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I attended the California State University Fresno [CSUF] “Conference on Middle East Studies” this weekend. I can only hit some high and low spots. Where to begin?

With the good parts: One of the first papers presented was by Neda Maghbouleh, a Ph.D student at UC Santa Barbara, about the effect of Iranian popular music of the  ’70’s and ’80’s on first and second generation Iranian-Americans. It was like discovering a parallel universe, inhabited by Googoosh, among others. Ms. Maghbouleh obviously enjoyed her research a great deal and showed it.

There were a few other bright spots, like when Mary Husain, who was pilloried here (”Scholarship or Rubbish?“) for publishing a striking example of postmodernist academic boondoggling at its worst, actually mentioned this site as an example of “The post-9/11 Assault on Higher Education and Academic Freedom”! “I don’t even know who these people are”, she wailed.

Ms. Husain, please know that 1) I chose to focus “Scholarship or Rubbish?” on you rather than your co-author because you are a member of the CSUF Middle East Studies Program [MESP] and he is not, and not because of your Muslim-sounding name; 2) I chose to write about you rather than a non-Muslim member of your department because of the availability and staggering badness of your published article; and 3) I fail to see how my critique limits academic freedom. I am however, guilty as charged of “stealing” your photo from the CSUF academic website.

From here on, though, things went rapidly downhill. My original fear that the MESP would become a platform for anti-Israel political agitation because the initiators, Dr. Vida Samiian and Dr. Sasan Fayazmanesh have expressed extreme anti-Israel positions in the past, appears to have been justified.

Dr. Lawrence Davidson of West Chester University (Pennsylvania) presented two papers. The first, on “forced migration” of Palestinians was a 20-minute polemical recitation of charges against Israel, including “purposeful impovershment” of the Palestinians, “equivalent to genocide” by such means as the “apartheid wall” because “Israel covets Palestinian land”. The Palestinians live in constant insecurity, Davidson said, from incursions, air attacks, etc. Israel claims that this is in self-defense, but in fact “over the past 60 years Israeli policy has been motivated by racism”, a desire to have all the land “Palestinian-rien”.

Davidson presented ‘facts’ and figures more rapidly than I could write, but I would be interested in knowing how he documents such highly dubious statements as “Israel expropriated 50% of the land in the West Bank” and “40% of Israelis favor ‘transfer’ of Palestinians”. This was anything but a scholarly paper; it was at best a political speech, and at worst — incitement of hatred.

Davidson gave an interesting answer when asked how he could discuss all of the above without even mentioning Palestinian terrorism, or decisions such as the rejection of partition, etc.  Israel is the dominant power, he said, and therefore controls everything that happens. The Palestinians are by definition powerless, so their ‘resistance’ is simply a reaction to Israeli oppression. Hence, surprisingly enough, violent actions on both sides are Israel’s fault. This argument needs no further refutation!

He was also asked how he could leave out of the equation the historical backing of extremists by the Arab nations, and, recently, the Iranian proxy war against Israel being prosecuted by Hamas and Hezbollah.  He responded that Israel was offensively powerful enough to counter any imaginable military threat — ignoring tiny Israel’s unique home-front vulnerability. He further suggested that Israel should simply ‘take a chance’ and agree to the Saudi initiative — which I think I have shown is equivalent to national suicide for the Jewish state.

Davidson presented a second paper, this one on teaching about the Middle East. He believes that students arrive with an anti-Muslim and pro-Israel orientation which is created by overwhelming bias in the American media. I suppose he has had students who only watch Fox News, but I hardly think that NPR, CNN, the NY Times, Reuters, the AP, Pacifica Radio, etc. can be called pro-Zionist!

Nevertheless, he faces the problem of how to break down the students’ ‘emotional’ cleavage to Zionism and get them to understand the Palestinian viewpoint.  One of his most effective techniques is to have the students read various sources, including pro-Palestinian material written by Israelis — he even mentioned renegade Israeli academic Ilan Pappé as a good choice! He also likes the early Benny Morris — with its doctored quotations from Ben-Gurion and other Zionists.

The class then takes the form of a discussion, in which he presents his own position, all the while reassuring the students that disagreement will not affect their grades. Some students have difficulty overwhelming their ‘emotional’ attachment to Zionism, and those, he admits, often drop his class. The possibility that there might be a student who — though employing logical thinking and careful research — might nevertheless fail to agree with him was not mentioned.

Davidson was less a scholar than a polemicist and less a teacher than an indoctrinator. I can’t imagine that such a person could have held an academic position when I was in school, but I suppose that was a long time ago.

One of the sessions that I most looked forward to was one on “What the future has in store?” This was to be, unfortunately, my last, as you will see.

Dr. Eric Hooglund blamed Israel and settlements for everything. Why bother to repeat it yet again? He also did not mention terrorism or Hamas, but he claimed that the failure of Camp David, the Roadmap and the Annapolis negotiations to lead to peace were all because of Israel insistence on expanding settlements and building new ones.

He also said that friends and former students of his in the US State Department felt that US policy would change significantly — I understood him to mean in the direction of the Palestinians — if Barack Obama is elected.

Dr. Sasan Fayazmanesh spoke about American policy toward Iran, as determined by the power relationships between various groups in the US administration (and the administration to come). At one point I actually began to empathize with him. After all, he thinks that American policy is to wage war against his homeland — if not by armies, then by economics; and I think that American policy may lead to the destruction of Israel by its enemies. We both see little difference between the parties in this respect.

However, all good things come to an end. In this case someone asked a question about Ahmadinejad’s famous remark that is often translated “Israel will be wiped off the face of the earth”.  Fayazmanesh said that the translation was incorrect — a not unreasonable point, although it is quite clear from Ahmadinejad’s support of Hezbollah and Hamas, his financing of the Syrian missile buildup, etc., that he is at least aiming for what might be called ‘regime change’ in Israel, from Jews to Arabs.

“You see, he said, Ahmadinejad is not anti-Semitic.” And he displayed a Powerpoint presentation entitled “Ahmadinijad: is he an anti-Semite?”

The first slide showed the Iranian President sitting down at a table — perhaps at the notorious Holocaust denial conference of 2006 — with representatives of a radical Neturei Karta faction, a tiny sect — possibly less than one hundred members — of the favorite Jews of every anti-Semite, previously paid to perform by Yasser Arafat and now most likely by Ahmadinejad.

“You see,” said Fayazmanesh, “he cannot be an anti-Semite. These are Jews. They are his friends.”

All of us have character weaknesses and one of mine is that the level of crap that sets me off is not all that high. I stood up, and said quite loudly, and maybe without making enough sense: what about the Holocaust denial conference? What about the Holocaust denial conference? Then either I walked out, was asked to leave, or both. Really, it was the cumulative effect of some of the other speakers — particularly, but not exclusively, Davidson — with the surrealism provided by Neturei Karta taken seriously that did me in.

Several times an Israeli participant in the conference asked something like “Look, this is supposed to be an academic meeting, why is only one point of view presented?” The response from one moderator was that constant discussion of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was — his word — “tedious”.  Apparently anti-Israel rants by Lawrence Davidson, Eric Hooglund and others were not “tedious” — only attempts to respond from the audience were.

Update [23 Oct. 1509 PDT]: Upon rereading my notes, I realize that I had wrongly attributed the statement about the State Department sources saying that Obama would lead to ‘big changes’ to Sasan Fayazmanesh. It was actually made by Eric Hooglund.

Technorati Tags: CSUF, Middle East Studies, Mary Husain, Lawrence Davidson, Sasan Fayazmanesh, Eric Hooglund

Sometimes you have to repeat the same facts over and over, because the other side never stops lying about them.

A case in point is the Clinton-Barak offer to Yasser Arafat in December 2000. Supporters of Israel have held that the offer was more than fair, an indication that Israel was prepared to make real sacrifices for peace, and that Arafat’s rejection of it and the ensuing intifada were proof of Palestinian unwillingness to accept any reasonable compromise.

Arafat — and since then Jimmy Carter and other supporters of the Palestinian cause — have claimed that the offer was not reasonable at all. For example, Lawrence Davidson — who, incidentally will be presenting several papers at a forthcoming conference sponsored by the California State University Fresno Middle East Studies Program — wrote the following:

The “generous offer” has been disproved by both American and Israeli experts. For instance, among others, Robert Malley, President Clinton’s advisor on Israeli-Arab affairs who was at Camp David II; Ron Pundak, Director of the Peres Center for Peace; Professor Jeff Halper (Ben Gurion University); Uri Avnery, head of Gush Shalom, Israel’s foremost peace organization; and finally Ehud Barak himself has twice (in the New York Times of May 24, 2001 and in the Israeli hebrew newspaper Yedi’ot Ahronoth of August 29, 2003) denied that his offer was anywhere near “generous.”

What did Barak really offer? According to the above reports his offer gave the Palestinians a little over 80% of the West Bank carved into nearly discontinuous cantons. The Israeli government would have controlled all the Palestinian borders (none of which would touch on another Arab state), it would have controlled the air space above the Palestinian territory, most of the major aquifers, retained sovereignty over East Jerusalem, maintained almost all Israeli settlements and access roads, controlled immigration into the Palestinian “state,” and retained the Jordan Valley through an indefinite “long term lease.” This is an offer that no Israeli would ever accept. However, most Israelis and Americans do not know these details and believe instead in the myth of generosity. — Davidson, “Orwell and Kafka in Israel/Palestine“

Before discussing the substance of Davidson’s allegation, let’s look at his sources.

Ron Pundak was one of the Oslo agreement negotiators, but he was not present at Camp David. His 2001 article “From Oslo to Taba: What Went Wrong?” appears to be Davidson’s source for the above. Pundak unsurprisingly argues that Oslo was a great idea, but it failed due to “miscalculations and mismanagement” on both sides, especially by former PM Binyamin Netanyahu and Barak. He does not specifically cite a source for the 80% figure, but a map included is an “approximation based on Israeli and Palestinian sources”.

Robert Malley was at Camp David as a special assistant to President Clinton. He is highly controversial today because he favors recognizing Hamas and calls for Israel to negotiate directly with Hamas. His 2001 article “Camp David: The Tragedy of Errors” (with Hussein Agha) appears to be Davidson’s source. In it, Malley explains that Barak’s positions were always presented verbally in terms of what he would agree to if there were a final agreement, because of his [justified] fear that the Palestinians would ‘pocket’ any concrete written proposal and then use it as a starting point for further demands. What Barak was in fact prepared to accept then appeared as American ‘ideas’ from the mouth of President Clinton. Malley argues that therefore there was actually no ‘real’ offer other than some ‘bases for negotiation’ which were in the 90% range. He sees this as justification for the Palestinian claim that this was Barak’s best offer. But this is not the case by Malley’s own account of Barak’s negotiation technique!

Jeff Halper and Uri Avnery, with all due respect (not much) were not in a position to know what was offered at Camp David and are partisans of the Palestinian cause. Halper is presently in Gaza as part of the “Free Gaza” mission.

Now, what about the most interesting source, Ehud Barak himself? Try as I might, I could not find a mention of Barak in the New York Times archive on May 24, 2001 (nor could I find the Yediot reference). However, the following appears in an August 6, 2001 interview with Clyde Haberman of the Times:

When those negotiations collapsed, Israelis and American officials, including President Bill Clinton, put the blame squarely on Mr. Arafat. But newly published accounts [Malley, Agha and Pundak?] offer a different perspective. They say that all the parties at Camp David share responsibility, among them Mr. Barak for supposedly overbearing negotiating tactics.

Stung by the criticism, the former prime minister asked for time to make his case against what he called the ”gossipizing of history.” He has never been one to admit mistakes freely, and he was no different today when he said, ”I can answer almost every gossip item.”

He had offered the Palestinians more than any Israeli leader ever, he said, but his ”peace partner” chose to turn his back.

But there is a highly specific and authoritative source for the details of the offers. Dennis Ross was the chief Middle East negotiator for both Presidents George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton. He was intimately involved in the negotiations from start to finish. Here is what he said about the final Clinton-Barak offer:

In actuality, Clinton offered two different proposals at two different times. In July, he offered a partial proposal on territory and control of Jerusalem. Five months later, at the request of Ehud Barak, the Israeli prime minister, and Arafat, Clinton presented a comprehensive proposal on borders, Jerusalem, Palestinian refugees and security. The December proposals became known as the Clinton ideas or parameters.

The Clinton parameters would have produced an independent Palestinian state with 100 percent of Gaza, roughly 97 percent of the West Bank and an elevated train or highway to connect them. Jerusalem’s status would have been guided by the principle that what is currently Jewish will be Israeli and what is currently Arab will be Palestinian, meaning that Jewish Jerusalem — East and West — would be united, while Arab East Jerusalem would become the capital of the Palestinian state…

Since the talks fell apart, there has emerged a mythology that seeks to defend Arafat’s rejection of the Clinton ideas by suggesting they weren’t real or that Palestinians would have received far less than what had been advertised.

Arafat himself later claimed he was not offered even 90 percent of the West Bank or any of East Jerusalem. But that was myth, not reality.

Indeed.

Technorati Tags: Israel, Lawrence Davidson, Camp David, Clinton-Barak offer

Fresno State’s Middle East Studies program is planning an “International Conference” on “Teaching about the Middle East in the 21st Century” this October.

Why do I care? Because, given the politicization of academia in general and Middle East Studies in particular — and the individuals running the conference — I expect that it will not be a quiet exercise in arcane scholarship.

Instead, I expect another attempt to bring the politics of hatred to our local university, just as the same people turned a benign “International Days” event into a vicious anti-Israel “Palestine Day” in 2003.

Papers apparently can be about absolutely anything Mideast-related. Some of the ‘disciplines’ listed are

• Culture, Gender & Ethnography
• Diaspora & Migration Culture
• Middle East Politics & Representations
• U.S. Foreign Policy

It’s easy to guess the kind of material that is likely to be presented in those ‘disciplines’, especially since the postmodernist revolution in academia has made it possible to claim that anything politically congenial to the writer is true (see Nadia Abu El-Haj and CSUF’s own Mary Husain).

The conference chair is Dr. Sasan Fayazmanesh, by trade an economist, but known for popularizing the term “USrael”, in support of his view that US and Israeli policy is closely coordinated (if only it were so), and dominated by a “neo-con” (Jewish) cabal.

The Middle East Studies program has been in existence for a year, funded by a grant from the US Department of Education. Judging by the course offerings and programs, my feeling is that it should have been called “Arab and Persian” studies, since there is no indication that there are or ever have been Christians or Jews in the region! The program is chaired by Dr. Vida Samiian, Dean of the College of Arts and Humanities, “Palestine Day” organizer, and an activist who has been responsible for bringing numerous anti-Israel speakers and films to the area.

Let’s hope this will not turn into Fresno’s Durban Conference.

Technorati Tags: CSU Fresno, Sasan Fayazmanesh, Vida Samiian, Middle East Studies

News item:

The Gaza Strip’s four main universities have shut down, saying students can’t get to class because of fuel shortages created by Israeli cutbacks…

The shortages were aggravated last week by two developments. Gaza fuel distributors stopped selling the reduced amounts that did arrive in Gaza, to protest the Israeli cutbacks. Then Israel cut off all supplies after gunmen attacked the Israeli terminal that pumps the fuel to Gaza, killing two workers. — Jerusalem Post

Here is a photo of the Islamic University (IU) of Gaza. It certainly looks like an oasis of learning and peace in a place where there’s no shortage of ignorance and violence.

It may be a bit messier since Fatah and Hamas gangs fought here during the Hamas coup. IU was in the news last year, when it was suggested that USAID funds were used to pay for terrorism-related activities at the university:

In a report entitled “Audit of the Adequacy of USAID’s Antiterrorism Vetting Procedures,” dated November 6 and obtained by Fox News, U.S. Agency for International Development Inspector General Donald A. Gambatesa concluded USAID’s “policies, procedures, and controls are not adequate to reasonably ensure against providing assistance to terrorists”…

“In the basement of Gaza Islamic University, a U.S.-funded institution,” said Rep. Mark Kirk, R-Ill., who sits on the House Appropriations Subcommittee on State, Foreign Operations and requested the audit, “Palestinian police found several Iranian agents and an Iranian general teaching the students in the U.S.-funded chemistry lab how to make suicide bombs.” — Fox News

I am happy to be able to report that these suspicions are completely unfounded. FresnoZionism.org has received a copy of the IU course catalog, and you can see that it is a serious institution of higher learning. Here are a few of the offerings:

Physics 203: Dynamics — Students will learn the classical theory of the motion of bodies when forces are applied, with special emphasis on Newton’s Third Law. Students will construct their own experimental demonstration of the Third Law, showing how expanding gases in a tube closed at one end can propel the tube forward.

Chemistry 107: Physical Chemistry — This is a laboratory course in which students will learn in a practical manner about high-velocity chemical reactions which liberate large amounts of energy in short periods. Students will demonstrate how such reactions can be created using readily available compounds, like fertilizer.

Communications 250: Cellular Technology — Students will learn the use of cellular telephones for innovative purposes, such as remote control of, er, things. Students from Chemistry 107 will participate.

Civil Engineering 110: Underground Construction – Students will learn techniques used in underground construction projects. Laboratory experience will include tunneling very quietly and concealing tunnel openings.

Psychology 300: Seminar in Deviant Behavior — There has recently been an explosion of suicide in certain cultures. Students will study the reasons for it, and develop techniques to encourage discourage it.

Biology 120: Evolution — Students will learn how certain ethnic groups have evolved, especially from apes and pigs.

Poli Sci 150: Religion and Politics — No longer offered. What’s the difference?

Technorati Tags: Islamic University, Gaza

One of the favorite themes of Neo-Nazis is that today’s Ashkenazi Jews aren’t Jews, that is, descendants of the inhabitants of ancient Judea, but rather descended from the Khazars, Caucasian nomads that converted to Judaism around the 7th century (some of them converted to Christianity and Islam too, but never mind).

Now an Israeli scholar, Shlomo Zand (or Sand) claims that Sephardic Jews aren’t Jews either, but descended from various North African tribes.

Zand is not a neo-Nazi, and he even admits that his ‘findings’ don’t reflect on the legitimacy of the State of Israel. However, since he believes that “the character of the State of Israel undermines it in a much more serious way”, and also that “the chances that the Palestinians are descendants of the ancient Judaic people are much greater than the chances that you or I are its descendants”, one can see that he is happy to provide ammunition to those who want an ideological foundation for their hoped-for destruction of Israel.

Zand, a historian who has heretofore written about 20th-century France, based his work on modern “studies that present unorthodox views of the origins of the Jews” (I can imagine). For a taste of the absurdity of his argument, here’s how the Jewish People was ‘invented’:

At a certain stage in the 19th century, intellectuals of Jewish origin in Germany, influenced by the folk character of German nationalism, took upon themselves the task of inventing a people “retrospectively,” out of a thirst to create a modern Jewish people. From historian Heinrich Graetz on, Jewish historians began to draw the history of Judaism as the history of a nation that had been a kingdom, became a wandering people and ultimately turned around and went back to its birthplace.

Of course the literature of the Jewish People goes back to long before this period. So Zand is apparently saying that at some point an influx of foreign DNA made the Jewish People not the the Jewish People, and therefore — knowing that they had been adulterated and therefore lost their birthright — they conspired to pretend that they were.

Even if we grant his genealogical point (which I don’t), certainly the ‘peoplehood’ of the Jews rests in culture and spirit and not physical DNA!

It’s argued that there is genetic evidence that links both Sephardic and Ashkenazi Jews to the Middle East. I’m not qualified to evaluate it, of course, but most importantly, even if many Jews were descended from converts, who cares?

I could similarly argue that many Palestinian Arabs are descended from Egyptians that came with Muhammad Ali in the early part of the 19th Century, or Syrians who migrated to Palestine when the end of Ottoman rule and Jewish development improved the regional economy. I could talk about how nobody ever heard of the ‘Palestinian people’ until 1967. But this, too, would be irrelevant.

What is relevant is that the legitimacy of the Jewish state of Israel is not dependent on the presence of converts in the genealogy of the Jews. It is not dependent on Jewish provenance in biblical times, just as it is not justified by the Holocaust.

The Early Zionists purchased land legally, often paying exorbitant prices for poor land which they then improved by draining swamps and so forth. The yishuv (pre-state Jewish settlement) built all the institutions that would become the state.

The Jewish state received international sanction in 1947 and was kept through a series of defensive wars, which in fact are still ongoing. Israel is no less ‘legitimate’ than Jordan, Iraq, Lebanon and Saudi Arabia which were created at about the same time — and possibly more so, due to the UN Partition Resolution, and the fact that Israel is a democracy.

Although religious Jews (and many Christians) believe that the Jews were given the Land as described in the Torah, there is a solid secular foundation for the state as well.

Zand’s work appears to be another manifestation of mental disorder in the extreme academic Left in Israel, similar to the completely insane thesis that the IDF’s failure to rape Arab women is a racist phenomenon.

Technorati Tags: Israel, Academia, antisemitism, Shlomo Zand, Shlomo Sand

The rules of the game regarding anti-Semitic expression have changed. Here is a cartoon chosen by the editors of the Los Angeles Times to illustrate a violently anti-Israel article written by John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, the authors of the book “The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy”, a book which many have argued is itself anti-Semitic.

Anti-Semitic cartoon from LA Times, January 6, 2008

CAMERA has written a response to the Mearsheimer-Walt article, and has even purchased a full-page advertisement in (other) LA-area newspapers criticizing the Times for its distorted coverage and incidentally pointing out the similarity of the cartoon to one in a German newspaper of the Nazi era.

Last July, I called for a boycott of the Times after they ran a op-ed by Hamas mouthpiece Moussa Abu-Marzouk, in which he asserts that murder of civilians within Israel is justified as ‘resistance to occupation’.

But the Times is just one example of a more widespread phenomenon. The fact is that extreme anti-Israeli expression (which I have argued is often actually anti-Semitic) as well as outright Jew hatred are becoming more and more commonplace. The recent case of Ms. Magazine refusing to print a completely innocuous advertisement that was pro-Israel illustrates the degree of animosity toward Israel in some circles.

US college campuses are presently awash in anti-Semitic expression and have been for some time, as documented in a 2005 hearing before the US Commission on Civil Rights:

The excessive fascination with Israel and the tendency to hold it up to disproportionate scrutiny has turned over into attitudes and acts of hatred and anti-Semitism on many of the nation’s college campuses. There have been a number of examples. For instance, in 2002, at San Francisco State University, Jewish students held an Israeli-Palestinian sit-in hoping to engage the pro-Palestinian students on campus in a dialogue. What ensued as the rally was closing was a hate-fest in which pro-Palestinian students surrounded the 30 remaining Jewish students, screaming “Hitler didn’t finish the job” and “Die racist pigs.” In April, a flyer advertising a pro-Palestinian rally featured a picture of a dead baby with the words, “Canned Palestinian Children Meat – Slaughtered According to Jewish Rites under American License,” thereby reinvigorating the 900-year-old blood libel that Jews eat Gentile children.

During Passover of that year, a brick cinderblock was thrown through the glass doors of the University of California at Berkeley’s Hillel Building. A week after that, two Orthodox Jews were attacked and severely beaten one block from Berkeley’s campus, with anti-Zionist graffiti on blocks and buildings near the school. During a vigil for Holocaust Day, Jewish students who were saying the mourner’s kaddish, the prayer for the dead, were shouted down by protesting students saying a prayer in memory of the suicide bombers. Northwestern University’s Norris University Center was marked with a three-foot swastika in 2003, accompanied by the words “Die Jews.”

However, I doubt that even three years ago we would have seen the kind of mainstream presentation of extreme anti-Israeli and anti-Semitic views as appear today. One of the precipitating events was the 2006 Second Lebanon War, in which much of the media presented an image — almost entirely false — of a diabolical Israel, wantonly killing Lebanese civilians. In addition to made-up incidents, fake casualties, faked news footage and Photoshopped pictures, the war was presented as Israeli aggression, ignoring the fact that Israel responded to an invasion of her territory and the killing and capture of her soldiers. The fact that Hezbollah operated from civilian areas, using residents as human shields was also deemphasized.

There were two major reasons for this: one was the academic bias against Israel which has come to be widespread in the college-educated media as well, and the highly effective media management strategy employed by Hezbollah, which tightly controlled access by the foreign media and assured, sometimes by means of simple intimidation, that they reported what Hezbollah wanted in the way that they wanted.

In any event, the reporting of the war fed anti-Israel sentiment (already strong in Europe) in the US, and interestingly — but not really surprisingly — it seems to spill over into anti-Semitism.

Another factor has been the opposition of some left-wing elements to the Bush Administration, in which it’s become useful to blame “neo-cons” — many of whom are Jewish — for the invasion of Iraq, etc. And the fact that the US economy seems presently to be on a downward trend will certainly give rise to the usual scapegoating.

Anti-Semitism has a viral nature, in which it spreads and intensifies in proportion to its prevalence. So once started, it seems to take on a life of its own.

Technorati Tags: anti-Semitism, antisemitism, LA Times, Israel

What I am about to discuss is simply unbelievable. So maybe it’s made up, intended as a satire on leftist academics. You decide.

(IsraelNN.com) A research paper that won a Hebrew University teachers’ committee prize finds that the lack of IDF rapes of Palestinian women is designed to serve a political purpose.

The abstract of the paper, authored by doctoral candidate Tal Nitzan, notes that the paper shows that “the lack of organized military rape is an alternate way of realizing [particular] political goals.”

The next sentence delineates the particular goals that are realized in this manner: “In the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, it can be seen that the lack of military rape merely strengthens the ethnic boundaries and clarifies the inter-ethnic differences - just as organized military rape would have done.”

The paper further theorizes that Arab women in Judea and Samaria are not raped by IDF soldiers because the women are de-humanized in the soldiers’ eyes…

Nitzan’s paper did, however, give much space to the explanation that the Israeli soldiers refrained from rape out of demographic considerations. She explained at length how fearful the Jewish population is of the growing Arab population, and how in cases of wartime rape, the baby is generally assumed to be of the mother’s nationality.

Let me try to get my mind around this idea.

Arab propaganda for the past hundred years or so has accused Jews of raping Arab women, because of the inflammatory nature of such accusations. But despite the fact that rape in war, even mass rape as a military tactic, has characterized many recent conflicts throughout the world, there are almost zero known cases of IDF soldiers raping Palestinian women.

A normal person would think that this is a good thing which speaks well of our army. Explanations that can be offered might include Jewish religious traditions, which persist even in secular Jews, the IDF’s concept of tohar haneshek [purity of arms], etc.

But a normal person cannot understand the mind of a person so damaged by self-hatred, so infused with the viewpoint of her enemies, that she would conclude that the reason her country’s soldiers are not guilty of rape is…that they are racists!

And it doesn’t matter if IDF soldiers rape or not, because “the lack of military rape merely strengthens the ethnic boundaries and clarifies the inter-ethnic differences - just as organized military rape would have done.”

So we might as well be rapists, because the goal of raping and not-raping is the same!

Even Dr. Chomsky didn’t think of this.

Technorati Tags: Jewish self-hate, military rape, IDF, Tal Nitzan

Recently I wrote about CSU Fresno’s developing Middle East Studies program. I suggested that it might — like many programs and academic departments of Middle East studies — have an uncomfortable slant, tending towards radical Islam and including tendentious anti-American and anti-Israel content.

One of the faculty members teaching several courses and proposed courses is Mary Husain. She has taught courses in the departments of Women’s Studies and Communications in the areas of “cultural studies, gender studies, and media persuasion”. She is listed to teach proposed courses in Middle Eastern Film Criticism, Middle Eastern News Analysis, and Intercultural Communication.

Ms. Husain has recently published an article with Kevin Ayotte, called “Securing Afghan Women: Neocolonialism, Epistemic Violence, and the Rhetoric of the Veil” (NWSA Journal, Vol. 17 No. 3). Although the article is not available on the web, I have obtained a copy from the library.

(more…)

California State University, Fresno (CSUF) has been known until now primarily for its excellent business school and its scandal-prone Athletic Department.

Now it is developing a program in Middle East Studies. Today it is only an interdisciplinary collection of courses, but in a year or so it will be possible for an undergraduate to minor in the program, and some day it may become a department in its own right.

The project is being spearheaded by Dean of the College of Humanities Dr. Vida Samiian; one of the co-directors is her husband, Dr. Sasan Fayazmanesh.

In November 2003, Dr. Samiian organized ‘Palestine Day’ at CSUF. Speakers included the renegade Israeli academic Ilan Pappé on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Dr. Saleh Abdul Jawad on “The End of the Two State Solution: Apartheid, Bi-national State, or the Final Stage of Socioside”, the film “Jenin, Jenin” which falsely depicted a ‘massacre’ that never occurred, the film “Gaza strip”, and more. Jewish students who attended said that the atmosphere was not only anti-Israel, but also antisemitic.

And Dr. Fayazmanesh? In a recent interview, he says

the Middle East Policy of the current administration has been determined by the “neoconservatives,” individuals who virtually see no distinction between the “interest” of the US and Israel and might even put the “interest” of the latter above the former. — (The US, Israel and Iran: An Interview with Sasan Fayazmanesh)

He names seven “neo-cons”, six of whom are Jewish, and then goes on to talk about the power of the Israeli lobby in the US. Indeed, he likes to use the expression “USrael” to express the idea that US policy is identical to that of Israel.

It is hard to believe that a program led by these two will present an unbiased view of the Middle East.

We can possibly get an idea of what they have planned by reading between the lines of some of the course descriptions. For example, in a course given by Dr. Sameh El Kharbawy on “Islamic Art and Architecture”, students will learn about

…the historical tensions between Islam and modernity, and explore Islam’s engagement with radical social and political theory; its flirtation with utopianism and mass culture; its encounters with colonialism and war; its flirtation with technology, as well as its changing conceptions of mind and human nature. Contemporary critical issues of post-colonial identity, exile, cultural hybridity will also be studied through art and architecture. The goal is to re-orient the historiographic project of modernity within Islam’s regional, pan-Islamic, and cross-cultural contexts, exposing the course participants, in the process, to their role in the construction of modern identities.

It isn’t hard to imagine the discussion sessions.

Technorati Tags: Fresno, CSUF, Samiian, Fayazmanesh

Here comes Columbia University again (specifically Barnard College), where another Palestinian propagandist masquerading as a scholar is about to receive tenure:

Nadia Abu El-Haj, an assistant professor of anthropology at Barnard, is the author of “Facts on the Ground,” a 2001 book that questions archaeological claims regarding the ancient Jewish presence in Israel and argues that Israeli archaeologists legitimize the Jewish state’s “origin myth.”

An online petition against Abu El-Haj had garnered nearly 1,000 signatures as of Tuesday, the bulk of them from students and graduates of Barnard or Columbia University, its institutional parent.

The controversy over El-Haj threatens to raise questions anew about the integrity of Columbia’s scholarship on the Middle East, which first came under fire in 2004 with the release of a documentary film alleging university professors intimidated and embarrassed pro-Israel students who challenged them in class. A committee of inquiry subsequently found only one example of improper behavior, leading critics to call the report a whitewash. — JTA

“Facts on the Ground: Archaeological Practice and Territorial Self-Fashioning in Israeli Society” is Abu El-Haj’s only book. An anthropologist of Israeli society who doesn’t speak or read Hebrew and who knows little about archaeology, she nevertheless can deny such well-known facts as the existence of the Hasmonean and Davidic dynasties, as well as explain the psychological motivations of the Israeli archaeologists who have studied such things.

The Solomonia blog has an article discussing the controversy in detail (”Who’s Coming Up For Tenure: Nadia Abu El-Haj“), including references and excerpts of reviews of the book. I want to quote one short passage from it — which, in my opinion, says it all — and then recommend that you read the whole article:

Abu El Haj’s scorn for evidence-based scholarship is explicit. In her own words, she writes within a scholarly tradition that “Reject(s) a positivist commitment to scientific methods…” Rather, her work is “rooted in… post structuralism, philosophical critiques of foundationalism, Marxism and critical theory… and developed in response to specific postcolonial political movements.”

Naturally, the discussion is turning into one of how Jews get what they want by applying pressure rather than one about Abu El-Haj’s scholarship or lack of it. But regarding the latter, here is a detailed review by historian and archaeologist David Meir-Levy, (also thanks to Solomonia).

Technorati Tags: Columbia, Nadia Abu el-Haj

Recently I commented on statements issued by the president of Columbia University and the chancellor of the University of California at Berkeley, which criticized the British University and College Union for considering a boycott of Israeli academics and institutions.

Both Lee Bollinger of Columbia and John Birgeneau at UC Berkeley strongly condemned the UCU boycott as representing an unacceptable infringement of academic freedom. In my original post I quoted Birgeneau; here is an excerpt from the even stronger statement by Bollinger:

Therefore, if the British UCU is intent on pursuing its deeply misguided policy, then it should add Columbia to its boycott list, for we do not intend to draw distinctions between our mission and that of the universities you are seeking to punish. Boycott us, then, for we gladly stand together with our many colleagues in British, American and Israeli universities against such intellectually shoddy and politically biased attempts to hijack the central mission of higher education.

I asked Dr. John Welty, President of California State University - Fresno, to consider issuing a similar statement. He has not issued a press release, but he gave me permission to quote him as follows:

The future of our world is dependent upon the free interchange of ideas and a discussion of solutions to complex problems. Any actions to stifle interactions among universities and their faculties is counter-productive.

Since the statement does not mention the UCU boycott motion, I asked Dr. Welty if he would be prepared to go a bit further, by prefacing the above with something like “I oppose the UCU boycott of Israeli academics and institutions because…”

He was not.

Dr. Bollinger has asked the UCU to boycott Columbia too, if they must boycott Israeli institutions; and Dr. Birgeneau has said that they can add UC Berkeley to their list. Here in Fresno, Dr. Welty stands four-square behind academic freedom — as long as we don’t get too specific. I didn’t ask him for his position on apple pie.

In his defense, he is presently dealing with several scandals surrounding the university’s Athletic Department. Of course, given the fact that similar scandals erupt with the regularity of Old Faithful (perhaps slightly more frequently), I would expect that he would have developed ways of dealing with other issues by now.

Technorati Tags: UCU boycott, Fresno State, Welty

The UK Jewish community has expressed concern about the physical safety of Jewish students on campuses in light of recent agitation relating to the UCU boycott resolution:

Henry Grunwald QC, president of the Board of Deputies of British Jews, said, “Our community has been able to rely on the support of the Prime Minister throughout his tenure and he has repeatedly proved to be a true friend of Israel as well. However our community is now facing a different type of threat - a recent attempted boycott of Israel by members of the University and College Union will result in Jewish students being harassed and bullied on campus. There is need for direct action - not just on the floor of union debates but also on university campuses themselves. We are grateful for the Prime Minister’s robust criticism of such boycotts and we call on him to do whatever he can to secure the safety of Jewish students’ on campus.” — Jerusalem Post

The anti-Israel climate in the UK is getting worse, with a recent call by UNISON, the UK’s largest trade union, representing over 1.3 million members working in the public sector, private contractors and the utilities. Their boycott motion calls on Israel to

1) withdraw to its 1949-67 borders;
2) allow the refugees of 1948 to return home;
3) remove all its settlements from the Occupied Palestinian Territories and Occupied Syrian Al-Joulan [Golan Heights];
4) take down the Apartheid Wall; and
5) respect the Palestinian people’s right to national self-determination and to establish a state in the West bank and the Gaza Strip with its capital in Jerusalem.
…
Conference believes that ending the occupation demands concerted and sustained pressure upon Israel including an economic, cultural, academic and sporting boycott. — UNISON Web site

There’s more, but you get the idea.

Here in North America, the situation on campuses has not reached the point that it has in Britain, but there have been some incidents of harassment of pro-Israel speakers in the US and Canada; for example, take Daniel Pipes’ recent experience at the University of California Irvine, and also the demonstrations that prevented Benjamin Netanyahu from speaking at Concordia University in Montreal in 2002. There are numerous other examples.

One of the few bright spots in the American academic scene has been the declaration by several university presidents that they reject the concept of academic boycotts on the grounds that they stifle academic freedom.

I’ve asked Dr. John Welty, the president of our own California State University at Fresno to issue a similar declaration, and will publish it here if he does so.

Technorati Tags: UCU boycott, UNISON boycott, Israel