FresnoZionism.org — ציונות פרסנו

From Israel 21c:

Do they really want to boycott this?

The decision by a British academics’ union to urge its members to boycott their Israeli counterparts has generated outrage and concern among academics and supporters of Israel. The stunningly illogical decision to shun Israeli academic institutions threatens some of the organizations most involved in promoting peace and human rights in Gaza and the West Bank and could impede progress Israeli universities enable in scores of fields.

Read the entire article here

I do want to add something: the boycott is illogical, unless it’s more important to help Hamas and Hezbollah in their project to destroy Israel than it is to promote human rights, peace, scientific progress, academic freedom, and all that good stuff that the boycotters pretend to be in favor of.

Once you understand motivations, a lot of ‘illogical’ and irrational behavior becomes explainable. Why do the Arab nations treat the Palestinian refugees so badly? Because they care more about hurting Jews than helping Arabs.

And the same goes for the organizers of the UCU boycott.

Technorati Tags: UCU, Israel

Whew. I just spent about 20 minutes on Sue Blackwell’s web site (just Google her). Blackwell, a highly energetic and apparently clever teacher of English and Linguistics at the University of Birmingham in the UK is one of those responsible for the intifada being waged against Israel by British academics. She is ‘disinterested’ in the conflict, being neither Arab nor Jewish, just motivated by her sense of justice.

Much of the material on her site refers to the treatment of Palestinians by Israel. There are links to articles ‘proving’ that Israel is racist, colonialist, etc. Blackwell is very much a socialist, writing that

Other than in self-defence the only war worth fighting is the class war. We live in a world where global capitalism is constantly exploiting the people who produce all the wealth, and wars between countries or peoples are an indirect result of that. For instance, Bush’s war-mongering against Iraq is not a war against terrorism, it’s a war for oil. Israel is a key player in the Middle East because of the oil in surrounding countries and the USA’s dependence on it.

Strange that Israel is a key player because of other nations’ oil, but the importance of Israel in Blackwell’s mindspace is overwhelming. When asked why she targets Israel when there are so many ‘other oppressive states’ in the world, including Arab states, she replies

I would say simply that two wrongs don’t make a right. The fact that there are other dreadful regimes in the world doesn’t make Israel any better. In my view, the sooner the rulers of Saudi Arabia and the rest are overthrown by their own people, the better. If they are, one of the reasons will be because they are seen by their subjects as having collaborated with the USA and Israel. It’s interesting, isn’t it, that the US and British governments are happy to do business with these disgusting regimes while condemning Iraq? But then they were happy to do business with Iraq a decade ago when it was fighting Iran.

Her answer is a massive non-sequitur which avoids the question, that is, why she singles out Israel. Of course she singles it out because she’s obsessed.

A strange section is a list of links to “Palestinian and Arab [women’s rights and] LGBT [lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender] organisations, and also to non-Palestinian LGBT organisations which prominently support Palestinian rights”. Given the fact that women and LGBT people are often arbitrarily subject to murder in the Palestinian areas, the irony is considerable. For example, there’s QUIT (Queers against Israeli Terrorism) who wouldn’t last 10 minutes on the streets of Gaza regardless of their position on Israel. But anyone who will say something negative about Israel is welcome, regardless of the irony.

There is a huge list of hundreds of links to every imaginable accusation, slander and calumny that has ever been thrown at Israel. I’m imagining Blackwell lovingly collecting them, putting together her large website, serving on numerous committees, boards, councils, etc. all concerned with attacking and delegitimizing Israel in one way or another, maintaining the correspondence this entails, etc.

Is it possible that someone of her obvious intelligence and education can fail to notice that Palestinians and other Arabs have been violently trying to expel Jews from the Middle East for almost a century? Can she miss the context of murderous terrorism by Arabs against Jews that is the background of the occupation that she so decries? Apparently it is and she can.

Why? I think that the obsession and the blind spots have a common root, a particular kind of mental illness. Here is what she says about antisemitism:

Anti-semitism means discriminating against people because they are Jewish, which is a question of ethnicity and/or religion - usually, but not always, both. I am not an anti-semite; on the contrary I am an active anti-racist as my colleagues, students and friends will attest. I am an anti-Zionist: Zionism is a political philosophy which some people choose for themselves to adopt, just like Thatcherism, liberalism or Marxism. I think it’s fair game to criticise people for their political beliefs: people criticise mine all the time!

If criticising the Israeli government constitutes anti-semitism, then all I can say is, firstly, there are an awful lot of anti-semitic Jewish people in the world; and secondly, by extension of the same logic any criticism of Robert Mugabe’s atrocious government in Zimbabwe is racist just because it’s a black-led government. Wrong is wrong, whatever the ethnicity or religion of the people doing it. If you are a consistent anti-racist you have to be an anti-Zionist as well as an anti-Nazi.

I don’t think she and I agree about what Zionism is, but that’s another article. For purposes of argument, it’s probably safe to say that the “anti-Zionism” that she advocates would eliminate Israel as a Jewish state, replacing it with an Arab majority entity.

As I’ve said before, while not all criticism of Israel is antisemitism, there is a certain extreme form of ‘criticism’ which is irrational and can only be called antisemitism. And Sue Blackwell’s site meets every one of the conditions:

• Israel’s actions are seen as more reprehensible than far worse things done by other nations

• Israel is bashed in all contexts (in this case, academics) even when the connection to politics is tenuous

• Every imaginable accusation against Israel is given play, no matter how unreasonable (see her list of links)

• There is a blindness to any possible mitigation (Arab terrorism is ignored, Israeli democracy minimized)

• Israel’s motives for any given action are always assumed to be the worst possible (the security fence is to steal land)

This is not normal politics. It’s hatred, and there is a name for it.

Update [3 Jun 0802 PDT]: For another discussion of the motivations of the boycotters, see The Real Face of the Boycott Movement, at Simply Jews.

Technorati Tags: Sue Blackwell, Israel

This is my third attempt to write about the decision by the British Universities and Colleges Union (UCU) to ‘consider an academic boycott of Israel’:

“Israel’s 40-year occupation has seriously damaged the fabric of Palestinian society through annexation, illegal settlement, collective punishment and restriction of movement,” the motion said. “Congress deplores the denial of educational rights for Palestinians by invasions, closures, checkpoints, curfews, and shootings and arrests of teachers, lecturers and students.”

“Congress condemns the complicity of Israeli academia in the occupation… Congress believes that in these circumstances passivity or neutrality is unacceptable and criticism of Israel cannot be construed as anti-Semitic,” it added. — JPost

Attempt one was to point out that they must be blind to not notice the pogroms, wars, and continuous terrorism of Arabs against Jews which might possibly have something to do with the “invasions, closures, checkpoints, curfews, and shootings and arrests”. But they aren’t blind.

Attempt two was to talk about how an anti-Israel position is so much a part of the conventional wisdom in Academe today, especially in the UK, that it’s almost like breathing. It would take a truly original thinker to think otherwise, and not too many academics are original. Probably true, but boring.

So I’ve decided to issue my own manifesto. It will have as much or as little influence on anyone as a line-by-line refutation of their statement, but will be more entertaining.

Resolved, that these academics are moral idiots, and their “criticism of Israel” can only be construed as antisemitic.

Their attempt to rewrite the history of the conflict from one of almost a century of attempted genocide against the Jews of Palestine and later Israel into a story about European colonialism is false from start to finish, and does such great violence to the plain facts staring us in the face that it can only have irrational motivation: antisemitism.

Their alliance with groups such as Hamas, so opposed to traditional British, Western, Christian, and Jewish values that they would send their own children to their deaths in order to kill Jewish children, indicates that those who support the boycott have in a sense become morally insane as a result of their antisemitic infection — a certain symptom of such infection.

Their ability to ignore or repress their awareness of current events, such as the continued Qassam barrage on Sderot, or even the continued captivity of the British journalist Alan Johnston — whose release Hamas could bring about in hours if they wished — in favor of their obsession, clearly points to its pathological nature.

Finally, the fact that support for Hamas and other murderous, totalitarian, corrupt, cruel, and plainly evil gangs can only lead to more misery, poverty, suffering, lack of self-determination and death among the Palestinian people that the academics purport to care about — this shows that the hatred of Jews is far more important to them than the love of Arabs.

Technorati Tags: UCU, Israel, Palestinians

By Vic Rosenthal

Sasan Fayazmanesh is chairman of the Economics department at California State University Fresno (CSUF), a university that has been called world-class in the misbehavior of its athletes, one of whom was arrested for biting off someone’s lip in a bar fight. But I digress.

(more…)

History professor Dr. Ilan Pappé, possibly the most grotesquely anti-Israel of Israeli academics has left the University of Haifa (to the great relief of most of his colleagues) from which he was about to be expelled, and moved to the University of Exeter in the UK. He plans to establish a “center for Palestinian studies” there.

He’s already attacked Jewish students for forming a ‘lobby’ (!) to prevent open debate on the usual issues.

“Jewish student organizations have ceased to care for the interests and concerns of Jewish students but have become a front for the Zionist point of view. They act as an arm of the Israeli embassy,” Pappé was quoted as saying. — YNet

It doesn’t seem to have occurred to him that he may be dealing with students who actually have a “Zionist point of view”.

It’s hard to understand why a legitimate university would offer a position to someone like Pappé, who is distinguished mainly for defending a student who had faked historical evidence, urging British academia to boycott Israeli scholars and universities, starting the annual “Right of Return Conferences” in Israel, and making statements like this:

“…1948 was the year in which Jews had done the most evil things to others, like Jews have never done before in the period of 2000 years. Within less than a year, Jews colonized, occupied, expelled, destroyed, massacred, and raped another people.” — Pappé interview, YouTube

He is, however, a good speaker in English, and his idiosyncratic point of view (that is, idiosyncratic when held by an Israeli Jew) guarantees excitement and controversy for a university which has recently suffered financial difficulties.

Technorati Tags: Pappé, Exeter

Manchester University in the UK has 26,000 students. A student organization managed to orchestrate the passage of a motion by the Student Union that affirmed solidarity with the students of a Palestinian university that apparently specializes in murder:

Jewish students were this week left reeling after the Student Union at Manchester University passed a motion twinning it with a West Bank university which has glorified suicide bombing and the massacre of innocent Israelis.

(more…)

I recently wrote about Ariel Toaff, the Bar Ilan scholar who wrote a book suggesting that the medieval blood libels against Jews might have had some basis in fact.

Now he has suspend distribution of his book to “re-edit the passages which comprised the basis of the distortions and falsehoods that have been published in the media.” Apparently it hadn’t occurred to him that what he wrote could have been used for nefarious purposes.

Of course one can argue that antisemites will distort anything, but still it’s remarkable that in today’s climate he would have missed this.

Now, of course, we’ll hear that the ‘Jewish lobby’ has ‘silenced’ him.

Technorati Tags: Toaff, antisemitism

By Vic Rosenthal

The older and farther removed from the academic world that I get, the more I am astonished by the irresponsibility, bias, and sheer ignorance that categorizes it.

Take Brandeis University (please).

Counting Albert Einstein as one of its founders and Abbie Hoffman, Angela Davis, and Jack Abramoff as alumni, Brandeis has

…incurred a sorry record when it comes to Israel in recent years - staging [the] “Voices of Palestine” exhibit, hiring [Natana] DeLong-Bas and [Khalil] Shikaki, granting an honorary degree to the anti-Zionist playwright Tony Kushner, appointing the muddled Prof. Shai Feldman (POL) to head the Crown Center, permitting an Islamist (Qumar-ul Huda) to serve as its Muslim chaplain and setting up the Brandeis-Al-Quds University study-abroad connection. — Daniel Pipes

Now Brandeis president Jehuda Reinharz has displayed his ignorance, bias, or both by calling both Pipes and Norman Finkelstein “weapons of mass destruction”. Poor Pipes is justifiably insulted (read his whole article here) by being lumped together with the disreputable Finkelstein, and irritated by Brandeis’ action in suspending Pipes’ planned appearance there.

Having read both Pipes and Finkelstein and heard Pipes speak, I must agree that Reinharz is far off-base. I do find the visceral negative response to Pipes in academic, left-wing, and Muslim circles to be interesting. The guy is a careful scholar, very competent in his field, and not at all a wild-eyed radical. He has never, as far as I know, written anything in praise of Baruch Goldstein or suggested forced transfer as a solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. I do expect that he votes Republican, but even that doesn’t justify the reception he receives.

I’m afraid that it’s simply his message, which often uncovers the “unclothed emperors” in the academic world, and which exposes radical Islam for the aggressive Jihadism that it is.

Technorati Tags: Daniel Pipes, Jehuda Reinharz, Brandeis

An Israeli historian, Prof. Ariel Toaff of Bar Ilan University, has written a book claiming that medieval Jews did actually use Christian blood to make Matzoh.

Of course, he justifies his claims using ‘evidence’ consisting of confessions extracted from Jews under torture.

Toaff’s father, Elio Toaff (who has disavowed the book) is a former chief rabbi of Rome and Italian restaurant owner.

The question of why he would write such a book naturally arises. Literally hundreds of innocent Jews have been murdered over the centuries as a result of the blood libel, and certainly no serious historian has ever suggested that confessions obtained by torture are evidence for anything. The blood libel today is believed by many in the Muslim world and continues to be a part of modern antisemitic literature. And Toaff’s book has already been cited on several antisemitic websites.

So to put things in perspective, Toaff has struck a small blow for Jew-hatred (small because those who believe such things will believe them anyway, and those who don’t won’t be convinced by his ‘evidence’) and perhaps a large one for his personal notoriety.

Update [14 Feb 1225 PST]: Toaff has suspended distribution of his book to “re-edit the passages which comprised the basis of the distortions and falsehoods that have been published in the media.” Apparently it hadn’t occurred to him that what he wrote could have been used for nefarious purposes. Now, of course, we’ll hear that the ‘Jewish lobby’ has ’silenced’ him.

The phenomenon of extreme anti-Zionism among some Jewish academics is puzzling. Now Ami Isseroff has come up with a case study to explain it. It doesn’t quite work for Jacqueline Rose, but otherwise it’s as good an explanation as any.

I recall sitting in a local Interfaith Alliance meeting a couple of years ago. Pipes’ name came up, and he was immediately dismissed scornfully as an ‘islamophobe’.

Nothing I’ve read by Pipes or heard him say indicates that he hates Muslims or despises Islam. On the contrary, he is knowledgeable about Islam and obviously wishes that radical Islamism had not become its public face. And unlike most who write and speak about the Mideast conflict, Pipes uses logic and reason.

Logic and reason, however, are not on the side of the Palestinians and their supporters. So he gets on their nerves.

In any event, he spoke recently at UC Irvine, where his talk was disrupted by anti-Israel student barbarians. You can read about it and link to videos of the event on Pipes’ own blog.

I especially recommend the shorter video that includes the protestors’ leader talking to his group at the very end. It’s chilling.

Update [4 Feb. 1456 PST]: LGF has excerpted the interesting part of the video and also provided a printed transcript.

Technorati Tags: Daniel Pipes, UC Irvine

By Vic Rosenthal

Some of the most effective anti-Israel propaganda lately comes from Jews. Some time ago, I wrote a piece titled With Jews like these, who needs Arabs? It doesn’t sound so clever anymore.

(more…)