For not only one has risen up against us, but in every generation they rise up to annihilate us… — Passover Haggadah
It’s impossible for me to be indignant or outraged any more by the behavior of our great universities. Whatever else they may be, they are running sewers of Jew-hatred, reminiscent of Hitler’s academies. I am not exaggerating.
The University of Pennsylvania has just completed a 2-day conference on Boycott-Divestment-Sanctions, a nonviolent, progressive approach to dismantling the Jewish state and making possible its very violent end at the hands of its primitive and bloodthirsty enemies.
And next week the great Harvard University, not to be outdone, will be the venue for a conference on the ‘one state solution’ (for anyone who doesn’t follow these things, that’s a single Arab-majority state from the river to the sea, and a guaranteed bloodbath).
All this is coordinated with Israel Apartheid Week (IAW), the annual festival of false analogies, made-up ‘history’, and post-colonialist moral relativism in which the group that is least advanced culturally gets a pass to be as murderous as it wants, because it’s always hunting season on ‘European colonialists’. In this drama, the Jews, beaten and spit out by Europe and the Arab countries in the 1940s and 1950s, can be given the role of colonials because — unlike the Arabs — they have been successful.
These universities are supposedly the best of our best, the super-selective Ivy League schools where our future presidents and corporate leaders are educated.
California State University Fresno is not one of the best of the best. Thanks to a bankrupt state, a greedy Board of Regents and administration, and an emphasis on big-time sports to the detriment of academics, it’s a mediocre campus in a mediocre state college system.
But Dr. Vida Samiian and her Middle East Studies program — although, for them, Israel is not in the ‘Middle East’ — won’t let Apartheid Week go by without getting their licks in. They have invited the renegade Israeli academic and professional liar Ilan Pappé to speak. You can read about Pappé here, but it’s enough to say that his scholarship is a fraud, his smooth exterior a mechanism to hide a pathological hatred of the Jewish state.
The President of the University, Dr. John Welty, received several letters from concerned community members. One of them, from the local Jewish Community Relations Council, dealt in particular with Pappé’s dishonesty, academic transgressions and role as a propagandist rather than a scholar. Another, from the AMCHA initiative, also referred to the fact that Dr. Samiian refused to allow a panel discussion to provide balance, and pointed to a policy established by the trustees that speakers must “contribute to educational values…and not be brought in for propagandizing purposes.”
Dr. Welty responded as expected, hiding his and his university’s moral bankruptcy behind platitudes about academic freedom, free speech, etc. He did not respond to any of the specific concerns in either letter.
Pappé will not present “unpopular opinions” (actually, his opinions are quite popular in the academic world) or make statements that some of us “don’t agree with” as Dr. Welty says in his letter. What he will do precisely is to tell lies and incite hatred of the Jewish state in his audience. The ultimate objective of Pappé is to end the state of Israel, which today probably also implies putting a final end to the Jewish people.
Pappé himself is of Jewish extraction, of course, which in part has made it possible for him to create a lucrative career as liar, slanderer and hatemonger.
There are certainly speakers to whom these universities would not give their platforms. I can’t imagine, for example, that someone would be invited to say that women are inherently intellectually inferior to men. In fact, Lawrence Summers was fired as President of Harvard for making the far milder and probably true statement that women in general have less aptitude for mathematics and engineering than men. If he were on tour presenting even this thesis, how many universities would invite him?
Dr. Welty has now done his duty for his mediocre university. Instead of seizing the opportunity to take a courageous stand by denouncing the execrable Pappé, he has brought CSU Fresno down to the moral level of Harvard or Penn.
And he didn’t even get $20 million from the Saudis in return.
Technorati Tags: Harvard, University of Pennsylvania, CSU Fresno, Ilan Pappe, BDS, Israel, John Welty
Well, maybe he DID get some Saudi money, and it was unreported. I’m sure this goes on all the time.
A while back, you looked at John Mearsheimer’s background (my former professor at U Chicago), and agreed that it looked like he was probably on the petrodollar whore list as well, not that this has ever been reported.
Anyway, if this is any consolation, I keep hearing all the time how Israel’s economy is doing pretty well these days by global standards, and that big outfits are investing there all the time.
It seems to me this Israel Apartheid Week/BDS stuff is not very effective.
It is annoying as hell, but no one really is listening to them.
I recall being a college student on the uber-liberal campus of U Michigan, Ann Arbor, back in the early 1980s. Most there hated Reagan, and I’m sure that was true on most college campuses across the country. But he got elected anyway in a landslide, and handily won a second term.
I’m not saying we shouldn’t push back against this BDS crap; we should. But we shouldn’t be shaking in our shoes over them, either.