Frontpage Interview’s guest today is Dr. Fred Gottheil, a professor of Economics at the University of Illinois.

FP: Dr. Fred Gottheil, welcome to Frontpage Interview.

I would like to discuss with you today a recent experiment you did – The Statement of Concern – which exposed the hypocrisy of leftist academics who pretend they care about women’s rights and the rights of gays and lesbians.

Tell us about the Statement of Concern, what motivated you to do it and what its results have been.

Gotteil: My “Statement of Concern” came about more by accident than by design. I was searching for someone or some subject on Google.com – can’t remember exactly – when I chanced upon multiple listings of Professor David Lloyd’s anti-Israel petition. That was in early January, 2009, just after the Gaza war. Lloyd’s petition, addressed to incoming President Obama, asked for a US abandonment of Israel. His four-page argument read as if it were written by Ahmadinejad himself. Of course, that wasn’t really interesting, considering the source. But it was the lead-in heading on so many of these petition-carrying sites that drew my attention. It read something like “900 Academics Sign Petition Against Israel …” I became more curious about who these 900 academics were than about the substance of the petition and found myself going carefully through the list of those 900. Did I recognize any? Indeed I did. Six were on faculty at the University of Illinois and one actually affiliated with its Jewish Studies Program! A few more were “the usual suspects” types but I couldn’t help but wonder who the others were and why they would sign onto such a distorted account of Israel.

I began searching through their web sites, making note of the signers’ research interests and department affiliations. That’s when I discovered that many were faculty in women and gender studies departments. The thought occurred to me: Would these same 900 sign onto a statement expressing concern about human rights violations in the Muslim Middle East, such as honor killing, wife-beating, female genital mutilation, and violence against gays and lesbians? I felt it was worth a try. My ‘Statement of Concern’ became a four-page document providing evidence of these human rights violations and identifying leading authorities – mainly Muslim clerics and professors – who condoned these anti-women and anti-gay practices. By late spring, I had the email addresses of 675 who signed Lloyd’s petition and sent them my ‘Statement of Concern,’ requesting their support. The results were surprising even though I thought the responses would be few. They were almost non-existent.

FP: What do you think explains this double standard on the Left in general and among leftist academics in particular?

Gottheil: Good question. And not an easy one to answer. I certainly claim no expertise but let me take a stab at it. You know, it’s not one size fits all. Some on the Left identify Israel with the US and that’s damning enough. Others, I think, see themselves as championing the cause of third-world people and, in this kind of mind-set, see Israel as white and successful, a deadly combination. There are some leftists – Marxists, mostly – who claim to oppose any form of nationalism and therefore regard Jews who are Zionist as enemy. Incidentally, these same leftists don’t seem to get too upset with African-style nationalism or even Arab-style nationalism. It’s just Jewish nationalism that gets their goat. Interesting, isn’t it? And we can’t discount the gorilla in the living room: plain old Anti-Semitism. It’s alive a well among the Left, and despite their vociferous denials, a growing phenomenon. In this respect, the academic Left is hardly different from the non-academic Left. They may be just a little more sophisticated in their loathing of Israel, but scratch the surface and it’s all the same.

FP: What conclusions do we make from your experiment?

Gottheil: What conclusions do I draw from this? The academic leftists are caught in an ideologically discriminatory trap of their own making. It turns out that with all their professing of principle, they are sanctimonious bigots at heart. And some are so obsessed about Israel that they would undermine their own self interest. Witness the faculty in gender studies who signed the anti-Israel petition but didn’t sign my “Statement of Concern” which is about discrimination of women, gays, and lesbians in the Muslim Middle East. Sort of pathetic, actually.

FP: In terms of the many faculty members in gender studies who refuse to come to the support of persecuted women, gays and lesbians in the Muslim Middle East, chances are that they are motivated by something else other than genuine concern for women, gays and lesbians. That’s obviously just a smokescreen – which your Statement of Concern exposes. So what do you think that they really care about and what is it really that they want to achieve?

Gottheil: Well, I really don’t think they’re disingenuous about issues of discrimination against women, gays, and lesbians. After all, it’s their chosen life work. It’s just that, for some, their dislike of the Jewish state – it’s a visceral kind of dislike – trumps their professional interests. You may find that hard to believe but think of those Muslim mothers in the Middle East who are happy when their children volunteer as suicide bombers. It’s not that they don’t love their children. It’s more about them buying into a cause they believe is worthy of child sacrifice. Remember how Shakespeare’s Brutus explained his role in Caesar’s assassination: “It’s not that I loved Caesar less but that I loved Rome more.” History is replete with these kinds of people. Now why some on the Left hate the Jewish state so much is another question. I think I addressed that earlier.

FP: Well, I would disagree with you about leftists’ genuine concern about discrimination against women, gays, and lesbians. This “concern” of theirs, as sociologist Paul Hollander has documented, is really just a weapon for them to use in their war against their own society. Destroying their host capitalist society is what matters to them and they will use whatever weapons are available to them in that quest for destruction. David Horowitz illuminates this disturbing mindset in the context of leftist academics in The Professors: The 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America.

If leftist “progressives” really cared about women, gays and lesbians, then they would be fighting for their rights in places where such rights are really violated – like under Hamas in Gaza and under the Mullahs in Iran. But doing so would legitimize their own society and its values and therefore completely cripple their entire identity and life purpose, and so their purported concern for women, gays and lesbians has to go out the window – a dynamic which the Statement of Concern exposes very well.

In any case, this is my own two cents worth and I’ve outlined this argument over the years here at Frontpage, so perhaps we’ll leave a dialogue on the matter for another time and place if you are up for it, my friend.

Let’s continue our discussion. What are your overall thoughts on the Left’s conduct in our conflict today with radical Islam?

Gottheil: That’s an easier question. Easier because many on the Left are forthright about it. And you have to believe they mean what they say. The problem, they will tell you, is not radical Islam but us. We are the world’s foremost oppressors, etc, etc. To them, radical Islamists are safeguarding their religion and culture by making us pay dearly for our intrusions. I’m sure these leftists acknowledge that the Taliban or Osama bin Laden aren’t mother Teresa, but these what-we-call-terrorists are way down the leftists’ list of evildoers. We top the charts. Read the Nation magazine, any issue. Or try Counterpunch, a cruder version of the same stuff.

FP: As an academic yourself, what is it that you think made you different from many of those in your milieu? How come you did not become part of the trendy and “cutting-edge” lefty crowd in academia? What was it about your own intellectual journey, and what is it about you as a person, that makes you an individual in academia who can sign the Statement of Concern while for so many others in your environment it is simply an unfathomable – and heretical– thing to do?

Gottheil: The truth of the matter is that I was considered a leftist myself not too long ago. After all, I am a Keynesian-type economist and I do share many of the positions normally attributed to the Left. I’m not afraid of deficit spending, I’m concerned about growing income inequality, I see sweetheart relations between corporate America and government – particularly oil – as sometimes problematic. So I would not be labeled completely evil to most of my leftist colleagues were it not for my advocacy of Israel. That advocacy is simply unforgivable to them. Actually, I regard Israel as the watershed issue among those on the Left. To me, if you don’t support Israel’s right to defend itself as best that it can against people and states who wish to destroy it, you’re not much of a human rights practitioner. That’s how I see it. And that’s what separates me from most of them.

FP: What do you hope that your Statement of Concern might help achieve?

Gottheil: “Disrobe the images if you do find them decked with ceremonies.” That, too, is taken from Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. I think my Statement of Concern disrobes those images of the Left that the Left likes to project about itself. Many of the Left’s adherents like you to believe they are on the side of human rights, social justice, civility, etc. etc. but they are really no different from the bigots parading on the other far side of the political spectrum. I think I’ve achieved that disrobing although it was not my intent. My intention was to offer them an opportunity to speak out against the violence committed in the Muslim Middle East against women, gays, and lesbians. They failed miserably.

FP: Dr. Fred Gottheil, thank you for joining Frontpage Interview.