstein, Associate Director of the Middle East Studies Program. Israel, she <a href="http://www.counterpunch.org/2012/08/31/a-legacy-of-two-martyrs/"><span style="color: #ed2324;">wrote</span></a>, “speaks with a viper’s tongue over the multiple amputee of Palestine whose head shall soon be severed from its body in the name of justice, peace and security,” and “Israel has made its view known again and again in the strongest possible language, the language of military might, of threats, intimidation, harassment, defamation and degradation.”<b> </b></p>
<p>This summer, while the Gaza incursion was raging, Dr. Julio Pino, associate professor of history at Kent State University, <a href="http://www.timesofisrael.com/ohio-professor-says-israel-spiritual-heir-to-nazism/"><span style="color: #ed2324;">published</span></a> a vitriolic open letter in which he chastised the “academic friends of Israel” who have “chosen to openly work for and brag about academic collaboration with a regime that is the spiritual heir to Nazism . . . I curse you more than the Israelis,” he told his academic colleagues, “for while The Chosen drain the blood of innocents without apologies you hide behind the mask of academic objectivity, nobility of research and the reward of teaching to foreign youth . . . Lest you think this is a personal attack I swear it applies equally to all who engage in collaboration with fascism, and we both know the fate of collaborators. In the same manner, only with more zeal, than you have sworn to the Jewish State I pledge to you, and every friend and stooge of Zionism.”</p>
<p>Occasionally, when an academic makes public his loathing of the Jewish state, and continues to demonize and libel Israel beyond the bounds of what would be considered acceptable scholarly discourse, there are consequences—though rarely. This summer, for instance, Steven Salaita, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Israels-Dead-Soul-Steven-Salaita/dp/1439906386"><span style="color: #ed2324;">author of <i>Israel’s Dead Soul</i></span></a> and perennial critic of Zionism, had an employment offer from the University of Illinois withdrawn once the school’s president was made aware of some of Salaita’s virulent Twitter posts about Israel.  During the widely-criticized Gaza incursion, Salaita <a href="https://twitter.com/stevesalaita/status/490683700116738048"><span style="color: #ed2324;">tweeted</span></a> that “At this point, if Netanyahu appeared on TV with a necklace made from the teeth of Palestinian children, would anybody be surprised?” He also blamed anti-Semitism on Jews themselves, as many anti-Semites do, by asserting that Israel’s behavior causes the hatred of Jews, that “By eagerly conflating Jewishness and Israel, Zionists are partly responsible when people say antisemitic shit in response to Israeli terror.”</p>
<p>As grotesque and distorted as these calumnies against Israel are, as perverse and inaccurate the comparisons drawn between Nazism and Zionism and between Nazis and Israelis are, and as wildly hateful these libels are to the point of being, as defined by the State Department’s own working definition, anti-Semitic in nature—the branding of Israel as the Nazi of nations by these academics serves to reinforce, and give credibility to, similar hatreds and biases expressed outside the university walls.</p>
<p>This is a lethal narrative because when it is believed the world naturally asks itself, as Cotler warned: if Israel is a Nazi-like, apartheid regime, standing in opposition to everything for which the civilized community of nations stands, who <i>cannot </i>hold Israel accountable and judge it harshly for its transgressions? That against all historical evidence and the force of reason the calumny against Israel that it is a murderous, sadistic, and genocidal regime has been successfully promoted and continues to gain traction indicates that Israel’s academic defamers have been successful in inverting history as part of the modern day incarnation of the world’s oldest hatred.</p>
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		<title>Ignoring Anti-Semitism in the Name of Palestinian Solidarity at UC Davis</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/richard-l-cravatts/ignoring-anti-semitism-in-the-name-of-palestinian-solidarity-at-uc-davis/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=ignoring-anti-semitism-in-the-name-of-palestinian-solidarity-at-uc-davis</link>
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		<pubDate>Thu, 06 Nov 2014 05:35:43 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Richard L. Cravatts]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Anti-Semitism]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Free Speech]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Islam]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[students for justice in Palestine]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[UC Davis]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=244598</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Who gets "free speech" and who doesn't. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/justice-for-Palestine.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-244602" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/justice-for-Palestine-450x304.jpg" alt="justice-for-Palestine" width="306" height="207" /></a>Since its founding in 2001, the radical campus group Students for Justice in Palestine has had as its mission to demonize Israel and promote a campaign to accuse the Jewish state of apartheid, racism, brutal occupation, and crimes against humanity, among other accusations. Its radical behavior has created a toxic atmosphere on campuses where its programs and events have regularly morphed into what has been categorized as being anti-Semitic in nature. Now, apparently in an effort to bring that same vituperative ideology to the faculty, a group on the UC Davis campus calling itself Faculty for Justice in Palestine recently decried a letter sent to the UC Davis administration by the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) which warned that</p>
<blockquote><p>“In the wake of the recent crisis, anti-Israel organizations are placing increasing pressure on academic institutions to engage in . . . ‘Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions’ (BDS) activities,” and that school officials should be aware that groups were undertaking a campus campaign “all in an effort to isolate and demonize Israel and Jewish communal organizations. These efforts serve only to polarize students on campus, inflame existing tensions, and often isolate and intimidate Jewish students.”</p></blockquote>
<p>In an opinion piece that ran in <em>The California Aggie</em>, the UC Davis student newspaper, professor of English Joshua Clover and professor of Asian American studies Sunaina Maira preposterously claimed that the ADL, far from being a civil rights organization, “is an avowedly Zionist lobbying organization with a long history of attempting to silence criticism of the Israeli state,” and claimed that the group’s intention was actually to suppress Palestinian activism and obscure the predations of Israel, a view that professor Maira was bound to harbor, given that she is a member of the American Studies Association Council which voted for an academic boycott against Israeli scholars and an organizer in the <a href="http://www.usacbi.org/">U.S. Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott</a>of Israel.</p>
<p>The paranoid notion that the ADL’s letter amounts to “unacceptable interference by off-campus interests” which is “baldly racist,” and which somehow “chills” political advocacy on the UC Davis campus, is, of course, ridiculous. More troubling is that this statement reveals that the professors naively believed that pro-Palestinian activists can institute an ideological assault against Israel, call for Jewish academics to be shunned from the community of world scholars while simultaneously singling out and attacking the Jewish state as an illegal, colonial occupier on stolen Palestinian land, and libel and harass Jewish students and other supporters of Israel by making them complicit in, and responsible for, the actions of their government in perpetrating what activists define as an “illegal occupation” without anyone with opposing views answering back these slanders with counter-arguments and opposing views.</p>
<p>The faculty members’ motivation was purportedly to “show support for Palestinian solidarity activism,” but several working definitions of anti-Semitism, including those by the U.S. State Department and the European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights, suggest that such actions, in targeting Israel and holding it to a different standard of behavior than all other nations—something which the actions and speech of UC Davis’s Students for Justice in Palestine and the organization American Muslims for Palestine clearly do—is one criteria by which speech and actions can be considered anti-Semitic, which of course the professors here conveniently ignore or of which they are sadly ignorant.</p>
<p>Whether or not these Professors for Justice in Palestine believe the activism they support is anti-Semitic is not relevant; anti-Semites rarely admit to their behavior, or to the consequences of their actions and speech. And their accusation that the ADL sent its letter to Chancellor Katehi, not on its own merits, but in an underhanded attempt to “silence criticism of the Israeli state” is also consistent with a pattern that David Hirsh of Engage in Britain has termed the “Livingstone Formulation,” part of which is “the counteraccusation that the raisers of the issue of antisemitism do so with dishonest intent, in order to de-legitimize criticism of Israel. The allegation is that the accuser chooses to ‘play the antisemitism card’ rather than to relate seriously to, or to refute, the criticisms of Israel.”</p>
<p>So not only did the professors reject some of the claims of underlying anti-Semitism in the ADL’s letter itself, they also decided that those organizations and individuals who made efforts to expose that anti-Semitism were not authentic, but were merely attempting to promote their own, pro-Israel agenda.</p>
<p>Protestations and defenses aside, the issue is far more obvious than the UC Davis professors care to realize, and much less insidious. Those who speak back to ideologues do so not to suppress criticism of Israel; academic freedom grants the professors the right to spew forth any academic meanderings they wish, but it clearly does not make them free from being challenged for their thoughts.</p>
<p>The core issue is that just as the pro-Palestinian activists on the UC Davis campus and elsewhere have the right under the umbrella of academic free speech to express their views – no matter how factually inaccurate, vitriolic, or repellant they may be – those within and outside academia with opposing views also have the right, under the same precepts of free expression, to question the those views, and to call them anti-Semitic, or racist, or genocidal, or merely historically inaccurate or incorrect if, in fact, that is the case. Also, a recently-leaked memorandum from the Binghamton University chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine revealed that the true intention of the anti-Israel activists on campus is not, as it regularly claimed, dialogue and debate, but a strategy, not only of refusing to engage in conversation with any pro-Israel groups or individuals, but to actively, and corruptly, interfere with, shut down, and otherwise suppress any pro-Israel sentiment on campuses.</p>
<p>That type of behavior violates the concepts of academic freedom and academic free speech—rights that campus radicals prefer to exploit themselves while denying the same freedoms to others and deeming speech with which they disagree “hate speech.” Spirited debate between people with opposing views is acceptable; shutting down or preventing the speech of one side of the argument, and not permitting those views to be aired in the marketplace of ideas, is not. Even though the professors claim that “the rhetoric of ‘civility’ has become the new discourse through which administrations seek to suppress political engagement,” what thoughtful administrators are trying to achieve by calling for civility in scholarly debate is reasoned, thoughtful, and fact-based discourse—not riotous, offensive, and violent expressions, regardless of the supposed sanctity of the cause.</p>
<p>That may have been the motivation for the 2013 resolution passed by the ASUCD Senate, Senate Resolution 21, which sought to condemn and identify Islamophobic speech at the UC Davis. The resolution, which was passed after a controversial Ayn Rand Society event on radical Islam, “Islamists Rising,” was held, defined Islamophobia as “the irrational fear of Islam, Muslims or anything related to the Islamic or Arab cultures and traditions.” The authors of the resolution wished to use the resolution to suppress speech by critics of radical Islam, and were successful in categorizing any view about Islam with which they did not agree to be outside the bounds of acceptable speech; in fact, it was henceforth categorized as “hate speech” and unwelcomed on campus. Presumably criticizing the genocidal charter is Islamic Hamas, or the group’s unending attacks on Israeli civilians for the purpose of murdering Jews, could thereby be considered a type of hate speech, Islamophobic, or contrary to the accepted values of the UC Davis campus.</p>
<p>The suggestion that people be careful with their speech when assessing other people was apparently overlooked during a 2012 event at UC Davis at which two Israelis –a Jewish man and a Druze woman—were to speak and whose appearance was effectively shut down by members of Students for Justice in Palestine and others who had decided, in advance, that “Events like these are not welcome on our campus anymore.” During the presentation, a protestor used the “heckler’s veto” to silence the speakers, standing up and screaming to the podium that Israel has “turned the land of Pales­tine into a land of pros­ti­tutes and rapists and child moles­ters,” and ask­ing the speaker, “How many women have you raped? How many chil­dren have you raped? You are a child moles­ter.”</p>
<p>And pro-Palestinian activists on the Davis campus obviously were not concerned about civility when three Jewish students tried to speak on behalf of Israel at UC Davis at a November 2012 protest against Israel’s Operation Pillar of Defense. The Jewish students were first shouted down with chants of “Leave our space!” “Shame on you!” “F**k Israel,” and “Long live the Intifada!” and then forced against a wall of windows while angry protestors threatened them with closed fists and physical aggression. When pro-Palestinian activists shout “Long live the intifada,” it is, of course, a grotesque and murderous reference to the Second Intifada, during which Arab terrorists murdered some 1000 Israelis and wounded more than 14,000 others, so the fact that this is what passes as intellectual debate about the Israeli/Palestinian conflict on campus is clear evidence that any hope of rational discourse or productive discussion has vanished. Civility has devolved into acrimony, and one can reasonably wonder, based on their language, what the true intentions are of those who defame, demean, and libel Israel in their effort to promote Palestinian self-affirmation.</p>
<p>Liberal-leaning academics at UC Davis and on other American campuses seemingly hold the notion that free speech is only good when it articulates politically correct, ideologically-acceptable views of protected victim or minority groups—and especially, as in the case, the perennially suffering Palestinians. But true intellectual diversity — the ideal that is often bandied about but rarely achieved — must be dedicated to the protection of unfettered speech, representing opposing viewpoints, where the best ideas become clear through the utterance of weaker ones.</p>
<p>For Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, for instance, the protection of free expression for all views was essential, not only to allow discourse of popular topics, but, even more importantly, in instances where unpopular or currently-controversial speech is deemed offensive and unworthy of being heard. “If there is any principal of the Constitution,” he observed, “that more imperatively calls for attachment than any other, it is the principal of free thought — not free thought for those who agree with us but freedom for the thought that we hate.”</p>
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		<title>Anti-Semitism Denial</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/richard-l-cravatts/anti-semitism-denial/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=anti-semitism-denial</link>
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		<pubDate>Thu, 23 Oct 2014 04:38:46 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Richard L. Cravatts]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[AMCHA Initiative report]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Anti-Semitism]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Gaza]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Israel]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[professors]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=243576</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Leftist professors and doublethink.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/antisemitism.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-243580" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/antisemitism-450x300.jpg" alt="antisemitism" width="251" height="167" /></a>As yet more evidence that academics are regularly able to engage in what George Orwell sardonically referred to as “doublethink,” “the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one&#8217;s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them,” this month 40 professors of Jewish studies published a denunciation of a study that named professors who have been identified as expressing “anti-Israel bias, or possibly even antisemitic rhetoric.”</p>
<p>While the 40 academic “heavyweights” claim they, of course, reject anti-Semitism totally as part of teaching, they were equally repelled by the tactics and possible effects of the AMCHA Initiative report, a comprehensive review of the attitudes about Israel of some 200 professors who signed an online petition during the latest Gaza incursion that called for an academic boycott against Israeli scholars—academics the petitioners claimed were complicit in the “latest humanitarian catastrophe caused by Israel’s new military assault on the Gaza Strip.”</p>
<p>“We believe the professors who have signed this petition may be so biased against the Jewish state that they are unable to teach accurately or fairly about Israel or the Arab-Israel conflict, and may even inject antisemitic tropes into their lectures or class discussion,” wrote Tammi Rossman-Benjamin and Leila Beckwith, co-founders of the AMCHA Initiative and authors of the report.</p>
<p>Calling “the actions of AMCHA deplorable,” the indignant professors were insulted by the organization’s “technique of monitoring lectures, symposia and conferences,” something which, they believe, “strains the basic principle of academic freedom on which the American university is built.” That is a rather breathtaking assertion by academics; namely, that it is contrary to the core mission of higher education that ideas and instruction being publicly expressed by professors cannot be examined and judged, and that by even applying some standards of objectivity on a body of teaching by a particular professor “AMCHA’s approach closes off all but the most narrow intellectual directions and,” as academics who do not want the content of their output to actually be examined for the quality of its scholarship are always fond of saying, “has a chilling effect on research and teaching.”</p>
<p>Only in the inverted reality of academia could a group of largely Jewish professors denounce a study which had as its core purpose to alert students to professors who have demonstrated, publicly and seemingly proudly, that they harbor anti-Israel attitudes, attitudes which unfortunately frequently morph into anti-Semitic thought and speech as part of discussions about Israel and the Middle East. Since the individuals named in the report teach in the area of Middle East studies, they are also likely to bring that anti-Israel bias into the classroom with them, and students, therefore, would obviously benefit from AMCHA’s report.</p>
<p>Specifically, it shows which professors have demonstrated that they bring to their teaching a clear bias against the Jewish state, and in fact have gone even further with that enmity by mobilizing as part of the global BDS movement to turn Israeli academics in intellectual pariahs by excluding them from the intellectual marketplace of ideas. Not Syrian academics; not Iranian academics; not North Korean academics; not Saudi Arabian academics; not the scholars of many other countries with despotic regimes and a prevailing absence of human and civil rights, not to mention academic freedom. Only Israeli academics.</p>
<p>Can anyone believe that had the AMCHA Initiative or other organization issued a report that revealed the existence of endemic racism, or homophobia, or sexism, or Islamophobia in university coursework, and had warned students who might be negatively impacted to steer clear of courses taught by those offending professors, that these same 40 feckless professors would have denounced such reports as potentially having a negative effect on teaching and learning? That they would question the motives of the organization that published the report? That they would deem the research and publication of such reports as being “McCarthyesque” or somehow undermining the civility of higher education by actually holding academics responsible for some of the intellectually deficient or corrupt ideologies to which they adhere and which they are more than happy to hoist on others—including, of course, their students.</p>
<p>Why should a professor’s political attitudes <em>not</em> be known to students, especially, as in this case, when those anti-Israel attitudes are extremely germane to their area of teaching, namely Middle East studies? The AMCHA researchers did not furtively investigate the private lives of the 200 professors, nor did they delve through their association memberships, reading habits, or private writings without the professors’ knowledge or consent. They were not spied upon and their courses taped by students.</p>
<p>The findings were based on the public utterances and writings of the professors, behavior and attitudes they apparently had no problem with making public and for which they were not hesitant to take responsibility. In fact, as often happens when anti-Israel academics are called upon to defend their libels and intellectual assaults against the Jewish state, they wish to freely pontificate on the many predations of Israel but do not like to be inconvenienced by being challenged on those often biased, and intellectually dishonest, views by others with opposing viewpoints.</p>
<p>Instead of defending their assertions and ideologies, they retreat from the argument, contending, at least in the Israeli/Palestinian discussion, that when their views are challenged, it is not done in good faith—an actual scholarly debate—but only as a way of suppressing their opinions, derailing their pro-Palestinian activism, and sheltering Israel from what they believe is justifiable and necessary criticism.</p>
<p>And there is another, more psychologically interesting aspect to a group of Jewish professors opposing a study that attempted to protect Jewish students and others from the pernicious effects of anti-Semitism in coursework, an aspect that Harvard’s insightful Ruth Wisse dealt with in her book, <em>If I Am Not For Myself: The Liberal Betrayal of the Jews: </em>the professors attacked the AMCHA study specifically because it deals with Israel, and how academia reacts to the debate about the Jewish state and its surrounding Arab neighbors. Rather than confront the lies and distortions promulgated by the Arab world against Israel over its alleged racism, apartheid, settlements, and lack of a just solution to the occupation, anti-Israel liberal Jews completely accept the spurious new narrative of Israel being the sole villain, and in fact often abet it with their own condemnations of the Jewish state. For Wisse, this behavior could “more accurately be described as the desire to disassociate oneself from a people under attack by advertising one’s own goodness,” a psychological pattern that has manifested itself conspicuously on campuses and seems to be at play in the current instance with the Jewish Studies professors. So worried are the 40 professors that by defending a report exposing academic anti-Semitism they will somehow be seen to be complicit in defending Israel, they would rather denounce the report and expose Jewish students to potential harm than stand up for principles that might tarnish their liberal credentials.</p>
<p>The signatories were also skeptical about the guidelines used by AMCHA to gauge instances of anti-Semitism and an acceptable definition by which campus speech, teaching, publications, and events could be judged to include manifestations of anti-Semitism and not just vituperation and critique of Israel—as anti-Israel activists regularly claim.   AMCHA’s “definition of antisemitism is so undiscriminating as to be meaningless,” the professors’ statement asserted, ignoring the fact that AMCHA based its own definition on earlier working definitions of anti-Semitism carefully developed by the U.S. State Department, the European Union Monitoring Centre on Racism and Xenophobia (now the Fundamental Rights Agency), and the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under the Law, among others.</p>
<p>And the professors also claim, without bothering to support the accusation with any proof, that AMCHA’s report—intent on exposing anti-Semitism in speech and behavior that can and has created a hostile campus environment for Jewish students—will somehow contribute to contracting, rather than enlarging, scholarly debate. In their zeal to preempt the insulating force of their notion of “academic freedom,” they seek to deprive those with alternate views of the same rights and protection; that is, while they want their fellow academics to be able to utter any calumny against the Jewish state and suffer no recriminations for their speech, even when it crosses the line into anti-Semitic expression, these professors view any speech from those challenging their views to be oppressive, stifling, and unacceptable. In fact, the professors contend, “Instead of encouraging openness through its efforts, AMCHA’s approach . . . has a chilling effect on research and teaching,” absurdly suggesting that excluding anti-Semitism from pro-Palestinian activism and teaching constricts scholarship and debate to “all but the most narrow intellectual directions.”</p>
<p>It is not as if campuses are unaware of the prevailing sensitivities of groups who are normally considered to be protected classes—black students, gay students, Muslim students, Hispanics, among others. Just this month, in a breathtaking act of moral incoherence, Britain’s National Union of Students (NUS) voted <em>against</em> condemning ISIS after the Black Students Officer, Malia Bouattia, opposed the motion, not because students did not have sincere concern for Syrians and Kurds being slaughtered, but because “condemnation of ISIS appears to have become a justification for . . . blatant Islamophobia.” In April, the Fifth Annual Conference on Islamophobia was held at UC Berkeley&#8217;s Boalt Law School, organized by Hatem Bazian, a Palestinian activist, co-founder of Students for Justice in Palestine, and professor of a current Berkeley course called &#8220;De-Constructing Islamophobia and the History of Otherness,” with part of the course requirements being that students open a Twitter account and tweet at least once a week about “Islamophobia.”</p>
<p>None of the Jewish Studies professors seemed to be concerned with investigations of purported instances of Islamophobia on campus and elsewhere, and how exposing those occurrences might lead to a stifling of someone’s academic free speech or “chilling” of scholarly debate. In fact, FBI statistics indicate that acts of anti-Semitism occur with eight times the regularity of anti-Muslim incidents, and that between 2011 and 2012 alone, the number of anti-Semitic incidents on college campuses tripled.</p>
<p>So regardless of how significant the professors seem to think the problem of anti-Semitism actually is, and whether they wish to minimize the virulence of anti-Semitism because they insist on conflating it with, and making it part of, the furious academic debate about the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, the AMCHA report shows us that the “oldest hatred” is still with us, creeping noxiously up the ivy walls.</p>
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		<title>The Moral Psychosis of Demonstrating in Support of Hamas</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/richard-l-cravatts/the-moral-psychosis-of-demonstrating-in-support-of-hamas/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-moral-psychosis-of-demonstrating-in-support-of-hamas</link>
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		<pubDate>Tue, 05 Aug 2014 04:47:51 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Richard L. Cravatts]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[apologists]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Hamas]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Israel]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Left]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Progressives]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=237769</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Inside the sordid world of a genocidal thugocracy's apologists. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/pro.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-237855" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/pro-450x299.jpg" alt="pro" width="280" height="186" /></a>As an example of what the insightful commentator Melanie Phillips referred to as a “dialogue of the demented” in her book, <em>The World Turned Upside Down</em>, since Israel launched Operation Protective Edge some three weeks ago, the streets of American and European cities have been crammed with activists intent on expressing their collective indignation for Israel’s perceived crime of defending its citizens from slaughter from the genocidal thugocracy of Hamas.</p>
<p>Rowdy and sometimes violent demonstrations have taken place in Berlin, Paris, Toronto, London, and Madrid, where blatantly anti-Semitic chants of “Death to Jews!,” “Hitler was right!,” “Gaza is the real Holocaust,” “end Israeli apartheid,” and “Jew, Jew, cowardly swine, come out and fight on your own!” could be heard, with similar events taking place in such U.S. cities as Boston, New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, and Seattle.</p>
<p>Joined with Muslim supporters of those wishing to destroy Israel and murder Jews were the usual suspects of peace activists, Israel-haters, social justice advocates, and labor unionists who decried Israel’s “genocide” against Gaza as well as the militarism, oppression, imperialism, and brutality imbued in Zionism itself. These radical, Israel-loathing groups include, among others, the corrosive, ubiquitous ANSWER (Act Now to Stop War and End Racism), Code Pink, Jewish Voice for Peace, and Students for Justice in Palestine.</p>
<p>What was particularly revealing, and chilling, about the hate-filled rallies was the virulence of the chants and messages on the placards, much of it seeming to suggest that more sinister hatreds and feelings—over and above concern for the current military operations—were simmering slightly below the surface. Several of the morally self-righteous protestors, for instance, shrieked out, to the accompaniment of drumbeats, “Long live Intifada,” a grotesque and murderous reference to the Second Intifada, during which Arab terrorists murdered some 1000 Israelis and wounded more than 14,000 others.</p>
<p>That pro-Palestinian student activists, those who purport to be motivated by a desire to bring “justice” to the Middle East, could publicly call for the renewed slaughter of Jews in the name of Palestinian self-determination demonstrates quite clearly how ideologically debased the human rights movement has become. Activists on and off U.S. campuses, who never have to face a physical threat more serious than getting jostled while waiting in line for a latte at Starbucks, are quick to denounce Israel’s very real existential threats and the necessity of the Jewish state to take counter measures to thwart terrorism. And quick to label the killing of Hamas terrorists by the IDF as “genocide,” these well-meaning but morally-blind individuals see no contradiction in their calls for the renewed murder of Jews for their own sanctimonious cause.</p>
<p>Other protestors were less overt in their angry chants, carrying signs and shouting out the oft-heard slogan, “Free, Free Palestine,” or, as they eventually screamed out, “Palestine will be free, from the river to the sea.” That phrase suggests the same situation that a rekindled Intifada would help bring about, namely that if the fictive nation of “Palestine” is “liberated,” is free, there will, of course, be no Israel between the Jordan River and Mediterranean—and no Jews.</p>
<p>Another deadly chorus emanated from protestors during the rally: “When people are occupied, resistance is justified.” That is an oft-repeated, but disingenuous and false notion that stateless terrorists have some recognized human right to murder civilians whose government has purportedly occupied their territory. That is clearly not any longer the case in Gaza, where every Jew was removed in 2005 and where there is a blockade in effect to prevent the influx of weapons, but clearly no occupation or, as commonly referred to, a “siege.” It may be comforting for Israel’s ideological foes to rationalize the murder of Jews by claiming some international right to do it with impunity and a sense of righteousness. Unfortunately, however, as legal experts have inconveniently pointed out, the rally participants and their terror-appeasing apologists elsewhere are completely wrong about the legitimacy of murder as part of “resistance” to an occupying force. Article IV of the Third Geneva Convention, the statute which defines combatants and legitimate targets in warfare, is very specific about who may kill and who may be killed, and it does not allow for the murder of either Israeli civilians—or soldiers—by Palestinian suicide bombers who wear no identifying military uniforms and do not follow the accepted rules of wars.</p>
<p>So when pro-Palestinian activists and critics of Israel repeat the claim that Palestinians somehow have an internationally-recognized legal “right” to resist occupation through violent means, they are both legitimizing that terror and helping to insure that its lethal use by Israel’s enemies will continue unabated. Those who lend their moral support to terrorism, and who continually see the existence of “grievance-based violence” as a justifiable tool of the oppressed, have helped introduce a sick moral relativism into discussions about radical Islam and Palestinianism, not to mention Israel’s right to protect its citizens from being slaughtered. And the notion that Israel cannot, or should not, retaliate against these rocket attacks until a sufficient number of Israelis has been murdered is equally grotesque.</p>
<p>The fact that so many demonstrators feel comfortable with openly supporting a terrorist group with the single purpose of murdering Jews, that they publicly proclaim that “We are all Hamas now,” indicates quite dramatically how prevalent, and acceptable, genocidal Jew-hatred has become, both in the streets and on campuses in America and Europe. This is clearly not, as it is regularly asserted, merely “criticism” of the Israeli government’s policies; this is what many define as a new permutation of anti-Semitism—an irrational, seething animus against the Jew of nations, Israel.</p>
<p>These fatuous, morally self-righteous activists, many of whom are from the hard Left or the pro-Islamic Right, are, without any expertise in military affairs, eager to advise Israeli officials on the rules of war and denounce the lack of “proportionality” in Israel’s attempts to defend its population from jihadist murderers. And so eager are they to publicly assert their righteousness as defenders of the Palestinian cause, they embrace and “eroticize” terroristic violence and willingly align themselves with Israel’s deadly foes who seek its annihilation, catering, as essayist David Solway lyrically put it, “to the ammoniac hatred of the current brood of crypto-antisemites posing as anti-Zionists.”</p>
<p>In fact, the continual pattern of violence in the Arab world against Israel agitates liberals greatly, and makes them condemn Israel, not its foes, for having inspired Arab rage, with the assumption that only peoples with justifiable grievances are moved to violent ends to solve their woes.</p>
<p>This explains why the Left has regularly glossed over terroristic behavior on the part of Islamists—Hamas, Hezbollah, Fatah, the Al Aqsa Brigades, or others—and has romanticized this violence as “resistance.” This rationalization, that violence is an acceptable, if not expected, component of seeking social justice—that is, that the inherent “violence” of imperialism, colonialism, or capitalism will be met by the same violence as the oppressed attempt to throw off their oppressors—is exactly the style of self-defeating rationality that in this age has proven to be an intractable part of the so-called War on Terror.</p>
<p>Abetted by the Arab world, which has also perennially defined Israelis as European interlopers with no legitimate connection to the Levant, Israel-haters are now willing to sacrifice the very survival of the Jewish state because they feel that false charge of racism and apartheid against Israel is more incompatible with their fervent belief in a perfectible world than the rejectionist and genocidal efforts of the Arab world which, in fact have necessitated Israeli security measures—the separation wall, indeed, the occupation itself—all of which, ironically, are pointed to as indications of exactly how racist Israel’s behavior actually is against the Palestinians.</p>
<p>In fact, observed Harvard’s Ruth Wisse, the more hostile the Arab foes of Israel became, the more difficult it has become for liberals to absolve Israel for creating the very violent urges that emerged to eliminate it. “By blaming Israel for Arab complaints,” she wrote, “liberals anticipate a reasonable, pacific solution to the conflict . . . The democratic Jewish state is subject to ‘rational’ persuasion; not so the Arabs. The more determinedly, and by Western standards, irrationally, Arab governments and their agents pursue their anti-Israel campaign . . . the more desperately the liberal imagination tries to blame the Jews for incurring Arab displeasure.”</p>
<p>The language of multiculturalism that animates the hate-Israel crowd is sprinkled with the code words of oppression, and radicals in newly-identified victim groups frequently see themselves as deserving of protection and special political, racial, and cultural recognition. Thus, the decades-old emphasis on enshrining multiculturalism has meant that activists have been seeped in an ideology which refuses to demarcate any differences between a democratic state struggling to protect itself and aggressive, genocidal foes who wish to destroy it with their unending assaults. For the multiculturalist left, the moral strengths of the two parties are equivalent, even though the jihadist foes of Israel, for example, have waged an unending struggle with the stated aim of obliterating the Jewish state through the murder of Jews.</p>
<p>There is no other explanation for why educated, well-intentioned and humane individuals, experiencing paroxysms of moral self-righteousness in which they are compelled to speak out for the perennial victim, can loudly and publicly advocate for the murder of Jews—who already have created and live in a viable sovereign state—on behalf a group of genocidal enemies of Israel whose tragic condition may well be their own doing, and, at any rate, is the not the sole fault of Israel’s. That these activists are willing, and ready, to sacrifice the Jewish state, and Jewish lives, in the name of social justice and a specious campaign of self-determination by Palestinian Arabs, shows how morally corrupt and deadly the conversation about human rights has become.</p>
<p>And its lethal nature and intent should frighten us all.</p>
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		<title>Academic Lies and Distortions in the Cognitive War Against Israel</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/richard-l-cravatts/academic-lies-and-distortions-in-the-cognitive-war-against-israel/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=academic-lies-and-distortions-in-the-cognitive-war-against-israel</link>
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		<pubDate>Mon, 28 Jul 2014 04:53:38 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Richard L. Cravatts]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Anti-Semitism]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[blood libel]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Israel]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=237206</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The blood libel has been revivified.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/antiisrael.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-237240" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/antiisrael.jpg" alt="antiisrael" width="308" height="178" /></a>Jews have been accused of harming and murdering non-Jews since the twelfth century in England, when Jewish convert to Catholicism, Theobald of Cambridge, mendaciously announced that European Jews ritually slaughtered Christian children each year and drank their blood during Passover season.</p>
<p>That medieval blood libel, largely abandoned in the contemporary West, does, however, still appear as part of Arab world’s vilification of Jews—now transmogrified into a slander against Israel, the Jew of nations. But in the regular chorus of defamation against Israel by a world infected with Palestinianism, a new, more odious trend has begun to show itself: the blood libel has been revivified; however, to position Israel (and by extension Jews) as demonic agents in the community of nations, the primitive fantasies of the blood libel are now masked with a veneer of academic scholarship and published as politicized scientific study.</p>
<p>Just this month, for example, the British medical journal <em>Lancet</em> further degraded its academic respectability and credibility by publishing something entitled “An open letter for the people in Gaza,” signed by 24 doctors and scientists. In the language of propaganda and politics—as opposed to the reasoned language of science and academically-based inquiry—the signers had as their purpose “denouncing what we witness in the aggression of Gaza by Israel.” These doctors and scientists, none of whom has had to live under an unceasing barrage of more than 10,000 rockets and mortars launched from Gaza into Israel, nevertheless denounced what they see as “the perversity of [Israel’s] propaganda that justifies the creation of an emergency to masquerade a massacre, a so-called ‘defensive aggression.’” Instead, the signers believe there is no basis for Israel’s self-defense, that it is actually no more than “a ruthless assault of unlimited duration, extent, and intensity” and an “unacceptable pretext of Israel eradicating political parties and resistance to the occupation and siege they impose.”</p>
<p>“The massacre in Gaza spares no one,” the letter continued in its hyperbolic, not factual, tones, and, according to the signers, “these attacks aim to terrorise [sic], wound the soul and the body of the people, and make their life impossible in the future, as well as also demolishing their homes and prohibiting the means to rebuild.”</p>
<p>Of course, there is no mention of the Palestinian’s complicity in their own situation, no reference to the nine years of genocidal aggression by Hamas since Israel’s disengagement from Gaza, no examination of the failure of Palestinian leadership to even attempt to start building a civil society and functioning government. Every pathology and failure, including the health and well-being of the entire Gazan society, is the fault of Israel—as a result of its siege, its blockade, its oppression, and its current incursion to suppress Hamas rocket attacks.</p>
<p>“In Gaza,” the letter continued, “people suffer from hunger, thirst, pollution, shortage of medicines, electricity, and any means to get an income, not only by being bombed and shelled.” And inverting cause and effect, the signers then make the breathtaking claim that Hamas terrorism is a tool for creating a viable Palestinian state, that Hamas rejected a truce not because they are dedicated to extirpating Israel and murdering Jews, but simply because “People in Gaza are resisting this aggression because they want a better and normal life and, even while crying in sorrow, pain, and terror, they reject a temporary truce that does not provide a real chance for a better future.”</p>
<p>This is not a scientific report at all, but a politicized, subjective screed designed to demonize Israel and assign total blame for a very complex political and military conflict that is well beyond the expertise of these particular individuals. That it was written by intellectuals in the West in the thralls of Palestinianism is not surprising or particularly unusual, especially in the wake of Israel’s Operation Protective Edge to protect its citizens from being murdered. What is troubling, however, is that a formerly-reputable journal such as <em>Lancet </em>is now being exploited as vehicle for flabby research and specious science in the pursuit of political ends.</p>
<p>This is not the first time that <em>Lancet</em> has strayed in this pseudo-academic manner. The entire so-called “occupation” has also become a target for scientists who attempt to link the general oppression by Israel with a host of pathologies in Palestinian society. Several years ago, feminist scholar Phyllis Chesler critiqued a particularly egregious example of politicized scholarship in a paper published in<em> Lancet</em>. Chesler noted that the article, with the biased title of “Association between exposure to political violence and intimate-partner violence in the occupied Palestinian territory: a cross-sectional study,” revealed “that Palestinian husbands are more violent towards Palestinian wives as a function of the Israeli ‘occupation’— and that the violence increases significantly when the husbands are ‘directly’ as opposed to ‘indirectly’ exposed to political violence.”</p>
<p>The study, of course, never chose to examine the effect of the conflict on Israeli husbands and wives, who may well share similar emotional stresses to their Palestinian counterparts as a result of the genocidal aggression against them from various jihadist foes, and instead, according to Chesler, attempted “to present Palestinian men as victims even when (or precisely because) those men are battering their wives,” defining “Palestinian cultural barbarism, which includes severe child abuse, as also related to the alleged Israeli occupation.” The cultural traditions in the Middle East which enable men to totally dominate family members, treat women as property, and even commit “honor” killings when women shame male family members—all of these, of course, are not included in the emotional equation which might logically lead or contribute to spousal abuse. It is the Israeli occupation, and that alone, that causes such deleterious mental health conditions, “intimate partner violence,” in Palestinian marriages. Perhaps a better title for the specious article would have been, “The occupation made me beat my wife.”</p>
<p>In 2010, to cite another instance of this trend, the findings of a study conducted by the New Weapons Research Group (Nwrg), a team of scientists based in Italy, were announced on “the use of unconventional weapons and their mid-term effects on the population of after-war areas,” in this case Gaza after Israel’s “Cast Lead” incursion in 2008-09. “Many Palestinian children still living in precarious situations at ground level in Gaza after Israeli bombing,” the study found, “have unusually high concentrations of metals in the hair, indicating environmental contamination, which can cause health and growth damages due to chronic exposure,” and these high levels were the direct result of Israeli bombs.</p>
<p>Moreover, suggested Professor Paola Manduca, spokesperson for this study and another principal signer of the Gaza open letter, the presence of metals in children’s hair “presents serious problems in the current situation in Gaza, where the construction and removal of damaged structures is difficult or impossible, and,” in case anyone does not know who to blame, “certainly represents the major responsibility of those who should remedy the damage to the civilian population under international law.”</p>
<p>Environmental contamination of children is certainly a critical issue to address and identify, but questions arise from this particular study due to the shabby way the controls and research were conducted. Was it actually Israeli weaponry that contributed to high metal levels in the hair of the studied group? Are those levels significantly different in Gaza, or do they parallel other high-density cities with refineries, smelters, and other form of pollutants that arise from other, non-military sources? Was the same group of subjects tested prior to Operation Cast Lead to see changes in the incidence of metals in hair after the incursion? Were groups in other towns, which had not been bombed, tested as well, and how do those levels compare with the test group?</p>
<p>Another principal signer of the Gaza letter, and frequent contributor to Lancet, is Iain Chalmers, a medical researcher and member of the <em>Lancet</em>-Palestinian Health Alliance (LPHA), an initiative between the journal and the group Medical Aid for Palestinians.Not surprisingly, the 2013 <em>Lancet</em> edition had a one-sided feature focusing on “the direct and indirect health effects of the Israeli occupation and conflict.” Chalmers is a defamer of Israel, who was gleeful about a Lancet cover that used the term Palestine, saying, “ . . . it’s one way in which the Zionists have failed. They have not stopped the use of the word ‘Palestine’ or ‘Palestinian.’ They have control in so many different domains. This is one that they cannot suppress.”</p>
<p>A third signer of the Gaza open letter was Derek Summerfield, a vitriolic maligner of Israel who has supported efforts to boycott Israeli physicians from attending medical conferences. In a 2008 interview in <em>Al Ahram</em> he described the Israeli/ Palestinian conflict as “the most awful crime has been played out down there by a colonial power that considered itself part of Europe. They were grabbing Palestinians&#8217; land and torturing them in ways that were reminiscent of South Africa but, as it turns out, far, far worse than South Africa.” Summerfield has also suggested, as he did in the <em>British Medical Journal</em> in an article entitled “Palestine: The Assault on Health and Other War Crimes,” that Israel is a morally malignant regime which capriciously murders Arabs with no justification. Like other haters of the Jewish state, he also has suggested that Israelis exploit the Holocaust as a means of distracting their misdeeds towards the Palestinians, that, as Summerfield sardonically put it, “Israel continues to play the Holocaust story and anti-Semitism as a way of blocking the truth.”</p>
<p>The principal signer of the Gaza open letter is Norwegian anesthesiologist and perennial Israel-hater, Mads Gilbert. A political activist and member of the fringe Norwegian Maoist ‘Red’ party, Gilbert is also a supporter of the Palestinian solidarity movement. While not giving biased medical commentary to the media during the various Gaza incursions, he also has apologized for and gave tacit approval to the 9/11 attacks in New York, saying in an interview that “The attack on New York did not come as a surprise after the policy that the West has led during the last decades . . . The oppressed also have a moral right to attack the USA with any weapon they can come up with,” and that while “terror is a bad weapon,” he supported a terror attack against the United States “within the context which I [had] mentioned.”</p>
<p>Interviewed by Iran’s Press TV in 2009, Gilbert announced, without conclusive proof, that, “We have <em>clear evidence</em>that the Israelis are using a new type of very high explosive weapons which are called Dense Inert Metal Explosives which is made out of a Tungsten alloy. These weapons have an enormous power to explode.” Though he moderated his opinion somewhat in the absence of any proof that his opinion about Israel’s use of weapons was even valid, he did use <em>Lancet</em> to repeat the calumny. “These are scenes out of Dante’s Inferno,” he said. “Many arrive with extreme amputations, with both legs crushed, [and what] I suspectare wounds inflicted by very powerful explosives called Dime [Dense Inert Metal Explosive].” Once again, a scientific journal published unsubstantiated and highly-biased articles, whose principal purpose seems to be to further malign Israel.</p>
<p>When brutal military assaults and Israel’s use of weaponry cannot be blamed for causing health damage to non-Jews, Israel-haters are quick to condemn the general oppression of Zionist occupation and brutality as detriments to Arab health and happiness. In 2005, Psychologists for Social Responsibility (PsySR) took it upon themselves to “condemn the Israeli Army&#8217;s use of psychological warfare against the Gaza population.” Through the use of Israeli F-16 jet plane-generated “sonic booms” that, according to PsySR, are a “particularly pernicious form of psychological warfare.” While they begrudgingly admit that the reason jet soirees were initiated against the Gazan population in the first place was the hundreds of rockets that had been raining down on Israeli neighborhoods in southern Israel, the psychologists’ concern never seemed to extend to Jewish children (75-94 percent of whom, living in Sderot and between the ages of 4-18, as one example, exhibit symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder), nor did they call for an end to the terrorism that Israeli military operations were attempting to curtail. But the sonic booms, nevertheless, were unacceptable.</p>
<p>Other scholarly publications have been intellectually hijacked with spurious studies that have a fundamental bias to them that discredits the validity of any research. The Canadian <em>Journal of Psychiatry,</em> for example, ran an article entitled “The prevalence of psychological morbidity in West Bank Palestinian children,” written, oddly enough, by a junior surgical resident and a microbiologist. When members of Scholars for Peace in the Middle East (SPME), an organization of academics seeking balance in discussion of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, became aware of this bit of defective scholarship, they analyzed the paper themselves and found that it was an example of “weak science, which included the lack of evidence or references, the lack of appropriate scientific design, the choice of nonstandardized test instruments and the inaccurate citing of the psychological literature.” What is more, the authors’ original thesis, “that ‘settlement encroachment’ was responsible for the problems of Palestinian children,” had relied on the psychiatric “expertise” of linguist Noam Chomsky, whose loathing of Israel is widely known, to help draw the study’s conclusions.</p>
<p>Supporters of the Palestinian cause have come to accept the fact that Israel will not be defeated through the use of traditional tools of warfare. Instead, the Jewish state’s enemies in the Middle East, abetted by their supporters in the West, have begun to use different, but equally dangerous, tactics to delegitimize and eventually destroy Israel in a cognitive war. By dressing up old hatreds against Jews, combined with a loathing of Israel, and repackaging them as seemingly pure scholarship, Israel’s ideological foes have found an effective, but odious, way to insure that the Jew of nations, Israel, is still accused of fostering social chaos and bringing harm to non-Jews—in the bright “lights of perverted science” Winston Churchill feared might well be unleashed by a Nazi victory in the Second World War.</p>
<p><strong><em>Richard L. Cravatts, Ph.D., is President of Scholars for Peace in the Middle East and the author of </em>Genocidal Liberalism: The University’s Jihad Against Israel &amp; Jews.</strong></p>
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		<title>Israel’s Morally Impossible Self-Defense</title>
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		<pubDate>Thu, 24 Jul 2014 04:49:17 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Richard L. Cravatts]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[condemnation]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Defense]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Hamas]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[Left]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=236821</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The only nation that is required to enter a suicide pact with its enemies.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/gh2.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-236822" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/gh2-450x253.jpg" alt="Israeli soldiers stand in front of Western Wall in Jerusalem's Old City" width="327" height="184" /></a>Seeming to give credence to Orwell’s observation that “Everyone believes in the atrocities of the enemy and disbelieves in those of his own side, without ever bothering to examine the evidence,” the world’s attention has turned once again to the clash between Hamas and Israel, as the Jewish state launches its ground incursion into Gaza in what is being called Operation Protective Edge. And predictably, as the body count rises on the Palestinian side, the moral arbiters of acceptable political behavior have begun condemning the Jewish state for its perceived abuses in executing its national self-defense.</p>
<p>Forgetting that Israel’s current campaign was necessitated by ceaseless rocket and mortar assaults on its southern towns from Hamas-controlled Gaza, international leaders and diplomats have initiated their moral hectoring of Israel as it attempts to shield its citizens from harm. Britain’s deputy Prime Minister, Nicolas Clegg, was <a href="http://www.barenakedislam.com/2014/07/18/uk-deputy-prime-minister-says-israeli-strikes-on-gaza-are-deliberately-disproportionate/">adamant</a> that Israel cease its self-defense. “I really would now call on the Israeli government to stop,” he said. “They have proved their point,” and had done so, in his opinion, through a deliberately “disproportionate form of collective punishment.”</p>
<p>UN Secretary-General, Ban Ki-moon, who presides over a morally bankrupt group comprised largely of despotic, authoritarian regimes, <a href="http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/3179848/posts">was quick to decide</a> that “Too many” Palestinian civilians have been killed, and that he “feels a sense of responsibility for the Palestinians who, especially in the Gaza Strip, have long been denied the sense of freedom and dignity that they deserve,” presumably overlooking those same human rights being denied to Israelis who have lived under a rain of rockets since 2005.</p>
<p>But the most insidious refrain, one uttered only when Israel’s enemies are killed (certainly not when Jews are murdered), is that Israel’s military response is too aggressive, that the force and effect of the excursion into Gaza are beyond what is permitted under human rights law and the rules of war. Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, for instance, <a href="http://english.alarabiya.net/en/News/middle-east/2014/07/09/Israel-hits-160-Gaza-Strip-targets-overnight.html">brushed aside any talk of justifiable self-defense</a>, asserting that “. . . Israel is not defending itself, it is defending settlements, its main project.” Moreover, the deaths so far of some 200 Palestinians in the latest incursion is, according to Mr. Abbas, tantamount to “. . . genocide—the killing of entire families is genocide by Israel against our Palestinian people,” indicating both an ignorance of what that term actually signifies and a blindness to actual genocides occurring presently at the hand of his co-religionists elsewhere in the world.</p>
<p>The UN’s Humanitarian Coordinator for the Occupied Palestinian Territories, James Rawley, <a href="http://reliefweb.int/report/occupied-palestinian-territory/remarks-humanitarian-coordinator-occupied-palestinian">had thoughts</a> only for the Palestinian victims of the conflict, sanctimoniously announcing that the Israeli response must be “proportionate” to the threats posed by Hamas attacks, and that “Our thoughts must first be with those many [Palestinian] civilians who have already lost their lives, and the even greater number of who have suffered physical or psychological injuries.”</p>
<p>The remonstrations of its many and far-flung critics aside, Israel is not the international outlaw here, but a victim now involved in a defensive countermeasure to terrorism against its citizenry. In fact, in a 2008 <a href="http://www.jcpa.org/text/puzzle1.pdf">report</a>, Justus Reid Weiner and Dr. Avi Bell, two legal scholars at the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, noted that Hamas’s shelling of civilian targets within Israel’s borders—the direct cause of the current conflict—clearly violates international law and requires a military response from Israel, even though world observers have been oddly silent on the Palestinian incitement that is the cause of the present clashes.</p>
<p>“The Palestinian attacks,” they wrote, “violate one of the most basic rules of international humanitarian law, the rule of distinction, which requires combatants to aim all their attacks at legitimate targets – enemy combatants or objects that contribute to enemy military actions. Violations of the rule of distinction – attacks deliberately aimed at civilians or protected objects as such – are war crimes,” exactly what Hamas has been committing with its relentless rocket assaults. Hamas militants not only commit a war crime each time they lob a rocket or mortar into Israel from Gaza by virtue of the fact that the targets of those attacks are specifically and purposely civilian, not military, assets—a violation of the “distinction” rule—but also, in not wearing military uniforms and often posing as civilians, Hamas terrorists are also committing another crime, that of perfidy.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.icrc.org/ihl/4e473c7bc8854f2ec12563f60039c738/8a9e7e14c63c7f30c12563cd0051dc5c?OpenDocument">Article 48 of Additional Protocol I of the Geneva Conventions of 1949</a> is very clear about this prohibited behavior of combatants, stating that “[i]n order to ensure respect for and protection of the civilian population and civilian objects, the Parties to the conflict shall at all times distinguish between the civilian population and combatants and between civilian objects and military objectives and accordingly shall direct their operations only against military objectives.” Since the rockets Hamas aims at southern Israeli towns are launched randomly into civilian enclaves, and lack the technical sophistication to reliably be aimed at military targets even if that was Hamas’s actual intention, each of the 12,000 or so rockets that have come into Israel from Gaza since 2005 (including over 1000 this month alone) represents both an <em>causis belli</em> and a war crime.</p>
<p>“It is a central principle of just war theory,” <a href="http://strategicstudiesinstitute.army.mil/pubs/parameters/articles/09spring/walzer.pdf">observed</a> Dr. Michael Walzer, Professor Emeritus at the Institute for Advanced Study, “that the self-defense of a people or a country cannot be made morally impossible.” Israel faces that precise dilemma every time it is forced to suppress Palestinian aggression and protect its populace from unending rocket assaults, particularly since its actions are widely and almost immediately denounced as excessive, disproportionate, and in violation of international law. Perceived as having unjustly dispossessed the Palestinians and accused of still occupying both the West Bank but also Gaza (and holding the latter under siege), and collectively punishing the Palestinian Arabs living there, Israel has been stripped of its moral standing in the community of nations and so its attempts at self-defense are at best tolerated.</p>
<p>Rather than serving as a deterrent against attacks of terrorists, Israel’s military strength and capabilities are instead looked at as an unfair advantage in the asymmetrical war in which it finds itself. Few leaders in the West and none in the Arab world ever condemn Hamas for its chronic, unlawful terroristic behavior toward Israel, but the moment Israel undertakes military action it receives strict warnings for restraint, censure for its success in neutralizing Hamas strongholds, and eventual condemnation for the inevitable deaths of civilians—the collateral damage that is the tragic byproduct of conflicts fought in neighborhoods rather than battlefields.</p>
<p>Israel, which is promiscuously condemned for committing “crimes against humanity” and human rights violations, not only waited years before responding to Palestinian terrorism, but then, in one of the most populous areas on earth, scrupulously followed the rule of distinction by precisely targeting Hamas terrorists and infrastructure, with minimal, though still unfortunate, collateral damage to the Gaza civilian population – a feat made all the more difficult by Hamas’s insidious tactic of embedding rocket launchers and armament stores within homes, apartment buildings, schools, and mosques in residential neighborhoods.</p>
<p>Combat in the crowded streets and alleys of Gaza obviously makes warfare more difficult for Israel, especially in its attempt to minimize civilian casualties while maximizing the suppression of enemy fire and attempting to neutralize Hamas’s ability to continue to pose a threat in the future. Since, as mentioned, Hamas militants do not wear identifying uniforms, and embed themselves within civilian environments, Israel’s effort to maintain “distinction”— that is, scrupulously determining who is a legitimate military target and who is a civilian— is normally challenging and dangerous. And, knowing that the world community is apt to be harsh about any civilian deaths that result from Israel’s offensive—even though it Hamas who has created the circumstances by which those civilians will and have perished—Israel has resorted to extraordinary measures to avoid the death of non-combatants, including “knocking” on roofs to warm of imminent bombardment, distributing flyers, and using other warning techniques, all of which compromise Israel’s strategic advantage while helping to minimize civilian deaths. Even so, when the inevitable Palestinian civilian deaths occur (which seem to be a welcomed part of Hamas’s cognitive war against Israel), Israel is accused of violating the rule of “proportionality,” the other aspect of warfare which international law requires that prohibits a military response that causes more civilian deaths than would be considered necessary in achieving a set military objective.</p>
<p>In fact, collateral damage – the accidental killing of civilians during military conflicts – is itself allowed by international law, provided the actions that caused the civilian deaths are not, according to Weiner and Bell, excessive in relation to the military need. But the fact that deaths occur in civilian populations – even what might be perceived as excessive deaths – are not in and of themselves indicative of violations of international law, and, says Weiner and Bell, “if a state, like Israel, is facing aggression, then proportionality addresses whether force was specifically used by Israel to bring an end to the armed attack against it.”</p>
<p>The practice of Hamas of using human shields, as well as storing munitions and weaponry in civilian neighborhoods and non-military buildings, also absolves Israel from some of the proportionality requirements, since the use of human shields and the perfidy of Hamas in the first place puts the fault for civilian deaths on it, rather than Israel. Israel indiscriminately pummeling Gaza with bombardment from the air—with many resulting civilian deaths—would violate the rule of proportionality and could be considered a war crime; Israel responding to rocket fire from an apartment building and, in the process, killing civilians (even a large number of them) who were in the building with Hamas combatants is allowed, as long as Israel’s intent was to achieve a military objective and not just to exact revenge or capriciously murder civilians. Even errors which lead to the death of civilians are acceptable, as long as the military purpose was the motivating factor in the assault, since, as Jonathan F. Keiler<em>,</em> former captain in the Army&#8217;s Judge-Advocate General Corps, <a href="http://www.army.mil/article/25298/The_End_of_Proportionality/">noted</a>,“we do not determine criminality based on outcome, but intent.”</p>
<p>Proportionality also does not require that the number of deaths—either of Hamas militants or Palestinian civilians—be equal to the number of deaths suffered by Israel, or to damage done to Israeli infrastructure or military targets. One moral challenge in asymmetrical war is that observers in the world community intuitively feel that Israel’s disproportionate military strength makes the conflict fundamentally “unfair,” that because it is technologically and logistically able to exact more harm on the Palestinians, Israel should restrain itself to minimize enemy casualties. That may be a compelling emotional response, but it is, of course, not a legal or moral argument with any weight. In fact, it is precisely because of Israel’s military superiority that a rational adversary would have been deterred from attacking in the first place.</p>
<p>The fact that Hamas chose to challenge an adversary with disproportionate military capability indicates that the decision was either irrational or some type of collective death wish; in either instance, the Palestinians, and the world at large, cannot now expect Israel not to use every means possible to protect its citizenry from both immediate and future assaults by genocidal terrorists who wish to murder Jews and destroy the Jewish state. No nation is required to enter a suicide pact with its enemies, and no nation can be expected to wait until enemy rockets successfully reach an apartment building or school, forcing Israel to play, in the <a href="http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB123085925621747981">words</a> of Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz, “Russian roulette with its children.”</p>
<p><strong>Richard L. Cravatts, PhD, President of Scholars for Peace in the Middle East, is the author of <em>Genocidal Liberalism: The University’s Jihad Against Israel &amp; Jews</em>.</strong></p>
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		<title>The Agony of Moral Defeat</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/richard-l-cravatts/the-agony-of-moral-defeat/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-agony-of-moral-defeat</link>
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		<pubDate>Fri, 07 Mar 2014 05:40:10 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Richard L. Cravatts]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[divestment]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Harvard]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[palestinians]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Sandra Y.L. Korn]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[UCLA]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=220320</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[A tale of two leftists and their broken dreams.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/harvard.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-220417" alt="harvard" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/harvard-450x325.jpg" width="270" height="195" /></a>Perhaps when literary critic C.S. Lewis despaired of “omnipotent moral busybodies . . . who torment us for our own good,” he was speaking about those well-meaning, but naïve college students who “torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.” Lewis’s observation seemed to have been given credence in the past weeks by the very public, tendentious rants of two coeds, one at Harvard University and one at UCLA, as they railed against a world in which their dreams of social justice for the oppressed and weak was not being realized, despite their best efforts.</p>
<p>In the first instance, in an op-ed in the <i>Harvard Crimson </i>entitled “The Doctrine of Academic Freedom,” Sandra Y.L. Korn, majoring at Harvard, tellingly, in the history of science and studies of women, gender and sexuality, decided that academic freedom was undeserved by those who hold beliefs different than hers and her fellow “moral busybodies”— those who have decided what is moral, what is right, and what is acceptable speech and behavior on Harvard’s campus and in the world beyond. “Why should we put up with research that counters our goals simply in the name of ‘academic freedom?’,” she asked, seemingly without embarrassment. Academic freedom, she contended, should be put in check so that unwelcomed viewpoints can be suppressed. As an alternative virtue, she suggested “a more rigorous standard: one of ‘academic justice.’”</p>
<p>One example of how that justice might be applied, at the expense of academic freedom, was the recent academic boycott against Israeli academics called for by the American Studies Association (ASA). Though the boycott was subsequently denounced by over 200 university presidents and scores of academic organizations and scholars, Ms. Korn thinks that the loss of academic freedom by Israelis is of secondary importance to her notion of “academic justice;” that is, justice for the oppressed, the victimized, the marginalized, the weak. “The ASA, like three other academic associations,” she wrote, “decided to boycott out of a sense of social justice, responding to a call by Palestinian civil society organizations for boycotts, divestment, and sanctions until Israel ends its occupation of Palestine.” Despite universal protestations from many people far more insightful than Ms. Korn, in her mind, any critics of the boycott are, by definition, morally wrong, and, she asserted, “only <a href="http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2014/1/21/a-just-boycott-for-palestinian-rights/">those who care about justice</a> can take the moral upper hand.”</p>
<p>The UCLA incident revealed a similar Leftist obsession with obtaining social justice for the Palestinians, even if it necessitates the weakening or destruction of the Jewish state. On February 26<sup>th</sup> , the UCLA undergraduate student government voted 7-5 against a Students for Justice in Palestine-proposed “Resolution to Divest from Companies that Violate Palestinian Human Rights,” including specific corporations:  Caterpillar, Cement Roadstone Holdings, Cemez, General Electric, and Hewlett-Packard. After the charged hearings, which included some 500 people in the audience and went on for ten hours, an identified UCLA undergraduate, who was serving as a note taker for the hearings, broke down and railed at the cameras with an expletive-laden rant about how disappointed she was that the resolution failed, how ashamed she was of the racists and bad people who voted against divestment, and how Palestinians would now continue to be “hurt” because of their inaction. For two minutes the hysterical woman can be seen screaming “I’ve never been so f***ing disappointed” and complaining that “we just f***ing blew it” by not passing the corrosive divestment resolution.</p>
<p>Many pro-Israel commentators gleefully parodied the whimpering student when the video went viral, suggesting that her behavior typified the dangerous liberalism which elevates the Palestinian cause at the expense of Israel’s survival. But the reality is more troubling than that: this woman, like the Harvard undergraduate who wishes to live in a world where only her predetermined virtues and worldview prevail, feels quite strongly that, in the case of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, at least, the answers are black and white, there is a moral side and an immoral side, and that anyone who does not, or cannot, see things as clearly and unambiguously as these gifted undergraduates do is a racist, an oppressor, an imperialist, a colonizer, or a supporter of an illegal, apartheid regime trampling the human rights of a blameless indigenous people.</p>
<p>As commonly happens when liberals appraise the relative merits of their own countries and others, one set of expectations is used to measure Third-world countries and their leaders, and a totally different, far more stringent (if not unreasonable) set is used when evaluating the behavior and values of the United States, the EU, or Israel. This cynical, nearly hypocritical, view has meant that the Left frequently denounces Western democracies as imperialistic, racist, militaristic oppressors, precisely because they wish them to evolve to a purer, newly-structured society and feel that they have the collective insight and moral strength to effect this change as they strive for the social justice, or its intellectually-flaccid offspring, “academic justice,” a nebulous term lifted from Marxist thought which empowers Left-leaning administrators, students, and faculty with the false ethical security derived from feeling that they are bringing positive moral and ethical precepts to campuses.</p>
<p>For that reason, Israel is continually slandered as a racist state, an aggressive, militaristic regime that inflicts disproportionate suffering on the hapless Palestinians, lubricating the argument that this inequality is inherently and inexorably wrong, that it must be corrected and made just. Thus, when such radical campus groups as Students for Justice in Palestine have as their core mission, as their name implies, bringing their own vision of justice to the Middle East, it is justice <i>only</i> for the oppressed, the Palestinians, and not for the perceived oppressor, Israel, whose position of power was made possible only because of military strength and imperialistic tendencies.</p>
<p>For the Left, social justice is solely for the disenfranchised, the ‘victims’ of unjust Western societies, those whose suffering is ostensibly caused by and is the fault of imperialistic, capitalistic, militant, hegemonic nations—America and Israel foremost among them. And on campuses, where liberal professors have nearly made sacred the politics of race and class and have identified specific sets of favored victim groups for whom justice will be sought, the cult of “victimhood” has even led to compulsory instruction on the mechanics of achieving social justice for the weak in society.</p>
<p>The new academic dialogue over the concept of social justice obviously has found a fitting locus with concern for the Palestinian cause, since the concept of social justice is particularly applicable on highly-politicized campuses when, as in the case of the Palestinians, the absence of a new Arab state is perceived to be the fault of Israel alone. Compassion for the dispossessed and the weak on the part of the Left has also seen the growth of a whole different set of ethical standards by which the actions of powerful nations—primarily Israel and the U.S—are judged as compared to weaker, developing, sometimes clearly inferior nations, based on their political and international behavior.</p>
<p>In their mission to protect the sensibilities and emotional well-being of identified campus victim groups, universities, often violating their own written guidelines and codes of behavior, have also instituted speech codes to prevent what is generally called “hate speech” now, but which has become a perverse tactic to marginalize, and exclude, the speech and ideology of those with whom liberals and Leftists do not agree, those individuals who express ideas that offend the sensibility of Ms. Korn, for example. Because they feel they have the moral high ground and a much more profound insight into social justice and the rights of the oppressed victim groups with whom they share an intellectual affinity, Leftists are fervent in their belief that they, therefore, have a right to unfettered speech to promulgate their own high-minded views; in fact, the speech of their ideological opponents, simply by virtue of the fact that it contradicts the moral principles that the Leftist holds dear, is regularly regarded as “hate speech” that can be ignored, punished, or, as happens with increasing regularity, shut down completely and excluded from the campus conversation.</p>
<p>That core sentiment has come to define the Boycotts, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement, and was on full display at UCLA during the divestment debate: it is the notion that the repeated defamation of Israel will result in its eventual expulsion from the supposed civilized community of nations. But the call for divestment is merely a tactic through which Israel will be marginalized, and eventually extirpated, as a pariah state with no moral justification for existing.</p>
<p>The acting out and vitriolic language against Israel that so often defines campus anti-Israelism may make the activists feel good about themselves for striving for social justice, but, as journalist Khaled Abu Toameh has contended, these are hollow efforts, that “[i]nstead of investing money and efforts in organizing Israel Apartheid Week, for example, the self-described ‘pro-Palestinians’ could dispatch a delegation of teachers to Palestinian villages and refugee camps to teach young Palestinians English. Or they could send another delegation to the Gaza Strip to monitor human rights violations by the Hamas authorities and help Palestinian women confront Muslim fundamentalists who are trying to limit their role to cooking, raising children and looking after the needs of their husbands.” What was Abu Toameh’s conclusion about this misdirected effort to support the Palestinian cause? “What is happening on the U.S. campuses,” he wrote, “is not about supporting the Palestinians as much as it is about promoting hatred for the Jewish state. It is not really about ending the ‘occupation’ as much as it is about ending the existence of Israel . . ,” and “we should not be surprised if the next generation of jihadists comes not from the Gaza Strip or the mountains and mosques of Pakistan and Afghanistan, but from university campuses across the U.S.”</p>
<div>
<p>“The whole problem with the world,” observed philosopher Bertrand Russell, “is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, but wiser people so full of doubts.” That these two undergraduates display a certainty that is so stringent and so contrary to intellectual inquiry should give us all pause, and might make us question if we are teaching a whole generation of college students <i>what</i> to think instead of <i>how</i> to think.</p>
</div>
<p><strong><i>Richard L. Cravatts, PhD, is president of Scholars for Peace in the Middle East and the author of </i>Genocidal Liberalism: The University’s Jihad Against Israel &amp; Jews.</strong></p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>.   </b></p>
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		<title>The Guilt of Israeli Scholars</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/richard-l-cravatts/the-guilt-of-israeli-scholars/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-guilt-of-israeli-scholars</link>
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		<pubDate>Fri, 17 Jan 2014 05:12:45 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Richard L. Cravatts]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Academics]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[boycott]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Israel]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Left]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Scholars]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=216634</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The accusations which aren't made against any other academics from any other country. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/bc.gif"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-216653" alt="bc" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/bc.gif" width="263" height="170" /></a>As one shocking example of how ideologically detached the professoriate of U.S. universities have become from the thought and beliefs of normal citizens, at a 2003 “peace rally” at Columbia University held to denounce America’s initiation of the liberation of Iraq from Saddam Hussein’s treachery, many were stunned and mortified when Columbia anthropology professor Nicholas De Genova asserted the insidious, perverse notion that “The only true heroes are those who find ways that help defeat the U.S. military. I personally would like to see a million Mogadishus,” alluding to the 1993 ambush and slaughter of American forces in Somalia.</p>
<p>Opposition to the government, its military policies, the War on Terror, the Patriot Act, extrajudicial assassinations by unmanned drones—all of these, at various times and during different presidential administrations, have drawn the condemnation of great swathes of academia, precisely because, like Professor De Genova, the academy has become ideologically imbalanced. In fact, a 2003 study, “How Politically Diverse Are the Social Sciences and Humanities?,” identified the existence of highly-biased campuses where self-identified Democrats (liberals) outnumber Republicans (conservatives) at alarming rates, with “results [that] support the view that the social science and humanities faculty are pretty much a one-party system.”  The study found that the ratios between Democrats and Republicans in the different academic departments ranged from a low of 3-to-1 in Economics to a shocking 30.2-to-1 imbalance of Democrats to Republicans among Anthropology faculty, the average of the ratios being 15.1-to-1.</p>
<p>As the recent calls for boycotts and sanctions against Israeli universities by the American Studies Association (ASA) and the Modern Language Association (MLA) clearly indicate, an ideological imbalance in the professoriate has resulted in a collective antipathy toward Israel as the latest villain in the academic Left’s panoply of oppressors—this time of the victim of the moment, the Palestinians.  These alleged transgressions on the part of Israel are often further conflated with the view that the “brutal occupation” of Zionism has unleashed “crimes against humanity” through U.S. complicity, that as its proxy in the Middle East, Israel tarnishes America through its misdeeds and mirrors the U.S.’s own imperialistic, militant, and anti-Muslim impulses.</p>
<p>This view of the colonial oppression by the occupier, Israel, against a guiltless indigenous people, the Palestinians, is, of course, nothing new on campus. What was unique about the MLA’s and the ASA’s approach was the breathtakingly Orwellian notion that not only was the Jewish state itself guilty of the many alleged transgressions assigned to it by its libelers, but a boycott against Israeli academics was warranted because the academic establishment itself is complicit in Zionism’s excesses and a core element of the bemoaned occupation, oppression, and denial of Palestinian self-determination.</p>
<p>This fatuous notion, in fact, is one of the core principles of the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI), articulated in its “Academic Freedom or Academic Privilege: In defense of the Academic Boycott of Israel,” which suggests that “Israeli universities . . . are part and parcel of the prevailing ideology that accepts and treats the political regime in all its aspects—the military, the intelligence agencies, the government—as a benign feature of the social-political landscape.” Moreover, in the post-colonial gibberish that characterizes the language of victimhood, it is <i>academics themselves</i> who facilitate and perpetuate the unjust occupation, since, in the PACBI’s view, “academia is, by and large, Israel’s <i>most</i> effective propaganda tool to colonize people’s minds and falsely project the state as a normal country on the world stage despite its violations of international law, and its occupation, apartheid and colonialism.”</p>
<p>At the MLA annual conference in Chicago this month, delegates considered a resolution to call on the U.S. State Department “to contest Israel&#8217;s arbitrary denials of entry to Gaza and the West Bank by U.S. academics who have been invited to teach, confer, or do research at Palestinian universities.”  The panel discussion which addressed that issue was called, “Academic Boycotts: A Conversation about Israel and Palestine,” and included, as one of its panelists, Omar Barghouti, the co-founder of the PACBI. His view is that Israeli academia not only has a moral obligation to right the wrongs in Israel, but it is a co-enabler, if not co-conspirator, in the continued occupation and oppression of Palestinians.</p>
<p>“For decades,” Barghouti has written, “Israeli academic institutions have been complicit in Israel’s colonial and racist policies. Funded by the government, they have consistently and organically contributed to the military-security establishment, and, therefore, to perpetuating its crimes, its abuse of Palestinian human rights and its distinct system of apartheid.” Ignoring the highly-visible contingent of Israeli academics on the far Left who ferociously denounce the same Zionism, occupation, and oppression that are Barghouti’s regular targets of attack, he nonetheless contends that academics do not merely accept Israeli policies affecting the Palestinians, their research and scholarship helps perpetuate the status quo. “Not only do most Israeli academics defend or justify their state’s colonial narrative,” Barghouti suggests, “they play a more active role in the process of oppression.”</p>
<p>Why an academic boycott? Because, Barghouti says, a boycott “directly targets the academy itself as one of the pillars of this oppressive order.”  And the language of the ASA resolution that led to a vote to boycott Israeli academic institutions contained the nearly identical sentiment, namely, the ASA’s decision was based on a recognition of “the extent to which Israeli institutions of higher education are a party to state policies that violate human rights.”</p>
<p>Making academics responsible for—even complicit in—the machinations of the current government, and justifying a boycott as a result—as if Israeli academics, in this instance, even have the collective power to influence and change the status of the occupation and other aspects of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict—is normally an anathematic proposition for professors, just as it would have been for the patriotic Professor De Genova if Columbia University had been boycotted for the perceived excesses of the Bush White House during the invasion of Iraq.</p>
<p>And besides applying a perverse double standard to Israeli academics by making them liable for the actions of their government, and punishing them for this perceived liability, the idea that universities in Israel are any more influential in shaping government policy, administering the nation’s laws, or overseeing its defense is itself a radical departure from what is ever blamed on the university and the people who comprise it.  The ASA also made central to its academic boycott the idea that Israeli universities conduct research to support Israel’s military, and that this research contributes to the continuing plight of the Palestinians. “This complicity has been extensively documented,” the ASA web site reads, “and manifests through direct research and production of military technologies,” including the “development of weapon systems used by the occupation army in committing grave violations of human rights.”</p>
<p>As the academic boycotters might have noticed, and should know had they not been experiencing paroxysms of self-righteous indignation towards Israel, like Israel’s universities, U.S. universities rely on, and frequently accept, billions of dollars of defense-applied contracts from the Department of Defense; specifically, between 2000 and 2006 the total number of contracts to universities rose from 5,887 to 52,667, with $46.7 billion granted to universities in 2006 alone.</p>
<p>In fact, many of the universities where some of the foremost defamers of Israel teach have benefitted from the largesse of the Department of Defense, and could, by the same logic being applied to Israeli universities, be condemned for facilitating and contributing to the creation of the military/industrial complex that many on the Left decry as emblematic of U.S. imperialism, colonialism, and militarism, similar to how Israel is maligned for the same offenses. Those anti-Israel American scholars, then, would find themselves boycotted, even though they obviously do not share the ideology of an imperialistic, hegemonic United States.</p>
<p>David Lloyd, another anti-Israel, pro-boycott speaker who spoke on the MLA panel, is a professor at UC Riverside, part of the California university system that, in 2009, received $766,179,039 in defense-related research funding. That embarrassing detail about his own university system aside, Lloyd is still content with denouncing any connection with Israeli universities and the country’s military. “By endorsing the boycott,” he wrote, “we withhold our consent from collaboration with academic institutions that are part and parcel of Israel&#8217;s ongoing occupation, furnishing its technical infrastructure and expanding onto stolen lands.” Israeli academics’ silence, for Lloyd, is consent—and complicity. “We continue to wait for Israel&#8217;s own institutions to condemn forthrightly both the occupation and the denial of academic freedom to Palestinians.”</p>
<p>Stanford University, as another example, which in 2011 received nearly $72 million from the Department of Defense, is home to Joel Beinin, professor of history and Middle East history.  Beinin, a self-proclaimed Marxist, is a rabid anti-Zionist who singles out Israel for criticism of its varied and frequent transgressions, all the while excusing the social and political defects of the neighboring Arab states who surround it and blaming the pathologies of the Middle East on Western imperialism and the continuing colonial impact of the U.S.&#8217;s proxy in the Levant, Israel. In fact, in those rare instances when Beinin is even willing to admit to the existence of Islamic terrorism, he is quick to find its root cause with its victims, not its perpetrators. Terrorism, Beinin has wildly suggested, is a “product of postcolonial anxieties about U.S. global supremacy, and the regional dominance of the U.S. alliance [with Israel] in the Middle East,” not, of course, the product of a jihadist impulse of barbaric madmen seeking to impose their own form of Islamic imperialism in the Middle East and into the West, as well.</p>
<p>Beinin&#8217;s intent, as it is for Israel-haters worldwide, is to make any defensive actions on the part of Israel seem an overreaction, regardless of how many of its citizens have been murdered or how many threats against its very existence have been proclaimed. “According to both Ehud Barak and Ariel Sharon,” Beinin wrote, dismissively, “Israel is engaged in a war <i>despite the spectacularly unequal military balance in the conflict</i>,” as if a nation reacting to unprovoked attacks on its citizens is compelled to insure that its enemy is equally armed and that the fight will be “fair”—something only a college professor, from the comfort and safety of his Stanford office, could possibly consider.</p>
<p>Another Israel-loathing, anti-American academic who shares Beinin’s worldview is Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s unctuous Noam Chomsky. MIT, like Stanford, has also been very successful in attracting Department of Defense funding, $876,792,510 in 2009 alone, which has seemingly not impeded Chomsky from making his views widely known about how atrocious his country and its military are.</p>
<p>Chomsky, who Harvard’s Alan Dershowitz has called the “godfather” of anti-Israel thought, when he is not lecturing on the evils of American capitalism and its ruthless lust for “empire,” busies himself by blaming Israel for every problem of the Middle East’s highly dysfunctional, authoritarian regimes. If Chomsky’s vituperation against America has been a defining theme in his intellectual jihad, an obsessive, apoplectic hatred for Israel has more completely dominated his screeds and spurious scholarship.  Like other anti-Zionists in the West and in the Arab world, Chomsky does not even recognize the legitimacy of Israel, believing that its very existence was, and is, a moral transgression against an indigenous people, and that the creation of Israel was “wrong and disastrous . . . There is not now and never will be democracy in Israel.” And Israeli Jews are not solely responsible for the crimes of the Jewish state; American Jews, too, in Chomsky’s opinion, share culpability. “In the American Jewish community,” he scolded, “there is little willingness to face the fact that the Palestinian Arabs have suffered a monstrous historical injustice, whatever one may think of the competing claims. Until this is recognized, discussion of the Middle East crisis cannot even begin.”</p>
<p>Chomsky draws the perverse parallel between Israelis and Nazis so frequently in his writings that, to paraphrase the wry Professor Edward Alexander, he would be rendered nearly speechless if he was unable to use the epithet of Nazi against Israel in every sentence he utters. The rogue state of “Israel has tried killing, beating, gassing, mass arrests, deportation, destruction of houses, curfews and other forms of harsh collective punishment,” Chomsky wrote, and yet, even in the face of this hideous, Nazi-like behavior by Israel, “nothing has succeeded in enforcing obedience or eliciting a violent response.”</p>
<p>In 2011, the University of Michigan was awarded almost $15 million in defense contracts, which ought to have been upsetting to the school’s conspiracy-frenzied Juan Cole, whose regular rants in his blog, <i>Informed Comment</i>, take swipes at Israeli and American defense, while simultaneously excusing Arab complicity for violence or terror. In fact, according to Cole, it is the militancy of the West that causes the endemic problems in the Middle East, and makes America guilty for its moral and financial support of Israel. “When Ariel Sharon sends American-made helicopter gunships and F-16s to fire missiles into civilian residences or crowds in streets,” Cole wrote in 2004, “as he has done more than once, then he makes the United States complicit in his war crimes and makes the United States hated among friends of the Palestinians. And this aggression and disregard of Arab life on the part of the proto-fascist Israeli Right has gotten more than one American killed, including American soldiers.”  There is, of course, no mention in Cole’s fantasies about why American or Israeli soldiers would be involved in military actions in the first place, affirming the view that it is Western imperialism and oppression that disrupt and embroil the otherwise taciturn political state of the Arab world.</p>
<p>The run-up to the Iraq war, Cole suggested, was simply another example of the manipulation of U.S. foreign policy under the influence of the nefarious Likud, operating in a behind-the-scenes cabal within the American government. “It is an echo of the one-two punch secretly planned by the pro-Likud faction in the Department of Defense,” Cole revealed. “First, Iraq would be taken out by the United States, and then Iran . . . These pro-Likud intellectuals concluded that 9-11 would give them carte blanche to use the Pentagon as Israel&#8217;s Gurkha regiment, fighting elective wars on behalf of Tel Aviv (not wars that really needed to be fought, but wars that the Likud coalition thought it would be nice to see fought so as to increase Israel&#8217;s ability to annex land and act aggressively, especially if someone else&#8217;s boys did the dying).”</p>
<p>At Harvard, which annually receives some $44 million of DoD funding, Sara Roy, a researcher at the University&#8217;s Center for Middle East Studies (CMES), has been an apologist for Hamas, intent on absolving Hamas from any wrongdoing. She and Boston University professor Augustus Richard Norton co-authored an article for the <i>Christian Science Monitor</i> in which they conjured up the fantasy of a “New Hamas,” a now-benign political group the authors felt were deserving of recognition by Western diplomats. And in her own op-ed in the <i>Monitor</i>, she only started counting rockets lobbed into Israel from Gaza after, she said, Israel violated some illusory cease fire of which apparently only she and the “new” Hamas were aware. In her view, it seemingly was only Israel&#8217;s defensive reaction to the attempted murder of its citizens that prompted Hamas rocket attacks from Gaza, nothing else. “Since Nov. 4,” Roy wrote, “when Israel effectively broke the truce with Hamas by attacking Gaza on a scale then unprecedented—a fact now buried with Gaza&#8217;s dead—the violence has escalated as Hamas responded by sending hundreds of rockets into Israel to kill Israeli civilians.”</p>
<p>Those who have criticized the decisions by the ASA and the MLA to call for academic boycotts against Israeli universities, did so, first, because academic boycotts are antithetical to the core principles upon which the university was founded. That is, suppressing the academic freedom of one country’s scholars, making it impossible for them to express their views or disseminate their scholarship, and banishing them from contact with other scholars defies what the university is supposed to stand for—among other things, an open and free exchange of ideas in an international “marketplace of ideas.” That alone is reason to reject calls for academic boycotts.</p>
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<p>But the current accusation made against Israeli scholars—which are not, tellingly, made against any other academics from any other country—that imputes a moral responsibility on Israeli academics for the political behavior of their government is particularly baleful. In this perverse assault on academic integrity, and even good sense, a whole nation of scholars is tarred with same brush of virulent anti-Israel activism, so, as commentator Howard Jacobson put it, “All are guilty by association with the heinous ideology of their country, that is to say, guilty by simple virtue of being Israelis.”</p>
</div>
<p><strong><i>Richard L. Cravatts, PhD, author of </i>Genocidal Liberalism: The University’s Jihad Against Israel &amp; Jews<i>, is president of Scholars for Peace in the Middle East.</i></strong></p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>.</b></p>
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		<title>Moral Narcissism and the MLA’s Obsession with Israel</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/richard-l-cravatts/moral-narcissism-and-the-mlas-obsession-with-israel/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=moral-narcissism-and-the-mlas-obsession-with-israel</link>
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		<pubDate>Wed, 08 Jan 2014 05:30:42 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Richard L. Cravatts]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[American Studies Association]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Anti-Semitism]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[boycott]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Israel]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[west bank]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=214744</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The lure of Palestinianism.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/mla.gif"><img class="alignleft size-full wp-image-214748" alt="mla" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/mla.gif" width="250" height="136" /></a>Characterized by the same paroxysms of self-righteousness as were evident in the much-maligned and tendentious academic boycott by the American Studies Association (ASA) last month, members of the Modern Language Association (MLA) head to Chicago during the first week of January for the organization’s 129th convention. The annual meeting, which is generally attended by a third of the MLA’s 30,000 members, has, as <i>New Criterion</i> editor, Roger Kimball, wryly noted, customarily “provided observers of the academic scene with a spectacle as appalling as it is rich in unintended comedy,” complete with a “full range of barbarous jargon, intellectual pos­turing, and aggressive politicization that has infected the academic study of the human­ities in this country . . . .”</p>
<p>But this year’s conference promises even more intellectual acting out, given that the MLA’s Radical Caucus has proposed a resolution that will call on the U.S. State Department “to contest Israel&#8217;s arbitrary denials of entry to Gaza and the West Bank by U.S. academics who have been invited to teach, confer, or do research at Palestinian universities.” Why the focus on Israel by these scholars of the English language and humanities?  Because, as presiding officer Samer M. Ali smugly put it, as far as the MLA is concerned, Israel deserves to be demonized for its perceived transgressions, and the “question that [attendees] will be debating is not whether Israel is violating the rights of Palestinians, but what to do about it.”</p>
<p>The lure of Palestinianism has proven to be positivity irresistible to left-leaning humanists and literary scholars who burrow into Western thought to uncover the dark underpinnings of imperialism, militarism, colonialism, oppression, racism, and, as a result of one of the MLA’s notorious past presidents, Edward Said, the theory of “Orientalism,” a mode of thought which claimed to reveal the inherent racism and imperialism imbedded in Western scholarship and politics. The fascination with Third-world victimism, identity politics, and multiculturalism, coupled with harsh critiques of both the U.S. and its proxy in the Middle East, Israel, have all led academics like those in the ASA and the MLA—whose fields are, in a normal world, unrelated to these issues—to involve themselves aggressively in answering calls for boycotts, divestment, and sanctions solely against the Jewish state.</p>
<p>As a result of this obsessive reverence for the purported victims of Israeli policies, one panel planned for the MLA meeting has drawn considerable attention, “Academic Boycotts: A Conversation about Israel and Palestine,” which, as the MLA website put it, “addresses the political movement Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions against Israel, seen by its defenders as a viable means to end the Palestinian occupation.” Besides its seeming irrelevancy at a conference for scholars of language and humanities, this odious panel has been condemned for its blatant one-sidedness: each of the four panelists is a vocal and avowed ideological enemy of, and proponent of boycotts against, Israel.</p>
<p>One of them, Omar Barghouti, ironically also a doctoral student at Tel Aviv University, is the co-founder of the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI), which has been relentlessly urging academic associations to institute boycotts against Israel. Barghouti apologizes for and condones the murder of Jews by Arab terrorists, having mistakenly asserted that “International law does give people under occupation the right to resist in any way, including armed resistance.” He also, as is characteristic of those in the BDS movement, accuses Israel of being a racist entity, suggesting that apartheid is “alive and well inside Israel . . ; it is legalized and institutionalized racism and that&#8217;s what makes it apartheid.”</p>
<p>Another panelist, University of California’s David C. Lloyd, is one of BDS’s original supporters, whose belief it is that “If there has been anywhere a systematic denial of academic freedom to a whole population, rather than to specific individuals or to institutions, it is surely in Palestine under Israeli occupation.”  Moreover, Lloyd has proclaimed, Israel is committing something he calls “scholasticide” on the hapless Palestinians, since, as he wrote, “Palestinian education, like Palestinian culture and civil society, has been systematically and maliciously targeted for destruction, and “in the time-honored manner of settler colonialism, a powerful and well-armed state seeks to extinguish the cultural life and identity of an indigenous people.”</p>
<p>The fulminations against Israel expected from this panel are not surprising given the MLA’s ideological history, nor is the fact that its members have collectively already determined that this panel will be a monologue of vitriol aimed at the Jewish state, not an academic debate, and that there is one oppressor, Israel, and one victim, the Palestinians.  When it comes to Israel, even academics, people who have chosen as their life’s work scholarly discussion and open inquiry, are perfectly willing to vitiate what the academy is supposed to represent and abandon even the pretense of honest debate. The PACBI’s own language not only confirms its disdain for Israel’s side of the conversation, it specifically calls for suppressing opposing views, since Israel, in its view, is illegitimate for being a racist oppressor in the first place—exactly what is taking place on the MLA panel. “Events and projects,” PACBI guidelines read, “involving Palestinians and/or Arabs and Israelis that promote ‘balance’ between the ‘two sides’ in presenting their respective narratives or ‘traumas,’ as if on par, or are otherwise based on the false premise that the colonizers and the colonized, the oppressors and the oppressed, are equally responsible for the ‘conflict,’ are intentionally deceptive, intellectually dishonest and morally reprehensible.” In other words, the default position is that Israel is to blame, and that the Palestinians are blameless victims.</p>
<p>The charges of racism and oppression also enable the left-leaning members of the MLA to excuse the moral transgressions of the victim, and, as an extension of that thinking, to single out Israel and America for particular and harsh scrutiny owing to their perceived “institutionalized” racism and greater relative power. The self-righteousness the left feels in pointing out Zionism’s essential defect of being a racist ideology insulates it from having to also reflect on the social and cultural pathologies of Arab states, since, as Harvard’s Ruth Wisse has pointed out in <i>If I Am Not For Myself: The Liberal Betrayal of the Jews</i>, liberals can excuse their own betrayal of Israel by holding it fully responsible for the very hatreds it inspires. “In the case of the Arab war against the Jewish state,” Wisse wrote, “obscuring Arab intentions requires identifying Jews as the cause of the conflict. The notion of Jewish responsibility for Arab rejectionism is almost irresistibly attractive to liberals, because the truth otherwise seems so bleak.”</p>
<p>The rectitude of the MLA academics pushing for condemnations of Israel manifests itself as what Boston University professor Richard Landes has termed “moral narcissism,” the tendency of members of the well-meaning, intellectual elite to align with causes and ideological positions which are based, not on the actual viability or justice of a cause, but on how the moral narcissist feels about him- or herself by committing to a particular cause or movement. “A moral narcissist,” observed legal commentator Jay B. Gaskill, “lives in a self-approval bubble shared by other moral narcissists who collectively have agreed that their cocoon of mutually agreed moral gestures and self congratulations [sic] will constitute a perfect and sufficient engagement with an imperfect world.” Like other members of the academic left, who believe their worldview is correct because it seeks to create a world in which social equanimity will be realized by the downtrodden, members of the MLA, similar to their like-minded brethren in the ASA, are content to support such intellectually dishonest campaigns as academic boycott because it enables them to denounce Israel as an imperialistic, racist, militaristic oppressor. “Moral narcissists,” said Gaskill, “have adopted a camouflage strategy to escape the moral disapproval of others [and] . . . they accomplish this camouflage by cloaking their narcissism in the trappings of ‘social justice positioning.’” The moral narcissist’s reasoning may defective, ahistorical, counter-intuitive, or just wrong, but he still feels good about himself. But in this worldview there can be only one enemy of justice, and Israel is that enemy.</p>
<p>One wonders why, in asking the U.S. State Department to monitor and report on instances in which U.S. scholars are denied access to Palestinian schools in the West Bank and Gaza by Israel, the MLA’s resolution limited the request only to instances in which students and faculty are denied access to educational institutions as a result of Israeli policy? Would not the self-anointed guardians of academic freedom and unrestrained academic debate be concerned with similar injustices plaguing other nations surrounding the one country, Israel, where they have now focused their moral opprobrium?</p>
<p>The MLA is silent, for example, about the situation in Egypt where universities in November reversed their policy of preventing police from entering campuses to suppress student protests. A Cairo University student was shot in the head and killed by police one week later; at Al-Azhar University twelve students were sentenced to 17-year terms for a campus takeover, thirty-eight students were sentenced to year and a half sentences for protests, and another student was killed in his dorm by police.</p>
<p>No MLA resolutions were forthcoming when bomb blasts decimated the campus of Aleppo University in Syria during exam week, killing 82 and wounding 192 in the explosions. The MLA resolution also apparently does not request that the State Department monitor other instances where students are denied access to their schools, such as the September 2013 incident when security forces of the genocidal thugocracy of Hamas beat up and dispersed some 200 Palestinian students attempting to enter Egypt and travel to their universities through the Rafah crossing. Hamas has also been actively recruiting students from West Bank Palestinian universities and sending them through its dawa, or indoctrination, centers to recruit them into Islamist ideology and jihad.</p>
<p>The MLA scholars whose entire professional lives are defined by a love of books and learning were also curiously silent when two-thirds of over 80,000 historic books in the Greek Orthodox Al-Saeh Library in Tripoli were destroyed by arson this month, the fire set by Muslims enraged after a pamphlet insulting Mohammed was allegedly found in one of the library’s books.</p>
<p>One might expect that the MLA would also be concerned with women’s rights in the Middle East, given members like Berkeley’s feminist philosopher, Judith Butler, who notoriously delivered a paper at a past MLA conference entitled, “The Lesbian Phallus: Or, Does Heterosexuality Exist?,” and who more recently, and almost surreally, commented that it is important to view “Hamas/Hezbollah as social movements that are progressive, that are on the left, that are part of a global left.” Perhaps MLA resolutions should be passed to help offer Muslim women greater educational opportunities, since statistics indicate that while only 22 percent of men in the Middle East and North Africa are illiterate, that rate soars to 42 percent for Muslim women. Hamas also imposes dress codes on girls, and a UN report noted that in Egypt, over 99 percent of women and girls had experienced sexual harassment in some form.</p>
<p>And, finally, if MLA members are so concerned with education and Israel, and the side effects of social strife, perhaps they should also ask for State Department reports on the unrelenting rocket fire from Hamas-controlled Gaza into southern Israeli towns, such as Sderot, where over 43 percent of middle school students suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder as a result of prolonged shelling of civilian neighborhoods and schools since the 2005 disengagement.</p>
<div>
<p>Of course, the MLA’s Radical Caucus is silent on all of these obstacles to education and the free exchange of ideas, both in Israel, the West Bank and Gaza, and the wider world of Israel’s neighbors. It is easy to demonize Israel, and certainly it requires no bravery in academia, where moral narcissists console each other in an echo chamber of good intentions, willing to sacrifice academic integrity, true scholarship, and vigorous, honest debate in the process.</p>
</div>
<p><strong>Richard L. Cravatts, PhD, author of <i>Genocidal Liberalism: The University’s Jihad Against Israel &amp; Jews</i>, is President of Scholars for Peace in the Middle East.</strong></p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>.   </b></p>
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		<title>The ASA Boycott: Academic Freedom for Me, But Not for Thee</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/richard-l-cravatts/the-asa-boycott-academic-freedom-for-me-but-not-for-thee/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-asa-boycott-academic-freedom-for-me-but-not-for-thee</link>
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		<pubDate>Fri, 27 Dec 2013 05:03:52 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Richard L. Cravatts]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Anti-Semitism]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[ASA Boycott]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Israel]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[palestinians]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[universities]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=213958</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The dark and pernicious call for a boycott of Israeli universities.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/bc.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-213963" alt="bc" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/bc.jpg" width="336" height="210" /></a>Seeming to give credence to Orwell’s wry observation that “there are some ideas so absurd that only an intellectual could believe them,” the fatuous members of the American Studies Association (ASA) passed a December 15<sup>th</sup> resolution to institute an academic boycott against Israeli universities. Admitting that the organization consciously made the decision to ignore the academic transgressions of universities in any number of other totalitarian, oppressive countries which stifle dissent and imprison errant professors, and which might actually deserve to be censured, ASA president Curtis Marez, a University of California at San Diego associate professor of ethnic studies,  said “that many nations, including many of Israel’s neighbors, are generally judged to have human-rights records that are worse than Israel’s, or comparable.”  Nevertheless, he contended, his tendentious organization would focus solely on Israeli institutions, since, as he stated quite tellingly and disingenuously, “One has to start somewhere.”</p>
<p>It was a comment that has garnered universal obloquy, primarily because to accept that the ASA was starting with Israel and would then subsequently call for boycotts elsewhere one would have to believe that this Left-leaning group, academics who Professor Bruce Thornton of California State Fresno has characterized as a “motley crew of Marxists, squishy leftists, radical feminists, deconstructionists, social constructionists, multiculturalists, and other postmodern warriors against patriarchal corporate hegemony,” would of course call for boycotts against other errant university systems in other countries. But Professor Marez hinted that was unlikely, that Israel would be the sole target for boycott, since while “the current resolution answers the call of Palestinian civil society, to my knowledge there has never been a similar call for boycott from the civil society in another country.”</p>
<p>That may well be true, but one has to wonder exactly what was so compelling about Palestinian “civil” society that motivated an academic association to call for an academic boycott—something which such reputable groups as the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), for example, have pointedly and historically denounced as anathematic to higher education.</p>
<p>Those Palestinian students who the ASA pretends to care for so deeply, together with “the Israeli system of occupation, colonization and apartheid that daily violates Palestinian academic and other freedoms,” something ASA members evidently believe to be solely the fault of Israel’s, what circumstances of those students’ current conditions are the direct result of the culture and ideology of the Palestinian Arabs themselves? Is any part of the Palestinians’ lives their own responsibility, or is all of their existence defined by Jewish occupation, dispossession, and brutality, that banality of evil ASA apparently can see in no other state on earth than in Israel?</p>
<p>The ASA has obviously overlooked the pathologies of Palestinian society, crystallized and made more malevolent by the rule of Hamas itself, in which Palestinian children are inculcated, nearly from birth, with seething, blind, unrelenting, and obsessive hatred of Jews, so that kindergartners graduate with blood-soaked hands while toting plastic AK 47s and dedicate their lives to jihad, and older children and college students are recruited to hide explosives on their bodies to transform themselves into <i>shahids</i>—a new generation of kindling for radical Islam&#8217;s cult of death.</p>
<p>Parents of these children the ASA cares so much about, in fact, glorify death and martyrdom and seek the death of their children if they distinguish themselves by murdering Jewish civilians. Hamas also broadcasts children’s TV shows with animal characters who repeat hateful propaganda about Israel, and who encourage children to attack and kill Jews, behaviour the ASA, of course, never mentions and fails to condemn.</p>
<p>All of these alleged transgressions on the part of Israel are often further conflated with the ASA’s view that the “brutal occupation” of Zionism has unleashed these “crimes against humanity” through U.S. complicity, that as its proxy in the Middle East, Israel tarnishes America through its misdeeds and mirrors the U.S.’s own imperialistic, militant, and anti-Muslim impulses. Thus, those ASA members who shared their ideology on the association’s web site in support of the boycott were very clear in their contempt for what they characterize as an “occupation, dispossession and discrimination from which Palestinians daily suffer.”  “This is what the ASA is about,&#8221; said University of Florida’s Malini Johar Schueller. “The ASA has been interested in work on imperialism, settler colonialism, and it just seems logical that they supported this.”<b></b></p>
<p>The language used by these ASA members is part of the cognitive war against Israel on campuses worldwide, through which Israel is regularly, though falsely, condemned for being created “illegally”—through the “theft” of Palestinian lands and property—and thus has no right to exist. The government is accused of a “brutal,” illegal “occupation” of Palestinian territory, especially Gaza and the West Bank, of being a “colonial settler state,” a Zionist “regime,” a land-hungry nation building an “apartheid wall” as a further land grab, a usurper of property that was lived on and owned by a Palestinian “people” “from time immemorial.”</p>
<p>In fact, many of the American studies professors who populate the ASA have made very specific analogies, not only comparing Israel and the apartheid of South Africa, but also comparing the dispossession of the indigenous native Americans to the hapless Palestinians, who have now become the Left’s victim group of the moment. And many of these American studies experts harbor the same disdain for the United States as they seem to exhibit when speaking of Israel—another explanation for why an academic association whose core focus is American studies would mount such a misguided assault on a country—and area of scholarship—completely outside of their intellectual orbits.</p>
<p>One of those morally-incoherent scholars is Eric Cheyfitz , professor of American Studies and Humane Letters at Cornell University and, not coincidentally,  one of the defenders of discredited academic fraud, Ward Churchill. In his essay, “Why I Support the Academic Boycott of Israel,” Cheyfitz articulated very clearly the prevailing ideology of the ASA—that is, that America and Israel are imperialistic, militaristic powers who have and continue to exploit the “wretched of the earth,” and that these countries’ self-pride is misguided and undeserved. “It is worth noting in this respect that just as the myth of American exceptionalism seeks to erase the genocide and ongoing settler colonialism of Indigenous peoples here in the United States,” Cheyfitz pontificated, “so the myth of Israeli exceptionalism seeks to erase Israeli colonialism in Palestine and claim original rights to Palestinian lands.”</p>
<p>“As a professor of Native American and Indigenous studies,” he continued, “I am acutely aware of how the agendas of settler colonialism—land grab being the primary one as it is in Palestine—actively decimated the Indigenous population of the United States.” This kind of language in academia helps reinforce the Left’s notion that the imperialism of Western nations is responsible for setting up racist, oppressive caste systems in developing countries, systems that have to be dismantled through protest, resistance, and divestment campaigns. It has also formed the basis of divestment and boycott petitions that become the ideological blueprints for a virulent campaign to demonize Israel as a racist, “colonial settler” state that lost its moral legitimacy upon its founding by stealing the land of and dispossessing the indigenous Arab Palestinians.  What is more, according to the ASA’s collective thinking, the United States, in providing continuous financial support for Israel, is directly responsible for the social injustices taking place in the occupied territories, and, therefore, a response from an American studies association is justified.  “As an organization that represents a leading voice in the humanities and cultural studies, and indeed on contemporary issues nationwide,” a statement on the ASA web site crowed, “the ASA is in a unique position to articulate its commitment to social justice and its opposition to extant projects of settler colonialism and racial exclusion, and to help lead the way nationally for other institutions to take part in this worldwide solidarity movement.”</p>
<p>Coupled with academia’s fervent desire to make campuses socially ideal settings where racial and cultural strife cease to exist is the other newly-popular impulse: to inculcate students with a longing for what is called “social justice,” a nebulous term, lifted from Marxist thought, that empowers Left-leaning administrators and faculty with the false ethical security derived from feeling that they are bringing positive moral and ethical precepts to campuses.</p>
<p>For the Left, those seeking social justice, therefore, do so with the intention of leveling the economic, cultural, and political playing fields; they seek to reconstruct society in a way that disadvantages the powerful and the elites, and overthrows them if necessary—in order that the weak and dispossessed can acquire equal standing. In other words, the Left yearns for a utopian society that does not yet exist, and is willing to reconstruct and overturn the existing status quo—often at a terrible human cost—in the pursuit of seeking so-called “justice” for those who, in their view, have been passed over or abused by history. For this reason those organizations and individuals calling for boycotts, divestment, or sanctions against Israel rarely, if ever, note the grave existential threats Israel faces on a daily basis, that the so-called “siege” of Gaza is necessitated by the fact that, since the disengagement in 2005, Hamas has cavalierly lobbed some 12,000 missiles into Southern Israeli towns with the specific intention of killing Jews, and that the dreaded occupation itself is the result, not of an Israeli “land grab,” but a response to Arab aggression.</p>
<p>This rationalization, that violence is an acceptable, if not welcome, component of seeking social justice—that is, that the inherent “violence” of imperialism, colonialism, or capitalism will be met by the same violence as the oppressed attempt to throw off their oppressors—is exactly the style of self-defeating rationality that has proven to be an intractable part of our age’s war on terror and part of the reason that campus antagonists of Israel are so quick to apologize for or totally ignore terrorism on the part of Arabs wishing to murder Jews as part of their “resistance” to occupation.</p>
<p>“American scholars now understand the physical violence that’s part of the Israeli occupation; they understand the massive restrictions on academic freedom for Palestinian scholars that is part of living under an illegal occupation,” said Bill Mullen, a professor of English and American studies at Purdue University and a member of the ASA’s Caucus on Academic and Community Activism, which first put forward the boycott resolution. “These facts are now irrefutable to so many people,” professor Mullen contended, absent any evidence that would support such an outrageous claim, based only on the opinions of like-minded ideologues speaking to each other in an echo chamber, “that the vote indicates a kind of coming to consensus around the illegitimacy of Israel’s occupation of Palestine.”</p>
<p>Overlooking the fact that Israel has clear legal rights and historic claims to Judea and Samaria, or whatever other part of the Levant Professor Mullen defines as comprising  Palestine, his use of the term “occupation of Palestine” is also profoundly revealing because it confirms that either he is manifestly confused about history and thinks there was some factitious state called Palestine comprised of the West Bank and Gaza that he believes Israel now illegally occupies, or, more likely, as many in the BDS movement do, he believes that a country of Palestine existed on all of what is now present-day Israel and even <i>that </i>territory is illegally occupied by Israel—in other words, Israel itself has no legal standing and no legitimacy as a sovereign nation.</p>
<p>Mullen continued that he thinks “what the vote indicates is that people recognize the illegal occupation of Palestine as one of the major civil rights issues of our time globally,”  presumably unimpressed by the other, one would think, more compelling situations one could find in the slaughter of 120,000 Syrian civilians in the past year, the murder and mass rape of hundreds of thousands of black Christians and Animists in Sudan, gender apartheid in Saudi Arabia, stoning and honor killings throughout the Arab world, and the suppression of human and civil rights of gays, dissidents, and scholars in any number of Middle East nations. But the Palestinians, who have rejected the opportunity for statehood on at least a half dozen occasions since 1937, define for Professor Mullen and his fellow travelers in the ASA “one of the major civil rights issues of our time.”</p>
<p>Of course, no acknowledgement is ever forthcoming from the ASA boycott proponents as to the reasons why “the illegal occupation of Palestine” exists in the first place as part of daily life for Israeli citizens as well as Arab ones; that is, that Israel’s so-called “brutal occupation” and its military incursions were necessitated by Arab aggression and terrorism, and the use of defensive force has not been a random occurrence based on the whims of a bellicose, sadistic Israeli military. According to its own statement about the boycott, the ASA, in part, called for an academic boycott because the organization’s members could not abide by Israeli universities conducting research to support Israel’s military. “This complicity has been extensively documented,” the ASA web site reads, “and manifests through direct research and production of military technologies,” including the “development of weapon systems used by the occupation army in committing grave violations of human rights.” In fact, by targeting institutions which help develop military technology for Israel, the ASA boycotters are not taking the high moral ground they purport to seek; they are actually helping to achieve what Israel’s Arab foes have long wanted: a militarily-weak Israel whose defenseless citizens can be massacred and, in the favorite exhortation of its jihadist foes, “driven into the sea.”</p>
<p>While they would never accept an attempt to boycott themselves—in which individual academics are tarred, not only by the institutional behavior of their respective universities, but also for the actions and policies of their governments—that is precisely what the ASA boycott does to Israeli academics and why it is so intellectually grotesque. Because they heeded the call from Palestinian “civil society” to implement a boycott against Israel, the ASA has become an association of academics boycotting fellow academics, even though, in the same way Whoopi Goldberg defended Roman Polanski by claiming he had not committed “rape” rape, ASA members are shameless in their assertion that this is not actually an academic boycott, that it targets institutions not individuals, and that, at any rate, it is critical because the Palestinian cause is so profoundly important to the world that it is reason enough to abandon fundamental academic values. “People who truly believe in academic freedom,” wrote Stanford professor David Palumbo Liu with breathtaking audacity on the ASA web site, “would realize protesting the blatant and systemic denial of academic freedom to Palestinians, which is coupled with material deprivation of a staggering scale, far outweighs concerns we in the West might have about our own rather privileged academic freedoms.”</p>
<p>In other words, Israeli scholars are too privileged to enjoy the same academic freedoms as anyone else, and especially the perennially suffering Palestinians, whose fate is clearly the responsibility of Israel. Statehood, academic freedom, national sovereignty, the rule of the law—all these are brushed aside by the ideology of the Left in their pursuit for social justice for the ever-present victim, a way of thinking critiqued by James Burnham in his insightful book,  <i>Suicide of the West: An Essay on the Meaning and Destiny of Liberalism. </i>The academic virtues, the “exceptionalism” of the U.S. and Israel that ASA members dismiss and demean, are, according to Burnham, precisely [the] ideals and institutions that liberalism has criticized, attacked and in part overthrown as superstitious, archaic, reactionary and irrational. In their place liberalism proposes a set of pale and bloodless abstractions — pale and bloodless for the very reason that they have no roots in the past, in deep feeling and in suffering.”</p>
<p>There is another, far darker and more pernicious, aspect to the call for a boycott of Israeli universities. Because what such a boycott does is to effectively silence the scholars of an entire country—a group comprised of what the ASA seemingly defines as racists, imperialists, and colonial interlopers on stolen Arab land—Israeli academics have been suppressed and robbed of the ability to speak. For many on the Left who were students and faculty members during the 1960s, and who are now populating the ASA, it was the influence of the Marxist philosopher Herbert Marcuse and his notion of “repressive tolerance” that changed the way intellectuals understood who should, and should not, have the right to free speech—in short, whose views should prevail in the marketplace of ideas. Marcuse realized that liberal progressivism could not achieve radical social and cultural change if its views had to compete on an equal plane with the conservative ideology of the Right. Why? Because in his view, the repressive force of the existing establishment could not be weakened unless its ability to control speech—and ideas—was diluted. That would only be accomplished, according to Marcuse, by favoring “partisan” speech to promote “progressive” or revolutionary change, and that speech would, by necessity, be “intolerant towards the protagonists of the repressive status quo.”</p>
<p>The ASA’s boycott accomplishes precisely what Marcuse advocated: “the withdrawal of toleration of speech and assembly from groups and movements which promote aggressive policies, armament, chauvinism, discrimination on the grounds of race and religion . . ,”  but in being very selectively targeted at Israel, and Jews, this boycott parallels the actions of radical student groups such as Students for Justice in Palestine, who regularly shout down or prevent pro-Israel speakers (such as Ambassador Michael Oren at UC Irvine) from even expressing their side of the story about the Israeli/Palestinian conflict.</p>
<p>There is no surprise that an academic association like the ASA would call for a boycott against only one country—Israel—precisely because a large number of its ranks are steeped in a world view defined by post-colonial, anti-American, anti-Israel thinking, and dedicated to the elevation of identity politics and a cult of victimhood. That they profess to hold high-minded, well-intentioned motives, and speak with such rectitude, does not excuse the fact that their efforts are in the end a betrayal of what the university has, and should, stand for—the free exchange of ideas, even bad ones.</p>
<p>“People we used to think of as harmless drudges pursuing mouldy futilities,” observed Edward Alexander, professor emeritus at the University of Washington, in speaking about a professoriate that has lost its intellectual compass, “are now revealing to us the explosive power of boredom, a power that may well frighten us.”</p>
<p><strong><i>Richard L. Cravatts, PhD, author of </i>Genocidal Liberalism: The University’s Jihad Against Israel &amp; Jews<i>, is president of Scholars for Peace in the Middle East.</i></strong></p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>.   </b></p>
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		<title>The Moral Incoherence of the Israeli Scholars Boycott Movement</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/richard-l-cravatts/moral-incoherence-in-the-call-for-academic-boycotts-against-israeli-scholars/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=moral-incoherence-in-the-call-for-academic-boycotts-against-israeli-scholars</link>
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		<pubDate>Mon, 21 Oct 2013 04:32:10 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Richard L. Cravatts]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Academia]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Anti-Semitism]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[boycott]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=207978</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[A long campaign of historical distortion and outright lies. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/ib.gif"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-208004" alt="ib" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/ib.gif" width="263" height="170" /></a>This month, the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), the most largest and most significant organization of academic faculty members in the United States, with over 47,000 members dedicated an entire issue of their online <i>Journal of Academic Freedom</i> to examine the feasibility and appropriateness of an academic boycott of Israel.</p>
<p>Given the AAUP’s former stated policy not to support academic boycotts generally or a boycott of Israel specifically, the question that arises from this recent tendentious exercise in moral incoherence, is: why argue the case for academic boycotts specifically targeting Israeli scholars and academic institutions?   Reciting the list of Israel’s perceived ongoing human rights abuses against the long-suffering Palestinians is, of course, a favorite pastime of the academic Left, in the U.S., Britain, and Ireland (not to mention, ironically, inside of Israel’s own universities), so it is no surprise that the litany of complaints lodged on behalf the victim group of the moment show themselves here as justification for the shunning of Israel scholars from campuses worldwide. The problem, however, is that this view of Israel is the result of a long campaign of historical distortion, outright lies, and propaganda on the part of the Arab world and their apologists and same-thinking colleagues on campuses in the United States.</p>
<p>That academics so carelessly throw about politically-loaded, and inaccurate, terms when discussing Israel and sanctifying the Palestinian cause—words like “apartheid,” “occupation,” and “racism”— indicates exactly why a boycott that seeks to make absolute moral judgments is bound to be perilous—especially for academics who give the pretense of standing for values of academic freedom, scholarly inquiry, a respect for history and law, and open debate over a complex geopolitical problem.</p>
<p>A boycott barring all Israeli academics from participating in academic endeavors with scholars from other nations is also defective because it necessarily must assume that all Israeli scholars—regardless of their political orientation and social values—are painted with the same moral brush and deserve to be condemned and excluded merely because of the perceived political sins of the nation in which they live.</p>
<p>If those calling for an academic boycott take the outrageous first step of denying Israeli academics any discourse at all in what is usually called “the academic marketplace of ideas,” of banishing them from the world of dialogue, research, and learning, have not they already struck a fatal blow to the core guiding principle of the academy? Since when has it been the responsibility of the university to control the actions of the state, or for its members to share culpability for the political decisions of a nation? “By its nature a boycott is not a precise instrument,” wrote Howard Jacobson, British author and commentator, “so no distinction is drawn between Israeli academics who actively support their government, those who speak vociferously against it, or those who just go quietly about their . . . researches. . . All are guilty by association with the heinous ideology of their country, that is to say, guilty by simple virtue of being Israelis.”</p>
<p>And if some in the AAUP in fact feel that academics shape and influence national policy and political behavior, their choice of the Palestinians, with their legacy of homicidal aggression against Israel, seems a bit troublesome. What should not be lost on observers is that in the  decision to condemn and boycott Israeli academics, boycott supporters therefore affirm the perceived ideological superiority of the Palestinian side of the moral equation. They have embraced ‘Palestinianism’ completely as their choice of a cause to defend—with the genocidal terrorism, rabid anti-Semitism, political truculence, internecine violence, and general cultural self-destruction that has defined the Palestinian cause since it was minted in the 1960s as a political tool against Israel.</p>
<p>More troubling with calls for an academic boycott against Israel, as Anthony Julius, British attorney and scholar of anti-Semitism, observed is that it reveals an obsessive inclination to demonize Israel, not to mention a breathtaking double standard in applying moral yardsticks to Israel not used to measure the political or social behavior of any other country—including those with far more dismal records of human rights abuses, racism, genocide, terrorism, and gender apartheid, among many other national pathologies. And in making a moral exception when Israel is the target of this collective moral opprobrium, those calling for a boycott against Israel are also not only violating some of the fundamental precepts of academia, but are repeating the impulses that have historically served to marginalize, demonize, and expel Jews from society—what Julius believes to be anti-Semitism.</p>
<p>“The academic boycott,” Julius wrote, “[does] not derive from any criteria capable of being applied universally; it [is] but in the latest in a millennial series of campaigns to isolate Jewish communities—in this case, the Jewish community living in Israel; it [is] inconsistent with the general academic and political principles the boycotters [profess] to espouse; it [punishes] indiscriminately—Israeli nationality [is] the only criterion; Jews [will] suffer disproportionately; it [is] not directed towards the achieving of any specific goals.”</p>
<p>An academic boycott,” Julius concludes, is “unfair, it [is] intellectually and morally frivolous, and it [is] continuous with historical anti-Semitic discourse and practice.”</p>
<p>Concern for the long-suffering Palestinians may be a commendable effort, but the isolation and demonization of Israeli scholars as a tool for seeking social justice for that one group, the very result that would be achieved if the academic boycott outlined by the AAUP is implemented, “represents a profound betrayal of the cardinal principle of intellectual endeavour,” observed Melanie Phillips of an earlier boycott call, “which is freedom of speech and debate,” something universities should never stop diligently defending.</p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>.   </b></p>
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		<title>Irish Teachers Union Calls for Academic Boycott of Israel</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/richard-l-cravatts/irish-teachers-union-calls-for-academic-boycott-of-israel/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=irish-teachers-union-calls-for-academic-boycott-of-israel</link>
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		<pubDate>Fri, 19 Apr 2013 04:20:02 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Richard L. Cravatts]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Anti-Semitism]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[boycott Israel]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Irish Teacher's Union]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Jew-Hate]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[palestinians]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[professors]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=186296</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[A tale of moral incoherence.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/Boycott-Israel.jpg"><img class="alignleft size-full wp-image-186322" alt="Boycott Israel" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/Boycott-Israel.jpg" width="275" height="275" /></a>In what has nearly become a perverse, recurring rite of spring, and yet more evidence that universities have become, as Abigail Thernstrom has described them, “islands of repression in a sea of freedom,” the Teachers’ Union of Ireland (TUI), which represents some 14,500 members, voted in early April “to cease all cultural and academic collaboration with Israel, including the exchange of scientists, students and academic personalities, as well as cooperation in research programmes [sic].”</p>
<p>Why employ academic boycotts against Israeli academic institutions? Because, its union members say, the union should “step up its campaign for boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) against the apartheid state of Israel until it lifts its illegal siege of Gaza and its illegal occupation of the West Bank, and agrees to abide by International law and all UN Resolutions against it.”</p>
<p>But facts and history are not the concern of the morally-elevated, self-righteous professoriate. Based on this politically-charged, biased language, the boycotters expose that they have, with the breathtaking certainty that only the very sanctimonious and intellectually elite can do, framed the 65 year-old Israeli/Palestinian conflict in such a way that they have determined precisely which side is worthy of opprobrium and which, by virtue of its perennial victimhood, is worthy of complete moral support.</p>
<p>Then, in a disingenuous moral inversion in which academics are forced to assume personal responsibility for a state’s politics and diplomacy, all Israeli scholars are made culpable for the perceived sins of the Jewish state. “BDS is a noble non-violent method of resisting Israeli militarism, occupation and apartheid, and there is no question that Israel is implementing apartheid policies against the Palestinians,” said Jim Roche, a lecturer in the DIT School of Architecture and member of the TUI Dublin Colleges Union branch who proposed the boycott motion. “Indeed, many veterans of the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa have said that it’s worse than what was experienced there.”</p>
<p>Reciting this list of Israel’s continuing human rights abuses against the long-suffering Palestinians is, of course, a favorite pastime of the academic Left, in the U.S., Britain, and Ireland (not to mention, ironically, inside of Israel’s own universities), so it is no surprise that the litany of Marxist-tainted protests against the victim group of the moment show themselves here as justification for the shunning of Israel scholars from campuses worldwide. The problem, however, is that this view of Israel is the result of a long campaign of historical distortion, outright lies, and propaganda on the part of the Arab world and their apologists and fellow travelers in the West.</p>
<p>That academics so carelessly throw about politically-loaded, and inaccurate, terms when discussing Israel and sanctifying the Palestinians, words like “apartheid,” “occupation,” and “militarism,” indicates exactly why a boycott that seeks to make absolute moral judgments is bound to be perilous—especially for academics who give the pretense of standing for values of academic freedom, scholarly inquiry, a respect for history and law, and open debate over a complex geopolitical problem.</p>
<p>A boycott barring all Israeli academics from participating in Irish academic endeavors is also defective because it necessarily must assume that <i>all</i> Israeli scholars—regardless of their political orientation and social values—are painted with the same moral brush and deserve to be condemned and excluded merely because of the perceived political sins of the nation in which they live.</p>
<p>Critics of the called-for boycott, and there are many who have voiced immediate and thunderous opposition, both of the current Irish version and also of similar academic boycotts in Britain, wondered aloud why, of all countries on earth—countries where actual and chronic repression, genocide, occupation, militarism, and subjugation do exist—was Israel being singled out for the academics’ disdain. Many, of course, ascribe the obsession with Israeli faults as being symptomatic, and an outgrowth of, a more serious concern:  Europe’s long sickness of anti-Semitism.</p>
<p>Assuming that the Irish union is actually innocent of this pernicious hatred, and that their sanctimonious effort to right the perceived wrongs done to the Palestinians is, though misconceived, sincere, what is the just cause or set of values they purport to defend with their boycott? If they take the outrageous first step of denying Israeli academics any discourse at all in what is usually called “the academic marketplace of ideas,” of banishing them from the world of dialogue, research, and learning, have not they already struck a fatal blow to the core guiding principle of the academy? Since when has it been the responsibility of the university to control the actions of the state, or for its members to share culpability for the political decisions of a nation?</p>
<p>And if the union members in fact feel that academics shape and influence national policy and political behavior, their choice of the Palestinians, with their legacy of homicidal aggression against Israel, seems a bit troublesome. What should not be lost on observers is that in the Union’s decision to condemn and boycott Israeli academics, they therefore affirm the perceived ideological superiority of the Palestinian side of the moral equation. They have embraced ‘Palestinianism’ completely as their choice of a cause to defend—with the genocidal terrorism, rabid anti-Semitism, political truculence, internecine violence, and general despair that has defined the Palestinian cause since it was minted in the 1960s as a political tool against Israel.</p>
<p>Roche himself openly declared his allegiance to the Palestinian cause, confirming, if there was any doubt, that “The unanimous passage of this motion that shows that the Palestinian struggle for freedom, of which academic freedom is a key part, resonates with TUI members and sends a strong message of solidarity to their counterparts in Palestine.” That message of solidarity sounds very benign, and possibly helps Mr. Roche and his fellow union members feel good about themselves, but their academic “counterparts in Palestine,” as he calls them, have continued to practice the perverse indoctrination and teaching of terror in their “struggle for freedom.” When Hamas formed its cabinet after being voted into office, for example, 13 of its ministers had been teachers at either at the Islamic University in Gaza or at the Al-Najah National University in Nablus.</p>
<p>In fact, says Matthew Levitt,  director of The Washington Institute&#8217;s Stein Program on Terrorism, Intelligence, and Policy, with some 11,000 students, Al-Najah is the largest university in the territories and “the terrorist recruitment, indoctrination and radicalization of students for which al-Najah is known typically take place via various student groups,” among them the Hamas-affiliated Islamic Bloc. “Of the thirteen members of Al-Najah&#8217;s 2004 student council, eight,” he says—“including the chairperson—belong to Hamas&#8217;s Islamic Bloc.”</p>
<p>Perhaps TUI members have forgotten that sometimes Palestinian students take their ideological lead from college administrators who are not hesitant to make their political feelings known. In fact, Sari Nusseibeh, president of Al-Quds University, took the opportunity during a 2002 appearance on Al-Jazeera to congratulate the mother of a suicide bomber with whom he appeared by rhapsodizing, &#8220;When I hear the words of Umm Nidal, I recall the verse [from the Koran] stating that &#8216;Paradise lies under the feet of mothers.&#8217; All respect is due to this mother; it is due to every Palestinian mother and every female Palestinian who is a Jihad fighter on this land.&#8221;</p>
<p>The Irish boycotters may be frustrated that Israeli academics have not been influenced by their own government’s oppressive actions, but the same cannot be said of students at Bir Zeit University, when they actively participated in student government activities. “During student elections at Bir Zeit University in 2003,” Leavitt recounts, “Hamas candidates reenacted suicide bombings by blowing up models of Israeli buses. In one Bir Zeit campus debate, a Hamas candidate taunted his Fatah challenger by boasting, ‘Hamas activists in this University killed 135 Zionists. How many did Fatah activists from Bir Zeit kill?’”</p>
<p>But even the tranquility of the university setting, where this ideological stew can normally boil unmolested, was shattered with the 2007 internecine violence in Gaza between factions of Hamas and Fatah. Though the Irish lecturers excoriated Israel because, as one of their complaints went, it causes “disruption under checkpoint, closure and curfew regimes, and arrests, [and] beatings and killing of both students and teachers,” the “sanctity” of the Palestinian college setting was forgotten in 2007 when PA forces, believing it was being used as a staging area for Hamas rocket launches, stormed the 17,000-student Islamic University in Gaza, setting the entire campus ablaze, destroying books in its library , and gutting offices, classrooms, and the student center. Apparently the concept of academic freedom had to be revoked here, since virtually every leading figure of Hamas has taught or studied at Islamic University.</p>
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<p>The notion that universities ought to facilitate a range of opinions and ways of thinking about complex issues should be at the core of academic freedom and a university’s overall mission.  It requires, though, that campuses allow many different views and perspectives, and do not try to exclude unpopular thought from being heard in the proverbial marketplace of ideas. Concern for the long-suffering Palestinians may be a commendable effort, but the isolation and demonization of Israeli scholars as a tool for seeking social justice for that one group “represents a profound betrayal of the cardinal principle of intellectual endeavour,” observes commentator Melanie Phillips, “which is freedom of speech and debate,” something universities should never stop diligently defending.</p>
<p>In fact, Phillips, in speaking about a similar boycott initiated in 2006 by the British teacher’s union, lamented how, in that instance, British academics, with a long tradition of learning, had incredulously shamed that legacy and that their action, as she put it, “represents a profound betrayal of the cardinal principle of intellectual endeavour, which is freedom of speech and debate.” The act of condemning Israel’s universities, of excluding them from the fellowship of the international academic community, was, Phillips thought, a disgraceful calumny that contradicted all those values that the university should, and usually does, hold dear. Instead, the boycotters have begun to behave in a repressive, unethical, and morally-questionable way.</p>
</div>
<div>
<p>“Censorship, suppression of ideas and intellectual intimidation are associated with totalitarian regimes,” Phillips said, “which attempt to coerce people into the approved way of thinking.”  As Hamas shuts downs internet cafes, promotes genocidal incitement against Jews, murders its political foes, and begins introducing Islamic law in Gaza, one wonders if the Irish Union, in their misguided quest to make academic inquiry and unfettered learning flourish in the Levant, perhaps has chosen the wrong horse to ride.</p>
</div>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank">Click here</a>.  </strong></p>
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		<title>Trying to Give Scholarly Respectability to the &#8216;Right of Return&#8217; Fantasy</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/richard-l-cravatts/trying-to-give-scholarly-respectability-to-the-right-of-return-fantasy-at-boston-university/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=trying-to-give-scholarly-respectability-to-the-right-of-return-fantasy-at-boston-university</link>
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		<pubDate>Wed, 03 Apr 2013 04:39:02 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Richard L. Cravatts]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[anti-Israel]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[boston university]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Israel]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[palestinians]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[right of return]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=183866</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Jew-haters prepare to descend on Boston University. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2013/richard-l-cravatts/trying-to-give-scholarly-respectability-to-the-right-of-return-fantasy-at-boston-university/israeli-flag-turned-swastika-4453720158_3f639a1ea52-2/" rel="attachment wp-att-184068"><img class=" wp-image-184068 alignleft" title="israeli-flag-turned-swastika-4453720158_3f639a1ea52" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/israeli-flag-turned-swastika-4453720158_3f639a1ea52.jpg" alt="" width="238" height="181" /></a>Seeming to give credence to Orwell’s observation that “some ideas are so stupid that only an intellectual could believe them,” on April 6<sup>th</sup> and 7th, Boston University will be hosting a Students for Justice in Palestine-run “Right of Return Conference,” yet another example of how purported scholarship about the Middle East is frequently biased and diluted by ideology.</p>
<p>Most sentient observers of the Palestinian issue know that the “right of return” issue is a core tactic in rendering real peace, any viable Arab/Israeli solution, effectively impossible, that the prospect of some 5-7 million Palestinian refugees flooding into what is now Israel would, as University of Haifa professor Steven Plaut put it, “derail Israel demographically and turn it into the Rwanda of the Levant.” That is exactly why every one of the participants of the BU conference are part of a retinue of the hate-Israel crowd, a traveling road-show of politicized scholars, propagandists, and pseudo- and non-academic activists with only a thinly-veiled animus towards Israel, Zionism, and Jews in general. What this conference clearly is not is a true academic or scholarly exercise designed to reveal some rational and reasonable solutions in the Middle East; instead, it is yet another opportunity for ideologues with an anti-Israel, anti-Western agenda to trumpet their perverse views under a cloak of academic respectability, and here even with Boston University’s imprimatur.</p>
<p>The demand for a right of return, a notion referred to by Palestinians and their supporters as “sacred” and an “enshrined” universal human right granted by UN resolutions and international law, in fact, has no legal or diplomatic standing at all, and is part of the propaganda campaign that is based on the thinking that if Israel cannot be eradicated by the Arabs through a military war, it can be effectively destroyed by forcing it to accept demographic subversion.</p>
<p>In the first place, it uses the fraud as its core notion that the Palestinians were “victimized” by the creation of Israel, and that they were expelled from a land of “Palestine” where they were the indigenous people “from time immemorial,” as historian Joan Peters put it in her book of the same name.</p>
<p>More importantly, far from being either a “sacred” or, for that matter, legal right, the right of return is a one-sided concoction that deliberately misreads United Nations resolutions for political advantage, and conveniently embraces only those portions that fit the intent of Arabs to make good on their intent to “drive Israel into the sea.” In continually repeating the lie that they are victims of the “Zionist regime” and that they were expelled from a country of their own and condemned to unending refugee status, the Palestinians ‒ and their Arab enablers ‒ have prolonged the myth of victimhood.</p>
<p>There is some irony in the fact that the Palestinians have repeatedly violated both the spirit and intent of 194, that particular UN resolution containing a reference to the concept of ‘return’ to one’s country, although two key points are characteristically ignored by those pointing to this source as justification for their legal claim. First, Resolution 194 was the product of the UN General Assembly and “is an expression of sentiment and carries no binding force whatsoever,” meaning that it is meant to make recommendations but not enforceable law.</p>
<p>Moreover, that permission is subject to two conditions ‒ that “the refugee wishes to return, and that he wishes to live at peace with his neighbors,” something the Arab world, even now, has clearly never seen fit to do. Legal scholars also point out that international law grants the right to leave or return to one’s country only to individuals, not as a collective right as the Palestinians claim. More importantly, no population of refugees has ever presumed that the right of return ‒ if such a right even exists ‒ could be claimed, not only by the original refugees, but also by all of their descendants.</p>
<p>So it should come as no surprise that the list of guest speakers for the repugnant Right of Return Conference includes a galaxy of notorious anti-Israel Jew-haters whose contribution to the event’s awareness-raising will not likely be an animated discussion of approaches to the Israeli-Palestine conflict, but a one-sided, biased, inflammatory series of exhortations calling for continued assault against the very existence of Israel and the eventual extirpation of the Jewish state.</p>
<p>One of the conference’s keynote speakers, for example, is Columbia University’s Joseph Massad, an associate professor of modern Arab politics who regularly espouses his loathing of Israel in fringe, anti-Semitic publications like Counterpunch and The Electronic Intifada, or in the Arab press, and never misses an opportunity to denigrate the Jewish state as a racist, colonial enterprise, a moral stain on the world without any semblance of legitimacy. He assigns blame for all of the turmoil in the Palestinian territories to the brutal Israeli regime, claims that the “Jewish state is a racist state that does not have the right to exist,” and ignores completely any role the Arabs states may have had in inciting violence and murdering Jews in the name of what he, and his like-minded apologists for jihadist terror, categorizes as legitimate “resistance” to occupation.</p>
<p>In fact, in his perfervid imagination, Israelis have become the new Nazis and the Palestinians the Jews. “As Palestinians are murdered and injured in the thousands,” he wrote after Operation Cast Lead in January of 2009 when Israel was defending itself against some 6,000 rocket attacks from Gaza, “world powers are cheering on…, and it even happened during World War II as the Nazi genocide was proceeding.” Perversely likening the barbaric aggression of Hamas from within Gaza to the efforts of Warsaw Jews to repel imminent extermination by the Nazis, Massad obscenely suggested that “The Gaza Ghetto Uprising will mark both the latest chapter in Palestinian resistance to colonialism and the latest Israeli colonial brutality in a region whose peoples will never accept the legitimacy of a racist European colonial settlement in their midst.”</p>
<p>Professor Massad is also quite willing to invoke stereotypes and overlook history and fact when describing the malevolence of Israel and the victimization of Palestinians. In a 2009 article in The Electronic Intifada, ironically entitled “Israel’s Right to Defend Itself,” Massad concluded that Israel, due to its fundamental racist nature and oppression of the Palestinians, has no moral, or legal, right to self-defense, suggesting that “What the Palestinians ultimately insist on is that Israel must be taught that it does not have the right to defend its racial supremacy, and that the Palestinians have the right to defend their universal humanity against Israel’s racist oppression.”</p>
<p>A second planned keynote speaker is Salman Abu Sitta, co-founder of Al-Awda, The Palestine Right to Return Coalition, a grassroots organization that uses as its core tagline, “Palestine will be free, from the River to the Sea,” meaning a new Palestinian state replacing, not co-existing with, Israel. He has referred to the “Nakba,” the Palestinian’s name for the tragedy they suffered upon the creation of Israel, as the “largest, longest operation of planned ethnic cleansing in history.” In grotesque thinking similar to Massad’s, Abu Sitta also tried to make analogous Israel’s interaction with Palestinians with the Nazi’s treatment of Jews by referring to Gaza as “the new Auschwitz.”</p>
<p>Representing yet another virulently anti-Israel position is human rights activist and lawyer Noura Erakat, a fellow at Temple University’s law school and the U.S.-based Legal Advocacy Consultant for the Badil Resource Center for Palestinian Refugee and Residency Rights. In 2006, when recruiting legal volunteers on behalf of The Middle East Subcommittee of the National Lawyers Guild to work as activists for the Palestinian cause, Erakat invited prospects to do “human rights work” in what she termed “Occupied Palestine,” “all lands occupied in 1967 and 1948” ‒ meaning that she believes that all of present-day Israel is occupied Arab land.</p>
<p>The Conference’s opening panel is entitled “Discourses of Return and Resistance Among Palestinian Refugees,” which might be taken as a planning session for terror, given that the term “resistance” is pro-Palestinian activist’s oft-used euphemism for suicide attacks. In fact, one of that panel’s participants, Charlotte Kates, former Rutgers law student and leader of the New Jersey Solidarity Movement, long a champion of the Palestinian right of “resistance,” has often supported “Palestinians’ right to resist occupation and oppression… Why is there something particularly horrible about ‘suicide bombing,’ except for the extreme dedication conveyed in the resistance fighter’s willingness to use his or her own body to fight?” In addition to calling on her own university, Rutgers, to divest from companies doing business with Israel, her ultimate ambitions were even more odious: “Israel is an apartheid, colonial settler state,” she said. “I do not believe apartheid, colonial settler states have a right to exist.” And if this on-campus hostility towards Israel and Jews intimidated Jewish students, so be it, Kates said at Rutgers. “We have no desire to create an environment where racists may feel comfortable and secure in their racism; we very much want…. to create an environment where it is, indeed, uncomfortable to declare oneself an unequivocal supporter of an oppressive, racist state. It should be uncomfortable…. May the tension continue to escalate.”</p>
<p>The motivation for this BU conference is very clear: prolong the myth of Palestinian victimization and grant them, as part of that mythology, exclusive international recognition and supposed legal rights. Why? “Unlike all those many millions of other people considered refugees in the late 1940s,” answers professor Plaut, “the ‘Palestinians’ were the only ones for whom the ‘right of return’ to their previous homes was considered an entitlement. The reason was not a selective affection for Palestinians, but a selective hostility towards Israel and Jews.”</p>
<div>
<p>Having a conference with the primary intention to demonize and delegitimize Israel, while promoting a legally- and morally-defective approach to achieving Palestinian self-affirmation, is not an academic exercise of any merit; it is propaganda parading as scholarship, and violates not only one of the basic precepts of scholarship but also the spirit of any university, which were conceived as places where faculty and students could debate – with academic integrity, reason,  and an absence of bias – the important issues of the marketplace of ideas.</p>
</div>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank">Click here</a>.  </strong></p>
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		<title>Northeastern U’s Students for Justice in Palestine Cheerlead Hamas &amp; Call for the Murder of Jews</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/richard-l-cravatts/northeastern-us-students-for-justice-in-palestine-cheerlead-hamas-call-for-the-murder-of-jews/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=northeastern-us-students-for-justice-in-palestine-cheerlead-hamas-call-for-the-murder-of-jews</link>
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		<pubDate>Mon, 03 Dec 2012 04:48:37 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Richard L. Cravatts]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Gaza]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Hamas]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[intifada]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Israel]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Protest]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[students for justice in Palestine]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Terrorism]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=167618</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The Unholy Alliance's chilling display of hate.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><strong></strong><a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2012/richard-l-cravatts/northeastern-us-students-for-justice-in-palestine-cheerlead-hamas-call-for-the-murder-of-jews/israeli-flag-turned-swastika-4453720158_3f639a1ea52/" rel="attachment wp-att-167710"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-167710" title="israeli-flag-turned-swastika-4453720158_3f639a1ea52" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/israeli-flag-turned-swastika-4453720158_3f639a1ea52.jpg" alt="" width="238" height="181" /></a>As an example of what the insightful commentator Melanie Phillips referred to as a “dialogue of the demented” in her book, <em>The World Turned Upside Down</em>, Northeastern University’s chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), paralleling the moral incoherence of anti-Israel activists demonstrating elsewhere in American and European cities, sponsored a November 15th Boston rally in support of Gaza and, presumably, its genocidal thugocracy, Hamas.</p>
<p>The members of SJP who attended Tuesday&#8217;s demonstration, along with their fellow travelers of anti-Semites, Israel haters, and such psychologically mystifying groups as Jewish Voice for Peace, apparently were not sufficiently concerned when some 12,000 rockets and mortars were launched almost daily into southern Israeli towns from Gaza by Hamas over the past seven years, aimed at civilian targets for no other reason than the intended victims were Jews. In fact, nearly 600 rockets plunged into Israeli neighborhoods just since the start of Operation Pillar of Defense, Israel’s current campaign to suppress further assaults on its populace.</p>
<p>Once Hamas began to deploy more sophisticated, and lethal, Iranian-supplied Fajr-5 rockets, able to reach Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, Israel finally retaliated, as it had in 2008-2009 during Operation Cast Lead, with targeted strikes against Hamas. Despite surgical strikes against terrorist targets, some 100 Palestinians have been killed so far, and the inevitable civilian casualties were immediately elevated by Israel&#8217;s worldwide critics to “crimes against humanity,” “genocide,” and “disproportionate” responses to what they evidently believe to be a mere inconvenience for the Israelis upon whom rockets and mortars have incessantly rained down. “Israel&#8217;s assault on Gaza will not be tolerated,&#8221; Northeastern’s SJP wrote on its Facebook page, lacking any context or the possibility that Hamas’ actions may have contributed to the current conflict, and they called on supporters “to take a stand against these ongoing massacres!”</p>
<p>What was particularly revealing, and chilling, about the Boston rally was the virulence of the chants and messages on the placards, much of it seeming to suggest that more sinister hatreds and feelings—over and above concern for the current military operations—were simmering slightly below the surface. Several of the morally self-righteous protestors, for instance, shrieked out, to the accompaniment of drumbeats, “Long live Intifada,” a grotesque and murderous reference to the Second Intifada, during which Arab terrorists murdered some 1000 Israelis and wounded more than 14,000 others.</p>
<p>That pro-Palestinian student activists, those who purport to be motivated by a desire to bring “justice” to the Middle East, could publicly call for the renewed slaughter of Jews in the name of Palestinian self-determination demonstrates quite clearly how ideologically debased the human rights movement has become. Students on U.S. campuses, who never have to face a physical threat more serious than getting jostled while waiting in line at Starbucks, are quick to denounce Israel’s very real existential threats and the necessity of the Jewish state to take counter measures to thwart terrorism. And quick to label the killing of Hamas terrorists by the IDF as “genocide,” these well-meaning but morally blind individuals see no contradiction in their calls for the renewed murder of Jews for their own sanctimonious cause.</p>
<p>Of course, the notion of murdering Jews to extirpate Israel is not a unique one, since words to that effect are regularly uttered by, among others, Iran&#8217;s raving president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who dreams of such apocalyptic final solutions. What is unique is the morally-defective logic that would enable otherwise sane people to justify a second Holocaust, the mass murder of Jews, on the basis of Israel having defended itself from years of rocket attacks and having killed murderous terrorists in the process. Making the Middle East free of Jews, Judenfrei, is exactly what Hamas, the group of genocidal brutes being cheered on by the Boston demonstrators, ardently longs for; in fact, Hamas’s charter expresses as one of its core tenets that Israel should be eliminated and that Jews should be murdered, that “Israel will exist and will continue to exist until Islam will obliterate it, just as it obliterated others before it,” and that “the time will not come until Muslims will fight the Jews (and kill them); until the Jews hide behind rocks and trees, which will cry: O Muslim! there is a Jew hiding behind me, come on and kill him!”</p>
<p>Other protestors were less overt in their angry chants, carrying signs and shouting out the oft-heard slogan, “Free, Free Palestine,&#8221; or, as they eventually screamed out, “Palestine will be free, from the river to the sea.” That phrase suggests the same situation that a rekindled Intifada would help bring about, namely that if the fictive nation of “Palestine” is “liberated,” is free, there will, of course, be no Israel between the Jordan River and Mediterranean—and no Jews.</p>
<p>Another deadly chorus emanated from protestors during the rally: “When people are occupied, resistance is justified.” That is an oft repeated, but disingenuous and false notion that stateless terrorists have some recognized human right to murder civilians whose government has purportedly occupied their territory. That is clearly not any longer the case in Gaza, where every Jew was removed in 2005 and where there is a blockade in effect to prevent the influx of weapons, but clearly no occupation. It may be comforting for Israel’s ideological foes to rationalize the murder of Jews by claiming some international right to do it with impunity and a sense of righteousness. Unfortunately, however, as legal experts have inconveniently pointed out, the rally participants and their terror-appeasing apologists elsewhere are completely wrong about the legitimacy of murder as part of “resistance” to an occupying force. Article IV of the Third Geneva Convention, the statute which defines combatants and legitimate targets in warfare, is very specific about who may kill and who may be killed, and it does not allow for the murder of either Israeli civilians—or soldiers—by Palestinian suicide bombers who wear no identifying military uniforms and do not follow the accepted rules of wars. Nor, certainly, does it recognize the legitimacy of launching more than 12,000 random rocket and mortar attacks from Gaza aimed at Israeli neighborhoods, a violation of the Geneva conventions that require “distinction” in the targeting of opponents and clearly a more salient example of “collective punishment” than, say, the Gaza blockade itself.</p>
<p>So when pro-Palestinian activists and critics of Israel repeat the claim that Palestinians somehow have an internationally-recognized legal “right” to resist occupation through violent means, they are both legitimizing that terror and helping to insure that its lethal use by Israel’s enemies will continue unabated. Those who lend their moral support to terrorism, and who continually see the existence of terror as a justifiable tool of the oppressed, have help introduce a sick moral relativism into discussions about radical Islam and Palestinianism, not to mention Israel’s right to protect its citizens from being slaughtered. And the notion that Israel cannot, or should not, retaliate against these rocket attacks until a sufficient number of Israelis has been murdered is equally grotesque. How many dead Jewish civilians would be a sufficient number before the international community agreed to Israeli counter-measures? Should Israel have continued to wait until a school or daycare center was struck, forcing Israel to play, in the words of Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz, “Russian roulette with its children?”</p>
<p>The fact that so many demonstrators feel comfortable with openly supporting a terrorist group with the single purpose of murdering Jews indicates quite dramatically how prevalent, and acceptable, genocidal Jew-hatred has become, both in the streets of Boston and on campuses in America and Europe. This is clearly not, as it is regularly asserted, merely “criticism” of the Israeli government’s policies; this is what many define as a “new” anti-Semitism—an irrational, seething animus against the Jew of nations, Israel.</p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank">Click here</a>.</strong></p>
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		<title>Benghazi and the Oslo Syndrome</title>
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		<pubDate>Fri, 02 Nov 2012 04:42:52 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Richard L. Cravatts]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Benghazi]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Hillary Clinton]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Jihad]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[mitt romney]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Muhammad]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[Terrorism]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Video]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=163481</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Unmasking the psychology of blaming America for the terrorism perpetrated against it. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2012/richard-l-cravatts/benghazi-and-the-oslo-syndrome/benghazi-attack-consulate-550x344/" rel="attachment wp-att-163521"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-163521" title="Benghazi-Attack-consulate-550x344" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/Benghazi-Attack-consulate-550x344-450x281.jpg" alt="" width="315" height="197" /></a>In their third and final presidential debate in Boca Raton on October 22<sup>nd</sup>, this one focused on foreign affairs, neither President Obama nor Governor Romney, somewhat inexplicably, addressed a still nagging question on the minds of many, both Republican and Democrat: namely, why, for some two weeks after the lethal attack on the Libyan embassy, did the State Department and Obama administration continue to explain the attacks as a random madness of Muslim protestors incited by an innocuous video clip on You Tube rather than a pre-planned, determined attack by well-armed terrorists commemorating 9/11 again by spilling American blood?</p>
<p>Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was quick to point out that the anti-Islam video, “Innocence of Muslims,” was “inflammatory, despicable material posted on the Internet” and “an awful Internet video that we had nothing to do with,” trying to distance both the administration and the U.S. government as a whole from the film.</p>
<p>White House Press Secretary Jay Carney similarly insisted that the protests and deadly attacks in Benghazi were not “directed at the United States,” but could be traced directly to the video. “This is a fairly volatile situation, and it is in response not to United States policy, obviously not to the administration, not to the American people,” he told the press, “but it is in response to video that is offensive to Muslims.” Appearing on no less than five Sunday news programs on September 16<sup>th</sup>, U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Susan Rice repeated the by-then widely promoted theory that “the best information and the best assessment we have today is that in fact this was not a preplanned, premeditated attack  . . . that it was a spontaneous reaction to what had just transpired in Cairo as a consequence of the video.” And a story released just last week reveals that a flurry of emails, sent nearly in real time as the embassy attacks were underway, contained information that Ansar al Sharia, a group identified by the State Department as being an Al Qaeda-affiliated group, initially claimed responsibly for the attack that was clearly an act of terrorism and not, as the Obama administration continued to contend and position the event, a random reaction to perceived insults of Islam.</p>
<p>The problem with all of the explanations emanating from the Obama White House was, of course, that they were intentionally misleading or certainly misguided, a situation that was immediately apparent to many observers outside of the White House’s inner circle who saw the attack on the Libyan embassy exactly for what it was: a carefully executed terrorist attack on a day with specific symbolic import, and not a spontaneous burst of anger from indignant and aggrieved Muslim mobs.</p>
<p>The question is, why did the Obama administration reflexively, and obsessively, cling to the view that an obnoxious video inflamed Muslim passions, not a long-apparent ideology of jihad against the West in general and America specifically? Why were the President’s spokespeople so adamant in deflecting the obvious explanation that the Libyan events were very clearly acts of terrorism, and that they signaled quite obviously, on the anniversary of 9/11, that the lethal reach of radical Islam had not been contained with the killing of Bin-Laden?</p>
<p>The answer to those questions may not come from strategists in the State Department, or even from the White House spin doctors, but may have an explanation from psychotherapy, and particularly in a theory developed by Dr. Kenneth Levin when, in his book <em>The Oslo Syndrome: Delusions of a People Under Siege</em>, he examined Israel’s responses to terror as it tried to hammer out peace with its Palestinian foes. Levin, an historian and psychiatrist, postulated that Israelis, faced with persistent hostility and existential attack from an implacable foe with whom they were forced to negotiate for peace, had the characteristics “of at least some members of besieged or abused groups to embrace the indictments and calumnies of their abusers . . , the psychoanalytic concept of ‘identification with the aggressor.’” In the case of Israel, Levin saw the repetitive inclination on many Israelis on the Left, in the peace movement, and others to negotiate for peaceful coexistence with the Palestinian leadership—and to make continued one-sided concessions and accommodations in that effort—at the same time Yasser Arafat was conspicuously derailing authentic peace negotiations and actually continuing his efforts to extirpate the Jewish state through terror, incitement, and ideological attack.</p>
<p>But all the while, the failure to achieve peace after the Oslo Agreements was assigned to Israel, not to its abusive and disingenuous “peace” partner, a classic symptom of the Oslo Syndrome, which Dr. Levin describes as “a defense mechanism in which the individual blunts the pain of negative interactions with others, such as criticism or rejection, by embracing the indictment, making it one’s own criticism.” Embracing the indictment and making it one’s own criticism, of course, has been a salient and oft-noted characteristic of this administration, starting with what Governor Romney referred to as the President’s “apology tour” and his 2009 Cairo speech where Obama contended that the “great tension between the United States and Muslims around the world” was the result, not of an expanding Islamism and impulses of jihad, but “tension [that] has been fed by colonialism that denied rights and opportunities to many Muslims.” So, in Obama’s view, it was the behavior and actions of the U.S. and the West that had inspired jihad, and our own progress and freedoms were at fault, that “the sweeping change brought by modernity and globalization led many Muslims to view the West as hostile to the traditions of Islam.” Similarly, in an <em>al Arabiya</em> interview in which he announced his intention to reset the diplomatic vagaries introduced by George Bush, the President suggested that the U.S. must “start by listening, because all too often the United States starts by dictating—in the past on some of these issues—and we don&#8217;t always know all the factors that are involved.” There is also the prevalent strain in the multiculturalist, victimology, group identity ideology of the Left on campuses and in the current administration who have been willingly blind to the realities of terrorism, and have either obscured its existence when it was seemingly self-evident (as in the Ft. Hood mass murder by Maj. Nidal Hasan, defined by the administration as an incidence of “workplace violence”), or in the Libyan embassy incident when the U.S. embassy in Cairo, during the height of the attacks, quickly issued a statement condemning, not the slaughter of Americans by jihadist madmen, but “the continuing efforts by misguided individuals to hurt the religious feelings of Muslims—as we condemn efforts to offend believers of all religions.”</p>
<p>The reality is that members of this administration, because of their delusions about their own healing abilities and their misinterpretation of and apologetics for the lethal nature of radical Islam, have continually sidestepped the issue of terrorism, falling for the psychological trap, as Levin describes at it, of thinking they can remain in control by ignoring manifestations of radical Islam over which they actually have <em>no</em> control, and instead blaming terroristic events on causes over which they presumably can exercise control, such as workplace conditions, aggressive U.S. foreign policy, and You Tube videos. In this psychological juggling, Levin observed, “the individual [or nation, a collective individual] at least attains a sense of being in control of the indictment rather than simply feeling the passive victim of assault by others, and he or she attains also a sense of shared comprehension and rapport with the attacking other rather than feeling simply the targeted outsider.”</p>
<p>This explains why many on the Left, including those in academia, have regularly glossed over terroristic behavior on the part of Islamists—Hamas, Hezbollah, Fatah, the Al Aqsa Brigades, or others—and not only refused to call this terrorism, but have romanticized this violence as justifiable “resistance.”  But in Obama’s idealized, post-colonial, multicultural world of progressive thought the assumption is that political actors behave in rational ways, something that is clearly absent in conflicts in which theology, apocalyptic views of the world, a longing for martyrdom, contempt for the infidel, or genocidal ethnic hatred underlie geopolitical struggles. The administration’s professed belief that through sheer good will and mutual understanding the forces of radical Islam could be moderated has shown itself to be delusional, which Levin pointed to as what Israel attempted to achieve by making itself, on its own, responsible for achieving peace even when confronted with an implacable, even hostile, opponent.</p>
<p>This “pain of abuse and the fantasies of relief,” Levin said, “however divorced from realistic expectations those fantasies may be,” result in two behaviors: one is “self-denigration,” as Obama has expressed in Cairo and elsewhere and was certainly underlying the sentiment of the diplomatically-worded communiqué that announced that “the Embassy of the United States in Cairo condemns the continuing efforts by misguided individuals to hurt the religious feelings of Muslims.” The second behavior, Levin noted, is “grandiosity, the inclination to believe that they have the power by their own actions, by their self-reform, to alter the behavior of their abusers.”</p>
<p>That grandiosity was on display in Cairo in 2009, where Obama, announcing himself as the new, multicultural, compassionate face of American diplomacy, deluded himself into thinking that making apologies for America’s perceived diplomatic excesses under Bush, excusing its failure to appreciate the subtleties of Islam and to accommodate its beliefs, and ending the U.S.’s own feeling of exceptionalism in dealing with the world would, as measures of self-reform, work to moderate radicalism and suppress terrorism. The problem with that thinking, of course, just as it was a lethal problem for Israel, is that jihadist foes see those reforms, not as acts of kindness and understanding, but as weakness. The Islamists who murdered Ambassador Stevens and three other Americans may have actually been insulted by the silly You Tube video, just as many Muslims were outraged by the Danish cartoons of Mohammed, but these offenses were simply pretexts for the ensuing violence, not its root cause.</p>
<p>Radical Islam is at war with the U.S. and the West, and with Israel, because our way of life, rights of expressions, standards of law, and civil and human rights conflict with the rigidity of Islam and its inability, in its fundamental form and practice, to coexist. That reality contradicts the administration’s apparent belief that Islamic truculence and aggression are merely understandable and natural responses to the vagaries of American policy and culture, and that if we simply behave appropriately, terrorism will disappear. That is why, too, this administration is so wary of even using the word terrorism, or identifying terroristic acts as being just that when they do occur.</p>
<p>It may give psychological comfort to the Obama administration to think they have the power and ability to moderate the behavior of jihadist foes by reforming U.S. behavior, but in spending two weeks arguing about the merits of an offensive film, tracking down its producer, and blaming the victims of terror instead of the perpetrators, the Obama administration simply demonstrated to our lethal foes what James Burnham described in <em>The Suicide of the West</em> when he spoke of those who threaten themselves from within because they “hate their own civilization, readily excuse or even praise blows struck against it, and themselves lend a willing hand, frequently enough to pull it down.”</p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank">Click here</a>.  </strong></p>
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		<title>A BDS Call for Disarmament in the Middle East</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/richard-l-cravatts/a-bds-call-for-disarmament-in-the-middle-east/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=a-bds-call-for-disarmament-in-the-middle-east</link>
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		<pubDate>Wed, 13 Jun 2012 04:16:01 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Richard L. Cravatts]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[BDS]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[boycott Israel]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[University Arizona]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=134676</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[But only for Israel, of course.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/photo.gif"><img class="alignleft size-full wp-image-134731" title="photo" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/photo.gif" alt="" width="375" height="243" /></a><strong>Editor’s note: The article below is written by Dr. Richard Cravatts, the author of <em><a href="https://secure.donationreport.com/productlist.html?key=RVTZX68SIJJN">Genocidal Liberalism: The University’s Jihad Against Israel &amp; Jews,</a> </em>a book published by the David Horowitz Freedom Center. To order a copy, <a href="https://secure.donationreport.com/productlist.html?key=RVTZX68SIJJN">click here</a>.</strong></p>
<p>The eleventh-hour June 5th vote by Arizona State University’s student government to divest holdings in targeted companies that supply military equipment to Israel is part of a troubling trend that exposes dangerous radicalism on campuses by BDS proponents, disguised as an effort to achieve social justice for the Palestinians. In May, for instance, the student government at University of Massachusetts, Boston voted on a similar resolution to demand “that the UMass Foundation, Inc. divest its funds from Boeing Company and other entities that perpetuate and profit from war crimes and/or human rights violations,” those illegal acts, naturally, being perpetrated by Israel.</p>
<p>In November of 2011, the New York University chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine, in the same ideological vein, submitted an “Open Letter to TIAA-CREF CEO and President Roger W. Ferguson from NYU Faculty and Staff,” signed by over 70 members of the NYU community, which had as its purpose “to pressure TIAA-CREF into divesting its holdings in 5 key companies which profit from the illegal Israeli occupation and oppression of the Palestinians.” The effort signaled a shift in the tactics of the BDS movement away from simply boycotting academics, theatre groups, or humus, and instead attempting to strip Israel of its ability to defend itself, militarily, from those foes who are clearly more concerned with the extirpation of the Jewish state than they are with Palestinian human rights and nationhood.</p>
<p>Of course, no acknowledgement is ever forthcoming from divestment proponents as to the reasons why “illegal Israeli occupation and oppression of the Palestinians” exists in the first place as part of daily life for Israeli citizens as well as Arab ones; that is, that Israel’s so-called “brutal occupation” and its military incursions were necessitated by Arab aggression and terrorism, and the use of defensive force has not been a random occurrence based on the whims of a bellicose, sadistic Israeli military. In fact, by targeting firms which supply arms to Israel—a divestment ploy begun in a similar 2002 campaign at Columbia University—supporters are not taking the high moral ground they purport to seek; they are actually helping to achieve what Israel’s Arab foes have long wanted, a militarily-weak Israel whose defenseless citizens can be massacred and, in the favorite exhortation of its jihadist foes, “driven into the sea.”</p>
<p>More ironically, the divestment proponents who wish to hobble Israel’s military strength fall into the morally-convenient trap which ascribes the root cause of terrorism not where it belongs—with the homicidal madmen who perpetrate it in the name of jihad—but once again to Israel, due to its very presence in the Levant and its perceived racist, territory-hungry, brutal, and oppressive character.</p>
<p>The ASU divestment call included an additional, rather odious, element that the earlier efforts had not included:  not only did students in this case demand “that ASU divest from and blacklist companies that continue to provide the Israeli Defense Force with weapons and militarized equipment,” but, they added, they would also target companies for divestment that “are complicit with the genocidal regime in Darfur.”</p>
<p>The conflation of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict and the genocide being perpetrated against black Christians and animists in Sudan, of course, is morally incoherent and a grotesque inversion of facts, and yet another disingenuous and repellent tactic in the BDS movement to demonize and delegitimize Israel. The killing fields of Darfur are the work of Arab Janjaweed, who, on behalf of the Bashir government, have been responsible, since only 2003, for the slaughter of some 400,000 innocents, the displacement of over 2,500,000 people, gang rapes of thousands of women and young girls, the decimation of entire villages, and a death toll that still reaches 5000 monthly. So Israel’s use of weaponry and military equipment to protect itself in its 63 years of existence has nothing in common with the Bashir government’s campaign to suppress and extinguish portions of Sudan’s own populace, based on internecine tribal and religious conflict.</p>
<p>But facts are not important in the BDS campaign. What is important, and effective, is being able to utter the words “Israel” and “genocide” in the same breath, just as the BDS movement, and other enemies of Israel on campus, regularly conflate the words “racism” and “apartheid” with Israel, and for the same reason: to position Israel as an immoral state, the cause of instability in the Middle East, an impediment to peace in the region, and the source of the radical Islamism that threatens the West. And while the campus demonizers of Israel are ordinarily silent when Muslims murder co-religionists or non-Muslims, the Darfur genocide represents such a barbaric excess, that it has obviously proven to be irresistible for the divestment ideologues to equate Israel’s self-defense against external foes with Sudan’s internal, genocidal ethnic cleansing.</p>
<p>More significantly, the morally-obtuse ASU students and other BDS supporters who have called for stripping Israel of its military protection—if they are truly interested in ending warfare—might well direct their concern about arms proliferation and military clashes at other of the region’s states and terrorist organizations, and not the only democratic nation and reliable American ally.</p>
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		<title>Hating Israel at New York University</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2011/richard-l-cravatts/the-disingenuity-of-divestment/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-disingenuity-of-divestment</link>
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		<pubDate>Wed, 19 Oct 2011 04:14:47 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Richard L. Cravatts]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=109160</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The campaign to destroy the Jewish state sweeps the campus.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/stop-killing-children.gif"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-109174" title="stop-killing-children" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/stop-killing-children.gif" alt="" width="375" height="251" /></a></p>
<p>The  recent call by NYU’s chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP)  for <a href="http://www.tiaa-cref.org/public/about/index.html">TIAA-CREF</a> to divest holdings in targeted companies doing business  in Israel is part of a troubling trend that exposes dangerous radicalism  on campuses disguised as efforts at achieving social justice. In 2010,  for instance, student-led groups at both UC San Diego and UC Berkeley  introduced initiatives to demonize Israel once again in the court of  world opinion. One effort, disingenuously named “UCSD Divest for Peace,”  was aimed at divesting university funds from U.S. companies which  benefit Israel and which take a “non-neutral financial stance in the  occupation of Palestinian territories.”  The Berkeley initiative,  endorsed by 41 student groups in March 2010 and cynically named “A Bill  In Support of UC Divestment From [Israeli] War Crimes,” was promoted by a broader anti-Israel effort named the “U.S. Campaign for the Academic  and Cultural Boycott of Israel.”</p>
<p>The latest NYU effort, an “Open  Letter to TIAA-CREF CEO and President Roger W. Ferguson from NYU Faculty  and Staff,” signed by over 70 members of the NYU community, has as its  purpose “to pressure TIAA-CREF into divesting its holdings in 5 key  companies which profit from the illegal Israeli occupation and  oppression of the Palestinians.” It has at its core the same baseless  accusations and libels against Israel, namely, that Caterpillar &#8220;sells the bulldozers used by the IDF to <em>destroy Palestinian  homes</em>,<em> infrastructure, and fruit and olive trees</em>;” Elbit Systems  provides “drones <em>used to kill Palestinian and Lebanese civilians</em>;”  Northrop Grumman builds weaponry that “Israel needs to defend itself  from <em>crowds of children throwing stones</em>;” Veolia “operates a light-rail  system linking Israel’s <em>illegal settlements</em> to Jerusalem;” and Motorola  “manufactures surveillance equipment for <em>Israeli checkpoints</em>” [emphasis added].</p>
<p>These companies, it is asserted by SJP, are not only  complicit in the slaughter and oppression of the completely innocent  Palestinians, but the firms profit, in an immoral and rapacious way,  from the suffering caused by their occupation and dispossession.  Clearly, there is no historical context to these outrageous claims, no  moral balance, no acknowledgement of Israel&#8217;s existential threats from  Hamas, Hezbollah, and its other genocidal neighbors&#8211;only  condemnation for being an oppressive, racist, murderous colonial settler  state, illegal, in the view of activists, under international law.</p>
<p>This  core sentiment has come to define the Boycotts, Divestment, and  Sanctions (BDS) movement; the notion that the repeated defamation of  Israel will result in its eventual expulsion from the supposed civilized  community of nations. But the call for divestment is merely a tactic  through which Israel will be marginalized, and eventually extirpated, as  a pariah state with no moral justification for existing. Thus, Students  for Justice in Palestine &#8212; which gives public expression to notions of  “social justice” for everyone in the Middle East but actually means justice for the Palestinians alone, and not to Israelis &#8212; admit, when  pushed, that the sole underlying purpose of their calls for divestment  is not, as is frequently though falsely described, to create a  Palestinian state that will exist “side by side with Israel in peace,”  but actually as a new entity that will either economically, militarily,  or demographically subsume Israel.</p>
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		<title>When Free Speech Died</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/richard-l-cravatts/the-death-of-academic-discourse/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-death-of-academic-discourse</link>
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		<pubDate>Mon, 22 Feb 2010 05:02:08 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Richard L. Cravatts]]></dc:creator>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=51152</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Leftist and Muslim thugs shut down discourse on campus.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><strong> </strong></p>
<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/free-speech2.jpg"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-51154" title="free-speech2" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/free-speech2.jpg" alt="" width="450" height="363" /></a></p>
<p>Of the many intellectual perversions currently taking root on college campuses, perhaps none is more contradictory to what should be one of higher education’s core values than the suppression of free speech. With alarming regularity, speakers are shouted down, booed, jeered, and barrage with vitriol, all at the hands of groups who give lip service the notion of academic free speech, and who demand it when their speech is at issue, but have no interest in listening to, or letting others listen to, ideas that contradict their own world view.</p>
<p>Coincidentally, just recently two Israeli officials, Deputy Foreign Minister Daniel Ayalon and ambassador to the United States Michael Oren had the unpleasant experience of confronting virulent anti-Israel, pro-Palestinian Muslim students whose ideology on academic debate seems to be “free speech for me, but not for thee.”</p>
<p>Ayalon, who spoke at Oxford University, had his speech interrupted by several audience members, including one who yelled incessantly and called Ayalon a “racist” and “a war criminal” while waving a Palestinian flag, another student who loudly read passages of the incendiary Goldstone Report, calls from one charming scholar to “slaughter the Jews,” the intrusion of a third student who remained standing for the entire balance of the lecture while she hurled anti-Israel invective, and another radical brat who threatened to Ayalon that “we will do to you what we did to Milosevic.”</p>
<p>The genteel, soft-spoken Ambassador Oren did not fare much better during his visit to the University of California at Irvine, a notorious hotbed of radical anti-Israelism by Muslim students. During the aborted speech to some 500 people about U.S.-Israeli relations, which was loudly interrupted ten times, boorish hecklers screamed over Oren’s talk such profound observations as “Michael Oren, propagating murder is not an expression of free speech,” “I accuse you of murder,”  “How many Palestinians have you killed?” and “Israel is a murderer.” Even after he took a 20-minute recess to let the crowd cool off and regain its collective composure, he returned to the podium with more volleys of invective, shouting, and speech-stopping bombast from the Muslim students, eleven of whom―eight from UC-Irvine (including the Muslim Student Union’s president) and three from UC Riverside—were eventually escorted out of the hall and arrested.</p>
<p>The fact that UC-I’s habitually craven administrators, led by feckless Chancellor Michael Drake, were even motivated enough by the students’ errant behavior to have them ejected from the event is a promising sign. While the University has always claimed to be dedicated to encouraging debate and scholarly inquiry by letting the Muslim Student Union mount annual hate-fests to demonize and vilify Israel and Jews, the MSU has effectively hijacked all discussion of the Middle East on campus, and their odious events are not platforms at which opposing views are aired and discussed. In fact, these so-called pro-Palestinians seem to care very little about the actual self-determination and state building of the hapless Palestinians. As is frequently the case when speaking about the Israeli/Arab conflict, the discussion often glosses over the real problems of Palestinian culture, politics, and society (including its cult of death), and targets all criticism on the perceived defects of Israel, Zionism, and Jewish power.</p>
<p>Ambassador Oren is hardly what even his staunchest critics could consider an Islamophobe or even a rabid Zionist, perfectly willing to trample the Palestinian’s aspirations for their putative state. A Columbia and Princeton graduate, former Georgetown professor and fellow at Jerusalem’s Shalem Center, the American-born Oren is also the author of two seminal books on the Middle East, <em>Six Days of War: June 1967 and the Making of the Modern Middle East</em> and <em>Power, Faith and Fantasy: America in the Middle East: 1776 to the Present</em>, all of which clearly make him at least as qualified to speak about the Israeli/Palestinian situation as the raucous, boorish students who had decided, in advance of his UC-I appearance, that Oren was morally unfit to even appear on their campus.</p>
<p>This notion—that pro-Israel speakers and scholars do not even deserve, on a moral or intellectual basis, an opportunity to participate in scholarly debate is a very dangerous one, even if it comes from tendentious students. It starts with the assumption that Israel, because of its perceived moral defects and its oppression of the hapless Palestinians and the theft of their lands, does not even have the right to participate in intellectual debate, that academic free speech in Israel’s case can be modified and is not absolute. And while Muslim students and other campus radicals have, both at UC-I and other college campuses, seen to it that speech that they do not approve of, spoken by people with whom they disagree, is shut down with the “heckler’s veto,” they have never missed an opportunity to invite their own stable of slimy, anti-Israel, anti-American speakers. What is more, these speakers have never been shouted down, chased away, or jeered by those students and professors who might well have found their views to be repellant.</p>
<p>A closer look at the ideas tossed about by some of the MSU’s invited guests suggests both the moral incoherence and intellectual debasement that characterizes the human output of these events. Amir-Abdel Malik-Ali, for instance, former Nation of Islam member, convert to Islam, and cheerleader for Hamas and Hezbollah, has been a ubiquitous, poisonous presence on the Irvine campus who never hesitates to castigate Israel, Zionists, Jewish power, and Jews themselves as he weaves incoherent, hallucinatory conspiracies about the Middle East and the West.  Speaking from a podium with an execrable banner reading “Israel, the 4th Reich” in May 2006, Malik-Ali referred to Jews as “new Nazis” and “a bunch of straight-up punks.”  “The truth of the matter is your days are numbered,” he admonished Jews everywhere. “We will fight you. We will fight you until we are either martyred or until we are victorious.”</p>
<p>At a 2008 event, dubbed “Never Again? The Palestinian Holocaust,” Malik-Ali was at his hateful best once again, standing behind a banner that read “Death to Apartheid“ while he wildly contended that “The Islamic revival should only be feared by those who support imperialism, colonialism, racism, occupation . . . Groups like Hamas and Hezbollah” are not the real terrorists at all, he proclaimed. No, the actual “terrorists are the United States; the terrorists are Israel!”</p>
<p>Another odious guest speaker who regularly makes appearances on the hate-fest circuit is Muhammad al-Asi, an anti-Semitic, anti-America Muslim activist from Washington, DC who has written, among other notorious ideas, that “The Israeli Zionist are [sic] the true and legitimate object of liquidation.” At a MSU-sponsored event in February 2008, “From Auschwitz to Gaza: The Politics of Genocide,” which repulsively tried to draw parallels between the Holocaust and Hamas-controlled Gaza, al-Asi was a featured speaker. In his speech, he repeated the canard of Jewish control of world politics, suggesting that “Zionists or what some people call the Jewish lobby” had reduced the United States to playing “second fiddle to the Israeli government.”</p>
<p>Just months after 9/11, al-Asi had similar invective to utter towards Jews, in the context of Israeli oppression of Palestinians. Using his favorite image of the ghetto when describing Jews, he observed that “We have a psychosis in the Jewish community that is unable to co-exist equally and brotherly [sic] with other human beings. You can take a Jew out of the ghetto, but you can&#8217;t take the ghetto out of the Jew, and this has been demonstrated time and time again in Occupied Palestine.”</p>
<p>If ever there were utterances which deserved to be shouted down and drowned out with reason and fact, al-Asi’s hallucinatory ravings probably would qualify. But despite continual complaints from the Orange County Task Force on Anti-Semitism and other concerned UC-I stakeholders, the tenor and frequency of speakers at the MSU’s lurid hate-fests continue unabated, seemingly with the tacit approval of the university administration. The same Muslim students who could not abide even the presence of Israel’s ambassador to the United States, listen rapturously to the loathsome bloviating of Malik Ali, al-Asi, Norman Finkelstein, Ward Churchill, and any other ideological thug who have come to UC-I’s campus with the purpose of vilifying Israel and defaming Jews.</p>
<p>It is, of course, the MSU’s choice to hear whatever opinions they wish from whichever speakers to whom they choose to listen. What is not their choice, however, is to be able to prevent other views from being heard on campus, particularly the complex and thorny Israeli/Palestinian conversation, merely because pro-Palestinian students have decided that they will not recognize the very existence or legitimacy of a sovereign nation, Israel, nor hear that ideas of individuals who are able to defend it and explain the Israeli side of the argument. University officials must repeatedly make clear that campuses must allow many different views and perspectives, and should not try to exclude unpopular thought from being heard in the proverbial marketplace of ideas.</p>
<p>Concern for the long-suffering Palestinians may be a commendable effort, but the exclusion and demonization of Israeli speakers and government officials from the academic community as a tool for seeking social justice for that one group “represents a profound betrayal of the cardinal principle of intellectual endeavor,” observed commentator Melanie Phillips, “which is freedom of speech and debate,” something universities should never stop diligently defending. And they should certainly never abandon that pursuit to the baleful whining of ideological bullies intent on suppressing the views of others.</p>
<p><em>Richard L. Cravatts, Ph.D., director of Boston University’s Program in Publishing, just finished a book about the world-wide assault on Israel taking place on college campuses, &#8220;Genocidal Liberalism: The University’s Jihad Against Israel.&#8221;</em></p>
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		<title>Tolerating Violence Against Jews on Campus</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/richard-l-cravatts/tolerating-violence-against-jews-on-campus/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=tolerating-violence-against-jews-on-campus</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/richard-l-cravatts/tolerating-violence-against-jews-on-campus/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Fri, 19 Feb 2010 05:00:08 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Richard L. Cravatts]]></dc:creator>
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		<description><![CDATA[Is assaulting Jewish students on Canadian campuses now legitimate criticism of Israel?]]></description>
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<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/antisemitism02.jpg"><img class="alignnone size-full wp-image-50393" title="antisemitism02" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/antisemitism02.jpg" alt="" width="450" height="265" /></a></p>
<p>In a country where multiculturalism has a reverent following and criticism of protected minorities has essentially been criminalized as “hate speech,” it is more than ironic that on some Canadian campuses radical students have taken it upon themselves to target one group, Jewish students, with a hatred that is nominally forbidden for any others. And with a recent incident that took place at the beginning of February, York University in particular, has now revealed a troubling pattern of tolerating physical and emotional assaults by pro-Palestinian radicals against Jewish students and others who dare to demonstrate any support for Israel or question the tactics of Islamists in their efforts to destroy the Jewish state.</p>
<p>At a February 1<sup>st</sup> event, Hasbara Fellowships at York  University, with the permission of the University, had set up a table to inform interested students about Hezbollah-kidnapped Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit as part of Hasbara’s ongoing campaign called “Free Palestinians from Hamas.” Typically, York’s outspoken and volatile pro-Palestinian students were less than willing to let such benign sentiments be aired, and, according to Hasbara’s co-president, Tyler Golden, demonstrated their displeasure by surrounding the table in an angry mob of some 50 activists, spewing forth anti-Semitic and anti-Israel slurs at the Jewish students.</p>
<p>“At around 4 o’clock,” said Golden, “several known anti-Israel faces on campus came to start questioning us and debate with us . . . Security has asked us, when we come across this type of situation, to call them, which we did. We also videotape so they can see the faces and hear the voices of the people that do it. A few students who were surrounding us were upset that there were cameras in their faces, so they started yelling and screaming. As they were trying to push the cameras out of the way, they actually hit two of our students.” Muslim student groups have consistently attempted to disrupt the speeches of guests whose view are considered “unacceptable” because they might cause discomfort or “intimidation” for students unwilling to face the reality of radical Islam and unable to see any villain in the Middle East except Israel.</p>
<p>And the recent brawling at York  University is not the first instance of anti-Israelism gone amuck on that campus. York’s radicalized students had already revealed a rabid anti-Semitic leaning, when in February 2009, some 100 pro-Palestinian students initiated a near-riot, as police had to be called to usher Jewish students to safety after they had been barricaded inside the Hillel offices and were “isolated and threatened” by the physically and verbally aggressive demonstrators.</p>
<p>Parroting the morally-incoherent and factually-defective exhortations of Israel-haters elsewhere of “Zionism equals racism!” and “Racists off campus!” the York mob, members of both the York Federation of Students and Students Against Israeli Apartheid, demonstrated once again that what is positioned as “intellectual debate” on campuses about the Israeli/Palestinian issue has devolved into something that is not really a conversation at all. Rather, it is something more akin to an ideologically-driven shout fest with a new version of pro-Palestinian brown shirts who pretend that they are merely criticizing Zionism but are actually slurring Jews. So York’s supporters of the cult of Palestinianism apparently no longer felt even a bit uncomfortable voicing what was actually on their minds when the subject of Israel comes up: when the York Hillel students were trapped inside locked offices, surrounded by an increasingly violent and aggressive mob, the intellectual “debate” that day included such invidious and raw slurs as “Die Jew―get the hell off campus.”</p>
<p>That thuggery by pro-Palestinian Jew-haters had already become something of a tradition on the York campus. A year earlier in April 2008, Barbara Kay of Canada’s <em>National Post</em> reported, York’s Hillel had invited then-Knesset member Natan Sharansky to deliver an address. Not content with allowing anyone with a pro-Israel viewpoint to shares his or her views on campus, the Palestinian Students Association and Students Against Israeli Apartheid@York (SAIA) used the now common tactic of intellectual bullies on American and Canadian campuses: they jeered at and shouted down Sharansky, spoke loudly among themselves during his talk, and generally prevented anyone in the audience from listening to the content of the speech, but not before they had articulated their own vitriol with such comments as “Get off our campus, you genocidal racist” and “you are bringing a second Holocaust upon yourselves.”</p>
<p>Violence, and threats of violence, against Jewish students during conversations about Israel have occurred at other Canadian universities, as well. At the University of Toronto’s invidious 2009 Israeli Apartheid Week, for instance, the annual event had so devolved into a racist, rabid rally that proceedings were closed to cameras and reporters, and individuals who actually attempted to participate in a dialogue about the issues being raised by the noxious event in the first place were confronted with physical intimidation and threats, encountering the dark side of pro-Palestinianism.</p>
<p>One of these individuals, Isaac Apter, a Jewish alumnus of the University  of Toronto, recounted how he and others in the audience of one evening’s events quizzed a speaker about why Hamas had persistently refused to recognize the legitimacy of Israel—did “Israel have the right to exist?”—and when the speaker side-stepped the questioning repeatedly, some audience members shouted out, “Answer the questions!” Apter found himself approached from behind by a member of a private guard retained by Students Against Israel Apartheid, slapped in the head, yanked from his seat, and yelled at with the warning, “You shut the f&#8211;k up!” A second Jewish attendee was similarly assaulted that night by one of the hired security team and given a far more chilling warning, particularly in light of the barbaric practice of beheadings in the Middle East:<strong> </strong>“Shut the f&#8211;k up or I’ll saw your head off.”  Not only was the Jewish state being attacked and degraded throughout these events, but now Jews themselves were being targeted for emotional and physical assault, an unsurprising outcome of a prolonged, virulent campaign against the concept of Israel as a Jewish state.</p>
<p>University officials regularly proclaim, as they did when they had to defend sponsoring Israeli Apartheid Week,<strong> </strong>that they have a “commitment to the principles of freedom of inquiry, freedom of speech and freedom of association.” But that empty exhortation has shown itself, repeatedly, to be, at best, disingenuous, and, at worst, a masking of their true intention:  enabling favored victim groups to utter vitriol and libel against Israel and Jews, with the pretense that they have somehow encouraged intellectual debate and productive political discussion. This is not scholarship at all; it is Jew-hatred dressed up in academic clothes.<strong> </strong></p>
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