OC Jewish Life
Campus Currents
Ilene Schneider
September 2008
Should free speech include hate speech? What is the fine line between healthy debate and intimidation? What should the role of the university administration be in assuring that students are not intimidated? How should the community work with the university to create an atmosphere of tolerance on campus?
These are some of the questions that have been percolating in the Jewish community of Orange County and beyond. The answers are complicated.
"Hate speech is protected under the First Amendment unless it incites to violence, but the fundamental problem is that it is still anti-Semitic, and the university administration has a duty to speak up against it," explained Susan B. Tuchman, Esq., director of the Center for Law and Justice at the Zionist Organization of America (ZOA).
In August the ZOA urged University of California (UC) President Mark G. Yudof, to address ongoing problems of anti-Semitism and Israel-bashing at UC campuses. The ZOA described the events regularly sponsored by UCI's Muslim Student Union (MSU), which "demonize and vilify Jews, Zionism and Israel." According to the ZOA, "[t]he events' titles alone convey just how false and hateful the events are," including 'Zionism Hijacking Judaism,' 'Israel: The 4th Reich,' and 'From Auschwitz to Gaza: The Politics of Genocide,' a program absurdly suggesting that the systematic and deliberate murder of Jews in Auschwitz is comparable to the situation today in Gaza. Last May, the MSU sponsored such programs as 'The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine,' 'Death to Apartheid: A Farewell to Zionism,' and 'Silence is Consent: Stop the Palestinian Holocaust.'"
The ZOA informed President Yudof thatAt UC Irvine, speakers accuse the Jews of controlling the media and the government and of being responsible for 9-11. They have compared "Zionist Jews" to Nazis, advocated suicide bombings and terrorism against Israeli Jews, and called for Israel's destruction. According to the ZOA, students have been afraid to wear anything that would identify them as Jewish or Israel supporters, students avoid parts of the campus or avoid the campus altogether, and students' academic performance has suffered.
While UC President Yudof has publicly stated that university leaders have the moral duty to speak out forcefully against anti- Semitism, the ZOA said that UC Irvine's Chancellor, Michael Drake, has never condemned any of the anti-Semitism that has occurred on his campus in any of his messages to the university community. Although the chancellor issued a campus message saying that he abhorred hate speech, he never mentioned the word "anti-Semitism" or tied his general anti-hate message to a specific program or speaker on the campus, according to the ZOA letter, which added that Chancellor Drake has only condemned anti-Semitism in general terms, off campus, to a predominantly Jewish audience.
The ZOA noted that its criticism of Chancellor Drake's silence has been echoed by others. The independent Orange County Task Force, which conducted a year-long investigation of allegations of anti-Semitism at UC Irvine, condemned the chancellor and called on him to "publicly identify and denounce hate speech when it occurs" on his campus. The Orange County Register published an editorial criticizing the Chancellor's administration for "punting in its response" to hateful speech. In May 2008, in response to the MSU's event entitled "Never Again? The Palestinian Holocaust,"
U. S. Congressman Brad Sherman (D-CA) wrote to the Chancellor, calling on him to condemn the MSU's event, which "appears intended to encourage violence against the State of Israel and propagate the spread of anti-Semitism." Congressmen Sherman stated in his letter to Chancellor Drake: "As an American, you have a right to speak out. As Chancellor, it is your duty to condemn anti-Semitism, especially when it occurs at the UCI campus."
The ZOA urged UC President Yudof to insist that UC Irvine's chancellor exercise his moral leadership and speak out clearly and forcefully against the MSU's anti-Semitic speakers and programs. According to Tuchman, that is part of the chancellor's First Amendment right.
After the task force report was issued, a group of concerned citizens circulated a petition expressing concern about the situation at UCI. "It reflects the depth and breadth of the emotion on this matter in the community and the distance between them and the leadership in the local Jewish organizations on the UCI situation," according to Marty Migdall, one of the organizers of the petition campaign.
As former chair of the Orange County Independent Task Force on Anti-Semitism, Jesse H. Rosenblum, Ph.D., strongly endorses ZOA's request to the president of the University of California. According to Rosenblum, the first recommendation of the task force was, "The Chancellor should publicly identify and denounce hate speech when it occurs so as not to insinuate an equivalence where there is none. Unless the Jewish Community stands as one to fight anti-Semitism, we and our college-age progeny will suffer the consequences."
Recent UCI graduate Reut R. Cohen said that she "was very happy to see the ZOA take the initiative to address the UC president about the situation at UC Irvine...The Muslim Student Union on campus promotes ethnic hatred, advocates for terrorism, and calls for the downfall of both America and Israel...This is an issue that affects the entire community and the reputation of a very good university. This group received money from student government to host some of the most absurd and hateful speakers imaginable...By remaining silent, we are not alleviating any of these problems."
Another recent UCI alumnus, who wished to remain anonymous, said "I am heartened that the ZOA continues to pressure the UC and UCI administrations for once (1) to demonstrate real public recognition of, and (2) to take effective action against the on-going anti-Semitism on campus...A good start would be for Chancellor Drake to finally publicly define the term 'anti-Semitism,' and then demonstrably identify prior examples of anti-Semitism on campus."
However, James Weiss, M.D., a member of the Board of Directors of Jewish Federation of Orange County, takes exception to the facts in the ZOA's National President Morton A. Klein's letter. According to Weiss, "In the first sentence of page 4, Mr. Klein writes, '...UCI is presently under federal investigation for the second time...' He is referring, I believe, to an investigation by the Department of Education's Office of Civil Rights (OCR). As far as I know there is no second investigation as yet underway. According to the ZOA's press release from June 6, 2008, 'OCR indicated that it had determined that several of the ZOA's allegations "are appropriate for investigation under the laws enforced by OCR. . . . We will contact you soon to discuss the allegations and complaint resolution process.' OCR had yet to begin an investigation and to my knowledge one not been started as of today."
Weiss agrees with the ZOA's position that anti-Semitic speech should cease on the UCI campus, as it should everywhere around the world. He said, "Certainly the Muslim Student Union (MSU) has been guilty of anti-Semitic speech there. It was my personal observation that the anti-Semitic rhetoric on display was much more muted during MSU's week of demonstration in May 2008, compared to similar events in previous years. It is my belief that the toned down rhetoric this year is due in large part to the efforts of Chancellor Michael Drake, as well as the efforts of the Jewish Federation of Orange County, Hillel, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), the American Jewish Committee (AJC), Stand With Us, and others."
Weiss cited positive data about Jewish Life on the UCI campus:
· Israel advocacy funding resources have increased dramatically.
· Hillel has a new energized team to work with students and cultivate them to become leaders.
· This past summer Chancellor Drake traveled to Israel with University of California President Marc Yudof. Fourteen UCI students went to Israel with University Vice-Chancellor Manuel Gomez to build a foundation to work through the issues of conflict at UCI.
· Chancellor Drake has urged any Jewish student to come directly to him any time he or she felt intimidated. During the last academic year, Chancellor Drake kept in constant touch with Jewish student leaders to ensure that their voice was heard and safety protected.
Tuchman acknowledged that Chancellor Drake has made more efforts than his predecessors, but she wants him to let the perpetrators know that anti-Semitism is against the values of the university. "If just one student is being harassed, we as a community have to be concerned about it, and so does the chancellor," she concluded.
Some Antidotes to Hate Speech on Campus
Jewish National Fund and Media Watch International sponsor the Caravan for Democracy Program, which drives constructive dialogue on college campuses throughout the United States by bringing different speakers from Israel to discuss the challenges Israel faces as the only democracy in the Middle East. Caravan for Democracy provides access to resources and opinions to encourage critical thinking about the issues affecting Israel, its commitment to peace, how it is covered in the media, and its unique role in the region. Learn more at www.caravanfordemocracy. org, caravan@jnf.org, or (800) 969-5585x247.
StandWithUs is an international education organization that ensures that Israel's side of the story is told in communities, campuses, libraries, the media and churches through brochures, speakers and conferences. Stand- WithUs brings up-to-date information, resources, and tools for Israel advocacy on and off campus. The organization uses new technologies and creates fresh initiatives to reach out to today's young campus activists. Learn more at www.standwithuscampus.com.
Thursday, November 13, 2008
antisemitism and anti-Zionism on campus
Israel ENews.com
Sunday, September 14, 2008 - By: Gerstenfeld, Dr. Manfred
2007-2008: Another Year of Global Academic Anti-Semitism and Anti-Israelism
The academic year 2007-2008 saw ongoing anti-Israeli and anti-Semitic incidents in various countries. Among them is Israel Apartheid Week, which has become an annual ritual in a number of cities on several continents. So have the calls of the University and College Union (UCU) in the United Kingdom for discriminatory measures against Israeli universities and academics. In several universities, such as on some campuses of the University of California, anti-Israelism is endemic.
Much of the visible anti-Semitism and anti-Israelism occurs in the academic world of Britain, Canada, and the United States. There are problems in many other countries as well. The situation is obfuscated by limited media attention.
Effective counteractions are also increasing. There is now more exposure of Islamist racism and anti-Semitism on American campuses. In Canada protests against anti-Israeli actions are on the rise. There are also European and British initiatives to enhance academic collaboration with Israeli universities. External monitoring bodies are more and more exposing the hate culture and biased actions of some university lecturers.
The onslaught against Israel and Jews is not an isolated phenomenon. What happens to Jews has usually been a pointer to their societal environment and a sensor of events to come. This is also the case regarding academic anti-Israelism. Academic freedom has been abused so much that in its present form it has outlived part of its academic and societal usefulness for fostering knowledge.
The academic year 2007-2008 saw ongoing anti-Israeli and anti-Semitic incidents in various countries. Among them is Israel Apartheid Week, which has become an annual ritual in a number of cities on several continents. So have the calls of the University and College Union (UCU) in the United Kingdom for discriminatory measures against Israeli universities and academics.
In several universities, such as on some campuses of the University of California, anti-Israelism is endemic. In many others it has seen highs and lows over the years. The situation is obfuscated by the fact that, with a few exceptions, the incidents this academic year were not given much media publicity.
On the other hand, effective counteractions are also increasing. There is now more exposure of Islamist racism and anti-Semitism on American campuses. In Canada protests against anti-Israeli actions are on the rise. There are also European and British initiatives to enhance academic collaboration with Israeli universities. External monitoring bodies are more and more exposing the hate culture and biased actions of some university lecturers.
It is mistaken to assume that hate campaigns can be largely counteracted or balanced by positive programs on Israel. Because of their extremism, the hate campaigners' damage to Israeli and Jewish causes runs deeper than the superficial impression left by the positive activists. This also reflects the intense motivation of Muslim and far-Left racists and anti-Semites. Their activities are often supported de facto by the passivity of university authorities. Although they may explicitly oppose anti-black or anti-Muslim racism, these authorities are often far more reluctant to take similar actions against anti-Semitism and its new mutation anti-Israelism. It is usually easy to prove that these double standards operate.
A complete overview of the many anti-Israeli and anti-Semitic actions on campuses worldwide is not possible. The following should thus be seen as a selection of important trends and events. It focuses mainly on Britain, Canada, and the United States where many of the problems are concentrated.[2] Yet academic anti-Semitism and anti-Israelism are rife in many other countries as well. As these problems are hardly monitored and little is written about them, the illusion is often created that they do not exist.
Israel Apartheid Week
Israel Apartheid Week or similar anti-Israeli activities took place in February 2008 in twenty-five locations in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, South Africa, and the Palestinian Authority. Since 2005 such activities have been increasing, and February 2008 marked Israel Apartheid Week's fourth anniversary.
The programs include calls for boycotts, divestments, and sanctions against Israel. One goal is to raise "awareness and disseminate information about Zionism, the Palestinian liberation struggle and its similarities with the indigenous sovereignty struggle in North America and the South African anti-Apartheid movement."[3] These activities should be seen in the wider framework of the anti-Israeli campaign.
The website called "Israeli Apartheid Week" gives no information on who is behind this project other than mentioning that: "Prominent Palestinians, Jewish anti-Zionists, and South Africans have been at the forefront of this struggle."[4]
Originating at the University of Toronto
The origins of Israel Apartheid Week can be traced to the University of Toronto in 2004, where groups supporting the Palestinian cause tried to delegitimize Israel. The first annual event there was organized by the Arab Students Collective (ASC) and took place in early 2005. Over the years other organizations at this university joined, such as the Coalition against Israel Apartheid and Solidarity for Palestinian Human Rights.[5]
In Canada groups at the Universities of Toronto, Montreal, Ryerson, Ottawa, and McMaster all took part in Israel Apartheid Week 2008. This year it received media attention partly because of the reactions to it. The organizers at the Canadian universities reached out to include other campus organizations such as the United Black Students and Indigenous Environmental Network, whose representatives spoke on the first day of the week and introduced the topic of apartheid.
Events at the University of Toronto this year included speeches by notorious anti-Israeli figures such as Ward Churchill, a professor who in 2007 was fired from the University of Colorado for research misconduct, as well as displays and a march starting at the Israeli consulate and called "Breaking the Silence." Churchill claimed among other things that the mass murder of the Jews was not "a fixed policy objective of the Nazis." This was yet another example of how anti-Semitism and anti-Israelism go together.
Churchill had also spoken at the event in 2006.[6] Past events in Canada have included figures such as former Knesset member Azmi Bishara. More recently Bishara has fled Israel and may be arrested on suspicion of treason if he ever returns.
This year for the first time, the week at the University of Toronto ended with a one-day conference for high school students.[7] There were also outdoor events such as demonstrations at mock Israeli checkpoints. Not only student organizations but also university academic departments sponsor the week.
McGill University and Carleton University organized activities on a smaller scale. Participants there also picketed Indigo Books and Music, a retail chain with locations throughout Canada. Its main shareholders are financial supporters of the Heseg Foundation for Lone [Israeli] Soldiers.[8]
Reactions from the Jewish Community
After years in which the Jewish community reacted only in minor ways, a change occurred in 2008. The University of Toronto's Israel Apartheid Week received much more attention this year from Jewish groups on campus, B'nai Brith, and the Friends of Simon Wiesenthal Center for Holocaust Studies. The pro-Israeli community at the University of Ottawa also staged a counterevent, including a lecture by the Israeli ambassador to Canada on "Israel, the Only Democracy in the Middle East."[9]
McMaster University, for its part, banned the words "Israel Apartheid" because they demonstrate intolerance. Controversy then erupted on campus as to whether the administration meant all use of "Israel Apartheid" or just the use of the term on printed displays. Students at Ryerson University and the University of Toronto also staged a protest.[10]
The Jewish community, including leaders of the abovementioned organizations, made the University of Toronto administration aware of their views. In April, 125 Jewish and non-Jewish professors took out a full-page ad in the National Post calling on the administration to prevent the university from hosting future Israel Apartheid Weeks. They noted that, while the university prohibits Islamophobia and discrimination toward other minorities and specific individuals, it permits freedom of speech for Israel Apartheid Week.[11]
The Friends of Simon Wiesenthal Center for Holocaust Studies also sent a letter to David Naylor, president of the University of Toronto, expressing their disappointment at the school's response to Israel Apartheid Week by dismissing the issue simply as one of freedom of speech.[12]
Boycott Motions at the University and College Union
On 28 May 2008, Britain's UCU adopted three anti-Israeli motions at its annual conference. They were passed by approximately a two-thirds majority. The UCU has 120,000 members, who include most of the British university teachers and related academic staff.
Although the UCU motions against Israel are usually referred to as proposed boycotts, their current content now stops somewhat short of directly calling for such actions. In 2007 the UCU received a legal opinion that boycotting Israel would be illegal. Its details have not been made public. One of the 2008 conference motions says that British academics should consider the moral implications of working with Israeli universities and discuss "the occupation" with Israeli colleagues with whom they work.
Before this year's UCU conference, British Jewry's Stop the Boycott Campaign published a legal opinion it had obtained. This stated among other things that if the UCU were to adopt and implement one of the proposed motions it might breach the British Race Relations Act.
At the UCU's invitation a delegation from PFUUPE (the Palestinian Federation of Unions of University Professors and Employees) visited UK universities and colleges during the past academic year. As Jonathan Halevi notes, "The discussions between UCU and PFUUPE were concentrated on promoting fields of cooperation and supporting the Palestinian academia, ignoring the fact that in all these universities there is a strong presence from the Palestinian terrorist organizations."[13]
Condemnation
As in previous years, the UCU resolutions prompted some condemnations. British minister of higher education Bill Rammell stated that he found boycotting academics deeply disturbing.[14] Paul Goldschmidt, former director of the European Union, wrote to José Manuel Barroso, president of the European Commission, that he should condemn the UCU decision.
Labor parliamentarian John Mann, chair of the All-Party Parliamentary Group against anti-Semitism, stressed the motion's discriminatory character against British Jews: "Boycotts do nothing to bring about peace and reconciliation in the Middle East but leave Jewish students, academics and their associates isolated and victimized on UK university campuses."[15]
Israel's ambassador to the UK Ron Prosor published an article in the Daily Telegraph in which he wrote: "Israel faces an intensified campaign of delegitimisation, demonisation and double standards. Britain has become a hotbed for radical anti-Israeli views and a haven for disingenuous calls for a ‘One state solution,' a euphemistic name for a movement advocating Israel's destruction."[16]
Minister Rammell responded:
I do not agree that there is widespread radical anti-Israeli sentiment on our higher education campuses. I do not believe calls for academic boycotts of Israel have anything more than small minority support amongst academics. Universities have a vital role to play in challenging those views that we may regard as uncomfortable or distasteful and, where such views do exist, it is the responsibility of staff and students to isolate the very small minority who promote extremism.[17]
Attorney Anthony Julius, representing various members of the UCU, wrote a letter to its general secretary Sally Hunt. He pointed out why one of the motions, number 25, was anti-Semitic, and argued that the UCU's behavior was "continuous with episodes in anti-Semitism's history."
Julius also mentioned the possibility of "a likely claim against the UCU for harassment under s. 3A(1) of the Race Relations Act, that is, the creating of an intimidating, hostile, degrading, humiliating and/or offensive environment for Jewish members of the union and/or violating their dignity." He then listed various points on which such a court case could be based.[18]
Those who propose and support the anti-Israeli motions are well aware that these are unlikely to influence those British academics who collaborate with Israeli universities. Their true aims are different. Many are Trotskyites who seek to attract public attention to various issues concerning the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. Another aim is to demonize Israel, while presenting themselves as moral people.
The Absentees
Two parties are surprisingly almost absent from the boycott-motions debate. One is the great majority of UCU members who want their union to focus on salaries and social conditions instead of political issues. Yet this majority is so silent that it has allowed the Trotskyite faction, the UCU Left, to take control.
The other major absentee is the Israeli universities. One would have expected those who are attacked to be the first to respond. They have, however, left the battlefield to British Jewry and its activists. Among the latter are Ronnie Fraser, founder and director of Academic Friends of Israel, and Engage, an organization that includes both Jewish and non-Jewish academics and has worked against the boycott since 2005.
Until the end of 2007 the International Advisory Board for Academic Freedom and its executive director Ofir Frenkel were at the forefront of the battle against Israel's academic enemies worldwide. This body, founded by Bar-Ilan University, had evolved into an umbrella organization of all Israeli universities. However, a lack of funds forced it to discontinue its activities.
The Israeli government was willing to make partial funding available, but this was conditional on the universities providing the remainder. Israel's university presidents however did not discuss the matter in their meetings.[19] The academic world would like to believe it is at its best when outsiders leave it alone. The Israeli universities' failure to deal with attacks against them is yet further proof that this is a fallacy.
Other Events
The Oxford Union is a very old student debating society. In late 2007 its leadership proposed discussing the topic "This house believes that one state is the only solution to the Israel-Palestine conflict." The debate had to be canceled because as representative of the pro-Israeli side the union chose Norman Finkelstein, an academic who had been fired from DePaul University "for his lack of scholarship and his ad hominems against pro-Israel writers."[20]
The Oxford Union held another event in November 2007 in which Holocaust-denier David Irving and Nick Griffin, leader of the far-Right British National Party, debated the subject of free speech. Irving had been jailed by an Austrian court in 2006 for his pro-Nazi statements. The debate was accompanied by heavy protests.[21]
New Israeli Academic-Collaboration Agreements
When British prime minister Gordon Brown visited Israel in July 2008 he, together with Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, launched a new academic- exchange program between the UK and Israel called BIRAX (Britain-Israel Research and Academic Exchange Partnership). The program is to run initially for five years and will be administered by the British Council.
Julia Smith, deputy director of the British Council said the program was not related to the boycott. Prof. David Newman of Ben-Gurion University, who has been active in fighting the boycott during a sabbatical in the UK, disagreed and said the program "has a great deal to do with the boycott. Because of the ongoing discussion of boycotts, the British government decided that the most appropriate response was to strengthen ties."[22]
In the same month European Commissioner for Education, Culture and Sport Jan Figel signed a joint declaration with Israeli education minister Yuli Tamir on the occasion of the inauguration of the first Tempus office in Israel. The Tempus program promotes the exchange of students and academic staff between the EU and neighboring countries.[23]
On the other hand, two leading British universities have received gifts from Saudi prince Alwaleed bin Abdul Aziz Alsaud. Centers for Islamic studies will be set up at Cambridge and Edinburgh universities with a $31 million endowment. The prince had earlier made gifts to Harvard and Georgetown universities.[24] Then-New York mayor Rudy Giuliani refused a $10 million gift from him after the 9/11 attack because the prince had suggested that American policies had contributed to the crime.
The financing of chairs in Western universities by Saudi Arabia and other Arab dictatorships is an issue that will require increasing scrutiny. Jay P. Greene, head of the Department of Education Reform at the University of Arkansas, says Gulf Arabs have donated a total of $88 million to fourteen U.S. universities from 1995 to the present. His own university was the largest recipient.[25] Prof. Anthony Glees, director of Brunel University's Centre for Intelligence and Security Studies, says that eight British universities-among them Oxford and Cambridge-have accepted more than £233.5 million from Saudi and Muslim donors from 1995 to 2008.[26]
United States: The Ad Hoc Committee to Defend the University
Another initiative that de facto serves the anti-Israeli racists on campuses is a statement of the Ad Hoc Committee to Defend the University. This was partly an attack on the pro-Israeli forces and those fighting anti-Semitism in American academia. In November 2007 professors from the University of California-Santa Cruz, Princeton, Harvard, and Columbia jointly launched a petition on academic freedom.
By August 2008 this declaration had about 650 signatures including those of academics representing almost every Ivy League school. The Ad Hoc Committee released the statement on its website for viewing or adding one's signature.[27]
The statement itself begins by stressing the essential role of academic freedom. Without citing any specific examples, the text discusses how it has recently become necessary to protect this freedom because of limitations on the type of material taught in classrooms and effects on the tenure of professors.
The language of the petition directs the blame for these limitations at pressure or lobby groups. It singles out pro-Israeli activities. It also states that "a greater percentage of social scientists today feels that their academic freedom has been threatened than was the case during the McCarthy era."[28]
According to supporters of the declaration, the Israel lobby has taken control of the universities through donations, linking anti-Semitism to being anti-Israeli, and other types of influence. Thus the petition calls for lecturers to have the freedom to teach what they consider appropriate in the classroom without fear. The signatories also state that the right to scrutinize their work belongs primarily to their peers.
Organizations such as Campus Watch have criticized the professors who support the petition by saying they "are sealing themselves from the society that supports them...and are ivory tower intellectuals who regularly render harsh judgments against the practitioners of other professions-but claim immunity from criticism when it is directed towards themselves."[29]
Campus Watch director Daniel Pipes unmasked the hypocrisy of the Ad Hoc Committee by pointing out that the anti-Israeli academic Noam Chomsky has no problem speaking at American universities and added: "When I go on universities I can barely give a talk."[30]
Investigations at the University of California-Irvine
Anti-Semitism and anti-Israelism are rife in a number of U.S. universities. A prime example is the University of California-Irvine. Incidents there in recent years have been described in an essay by Leila Beckwith.[31]
In 2006 the Hillel Foundation of Orange County set up a task force to investigate anti-Semitism on the UC-Irvine campus. They interviewed people about incidents that had occurred there. Officials from the school, however, including the chancellor, refused to be interviewed claiming it was against school policy. The interviews began in February 2007, but by August of that year Hillel decided the task was too extensive and discontinued its association with the project.[32]
The investigation was later continued by members of the Jewish community of Orange County. They published their report in February 2008. This document is of major importance as it examines the structural problems of anti-Semitic and anti-Israeli hate at one American university in their totality rather than dealing only with a number of incidents. It can serve as a model for similar investigations at other universities, Columbia and UC-Santa Cruz being among the prime candidates.
The new group's report states that "acts of anti-Semitism are real and well documented. Jewish students have been harassed. Hate speech is unrelenting." Furthermore, "Some faculty members have used their classroom as a forum for their anti-Israel agenda."[33]
The authors also assert that: "The Muslim Student Union...allies itself and identifies itself with terrorist groups that are enemies of the Unites States." About the administration they note:
The Chancellor has failed to exercise his moral authority as an educator and leader by abrogating his leadership responsibilities. The boundaries of rational and reasonable discourse by constituencies that have differing positions on emotional issues have not been established. There is no indication that the University is at all concerned about the disconnect between campus values and the values of the greater society.[34]
The report also mentions that the Jewish community as a whole has not been proactive. It even includes a suggestion that Jewish students should not attend school at UC-Irvine.
At the request of the Zionist Organization of America, the United States Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights (OCR) also launched an investigation into anti-Semitic incidents at UC-Irvine. After some initial inquiries, the office claimed it had not been informed in time and, based on this technicality, ceased the investigation. The task force of the Jewish community, however, concluded that there was evidence that all twenty-six incidents the OCR was supposed to investigate had indeed taken place, and that there had been additional ones as well.
An Abundance of Anti-Israeli Events
The 2007-2008 academic year was marked by numerous anti-Israeli events at UC-Irvine. In February 2008 an Israel Apartheid Week was held. This included a lecture by Imam Mohammad Al-Asi titled "From Auschwitz to Gaza: The Politics of Genocide."[35] He said Israel was an apartheid state and that "Israel is on the way down...your days are numbered. We will fight you until we are martyred or until we are victorious."[36]
Al-Asi returned to UC-Irvine in May 2008 to take part in a weeklong event to commemorate the Nakba, that is, the Arabs' catastrophic defeat in the 1948 war against Israel. Other speakers were Norman Finkelstein and the imam Amir Abdel Malik Ali, who praised Palestinian mothers who sent out their children as suicide bombers.[37]
When Daniel Pipes spoke in January 2008 at UC-Irvine on the threat to Israel's existence, he was interrupted by pro-Palestinian students who were then removed from the audience. They continued their protest outside, saying things such as "it's just a matter of time before the state of Israel will be wiped off the face of the earth...just keep on doing what we are doing, our weapon, our jihad, our way of struggling. May Allah give them strength."[38] Pipes, later interviewed by Hannity and Colmes on Fox News, said the school did not care about this type of disturbance.
Twenty students and alumni at UC-Irvine who were dissatisfied with the handling and representation of the events on campus wrote a letter to UC chancellor Michael V. Drake. It began: "We are deeply concerned about the anti-Semitism at UCI that has been frequently couched as false and hateful attacks on Israel. We do not believe that Chancellor Drake has exercised his responsibility as an educator and university leader in response to the anti-Semitism."[39] Drake, while condemning hate speech, never specifically condemned anti-Semitism and anti-Israelism even though they were rife on campus.
Hillel Invites Drake
Several of these students also wrote a letter to Hillel International president Wayne Firestone, saying they were upset that Chancellor Drake had been invited as a guest speaker at the National Summit of Hillel to lead a session on "Fostering a More Civil Society." Firestone answered that it is better to work with such people than to dismiss them.
Regarding the invitation to Drake, Morton Klein, president of the Zionist Organization of America said: "By giving him a podium to give a speech, that only sends a message to him and to others that we are reasonably comfortable with the actions he's taken to fight anti-Semitism and Israel bashing on campus when in fact he has said virtually nothing to give comfort to Jewish students on campus."[40]
Isi Leibler, former senior vice-president of the World Jewish Congress criticized Firestone's statement that there was no relationship between anti-Israeli activity and anti-Semitism: "It is surely disconcerting for a Hillel president to express views by now repudiated even by such bodies as the European Union and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, not to mention the US government."[41]
Columbia University
Columbia University has had a number of anti-Israeli incidents in recent years. Once again the fact that it only concerns a limited number of the staff is no consolation.
At a conference organized in New York by the David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies, Prof. Stephen H. Norwood recounted how then-Columbia president Murray Butler had tried to establish friendly relations with German universities in the mid-1930s. He said, "Butler was morally indifferent to Nazi crimes during the critically important early years of Nazi rule." Some professors who opposed his behavior were fired.
Norwood, who received his PhD in history at Columbia and teaches at the University of Oklahoma, told the Jerusalem Post: "Sixty years after the Holocaust, Columbia has never acknowledged that they did anything wrong, even when we now know what the failure of confronting Nazism led to. They don't care enough to look back and say injustices were done."[42]
In recent years Columbia's Middle East and Asian Language and Cultures Department has been accused of intimidating pro-Israeli students. Dozens of cases were exposed in the David Project's 2004 documentary Columbia Unbecoming.[43] The university then had no choice but to carry out an investigation by an academic committee that obfuscated more than it clarified.[44]
Columbia stood out negatively once again in September 2007 when it invited Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to speak at its World Leaders Forum. The idea of inviting him had already been raised the previous year. At the 2007 lecture, Columbia president Lee C. Bollinger challenged Ahmadinejad and others did so as well. Yet the event gave legitimacy to Ahmadinejad.
In January 2008 the Iranian news agency Mehr claimed that a number of Columbia professors intended to travel to Iran to apologize to Ahmadinejad for Bollinger's behavior. This was denied by various Columbia sources and nothing more was heard about it.[45]
In April 2008 Columbia's School of International and Public Affairs held a faculty panel discussion on "60 Years of Nakba: The Catastrophe of Palestine 1948-2008." A key speaker was Joseph Massad who had been the prime academic investigated for intimidation of pro-Israeli students after the showing of Columbia Unbecoming. Massad had been found at fault in the cases where this conclusion was almost unavoidable but no disciplinary measures against him were proposed.
A writer in FrontPage Magazine summed up this year's panel: "Using the ‘renaming' strategy to make the destruction of Israel more palatable to the West was the faculty panel's primary theme. Portraying the only democratic state in the Middle East as a brutal, non-democratic ‘Jewish supremacist and racist state,' as Massad once put it, was the secondary theme."[46]
James R. Russell, a professor of Armenian studies at Harvard wrote:
Is this Columbia University? A professor of anthropology calls for a million Mogadishus, a professor of Arabic and Islamic Science tells a girl she isn't a Semite because her eyes are green, and a professor of Persian hails the destruction of the World Trade Center as the castrating of a double phallus. The most recent tenured addition to this rogues' gallery is to be an anthropologist, the principal thrust of whose magnum opus is the suggestion that archaeology in Israel is a sort of con game meant to persuade the unwary that Jews lived there in antiquity.[47]
The latter accusation referred to Nadia Abu El-Haj's book Facts on the Ground. Russell said it "fits firmly into the postmodern academic genre, in which facts and evidence are subordinate to, and mediated by, a ‘discourse.'" He concluded that the battle against ideology at Columbia was probably lost.[48]
To balance the one-sided pro-Arab teaching at Columbia, a new Institute for Israel and Jewish Studies was established. However, the professor appointed as its director, Yinon Cohen, had signed a statement in May 2002 supporting Israelis who refused to serve in military operations in Gaza and the West Bank during the Second Intifada. Such a person was obviously not the right one to provide an Israeli perspective.[49] This model of hiring people to represent Israel whose views belong to the margins of Israeli society manifests itself at a number of universities. Some of these academics are even outspoken Jewish anti-Semites.[50]
Other Campuses
Although UC-Irvine and Columbia are among the main universities where the problem of anti-Israelism is structural, many incidents have taken place on other campuses. Some involved anti-Semitic graffiti, vandalism, or personal insults, such as at the University of North Dakota,[51] Rutgers,[52] and UC-Santa Cruz,[53] another university where structural anti-Israeli bias occurs.
There are also hostile acts by individual academics against which Israel's supporters should react. One example is David Mumford. This Harvard mathematician, who received the Wolf Prize in Israel,[54] decided to give part of the prize money to students of Birzeit University near Ramallah so that they could travel abroad.
It is worth recalling, though, that in the 2003 elections for the Birzeit student government council, the campaign featured models of exploding Israeli buses. In the debate, the Hamas candidate asked the Fatah candidate: "Hamas activists in this university killed 135 Zionists. How many did Fatah activists from Birzeit kill?" The people murdered are mostly Israeli civilians.[55]
Mumford accepted money from an Israeli body and used it to fund students of a Palestinian university where major incitement to murder of Israelis takes place. If he will become known more for his vicious mind than for his academic achievements it will serve as a lesson to others. It is sadly clear that in such battles Israeli universities that do not tend to their own direct interests will not be much of a partner.
Exposing the Abuses
The many ideological abuses on American campuses have led to a number of counteractions. "In October 2007 more than a hundred campuses hosted Islamo-Fascism Awareness weeks to make university communities aware of the Islamist threat and the danger it poses. In April 2008 a second Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week focused on the network created in America by the Muslim Brotherhood." Yet another campaign is planned for October 2008 on "Stop the Jihad on Campus."[56]
The highly politicized nature of the Middle East Studies Organization (MESA) has led a number of scholars to create an alternative organization, the Association for the Study of the Middle East and Africa (ASMEA). Its chairman is the well-known scholar Bernard Lewis and another leading academic, Fouad Ajami, is vice-president of its academic council. Its members already include five hundred scholars in forty countries. Its first meeting was held in April 2008.[57]
Italy
In Italy over several months in 2007 and the beginning of 2008 a list appeared on the internet of 162 Italian university teachers of Jewish origin. When the Rome Jewish community complained to the Interior Ministry, the internet service provider took the site off the web.
Professor Roberto della Rocca, a historian at the University of Rome III had already asked the provider in September 2007 to remove this site because he said it was a threat to him personally. Giuliano Amato, the interior minister, said that what he had seen on the blog violated both Italian culture and law. The ministry then launched an investigation.[58]
The Less Visible
There are also, however, many factors less visible than incidents that slowly pervert the teaching atmosphere on campus. These include, for instance, the selective choice of books for libraries, or the one-sided assigning of books in lecture classes. These are almost underground phenomena that are not monitored in any way.
A problem apart is self-hating Israeli academics, some of whom are outright advocates of Israel's genocidal enemies. Others, less extreme, defame Israel in various ways while remaining silent about the context in which Israel operates or without even mentioning the murderous attitudes that permeate Palestinian society.
An example of Israeli self-hate was cited by former Israeli minister Amnon Rubinstein. A visiting professor at Columbia when Ahmadinejad spoke there, he relates: "Inside the hall sat an Israeli student who applauded Ahmadinejad. I asked another Israeli who witnessed this behavior to tell me about her. I asked: ‘How can she applaud someone that wants to exterminate her?' His matter of fact reply: ‘She's known to be a leftist.'"
Rubinstein concluded:
In other words "leftists" applaud a tyrant, a Nazi, a persecutor of minorities, oppressor of women, stoner of "adulterers," and executioner of homosexuals. If he protests the oppression of the Palestinians, then he must clearly be a member of the "left" and should therefore be cheered. Later, I encountered other Israeli academics at Columbia who added more fuel to the fire of hatred against Israel-all belonged to what is known as the radical Left.[59]
Organizational Requirements
The abovementioned examples of anti-Semitic and anti-Israeli actions on campuses in a number of countries are far from comprehensive. At present no one is tracking such incidents systematically and globally.
There are several reasons why such a body is needed. Israel Apartheid Week has demonstrated that developments on one campus may spread to others, both in the same country and internationally. Only an international monitoring body can keep track of such developments.
Furthermore, individual students and Jewish organizations in various countries need a backup organization that has expertise in countering anti-Semitic phenomena on campus. Since academia is usually a world apart from society at large, off-campus Jewish organizations have great difficulty understanding how to cope with such developments. In addition, many incidents such as professors demonizing Israel in class go unrecorded.
Although certain aspects of these problems are competently covered in some countries by various Jewish organizations, there is a lack of an overall global picture, and of monitoring of many of the hate phenomena against Israel and the Jews. There is a need for a body to concentrate the knowledge on the various actions against Jews and Israel and how people respond to them. Only with this knowledge can effective action be undertaken-in other words, a more proactive policy is needed.
Conclusion
It would be mistaken to consider the onslaught on Israel and Jews as an isolated phenomenon. What happens to Jews has usually been a pointer to structural elements of the societal environment in which it takes place and is also a sensor of events to come. This is also the case as far as academia is concerned. Academic freedom has been abused so much that it has outlived part of its academic and societal usefulness for fostering knowledge in its present form.
If any further proof was needed, Columbia University's invitation to Ahmadinejad to lecture there provided it. In view of his incitement to genocide, the natural place for him to speak should be as a defendant before an international court. Similarly the many anti-Israeli hate campaigns on campus prove that the principle of academic freedom in its present form is partly obsolete.
The defenders of what now passes for academic freedom should largely be seen as an elitist interest group that tries to protect acquired privileges. Being powerful in society and having good public relations enables universities to present the current, ostensible academic freedom as a moral value, whereas actually it is an expression of extreme corporatism. The declaration of the Ad Hoc Committee to Defend the University is a prime example of this aberration.
Outsiders such as Campus Watch and FrontPage Magazine fulfill important roles in exposing misbehavior on campuses-all the more so because academic peers and administrations have often failed in preventing it. One can only hope that external scrutiny of what goes on in academia will increase further.
One important example of how an investigation can shed light on a troubled, insufficiently known area was Britain's All-Party Parliamentary Inquiry into Antisemitism.[60] It paid substantial attention to anti-Semitism on campuses.
There is a similar need for more comprehensive external investigations of the academic world, particularly its openness to hate teaching and bias. This includes elements such as political correctness, the promotion of ideology, the distortion of knowledge, and the protection of the hate promoters and falsifiers of knowledge as well as other malfunctions of campus administrations.
Sunday, September 14, 2008 - By: Gerstenfeld, Dr. Manfred
2007-2008: Another Year of Global Academic Anti-Semitism and Anti-Israelism
The academic year 2007-2008 saw ongoing anti-Israeli and anti-Semitic incidents in various countries. Among them is Israel Apartheid Week, which has become an annual ritual in a number of cities on several continents. So have the calls of the University and College Union (UCU) in the United Kingdom for discriminatory measures against Israeli universities and academics. In several universities, such as on some campuses of the University of California, anti-Israelism is endemic.
Much of the visible anti-Semitism and anti-Israelism occurs in the academic world of Britain, Canada, and the United States. There are problems in many other countries as well. The situation is obfuscated by limited media attention.
Effective counteractions are also increasing. There is now more exposure of Islamist racism and anti-Semitism on American campuses. In Canada protests against anti-Israeli actions are on the rise. There are also European and British initiatives to enhance academic collaboration with Israeli universities. External monitoring bodies are more and more exposing the hate culture and biased actions of some university lecturers.
The onslaught against Israel and Jews is not an isolated phenomenon. What happens to Jews has usually been a pointer to their societal environment and a sensor of events to come. This is also the case regarding academic anti-Israelism. Academic freedom has been abused so much that in its present form it has outlived part of its academic and societal usefulness for fostering knowledge.
The academic year 2007-2008 saw ongoing anti-Israeli and anti-Semitic incidents in various countries. Among them is Israel Apartheid Week, which has become an annual ritual in a number of cities on several continents. So have the calls of the University and College Union (UCU) in the United Kingdom for discriminatory measures against Israeli universities and academics.
In several universities, such as on some campuses of the University of California, anti-Israelism is endemic. In many others it has seen highs and lows over the years. The situation is obfuscated by the fact that, with a few exceptions, the incidents this academic year were not given much media publicity.
On the other hand, effective counteractions are also increasing. There is now more exposure of Islamist racism and anti-Semitism on American campuses. In Canada protests against anti-Israeli actions are on the rise. There are also European and British initiatives to enhance academic collaboration with Israeli universities. External monitoring bodies are more and more exposing the hate culture and biased actions of some university lecturers.
It is mistaken to assume that hate campaigns can be largely counteracted or balanced by positive programs on Israel. Because of their extremism, the hate campaigners' damage to Israeli and Jewish causes runs deeper than the superficial impression left by the positive activists. This also reflects the intense motivation of Muslim and far-Left racists and anti-Semites. Their activities are often supported de facto by the passivity of university authorities. Although they may explicitly oppose anti-black or anti-Muslim racism, these authorities are often far more reluctant to take similar actions against anti-Semitism and its new mutation anti-Israelism. It is usually easy to prove that these double standards operate.
A complete overview of the many anti-Israeli and anti-Semitic actions on campuses worldwide is not possible. The following should thus be seen as a selection of important trends and events. It focuses mainly on Britain, Canada, and the United States where many of the problems are concentrated.[2] Yet academic anti-Semitism and anti-Israelism are rife in many other countries as well. As these problems are hardly monitored and little is written about them, the illusion is often created that they do not exist.
Israel Apartheid Week
Israel Apartheid Week or similar anti-Israeli activities took place in February 2008 in twenty-five locations in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, South Africa, and the Palestinian Authority. Since 2005 such activities have been increasing, and February 2008 marked Israel Apartheid Week's fourth anniversary.
The programs include calls for boycotts, divestments, and sanctions against Israel. One goal is to raise "awareness and disseminate information about Zionism, the Palestinian liberation struggle and its similarities with the indigenous sovereignty struggle in North America and the South African anti-Apartheid movement."[3] These activities should be seen in the wider framework of the anti-Israeli campaign.
The website called "Israeli Apartheid Week" gives no information on who is behind this project other than mentioning that: "Prominent Palestinians, Jewish anti-Zionists, and South Africans have been at the forefront of this struggle."[4]
Originating at the University of Toronto
The origins of Israel Apartheid Week can be traced to the University of Toronto in 2004, where groups supporting the Palestinian cause tried to delegitimize Israel. The first annual event there was organized by the Arab Students Collective (ASC) and took place in early 2005. Over the years other organizations at this university joined, such as the Coalition against Israel Apartheid and Solidarity for Palestinian Human Rights.[5]
In Canada groups at the Universities of Toronto, Montreal, Ryerson, Ottawa, and McMaster all took part in Israel Apartheid Week 2008. This year it received media attention partly because of the reactions to it. The organizers at the Canadian universities reached out to include other campus organizations such as the United Black Students and Indigenous Environmental Network, whose representatives spoke on the first day of the week and introduced the topic of apartheid.
Events at the University of Toronto this year included speeches by notorious anti-Israeli figures such as Ward Churchill, a professor who in 2007 was fired from the University of Colorado for research misconduct, as well as displays and a march starting at the Israeli consulate and called "Breaking the Silence." Churchill claimed among other things that the mass murder of the Jews was not "a fixed policy objective of the Nazis." This was yet another example of how anti-Semitism and anti-Israelism go together.
Churchill had also spoken at the event in 2006.[6] Past events in Canada have included figures such as former Knesset member Azmi Bishara. More recently Bishara has fled Israel and may be arrested on suspicion of treason if he ever returns.
This year for the first time, the week at the University of Toronto ended with a one-day conference for high school students.[7] There were also outdoor events such as demonstrations at mock Israeli checkpoints. Not only student organizations but also university academic departments sponsor the week.
McGill University and Carleton University organized activities on a smaller scale. Participants there also picketed Indigo Books and Music, a retail chain with locations throughout Canada. Its main shareholders are financial supporters of the Heseg Foundation for Lone [Israeli] Soldiers.[8]
Reactions from the Jewish Community
After years in which the Jewish community reacted only in minor ways, a change occurred in 2008. The University of Toronto's Israel Apartheid Week received much more attention this year from Jewish groups on campus, B'nai Brith, and the Friends of Simon Wiesenthal Center for Holocaust Studies. The pro-Israeli community at the University of Ottawa also staged a counterevent, including a lecture by the Israeli ambassador to Canada on "Israel, the Only Democracy in the Middle East."[9]
McMaster University, for its part, banned the words "Israel Apartheid" because they demonstrate intolerance. Controversy then erupted on campus as to whether the administration meant all use of "Israel Apartheid" or just the use of the term on printed displays. Students at Ryerson University and the University of Toronto also staged a protest.[10]
The Jewish community, including leaders of the abovementioned organizations, made the University of Toronto administration aware of their views. In April, 125 Jewish and non-Jewish professors took out a full-page ad in the National Post calling on the administration to prevent the university from hosting future Israel Apartheid Weeks. They noted that, while the university prohibits Islamophobia and discrimination toward other minorities and specific individuals, it permits freedom of speech for Israel Apartheid Week.[11]
The Friends of Simon Wiesenthal Center for Holocaust Studies also sent a letter to David Naylor, president of the University of Toronto, expressing their disappointment at the school's response to Israel Apartheid Week by dismissing the issue simply as one of freedom of speech.[12]
Boycott Motions at the University and College Union
On 28 May 2008, Britain's UCU adopted three anti-Israeli motions at its annual conference. They were passed by approximately a two-thirds majority. The UCU has 120,000 members, who include most of the British university teachers and related academic staff.
Although the UCU motions against Israel are usually referred to as proposed boycotts, their current content now stops somewhat short of directly calling for such actions. In 2007 the UCU received a legal opinion that boycotting Israel would be illegal. Its details have not been made public. One of the 2008 conference motions says that British academics should consider the moral implications of working with Israeli universities and discuss "the occupation" with Israeli colleagues with whom they work.
Before this year's UCU conference, British Jewry's Stop the Boycott Campaign published a legal opinion it had obtained. This stated among other things that if the UCU were to adopt and implement one of the proposed motions it might breach the British Race Relations Act.
At the UCU's invitation a delegation from PFUUPE (the Palestinian Federation of Unions of University Professors and Employees) visited UK universities and colleges during the past academic year. As Jonathan Halevi notes, "The discussions between UCU and PFUUPE were concentrated on promoting fields of cooperation and supporting the Palestinian academia, ignoring the fact that in all these universities there is a strong presence from the Palestinian terrorist organizations."[13]
Condemnation
As in previous years, the UCU resolutions prompted some condemnations. British minister of higher education Bill Rammell stated that he found boycotting academics deeply disturbing.[14] Paul Goldschmidt, former director of the European Union, wrote to José Manuel Barroso, president of the European Commission, that he should condemn the UCU decision.
Labor parliamentarian John Mann, chair of the All-Party Parliamentary Group against anti-Semitism, stressed the motion's discriminatory character against British Jews: "Boycotts do nothing to bring about peace and reconciliation in the Middle East but leave Jewish students, academics and their associates isolated and victimized on UK university campuses."[15]
Israel's ambassador to the UK Ron Prosor published an article in the Daily Telegraph in which he wrote: "Israel faces an intensified campaign of delegitimisation, demonisation and double standards. Britain has become a hotbed for radical anti-Israeli views and a haven for disingenuous calls for a ‘One state solution,' a euphemistic name for a movement advocating Israel's destruction."[16]
Minister Rammell responded:
I do not agree that there is widespread radical anti-Israeli sentiment on our higher education campuses. I do not believe calls for academic boycotts of Israel have anything more than small minority support amongst academics. Universities have a vital role to play in challenging those views that we may regard as uncomfortable or distasteful and, where such views do exist, it is the responsibility of staff and students to isolate the very small minority who promote extremism.[17]
Attorney Anthony Julius, representing various members of the UCU, wrote a letter to its general secretary Sally Hunt. He pointed out why one of the motions, number 25, was anti-Semitic, and argued that the UCU's behavior was "continuous with episodes in anti-Semitism's history."
Julius also mentioned the possibility of "a likely claim against the UCU for harassment under s. 3A(1) of the Race Relations Act, that is, the creating of an intimidating, hostile, degrading, humiliating and/or offensive environment for Jewish members of the union and/or violating their dignity." He then listed various points on which such a court case could be based.[18]
Those who propose and support the anti-Israeli motions are well aware that these are unlikely to influence those British academics who collaborate with Israeli universities. Their true aims are different. Many are Trotskyites who seek to attract public attention to various issues concerning the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. Another aim is to demonize Israel, while presenting themselves as moral people.
The Absentees
Two parties are surprisingly almost absent from the boycott-motions debate. One is the great majority of UCU members who want their union to focus on salaries and social conditions instead of political issues. Yet this majority is so silent that it has allowed the Trotskyite faction, the UCU Left, to take control.
The other major absentee is the Israeli universities. One would have expected those who are attacked to be the first to respond. They have, however, left the battlefield to British Jewry and its activists. Among the latter are Ronnie Fraser, founder and director of Academic Friends of Israel, and Engage, an organization that includes both Jewish and non-Jewish academics and has worked against the boycott since 2005.
Until the end of 2007 the International Advisory Board for Academic Freedom and its executive director Ofir Frenkel were at the forefront of the battle against Israel's academic enemies worldwide. This body, founded by Bar-Ilan University, had evolved into an umbrella organization of all Israeli universities. However, a lack of funds forced it to discontinue its activities.
The Israeli government was willing to make partial funding available, but this was conditional on the universities providing the remainder. Israel's university presidents however did not discuss the matter in their meetings.[19] The academic world would like to believe it is at its best when outsiders leave it alone. The Israeli universities' failure to deal with attacks against them is yet further proof that this is a fallacy.
Other Events
The Oxford Union is a very old student debating society. In late 2007 its leadership proposed discussing the topic "This house believes that one state is the only solution to the Israel-Palestine conflict." The debate had to be canceled because as representative of the pro-Israeli side the union chose Norman Finkelstein, an academic who had been fired from DePaul University "for his lack of scholarship and his ad hominems against pro-Israel writers."[20]
The Oxford Union held another event in November 2007 in which Holocaust-denier David Irving and Nick Griffin, leader of the far-Right British National Party, debated the subject of free speech. Irving had been jailed by an Austrian court in 2006 for his pro-Nazi statements. The debate was accompanied by heavy protests.[21]
New Israeli Academic-Collaboration Agreements
When British prime minister Gordon Brown visited Israel in July 2008 he, together with Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, launched a new academic- exchange program between the UK and Israel called BIRAX (Britain-Israel Research and Academic Exchange Partnership). The program is to run initially for five years and will be administered by the British Council.
Julia Smith, deputy director of the British Council said the program was not related to the boycott. Prof. David Newman of Ben-Gurion University, who has been active in fighting the boycott during a sabbatical in the UK, disagreed and said the program "has a great deal to do with the boycott. Because of the ongoing discussion of boycotts, the British government decided that the most appropriate response was to strengthen ties."[22]
In the same month European Commissioner for Education, Culture and Sport Jan Figel signed a joint declaration with Israeli education minister Yuli Tamir on the occasion of the inauguration of the first Tempus office in Israel. The Tempus program promotes the exchange of students and academic staff between the EU and neighboring countries.[23]
On the other hand, two leading British universities have received gifts from Saudi prince Alwaleed bin Abdul Aziz Alsaud. Centers for Islamic studies will be set up at Cambridge and Edinburgh universities with a $31 million endowment. The prince had earlier made gifts to Harvard and Georgetown universities.[24] Then-New York mayor Rudy Giuliani refused a $10 million gift from him after the 9/11 attack because the prince had suggested that American policies had contributed to the crime.
The financing of chairs in Western universities by Saudi Arabia and other Arab dictatorships is an issue that will require increasing scrutiny. Jay P. Greene, head of the Department of Education Reform at the University of Arkansas, says Gulf Arabs have donated a total of $88 million to fourteen U.S. universities from 1995 to the present. His own university was the largest recipient.[25] Prof. Anthony Glees, director of Brunel University's Centre for Intelligence and Security Studies, says that eight British universities-among them Oxford and Cambridge-have accepted more than £233.5 million from Saudi and Muslim donors from 1995 to 2008.[26]
United States: The Ad Hoc Committee to Defend the University
Another initiative that de facto serves the anti-Israeli racists on campuses is a statement of the Ad Hoc Committee to Defend the University. This was partly an attack on the pro-Israeli forces and those fighting anti-Semitism in American academia. In November 2007 professors from the University of California-Santa Cruz, Princeton, Harvard, and Columbia jointly launched a petition on academic freedom.
By August 2008 this declaration had about 650 signatures including those of academics representing almost every Ivy League school. The Ad Hoc Committee released the statement on its website for viewing or adding one's signature.[27]
The statement itself begins by stressing the essential role of academic freedom. Without citing any specific examples, the text discusses how it has recently become necessary to protect this freedom because of limitations on the type of material taught in classrooms and effects on the tenure of professors.
The language of the petition directs the blame for these limitations at pressure or lobby groups. It singles out pro-Israeli activities. It also states that "a greater percentage of social scientists today feels that their academic freedom has been threatened than was the case during the McCarthy era."[28]
According to supporters of the declaration, the Israel lobby has taken control of the universities through donations, linking anti-Semitism to being anti-Israeli, and other types of influence. Thus the petition calls for lecturers to have the freedom to teach what they consider appropriate in the classroom without fear. The signatories also state that the right to scrutinize their work belongs primarily to their peers.
Organizations such as Campus Watch have criticized the professors who support the petition by saying they "are sealing themselves from the society that supports them...and are ivory tower intellectuals who regularly render harsh judgments against the practitioners of other professions-but claim immunity from criticism when it is directed towards themselves."[29]
Campus Watch director Daniel Pipes unmasked the hypocrisy of the Ad Hoc Committee by pointing out that the anti-Israeli academic Noam Chomsky has no problem speaking at American universities and added: "When I go on universities I can barely give a talk."[30]
Investigations at the University of California-Irvine
Anti-Semitism and anti-Israelism are rife in a number of U.S. universities. A prime example is the University of California-Irvine. Incidents there in recent years have been described in an essay by Leila Beckwith.[31]
In 2006 the Hillel Foundation of Orange County set up a task force to investigate anti-Semitism on the UC-Irvine campus. They interviewed people about incidents that had occurred there. Officials from the school, however, including the chancellor, refused to be interviewed claiming it was against school policy. The interviews began in February 2007, but by August of that year Hillel decided the task was too extensive and discontinued its association with the project.[32]
The investigation was later continued by members of the Jewish community of Orange County. They published their report in February 2008. This document is of major importance as it examines the structural problems of anti-Semitic and anti-Israeli hate at one American university in their totality rather than dealing only with a number of incidents. It can serve as a model for similar investigations at other universities, Columbia and UC-Santa Cruz being among the prime candidates.
The new group's report states that "acts of anti-Semitism are real and well documented. Jewish students have been harassed. Hate speech is unrelenting." Furthermore, "Some faculty members have used their classroom as a forum for their anti-Israel agenda."[33]
The authors also assert that: "The Muslim Student Union...allies itself and identifies itself with terrorist groups that are enemies of the Unites States." About the administration they note:
The Chancellor has failed to exercise his moral authority as an educator and leader by abrogating his leadership responsibilities. The boundaries of rational and reasonable discourse by constituencies that have differing positions on emotional issues have not been established. There is no indication that the University is at all concerned about the disconnect between campus values and the values of the greater society.[34]
The report also mentions that the Jewish community as a whole has not been proactive. It even includes a suggestion that Jewish students should not attend school at UC-Irvine.
At the request of the Zionist Organization of America, the United States Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights (OCR) also launched an investigation into anti-Semitic incidents at UC-Irvine. After some initial inquiries, the office claimed it had not been informed in time and, based on this technicality, ceased the investigation. The task force of the Jewish community, however, concluded that there was evidence that all twenty-six incidents the OCR was supposed to investigate had indeed taken place, and that there had been additional ones as well.
An Abundance of Anti-Israeli Events
The 2007-2008 academic year was marked by numerous anti-Israeli events at UC-Irvine. In February 2008 an Israel Apartheid Week was held. This included a lecture by Imam Mohammad Al-Asi titled "From Auschwitz to Gaza: The Politics of Genocide."[35] He said Israel was an apartheid state and that "Israel is on the way down...your days are numbered. We will fight you until we are martyred or until we are victorious."[36]
Al-Asi returned to UC-Irvine in May 2008 to take part in a weeklong event to commemorate the Nakba, that is, the Arabs' catastrophic defeat in the 1948 war against Israel. Other speakers were Norman Finkelstein and the imam Amir Abdel Malik Ali, who praised Palestinian mothers who sent out their children as suicide bombers.[37]
When Daniel Pipes spoke in January 2008 at UC-Irvine on the threat to Israel's existence, he was interrupted by pro-Palestinian students who were then removed from the audience. They continued their protest outside, saying things such as "it's just a matter of time before the state of Israel will be wiped off the face of the earth...just keep on doing what we are doing, our weapon, our jihad, our way of struggling. May Allah give them strength."[38] Pipes, later interviewed by Hannity and Colmes on Fox News, said the school did not care about this type of disturbance.
Twenty students and alumni at UC-Irvine who were dissatisfied with the handling and representation of the events on campus wrote a letter to UC chancellor Michael V. Drake. It began: "We are deeply concerned about the anti-Semitism at UCI that has been frequently couched as false and hateful attacks on Israel. We do not believe that Chancellor Drake has exercised his responsibility as an educator and university leader in response to the anti-Semitism."[39] Drake, while condemning hate speech, never specifically condemned anti-Semitism and anti-Israelism even though they were rife on campus.
Hillel Invites Drake
Several of these students also wrote a letter to Hillel International president Wayne Firestone, saying they were upset that Chancellor Drake had been invited as a guest speaker at the National Summit of Hillel to lead a session on "Fostering a More Civil Society." Firestone answered that it is better to work with such people than to dismiss them.
Regarding the invitation to Drake, Morton Klein, president of the Zionist Organization of America said: "By giving him a podium to give a speech, that only sends a message to him and to others that we are reasonably comfortable with the actions he's taken to fight anti-Semitism and Israel bashing on campus when in fact he has said virtually nothing to give comfort to Jewish students on campus."[40]
Isi Leibler, former senior vice-president of the World Jewish Congress criticized Firestone's statement that there was no relationship between anti-Israeli activity and anti-Semitism: "It is surely disconcerting for a Hillel president to express views by now repudiated even by such bodies as the European Union and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, not to mention the US government."[41]
Columbia University
Columbia University has had a number of anti-Israeli incidents in recent years. Once again the fact that it only concerns a limited number of the staff is no consolation.
At a conference organized in New York by the David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies, Prof. Stephen H. Norwood recounted how then-Columbia president Murray Butler had tried to establish friendly relations with German universities in the mid-1930s. He said, "Butler was morally indifferent to Nazi crimes during the critically important early years of Nazi rule." Some professors who opposed his behavior were fired.
Norwood, who received his PhD in history at Columbia and teaches at the University of Oklahoma, told the Jerusalem Post: "Sixty years after the Holocaust, Columbia has never acknowledged that they did anything wrong, even when we now know what the failure of confronting Nazism led to. They don't care enough to look back and say injustices were done."[42]
In recent years Columbia's Middle East and Asian Language and Cultures Department has been accused of intimidating pro-Israeli students. Dozens of cases were exposed in the David Project's 2004 documentary Columbia Unbecoming.[43] The university then had no choice but to carry out an investigation by an academic committee that obfuscated more than it clarified.[44]
Columbia stood out negatively once again in September 2007 when it invited Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to speak at its World Leaders Forum. The idea of inviting him had already been raised the previous year. At the 2007 lecture, Columbia president Lee C. Bollinger challenged Ahmadinejad and others did so as well. Yet the event gave legitimacy to Ahmadinejad.
In January 2008 the Iranian news agency Mehr claimed that a number of Columbia professors intended to travel to Iran to apologize to Ahmadinejad for Bollinger's behavior. This was denied by various Columbia sources and nothing more was heard about it.[45]
In April 2008 Columbia's School of International and Public Affairs held a faculty panel discussion on "60 Years of Nakba: The Catastrophe of Palestine 1948-2008." A key speaker was Joseph Massad who had been the prime academic investigated for intimidation of pro-Israeli students after the showing of Columbia Unbecoming. Massad had been found at fault in the cases where this conclusion was almost unavoidable but no disciplinary measures against him were proposed.
A writer in FrontPage Magazine summed up this year's panel: "Using the ‘renaming' strategy to make the destruction of Israel more palatable to the West was the faculty panel's primary theme. Portraying the only democratic state in the Middle East as a brutal, non-democratic ‘Jewish supremacist and racist state,' as Massad once put it, was the secondary theme."[46]
James R. Russell, a professor of Armenian studies at Harvard wrote:
Is this Columbia University? A professor of anthropology calls for a million Mogadishus, a professor of Arabic and Islamic Science tells a girl she isn't a Semite because her eyes are green, and a professor of Persian hails the destruction of the World Trade Center as the castrating of a double phallus. The most recent tenured addition to this rogues' gallery is to be an anthropologist, the principal thrust of whose magnum opus is the suggestion that archaeology in Israel is a sort of con game meant to persuade the unwary that Jews lived there in antiquity.[47]
The latter accusation referred to Nadia Abu El-Haj's book Facts on the Ground. Russell said it "fits firmly into the postmodern academic genre, in which facts and evidence are subordinate to, and mediated by, a ‘discourse.'" He concluded that the battle against ideology at Columbia was probably lost.[48]
To balance the one-sided pro-Arab teaching at Columbia, a new Institute for Israel and Jewish Studies was established. However, the professor appointed as its director, Yinon Cohen, had signed a statement in May 2002 supporting Israelis who refused to serve in military operations in Gaza and the West Bank during the Second Intifada. Such a person was obviously not the right one to provide an Israeli perspective.[49] This model of hiring people to represent Israel whose views belong to the margins of Israeli society manifests itself at a number of universities. Some of these academics are even outspoken Jewish anti-Semites.[50]
Other Campuses
Although UC-Irvine and Columbia are among the main universities where the problem of anti-Israelism is structural, many incidents have taken place on other campuses. Some involved anti-Semitic graffiti, vandalism, or personal insults, such as at the University of North Dakota,[51] Rutgers,[52] and UC-Santa Cruz,[53] another university where structural anti-Israeli bias occurs.
There are also hostile acts by individual academics against which Israel's supporters should react. One example is David Mumford. This Harvard mathematician, who received the Wolf Prize in Israel,[54] decided to give part of the prize money to students of Birzeit University near Ramallah so that they could travel abroad.
It is worth recalling, though, that in the 2003 elections for the Birzeit student government council, the campaign featured models of exploding Israeli buses. In the debate, the Hamas candidate asked the Fatah candidate: "Hamas activists in this university killed 135 Zionists. How many did Fatah activists from Birzeit kill?" The people murdered are mostly Israeli civilians.[55]
Mumford accepted money from an Israeli body and used it to fund students of a Palestinian university where major incitement to murder of Israelis takes place. If he will become known more for his vicious mind than for his academic achievements it will serve as a lesson to others. It is sadly clear that in such battles Israeli universities that do not tend to their own direct interests will not be much of a partner.
Exposing the Abuses
The many ideological abuses on American campuses have led to a number of counteractions. "In October 2007 more than a hundred campuses hosted Islamo-Fascism Awareness weeks to make university communities aware of the Islamist threat and the danger it poses. In April 2008 a second Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week focused on the network created in America by the Muslim Brotherhood." Yet another campaign is planned for October 2008 on "Stop the Jihad on Campus."[56]
The highly politicized nature of the Middle East Studies Organization (MESA) has led a number of scholars to create an alternative organization, the Association for the Study of the Middle East and Africa (ASMEA). Its chairman is the well-known scholar Bernard Lewis and another leading academic, Fouad Ajami, is vice-president of its academic council. Its members already include five hundred scholars in forty countries. Its first meeting was held in April 2008.[57]
Italy
In Italy over several months in 2007 and the beginning of 2008 a list appeared on the internet of 162 Italian university teachers of Jewish origin. When the Rome Jewish community complained to the Interior Ministry, the internet service provider took the site off the web.
Professor Roberto della Rocca, a historian at the University of Rome III had already asked the provider in September 2007 to remove this site because he said it was a threat to him personally. Giuliano Amato, the interior minister, said that what he had seen on the blog violated both Italian culture and law. The ministry then launched an investigation.[58]
The Less Visible
There are also, however, many factors less visible than incidents that slowly pervert the teaching atmosphere on campus. These include, for instance, the selective choice of books for libraries, or the one-sided assigning of books in lecture classes. These are almost underground phenomena that are not monitored in any way.
A problem apart is self-hating Israeli academics, some of whom are outright advocates of Israel's genocidal enemies. Others, less extreme, defame Israel in various ways while remaining silent about the context in which Israel operates or without even mentioning the murderous attitudes that permeate Palestinian society.
An example of Israeli self-hate was cited by former Israeli minister Amnon Rubinstein. A visiting professor at Columbia when Ahmadinejad spoke there, he relates: "Inside the hall sat an Israeli student who applauded Ahmadinejad. I asked another Israeli who witnessed this behavior to tell me about her. I asked: ‘How can she applaud someone that wants to exterminate her?' His matter of fact reply: ‘She's known to be a leftist.'"
Rubinstein concluded:
In other words "leftists" applaud a tyrant, a Nazi, a persecutor of minorities, oppressor of women, stoner of "adulterers," and executioner of homosexuals. If he protests the oppression of the Palestinians, then he must clearly be a member of the "left" and should therefore be cheered. Later, I encountered other Israeli academics at Columbia who added more fuel to the fire of hatred against Israel-all belonged to what is known as the radical Left.[59]
Organizational Requirements
The abovementioned examples of anti-Semitic and anti-Israeli actions on campuses in a number of countries are far from comprehensive. At present no one is tracking such incidents systematically and globally.
There are several reasons why such a body is needed. Israel Apartheid Week has demonstrated that developments on one campus may spread to others, both in the same country and internationally. Only an international monitoring body can keep track of such developments.
Furthermore, individual students and Jewish organizations in various countries need a backup organization that has expertise in countering anti-Semitic phenomena on campus. Since academia is usually a world apart from society at large, off-campus Jewish organizations have great difficulty understanding how to cope with such developments. In addition, many incidents such as professors demonizing Israel in class go unrecorded.
Although certain aspects of these problems are competently covered in some countries by various Jewish organizations, there is a lack of an overall global picture, and of monitoring of many of the hate phenomena against Israel and the Jews. There is a need for a body to concentrate the knowledge on the various actions against Jews and Israel and how people respond to them. Only with this knowledge can effective action be undertaken-in other words, a more proactive policy is needed.
Conclusion
It would be mistaken to consider the onslaught on Israel and Jews as an isolated phenomenon. What happens to Jews has usually been a pointer to structural elements of the societal environment in which it takes place and is also a sensor of events to come. This is also the case as far as academia is concerned. Academic freedom has been abused so much that it has outlived part of its academic and societal usefulness for fostering knowledge in its present form.
If any further proof was needed, Columbia University's invitation to Ahmadinejad to lecture there provided it. In view of his incitement to genocide, the natural place for him to speak should be as a defendant before an international court. Similarly the many anti-Israeli hate campaigns on campus prove that the principle of academic freedom in its present form is partly obsolete.
The defenders of what now passes for academic freedom should largely be seen as an elitist interest group that tries to protect acquired privileges. Being powerful in society and having good public relations enables universities to present the current, ostensible academic freedom as a moral value, whereas actually it is an expression of extreme corporatism. The declaration of the Ad Hoc Committee to Defend the University is a prime example of this aberration.
Outsiders such as Campus Watch and FrontPage Magazine fulfill important roles in exposing misbehavior on campuses-all the more so because academic peers and administrations have often failed in preventing it. One can only hope that external scrutiny of what goes on in academia will increase further.
One important example of how an investigation can shed light on a troubled, insufficiently known area was Britain's All-Party Parliamentary Inquiry into Antisemitism.[60] It paid substantial attention to anti-Semitism on campuses.
There is a similar need for more comprehensive external investigations of the academic world, particularly its openness to hate teaching and bias. This includes elements such as political correctness, the promotion of ideology, the distortion of knowledge, and the protection of the hate promoters and falsifiers of knowledge as well as other malfunctions of campus administrations.
Wednesday, November 12, 2008
Shocking, but not surprising
Oct. 6, 2008
Caroline Glick , THE JERUSALEM POST
In the end, the global jihad, and the West's fickle response to radical
Islam's assault on its civilization, is about hating Jews. This truth, never
wholly hidden from view, was exposed in all its ugliness in recent months
with startling disclosures by former Italian president and Senator-for-life
Francesco Cossiga.
In a letter to Italy's Corriere della Serra in August, Cossiga acknowledged
that during the early 1970s, then Italian prime minister Aldo Moro signed an
agreement with Yassir Arafat's PLO and affiliated organizations that enabled
the Palestinians to field terrorists, operate bases and store weapons in
Italy in exchange for immunity from attack for Italy and Italian interests
worldwide. Cossiga also acknowledged that even when the Palestinians
murdered Italians, the government still protected them. Indeed, he admitted
for the first time that the largest terror attack ever to take place on
Italian soil - the bombing of the Bologna train station in July 1980 which
killed 85 people - was the work of PLO-affiliated terrorists from George
Habash's Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.
At the time of the bombing, Cossiga was Italy's prime minister. Right after
it occurred, he blamed the atrocity on neo-fascists. In his words at the
time, "Unlike leftist terrorism, which strikes at the heart of the state
through its representatives, black terrorism prefers the massacre because it
promotes panic and impulsive reactions."
In August, he claimed that it was the work of the PFLP and asserted that the
bomb exploded inadvertently. That is, the Palestinians hadn't meant to kill
non-Jews - so Italian authorities protected them.
On Friday, Cossiga expanded on his disclosures to Corriere della Serra in an
interview with Yediot Aharonot's Rome correspondent Menachem Ganz. Cossiga
admitted that it wasn't just Israeli targets that Italy permitted the
Palestinians to attack with impunity, but Jewish targets as well. Indeed, in
at least one and probably two incidents, the Italians colluded with the
Palestinians in their attacks against Jews. On October 9, 1982, six
terrorists opened fire on worshippers leaving Rome's Great Synagogue. Dozens
of Jews were wounded and two-year-old Stefano Tache was murdered. Hours
before the attack the Italian police detail charged with securing the
synagogue was withdrawn.
Then too, in December 1985, Palestinian terrorists opened fire on the El Al
ticket counter at the Rome airport. Ten people were killed. Another seven
people were murdered in a simultaneous attack against the El Al ticket
counter at the Vienna airport. According to Cossiga, Italian intelligence
agencies received prior warning of the attack but didn't bother to share the
information with Israel.
Cossiga explained to Yediot, "No Italian targets were hit. They attacked the
Israeli airline at the airport. The murdered were all Israelis, Jews, and
Americans."
Then there was the hijacking of the Italian cruise liner Achille Lauro off
the Egyptian coast in October 1985. Palestinian terrorists led by Abu Abbas
commandeered the ship. They shot wheelchair-bound American Jewish passenger
Leon Klinghoffer and threw him overboard while he was still alive. The
Egyptians freed the hijackers and sent them off on a flight to Libya.
American jets forced a plane to land at a NATO base in Sicily. The Italians
refused to permit the Americans to take the hijackers into custody and freed
Abbas. The Italians cast the standoff as a victory against American bullies.
But it really amounted to a surrender to Palestinian murderers. As Cossiga
explained, "Since the Arabs were capable of harming Italy more than the
Americans, Italy surrendered to them."
COSSIGA ALLEGES that his country's agreement with the Palestinians has
recently been expanded to include Hizbullah. After the Second Lebanon War,
Italy agreed to command the UNIFIL force charged with preventing Hizbullah
from reasserting control over southern Lebanon and blocking its re-armament
efforts. Yet Cossiga asserts, "I can state with absolute certainty that.
Italy has a deal with Hizbullah according to which UNIFIL forces turn a
blind eye to Hizbullah's rearmament so long as no attacks are carried out
against soldiers in the force."
Ganz notes ruefully that although Cossiga's statements provoked the Italian
Jewish community to demand that Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi investigate
the government's collusion with Palestinian terrorists, no such
investigation is likely to be forthcoming. Ganz explains that Berlusconi
himself is not immune to the anti-Semitism that caused his predecessors to
abstain from protecting Italy's Jewish citizens. When he addresses Italian
Jews, Berlusconi often calls the Israeli government "your government," and
so exposes his adherence to the view that Jews are not true citizens of any
country other than Israel.
The anti-Semitic belief that all Jews are Zionists and therefore all Jews
are fair game in the war against Israel - itself simply another round of the
age-old war against the Jews - allows anti-Semites to obfuscate the fact
that their anti-Israel rhetoric is simply warmed over Jew-hatred. People
like Iranian leaders Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Ali Khamenei, and Palestinian
terrorists from the PLO and their progeny in Hamas and Hizbullah nearly
always limit their threats to "Zionists," and so pretend that they aren't
actually anti-Semites.
Their razor-thin deception is eagerly embraced by their fellow travelers in
the West - from university professors like Juan Cole, Steven Walt and John
Mearshimer, to policymakers like Brent Scowcroft and Zbigniew Brzezinski, to
Western decision-makers and European heads of state, and an alarming number
of American politicians.
This deception is par for the course of anti-Semitism. Throughout history
anti-Semites have used Jew-hatred as a way to rally their troops. By
attacking Jews as the collective enemy, tyrants have given their people a
convenient, weak culprit to attack to deflect criticism away from their own
failures or to hide real enemies from pacifistic publics uninterested in
fighting. Anti-Semitism appeals to people's basest instinct. But people
don't like to acknowledge how much they hate Jews, and Jews have always
preferred to deny that they are hated.
So anti-Semitic leaders have disguised their appeal to base instinct by
pretending that they are actually appealing to sublime aspirations. In the
case of the Nazis for instance, Adolf Hitler and Josef Goebbels appealed to
Germanic pride and love for the Fatherland. Today, the Left appeals to
people's aspirations for peace and justice. It is only by permitting and
indeed enabling Jews to die and the Jewish state to be destroyed that
"peace" can be secured and the Palestinians can receive "justice."
THIS STRATEGY appeals to European - and to greater and lesser degrees
American - policymakers for two reasons. First, as French Foreign Minister
Bernard Kouchner made clear in an interview with Ha'aretz on Friday, while
the West understands that Islamic jihadists seek the destruction of Europe
and the US, they believe - in part because their own anti-Semitism leads
them to exaggerate Jewish power - that they will get away with coddling the
Arabs and Iran because Israel will protect them.
Referring to Iran's nuclear weapons program, Kouchner said that no one is
particularly worried about Iran's nuclear threat because everyone believes
that Israel will attack Iran for them. In his words, "I honestly don't
believe that [a nuclear arsenal] will give any immunity to Iran. First, you
[Israel] will hit them before [they acquire nuclear weapons]. Because Israel
has always said that it will not wait for the bomb to be ready. I think that
they [the Iranians] know. Everybody knows."
What is ironic about this view is that it exposes the inversion of
anti-Semitic rhetoric. Five years ago, former Malaysian prime minister
Mahathir Mohamed told an approving audience of Islamic heads of state, "The
Jews rule the world by proxy. They get others to fight and die for them."
But the West's belief that Israel will protect it from Iran shows that the
opposite is true. The West is absolutely certain that Israel is its proxy,
and that Jews will fight and die protecting it from the forces of global
terror and jihad.
THE SECOND reason the Western champions of "peace" have opted to sell Israel
and the Jews out to the jihadists is because as anti-Semites, Western
"anti-Zionists" fear Jewish power and therefore want us to be weak. So it is
that for the past 40 years, European governments and the US State Department
have bankrolled anti-Zionist groups in Israel like Peace Now, B'tselem and
Four Mothers. So it is that they have blamed Israel for Palestinian
terrorism. And even when Israel succumbs to all their demands for
territorial withdrawals, they always manage to demand still more.
In the same interview with Ha'aretz for instance, Kouchner on the one hand
praised Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni for
their willingness to surrender Jerusalem, Judea and Samaria to the
Palestinians, but argued that this is still not enough. Israel must also
accept the free immigration of the hostile descendants of the Arabs who left
Israel in 1948. That is, Israel must also agree to its own destruction in
order to pave the way for "peace." In his words, "The main problem is the
refugees and Jerusalem, but more the refugees. Olmert and Livni do not have
the perception of this."
Kouchner for one is certain that Livni will come around to recognizing the
need to allow hostile foreign-born Arabs to move here. "I think she will
change. This is always the case for people that are in charge for politics
and for life," he claimed.
Kouchner soothed the reporters' fears of national destruction by claiming
that he's probably not talking about more than 100,000 hostile Arabs
immigrants. But that's today.
If Livni does form a government and comes around to this view, leave it to
the West to explain that placing "arbitrary" limits on Arab immigration is a
human rights abuse, and that Israel's Zionist racism is compelling the Arabs
and Iran to kill Jews and Westerners around the world.
AND THIS brings us to perhaps the greatest irony of the West's collusion
with the Arabs and Iran in their war against the Jews. The logical outcome
of the twin delusions of anti-Semitism - that Jews are all powerful and that
the Jews must be cut down to size - is the destruction of Israel. And if
that happens, the West will find itself in jaws of the Islamic jihadists
they have been feeding the Jews to for four decades.
The West's subversion of the Israeli elite has fomented a situation where
many Israeli leaders have embraced their anti-Semitic views of Israel.
Leaders like Livni and Olmert, and the media and academia in Israel, have
largely accepted the notion that Israel is to blame for the global jihad.
Today these leaders uphold Jewish weakness as an ideal. The longer these
Western-supported elites remain in power, the larger the chance that Israel
won't attack Iran and that Israel will allow itself to be destroyed in the
interest of pursuing "peace" with Palestinian terrorists.
And if Israel is destroyed, the West won't be able to depend on us Jews to
fight and die for them anymore. They will be all alone.
Caroline Glick , THE JERUSALEM POST
In the end, the global jihad, and the West's fickle response to radical
Islam's assault on its civilization, is about hating Jews. This truth, never
wholly hidden from view, was exposed in all its ugliness in recent months
with startling disclosures by former Italian president and Senator-for-life
Francesco Cossiga.
In a letter to Italy's Corriere della Serra in August, Cossiga acknowledged
that during the early 1970s, then Italian prime minister Aldo Moro signed an
agreement with Yassir Arafat's PLO and affiliated organizations that enabled
the Palestinians to field terrorists, operate bases and store weapons in
Italy in exchange for immunity from attack for Italy and Italian interests
worldwide. Cossiga also acknowledged that even when the Palestinians
murdered Italians, the government still protected them. Indeed, he admitted
for the first time that the largest terror attack ever to take place on
Italian soil - the bombing of the Bologna train station in July 1980 which
killed 85 people - was the work of PLO-affiliated terrorists from George
Habash's Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.
At the time of the bombing, Cossiga was Italy's prime minister. Right after
it occurred, he blamed the atrocity on neo-fascists. In his words at the
time, "Unlike leftist terrorism, which strikes at the heart of the state
through its representatives, black terrorism prefers the massacre because it
promotes panic and impulsive reactions."
In August, he claimed that it was the work of the PFLP and asserted that the
bomb exploded inadvertently. That is, the Palestinians hadn't meant to kill
non-Jews - so Italian authorities protected them.
On Friday, Cossiga expanded on his disclosures to Corriere della Serra in an
interview with Yediot Aharonot's Rome correspondent Menachem Ganz. Cossiga
admitted that it wasn't just Israeli targets that Italy permitted the
Palestinians to attack with impunity, but Jewish targets as well. Indeed, in
at least one and probably two incidents, the Italians colluded with the
Palestinians in their attacks against Jews. On October 9, 1982, six
terrorists opened fire on worshippers leaving Rome's Great Synagogue. Dozens
of Jews were wounded and two-year-old Stefano Tache was murdered. Hours
before the attack the Italian police detail charged with securing the
synagogue was withdrawn.
Then too, in December 1985, Palestinian terrorists opened fire on the El Al
ticket counter at the Rome airport. Ten people were killed. Another seven
people were murdered in a simultaneous attack against the El Al ticket
counter at the Vienna airport. According to Cossiga, Italian intelligence
agencies received prior warning of the attack but didn't bother to share the
information with Israel.
Cossiga explained to Yediot, "No Italian targets were hit. They attacked the
Israeli airline at the airport. The murdered were all Israelis, Jews, and
Americans."
Then there was the hijacking of the Italian cruise liner Achille Lauro off
the Egyptian coast in October 1985. Palestinian terrorists led by Abu Abbas
commandeered the ship. They shot wheelchair-bound American Jewish passenger
Leon Klinghoffer and threw him overboard while he was still alive. The
Egyptians freed the hijackers and sent them off on a flight to Libya.
American jets forced a plane to land at a NATO base in Sicily. The Italians
refused to permit the Americans to take the hijackers into custody and freed
Abbas. The Italians cast the standoff as a victory against American bullies.
But it really amounted to a surrender to Palestinian murderers. As Cossiga
explained, "Since the Arabs were capable of harming Italy more than the
Americans, Italy surrendered to them."
COSSIGA ALLEGES that his country's agreement with the Palestinians has
recently been expanded to include Hizbullah. After the Second Lebanon War,
Italy agreed to command the UNIFIL force charged with preventing Hizbullah
from reasserting control over southern Lebanon and blocking its re-armament
efforts. Yet Cossiga asserts, "I can state with absolute certainty that.
Italy has a deal with Hizbullah according to which UNIFIL forces turn a
blind eye to Hizbullah's rearmament so long as no attacks are carried out
against soldiers in the force."
Ganz notes ruefully that although Cossiga's statements provoked the Italian
Jewish community to demand that Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi investigate
the government's collusion with Palestinian terrorists, no such
investigation is likely to be forthcoming. Ganz explains that Berlusconi
himself is not immune to the anti-Semitism that caused his predecessors to
abstain from protecting Italy's Jewish citizens. When he addresses Italian
Jews, Berlusconi often calls the Israeli government "your government," and
so exposes his adherence to the view that Jews are not true citizens of any
country other than Israel.
The anti-Semitic belief that all Jews are Zionists and therefore all Jews
are fair game in the war against Israel - itself simply another round of the
age-old war against the Jews - allows anti-Semites to obfuscate the fact
that their anti-Israel rhetoric is simply warmed over Jew-hatred. People
like Iranian leaders Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Ali Khamenei, and Palestinian
terrorists from the PLO and their progeny in Hamas and Hizbullah nearly
always limit their threats to "Zionists," and so pretend that they aren't
actually anti-Semites.
Their razor-thin deception is eagerly embraced by their fellow travelers in
the West - from university professors like Juan Cole, Steven Walt and John
Mearshimer, to policymakers like Brent Scowcroft and Zbigniew Brzezinski, to
Western decision-makers and European heads of state, and an alarming number
of American politicians.
This deception is par for the course of anti-Semitism. Throughout history
anti-Semites have used Jew-hatred as a way to rally their troops. By
attacking Jews as the collective enemy, tyrants have given their people a
convenient, weak culprit to attack to deflect criticism away from their own
failures or to hide real enemies from pacifistic publics uninterested in
fighting. Anti-Semitism appeals to people's basest instinct. But people
don't like to acknowledge how much they hate Jews, and Jews have always
preferred to deny that they are hated.
So anti-Semitic leaders have disguised their appeal to base instinct by
pretending that they are actually appealing to sublime aspirations. In the
case of the Nazis for instance, Adolf Hitler and Josef Goebbels appealed to
Germanic pride and love for the Fatherland. Today, the Left appeals to
people's aspirations for peace and justice. It is only by permitting and
indeed enabling Jews to die and the Jewish state to be destroyed that
"peace" can be secured and the Palestinians can receive "justice."
THIS STRATEGY appeals to European - and to greater and lesser degrees
American - policymakers for two reasons. First, as French Foreign Minister
Bernard Kouchner made clear in an interview with Ha'aretz on Friday, while
the West understands that Islamic jihadists seek the destruction of Europe
and the US, they believe - in part because their own anti-Semitism leads
them to exaggerate Jewish power - that they will get away with coddling the
Arabs and Iran because Israel will protect them.
Referring to Iran's nuclear weapons program, Kouchner said that no one is
particularly worried about Iran's nuclear threat because everyone believes
that Israel will attack Iran for them. In his words, "I honestly don't
believe that [a nuclear arsenal] will give any immunity to Iran. First, you
[Israel] will hit them before [they acquire nuclear weapons]. Because Israel
has always said that it will not wait for the bomb to be ready. I think that
they [the Iranians] know. Everybody knows."
What is ironic about this view is that it exposes the inversion of
anti-Semitic rhetoric. Five years ago, former Malaysian prime minister
Mahathir Mohamed told an approving audience of Islamic heads of state, "The
Jews rule the world by proxy. They get others to fight and die for them."
But the West's belief that Israel will protect it from Iran shows that the
opposite is true. The West is absolutely certain that Israel is its proxy,
and that Jews will fight and die protecting it from the forces of global
terror and jihad.
THE SECOND reason the Western champions of "peace" have opted to sell Israel
and the Jews out to the jihadists is because as anti-Semites, Western
"anti-Zionists" fear Jewish power and therefore want us to be weak. So it is
that for the past 40 years, European governments and the US State Department
have bankrolled anti-Zionist groups in Israel like Peace Now, B'tselem and
Four Mothers. So it is that they have blamed Israel for Palestinian
terrorism. And even when Israel succumbs to all their demands for
territorial withdrawals, they always manage to demand still more.
In the same interview with Ha'aretz for instance, Kouchner on the one hand
praised Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni for
their willingness to surrender Jerusalem, Judea and Samaria to the
Palestinians, but argued that this is still not enough. Israel must also
accept the free immigration of the hostile descendants of the Arabs who left
Israel in 1948. That is, Israel must also agree to its own destruction in
order to pave the way for "peace." In his words, "The main problem is the
refugees and Jerusalem, but more the refugees. Olmert and Livni do not have
the perception of this."
Kouchner for one is certain that Livni will come around to recognizing the
need to allow hostile foreign-born Arabs to move here. "I think she will
change. This is always the case for people that are in charge for politics
and for life," he claimed.
Kouchner soothed the reporters' fears of national destruction by claiming
that he's probably not talking about more than 100,000 hostile Arabs
immigrants. But that's today.
If Livni does form a government and comes around to this view, leave it to
the West to explain that placing "arbitrary" limits on Arab immigration is a
human rights abuse, and that Israel's Zionist racism is compelling the Arabs
and Iran to kill Jews and Westerners around the world.
AND THIS brings us to perhaps the greatest irony of the West's collusion
with the Arabs and Iran in their war against the Jews. The logical outcome
of the twin delusions of anti-Semitism - that Jews are all powerful and that
the Jews must be cut down to size - is the destruction of Israel. And if
that happens, the West will find itself in jaws of the Islamic jihadists
they have been feeding the Jews to for four decades.
The West's subversion of the Israeli elite has fomented a situation where
many Israeli leaders have embraced their anti-Semitic views of Israel.
Leaders like Livni and Olmert, and the media and academia in Israel, have
largely accepted the notion that Israel is to blame for the global jihad.
Today these leaders uphold Jewish weakness as an ideal. The longer these
Western-supported elites remain in power, the larger the chance that Israel
won't attack Iran and that Israel will allow itself to be destroyed in the
interest of pursuing "peace" with Palestinian terrorists.
And if Israel is destroyed, the West won't be able to depend on us Jews to
fight and die for them anymore. They will be all alone.
Ahmadinejad, in his own words
Ahmadinejad in his own words
As the free world debates how best to thwart Iran’s nuclear ambitions, Israel has been criticized for suggesting it would take military action to prevent Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons. This has led some to portray Israel as the aggressor.
The quotes below from Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad paint a very different picture. Since assuming office in 2005, the fanatical Ahmadinejad has repeatedly threatened and predicted the demise of Israel. Read these quotes from the Iranian president, and then don’t forget to forward this page to your friends, so that the truth of the Iranian threat to Israel and the free world -- can be known by all.
September 2008
"[Israel] resembles an airplane that has lost its engine and is kind of going down. And no one can help it … This will benefit everyone." – (Los Angeles Times)
"In Palestine, 60 years of carnage and invasion is still ongoing at the hands of some criminal and occupying Zionists. They have forged a regime through collecting people from various parts of the world and bringing them to other people’s land by displacing, detaining, and killing the true owners of that land." – (Speech to U.N.)
"The dignity, integrity and rights of the American and European people are being played with by a small but deceitful number of people called Zionists. Although they are a miniscule minority, they have been dominating an important portion of the financial and monetary centers as well as the political decision-making centers of some European countries and the US in a deceitful, complex and furtive manner … This means that the great people of America and various nations of Europe need to obey the demands and wishes of a small number of acquisitive and invasive people. These nations are spending their dignity and resources on the crimes and occupations and the threats of the Zionist network against their will." – (Speech to U.N.)
"Today, the Zionist regime is on a definite slope to collapse, and there is no way for it to get out of the cesspool created by itself and its supporters." – (Speech to U.N.)
"Some say the idea of Greater Israel has expired, I say the idea of a Lesser Israel has expired, too." –(Press conference)
"The Holocaust is a lie and the real Holocaust is happening to the Palestinians." – (Press conference)
August 2008
"We will witness dismantling of the corrupt regime [Israel] in a very near future." - (Speech at "World Mosque Week," quoted by Islamic Republic News Agency)
June 2008
"Today Iran is an advanced country. We are ready for dialogue with anyone, except with the Zionist regime, in relations based on mutual respect and fairness." (Agence France-Presse)
June 2008
"You should know that the criminal and terrorist Zionist regime, which has 60 years of plundering, aggression and crimes in its file, has reached the end of its work and will soon disappear off the geographical scene." (Reuters)
May 2008
"The Zionist regime is dying. The criminals imagine that by holding celebrations ... they can save the Zionist regime from death. They should know that regional nations hate this fake and criminal regime and if the smallest and briefest chance is given to regional nations they will destroy (it)." (Reuters)
"This terrorist and criminal state (Israel) is backed by foreign powers, but this regime would soon be swept away by the Palestinians." (Ha’aretz)
"Those who think they can revive the stinking corpse of the usurping and fake Israeli regime by throwing a birthday party are seriously mistaken."
"Today the reason for the Zionist regime's existence is questioned, and this regime is on its way to annihilation.… (Israel) has reached the end like a dead rat after being slapped by the Lebanese." (Islamic Republic News Agency)
March 2008
"Resistance is the only way to defeat the Zionists and their masters." (Islamic Republic News Agency)
February 2008
"The world powers established this filthy bacteria, the Zionist regime, which is lashing out at the nations in the region like a wild beast. … "[Israel] won support [from the other nations] which created it as a scarecrow, so as to keep the people of this area under control." (Jerusalem Post)
January 30, 2008
"I warn you to abandon the filthy Zionist entity, which has reached the end of the line. It has lost its reason to be and will sooner or later fall. The ones who still support the criminal Zionists should know that the occupiers' days are numbered. … Accept that the life of Zionists will sooner or later come to an end." (Agence France-Presse)
November 2007
"It is impossible that the Zionist regime will survive. Collapse is in the nature of this regime because it has been created on aggression, lying, oppression and crime." (Islamic Republic News Agency)
October 2007
"After the Second World War, they created a scenario called 'pogrom against Jews.' All over Europe and the countries under Western rule, an anti-Jewish movement has been concocted. The climate of propaganda and psychological warfare on the one hand and on the other hand using the issue of ovens burning human beings, they have concocted a myth of deprivation and innocence for the Jews of Europe. They use this pretext of the innocence of Jews and the suffering of some Jews during the Second World War. Riding on the crest of a wave of anti-Jewish sentiments, they have laid the foundations for the Zionist regime."
"...you cannot tolerate the presence of Zionists in Europe but want to inflict them on the people of our region? You have so much land in your possession. This vast land of Canada and Alaska can be used to resettle the Jews."
September 2007
"The era of darkness will end. Prisoners will return home. The occupied lands will be freed. Palestine and Iraq will be liberated from the domination of the occupiers. And the people of America and Europe will be free of the pressures exerted by the Zionists." (Speech to United Nations General Assembly)
August 2007
"The Zionist regime is the flag bearer of violation and occupation and this regime is the flag of Satan. …It is not unlikely that this regime be on the path to dissolution and deterioration when the philosophy behind its creation and survival is invalid." (Speech to international religious conference in Tehran)
June 2007
"With God's help, the countdown button for the destruction of the Zionist regime has been pushed by the hands of the children of Lebanon and Palestine . . . By God's will, we will witness the destruction of this regime in the near future." (FARS news agency)
March 2007
"It is quite clear that a bunch of Zionist racists are the problem the modern world is facing today. They have access to global power and media centers and seek to use this access to keep the world in a state of hardship, poverty and grudge and strengthen their rule. The great nation of Iran is opposed to this inhuman trend. Of course, the Iranian nation will stick to its rightful stance. The Zionists and their supporters do not know that they are using failed approaches to take on human values, human civilization, nations and the great nation of Iran. Admitting the right of the dear Iranian nation and submitting to justice and the rule of law are the best way to salvation and the best way out of the deadlocks they have created for themselves." (Iranian New Year’s message)
February 2007
"The Zionists are the true manifestation of Satan . . . Many Western governments that claim to be pioneers of democracy and standard bearers of human rights close their eyes over crimes committed by the Zionists and by remaining silent support the Zionists due to their hedonistic and materialistic tendencies." (Ha’aretz)
December 2006
"Thanks to people's wishes and God's will the trend for the existence of the Zionist regime is downwards and this is what God has promised and what all nations want…Just as the Soviet Union was wiped out and today does not exist, so will the Zionist regime soon be wiped out" (Comments at Iran's Holocaust Conference)
October 2006
"The Zionist regime is counterfeit and illegitimate and cannot survive" (Speech in Islamshahr, Iran)
August 2006
"They (Israel) kill women and children, young and old. And, behind closed doors, they make plans for the advancement of their evil goals." (as quoted by Khorasan Provincial TV)
"A new Middle East will prevail without the existence of Israel." (Malaysian news agency Bernama website)
"Although the main solution is for the elimination of the Zionist regime, at this stage an immediate cease-fire must be implemented." (Iranian TV)
"Are they human beings?... They (Zionists) are a group of blood-thirsty savages putting all other criminals to shame." (as quoted by Iranian TV)
July 2006
"The occupying regime of Palestine has actually pushed the button of its own destruction by launching a new round of invasion and barbaric onslaught on Lebanon" (Islamic Republic News Agency)
"The Zionists think that they are victims of Hitler, but they act like Hitler and behave worse than Genghis Khan." (Islamic Republic News Agency)
"The Zionists and their protectors are the most detested people in all of humanity, and the hatred is increasing every day."
"[Israel] has blackened the pages of history". (As quoted by Iranian state television)
June 2006
"I think we have sufficiently talked about this matter and these Holocaust events need to be further investigated by independent and impartial parties."
"An event that has influenced so many diplomatic and political equations of the world needs to investigated and researched by impartial and independent groups."
"If it is true, then the response to this question should not be solved in Palestine. The Palestinian question should be settled as soon as possible. If it is false, why should such measures be taken against the people of Palestine?" (a news conference following a meeting with China's president)
May 2006
"I believe the German people are prisoners of the Holocaust. More than 60 million were killed in World War II . . . The question is: Why is it that only the Jews are at the center of attention?"
"We say that if the Holocaust happened, then the Europeans must accept the consequences and the price should not be paid by Palestine. If it did not happen, then the Jews must return to where they came from." (Der Spiegel)
April 2006
"We say that this fake regime (Israel) cannot not logically continue to live. Open the doors (of Europe) and let the Jews go back to their own countries."
"The Zionist regime is an injustice and by its very nature a permanent threat. Whether you like it or not, the Zionist regime is heading toward annihilation. The Zionist regime is a rotten, dried tree that will be eliminated by one storm."
"If there is serious doubt over the Holocaust, there is no doubt over the catastrophe and holocaust being faced by the Palestinians. Holocaust has been continuing in Palestine over the past 60 years."
(Speech at a conference in Tehran)
January 2006
"[N]o Muslim nation would put up with this entity [i.e. Israel] in Islamic lands, not for one moment … If it's true that the [Europeans] committed a big crime in World War II, then they must take responsibility for it themselves, and not ask the Palestinian people to pay the price … Those countries that support this regime [Israel] were terrified at the suggestion that [Israel] should be relocated to their neighborhood. So why should the Palestinians and the countries in our region accept this entity?"
(Speech in Qom, Iran)
" Zionism is a Western ideology and a colonialist idea ... and right now it massacres Muslims with direct guidance and help from the United States and a part of Europe ... Zionism is basically a new [form of] fascism."
December 2005
"Today, they [Europeans] have created a myth in the name of Holocaust and consider it to be above God, religion and the prophets … This is our proposal: give a part of your own land in Europe, the United States, Canada or Alaska to them [Jews] so that the Jews can establish their country."
(From a speech in Zahedan, Iran)
December 2005
"Some European countries insist on saying that Hitler killed millions of innocent Jews in furnaces.... Although we don't accept this claim, if we suppose it is true, our question for the Europeans is: Is the killing of innocent Jewish people by Hitler the reason for their support to the occupiers of Jerusalem? If the Europeans are honest they should give some of their provinces in Europe -- like in Germany, Austria or other countries -- to the Zionists and the Zionists can establish their state in Europe." (News conference in Mecca, Saudi Arabia)
October 2005
"Israel must be wiped off the map … The establishment of a Zionist regime was a move by the world oppressor against the Islamic world . . . The skirmishes in the occupied land are part of the war of destiny. The outcome of hundreds of years of war will be defined in Palestinian land." (Speech at a “World Without Zionism” conference) wish authority on evangelical Christians.
As the free world debates how best to thwart Iran’s nuclear ambitions, Israel has been criticized for suggesting it would take military action to prevent Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons. This has led some to portray Israel as the aggressor.
The quotes below from Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad paint a very different picture. Since assuming office in 2005, the fanatical Ahmadinejad has repeatedly threatened and predicted the demise of Israel. Read these quotes from the Iranian president, and then don’t forget to forward this page to your friends, so that the truth of the Iranian threat to Israel and the free world -- can be known by all.
September 2008
"[Israel] resembles an airplane that has lost its engine and is kind of going down. And no one can help it … This will benefit everyone." – (Los Angeles Times)
"In Palestine, 60 years of carnage and invasion is still ongoing at the hands of some criminal and occupying Zionists. They have forged a regime through collecting people from various parts of the world and bringing them to other people’s land by displacing, detaining, and killing the true owners of that land." – (Speech to U.N.)
"The dignity, integrity and rights of the American and European people are being played with by a small but deceitful number of people called Zionists. Although they are a miniscule minority, they have been dominating an important portion of the financial and monetary centers as well as the political decision-making centers of some European countries and the US in a deceitful, complex and furtive manner … This means that the great people of America and various nations of Europe need to obey the demands and wishes of a small number of acquisitive and invasive people. These nations are spending their dignity and resources on the crimes and occupations and the threats of the Zionist network against their will." – (Speech to U.N.)
"Today, the Zionist regime is on a definite slope to collapse, and there is no way for it to get out of the cesspool created by itself and its supporters." – (Speech to U.N.)
"Some say the idea of Greater Israel has expired, I say the idea of a Lesser Israel has expired, too." –(Press conference)
"The Holocaust is a lie and the real Holocaust is happening to the Palestinians." – (Press conference)
August 2008
"We will witness dismantling of the corrupt regime [Israel] in a very near future." - (Speech at "World Mosque Week," quoted by Islamic Republic News Agency)
June 2008
"Today Iran is an advanced country. We are ready for dialogue with anyone, except with the Zionist regime, in relations based on mutual respect and fairness." (Agence France-Presse)
June 2008
"You should know that the criminal and terrorist Zionist regime, which has 60 years of plundering, aggression and crimes in its file, has reached the end of its work and will soon disappear off the geographical scene." (Reuters)
May 2008
"The Zionist regime is dying. The criminals imagine that by holding celebrations ... they can save the Zionist regime from death. They should know that regional nations hate this fake and criminal regime and if the smallest and briefest chance is given to regional nations they will destroy (it)." (Reuters)
"This terrorist and criminal state (Israel) is backed by foreign powers, but this regime would soon be swept away by the Palestinians." (Ha’aretz)
"Those who think they can revive the stinking corpse of the usurping and fake Israeli regime by throwing a birthday party are seriously mistaken."
"Today the reason for the Zionist regime's existence is questioned, and this regime is on its way to annihilation.… (Israel) has reached the end like a dead rat after being slapped by the Lebanese." (Islamic Republic News Agency)
March 2008
"Resistance is the only way to defeat the Zionists and their masters." (Islamic Republic News Agency)
February 2008
"The world powers established this filthy bacteria, the Zionist regime, which is lashing out at the nations in the region like a wild beast. … "[Israel] won support [from the other nations] which created it as a scarecrow, so as to keep the people of this area under control." (Jerusalem Post)
January 30, 2008
"I warn you to abandon the filthy Zionist entity, which has reached the end of the line. It has lost its reason to be and will sooner or later fall. The ones who still support the criminal Zionists should know that the occupiers' days are numbered. … Accept that the life of Zionists will sooner or later come to an end." (Agence France-Presse)
November 2007
"It is impossible that the Zionist regime will survive. Collapse is in the nature of this regime because it has been created on aggression, lying, oppression and crime." (Islamic Republic News Agency)
October 2007
"After the Second World War, they created a scenario called 'pogrom against Jews.' All over Europe and the countries under Western rule, an anti-Jewish movement has been concocted. The climate of propaganda and psychological warfare on the one hand and on the other hand using the issue of ovens burning human beings, they have concocted a myth of deprivation and innocence for the Jews of Europe. They use this pretext of the innocence of Jews and the suffering of some Jews during the Second World War. Riding on the crest of a wave of anti-Jewish sentiments, they have laid the foundations for the Zionist regime."
"...you cannot tolerate the presence of Zionists in Europe but want to inflict them on the people of our region? You have so much land in your possession. This vast land of Canada and Alaska can be used to resettle the Jews."
September 2007
"The era of darkness will end. Prisoners will return home. The occupied lands will be freed. Palestine and Iraq will be liberated from the domination of the occupiers. And the people of America and Europe will be free of the pressures exerted by the Zionists." (Speech to United Nations General Assembly)
August 2007
"The Zionist regime is the flag bearer of violation and occupation and this regime is the flag of Satan. …It is not unlikely that this regime be on the path to dissolution and deterioration when the philosophy behind its creation and survival is invalid." (Speech to international religious conference in Tehran)
June 2007
"With God's help, the countdown button for the destruction of the Zionist regime has been pushed by the hands of the children of Lebanon and Palestine . . . By God's will, we will witness the destruction of this regime in the near future." (FARS news agency)
March 2007
"It is quite clear that a bunch of Zionist racists are the problem the modern world is facing today. They have access to global power and media centers and seek to use this access to keep the world in a state of hardship, poverty and grudge and strengthen their rule. The great nation of Iran is opposed to this inhuman trend. Of course, the Iranian nation will stick to its rightful stance. The Zionists and their supporters do not know that they are using failed approaches to take on human values, human civilization, nations and the great nation of Iran. Admitting the right of the dear Iranian nation and submitting to justice and the rule of law are the best way to salvation and the best way out of the deadlocks they have created for themselves." (Iranian New Year’s message)
February 2007
"The Zionists are the true manifestation of Satan . . . Many Western governments that claim to be pioneers of democracy and standard bearers of human rights close their eyes over crimes committed by the Zionists and by remaining silent support the Zionists due to their hedonistic and materialistic tendencies." (Ha’aretz)
December 2006
"Thanks to people's wishes and God's will the trend for the existence of the Zionist regime is downwards and this is what God has promised and what all nations want…Just as the Soviet Union was wiped out and today does not exist, so will the Zionist regime soon be wiped out" (Comments at Iran's Holocaust Conference)
October 2006
"The Zionist regime is counterfeit and illegitimate and cannot survive" (Speech in Islamshahr, Iran)
August 2006
"They (Israel) kill women and children, young and old. And, behind closed doors, they make plans for the advancement of their evil goals." (as quoted by Khorasan Provincial TV)
"A new Middle East will prevail without the existence of Israel." (Malaysian news agency Bernama website)
"Although the main solution is for the elimination of the Zionist regime, at this stage an immediate cease-fire must be implemented." (Iranian TV)
"Are they human beings?... They (Zionists) are a group of blood-thirsty savages putting all other criminals to shame." (as quoted by Iranian TV)
July 2006
"The occupying regime of Palestine has actually pushed the button of its own destruction by launching a new round of invasion and barbaric onslaught on Lebanon" (Islamic Republic News Agency)
"The Zionists think that they are victims of Hitler, but they act like Hitler and behave worse than Genghis Khan." (Islamic Republic News Agency)
"The Zionists and their protectors are the most detested people in all of humanity, and the hatred is increasing every day."
"[Israel] has blackened the pages of history". (As quoted by Iranian state television)
June 2006
"I think we have sufficiently talked about this matter and these Holocaust events need to be further investigated by independent and impartial parties."
"An event that has influenced so many diplomatic and political equations of the world needs to investigated and researched by impartial and independent groups."
"If it is true, then the response to this question should not be solved in Palestine. The Palestinian question should be settled as soon as possible. If it is false, why should such measures be taken against the people of Palestine?" (a news conference following a meeting with China's president)
May 2006
"I believe the German people are prisoners of the Holocaust. More than 60 million were killed in World War II . . . The question is: Why is it that only the Jews are at the center of attention?"
"We say that if the Holocaust happened, then the Europeans must accept the consequences and the price should not be paid by Palestine. If it did not happen, then the Jews must return to where they came from." (Der Spiegel)
April 2006
"We say that this fake regime (Israel) cannot not logically continue to live. Open the doors (of Europe) and let the Jews go back to their own countries."
"The Zionist regime is an injustice and by its very nature a permanent threat. Whether you like it or not, the Zionist regime is heading toward annihilation. The Zionist regime is a rotten, dried tree that will be eliminated by one storm."
"If there is serious doubt over the Holocaust, there is no doubt over the catastrophe and holocaust being faced by the Palestinians. Holocaust has been continuing in Palestine over the past 60 years."
(Speech at a conference in Tehran)
January 2006
"[N]o Muslim nation would put up with this entity [i.e. Israel] in Islamic lands, not for one moment … If it's true that the [Europeans] committed a big crime in World War II, then they must take responsibility for it themselves, and not ask the Palestinian people to pay the price … Those countries that support this regime [Israel] were terrified at the suggestion that [Israel] should be relocated to their neighborhood. So why should the Palestinians and the countries in our region accept this entity?"
(Speech in Qom, Iran)
" Zionism is a Western ideology and a colonialist idea ... and right now it massacres Muslims with direct guidance and help from the United States and a part of Europe ... Zionism is basically a new [form of] fascism."
December 2005
"Today, they [Europeans] have created a myth in the name of Holocaust and consider it to be above God, religion and the prophets … This is our proposal: give a part of your own land in Europe, the United States, Canada or Alaska to them [Jews] so that the Jews can establish their country."
(From a speech in Zahedan, Iran)
December 2005
"Some European countries insist on saying that Hitler killed millions of innocent Jews in furnaces.... Although we don't accept this claim, if we suppose it is true, our question for the Europeans is: Is the killing of innocent Jewish people by Hitler the reason for their support to the occupiers of Jerusalem? If the Europeans are honest they should give some of their provinces in Europe -- like in Germany, Austria or other countries -- to the Zionists and the Zionists can establish their state in Europe." (News conference in Mecca, Saudi Arabia)
October 2005
"Israel must be wiped off the map … The establishment of a Zionist regime was a move by the world oppressor against the Islamic world . . . The skirmishes in the occupied land are part of the war of destiny. The outcome of hundreds of years of war will be defined in Palestinian land." (Speech at a “World Without Zionism” conference) wish authority on evangelical Christians.
Why the Oslo Accords are Dead
Oslo Accords Are Dead
By Morton A. Klein and Daniel Mandel
JewishChronicle.org | Thursday, October 09, 2008
On June 20, 1995, the late Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin boasted, “[The Opposition] promised us Katyusha [rockets] from Gaza, but Gaza has been under the primary control of the Palestinian Authority for more than a year now, and there hasn’t been a single Katyusha.”
On Sept. 9, 1993, then Foreign Minister Shimon Peres challenged the Opposition, “[You] threaten that there will be Katyusha rockets landing in Ashkelon. Would you mind telling me why there are no rockets fired from Aqaba to Eilat?”
The Oslo Middle East peace process, argued its originators, was a success and reservations expressed were all so much fear-mongering.
Today, 15 years since Oslo, Katyusha rockets have been falling like rain on Sderot and Ashkelon (until a recent, intermittent breather brought about by a ceasefire).
Much worse, more than 1,500 Israelis have been killed and more than 10,000 more maimed by suicide bombings, drive-by shootings, roadside bombs, lynchings, bulldozer rampages and other inventive forms of murder.
More Israelis have been murdered by terrorists in the 15 years since Oslo than in the entire 45 years of Israel’s existence that preceded it.
Not only has Oslo been a failure, but its terrible consequences metastasize since its collapse in 2000, thanks largely to efforts to resurrect it and pretend it can work.
False presumptions
Ariel Sharon was elected prime minister in 2001 in response to Oslo’s clear failure. Yet he too ended up recommencing talks with the Palestinian Authority and agreed to the 2003 Roadmap peace plan.
The Roadmap calls for Israeli concessions in advance of verifiable Palestinian compliance with past agreements on jailing terrorists and ending the incitement to hatred and murder that feeds terror.
Worse, in place of making concessions only by agreement and in return for Palestinian concessions and commitments (however systematically dishonored by the P.A.), Sharon proceeded to make unilateral concessions, withdrawing from Gaza in 2005.
Not only did this ensure that Palestinian terror groups could redeploy unhindered by the Israel Defense Force, but the whole area fell into Hamas’ hands last year after an internal struggle with Mahmoud Abbas’ Fatah.
Today, Gaza is an inviting home for Al-Qaeda and other Islamist groups. The smuggling of offensive weaponry into Gaza from Egypt, previously curbed by Israeli forces before the 2005 withdrawal, has increased massively since Israeli forces left.
In surveys presented to Prime Minister Ehud Olmert’s government in July 2008, the head of the Israel Security Agency, Yuval Diskin, pointed to the accelerated Hamas arms buildup under the cover of the ceasefire, including four tons of explosive materials, 50 antitank missiles, light weaponry, materials for manufacturing rockets and longer range missiles that could strike Kiryat Gat and perhaps even Ashdod.
Hamas is also mining areas in the Gaza Strip and building bunkers.
It was often suggested by its supporters that the Oslo process would improve Israel’s standing in the world. The opposite has been true.
Even before Oslo’s collapse in 2000, Western governments and publics ended up accepting the logic implicit in dealing with the P.A.: that the Palestinians were seeking just ends like statehood alongside Israel, not Israel’s elimination; and that concessions from Israel was the key to peace.
As a result, the world blamed Israel for not giving enough when Arafat launched a terror war, while anti-Israel boycotts and divestment campaigns worldwide have become commonplace, especially at universities.
Since Oslo, there has been a surge of academics arguing openly for Israel’s replacement by an Arab-majority state. Anti-Semitic activity in Europe has risen steeply since 1993, according to all statistical data.
Other proponents of Oslo, like writer and Peace Now pioneer Amos Oz, prophesied that Oslo would make Israel justifiably tough on all Palestinian violation of agreements. This was a delusion.
P.A. atlases and textbooks continue to pretend that Israel doesn’t exist. Fatah’s constitution remains unchanged in its call for Israel’s destruction and the use of terrorism to that end, while the group’s 43rd anniversary poster shows all Israel draped in a Palestinian kfiyyeh.
Terrorists like George Habash and Samir Kuntar are personally lauded by P.A. President Abbas. Terror acts like the slaughter in a Jerusalem seminary in March are lauded as deeds of martyrdom and its perpetrators praised in P.A. publications.
Far from paying a price, the P.A. continues to get hand-outs from the international community. Western governments, including the U.S., which once refused to recognize the Palestine Liberation Organization, today declare Abbas and the P.A. peace partners worthy of diplomatic and financial support – $600 million from the U.S. this year alone.
Little wonder that former Peace Now activist Professor Yuval Steinitz, today a Likud member and recently chairman of the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee has opined, “The idea of a two-state solution should be dead, today, because unfortunately a Palestinian state in Judea and Samaria would bring about Israel’s demise.”
Steinitz passionately believed in Oslo but has had the courage to admit his mistake. So too should the U.S., Israel and American Jewry.
Morton A. Klein is national president of the Zionist Organization of America. Dr. Daniel Mandel is director of the ZOA’s Center for Middle East Policy.
By Morton A. Klein and Daniel Mandel
JewishChronicle.org | Thursday, October 09, 2008
On June 20, 1995, the late Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin boasted, “[The Opposition] promised us Katyusha [rockets] from Gaza, but Gaza has been under the primary control of the Palestinian Authority for more than a year now, and there hasn’t been a single Katyusha.”
On Sept. 9, 1993, then Foreign Minister Shimon Peres challenged the Opposition, “[You] threaten that there will be Katyusha rockets landing in Ashkelon. Would you mind telling me why there are no rockets fired from Aqaba to Eilat?”
The Oslo Middle East peace process, argued its originators, was a success and reservations expressed were all so much fear-mongering.
Today, 15 years since Oslo, Katyusha rockets have been falling like rain on Sderot and Ashkelon (until a recent, intermittent breather brought about by a ceasefire).
Much worse, more than 1,500 Israelis have been killed and more than 10,000 more maimed by suicide bombings, drive-by shootings, roadside bombs, lynchings, bulldozer rampages and other inventive forms of murder.
More Israelis have been murdered by terrorists in the 15 years since Oslo than in the entire 45 years of Israel’s existence that preceded it.
Not only has Oslo been a failure, but its terrible consequences metastasize since its collapse in 2000, thanks largely to efforts to resurrect it and pretend it can work.
False presumptions
Ariel Sharon was elected prime minister in 2001 in response to Oslo’s clear failure. Yet he too ended up recommencing talks with the Palestinian Authority and agreed to the 2003 Roadmap peace plan.
The Roadmap calls for Israeli concessions in advance of verifiable Palestinian compliance with past agreements on jailing terrorists and ending the incitement to hatred and murder that feeds terror.
Worse, in place of making concessions only by agreement and in return for Palestinian concessions and commitments (however systematically dishonored by the P.A.), Sharon proceeded to make unilateral concessions, withdrawing from Gaza in 2005.
Not only did this ensure that Palestinian terror groups could redeploy unhindered by the Israel Defense Force, but the whole area fell into Hamas’ hands last year after an internal struggle with Mahmoud Abbas’ Fatah.
Today, Gaza is an inviting home for Al-Qaeda and other Islamist groups. The smuggling of offensive weaponry into Gaza from Egypt, previously curbed by Israeli forces before the 2005 withdrawal, has increased massively since Israeli forces left.
In surveys presented to Prime Minister Ehud Olmert’s government in July 2008, the head of the Israel Security Agency, Yuval Diskin, pointed to the accelerated Hamas arms buildup under the cover of the ceasefire, including four tons of explosive materials, 50 antitank missiles, light weaponry, materials for manufacturing rockets and longer range missiles that could strike Kiryat Gat and perhaps even Ashdod.
Hamas is also mining areas in the Gaza Strip and building bunkers.
It was often suggested by its supporters that the Oslo process would improve Israel’s standing in the world. The opposite has been true.
Even before Oslo’s collapse in 2000, Western governments and publics ended up accepting the logic implicit in dealing with the P.A.: that the Palestinians were seeking just ends like statehood alongside Israel, not Israel’s elimination; and that concessions from Israel was the key to peace.
As a result, the world blamed Israel for not giving enough when Arafat launched a terror war, while anti-Israel boycotts and divestment campaigns worldwide have become commonplace, especially at universities.
Since Oslo, there has been a surge of academics arguing openly for Israel’s replacement by an Arab-majority state. Anti-Semitic activity in Europe has risen steeply since 1993, according to all statistical data.
Other proponents of Oslo, like writer and Peace Now pioneer Amos Oz, prophesied that Oslo would make Israel justifiably tough on all Palestinian violation of agreements. This was a delusion.
P.A. atlases and textbooks continue to pretend that Israel doesn’t exist. Fatah’s constitution remains unchanged in its call for Israel’s destruction and the use of terrorism to that end, while the group’s 43rd anniversary poster shows all Israel draped in a Palestinian kfiyyeh.
Terrorists like George Habash and Samir Kuntar are personally lauded by P.A. President Abbas. Terror acts like the slaughter in a Jerusalem seminary in March are lauded as deeds of martyrdom and its perpetrators praised in P.A. publications.
Far from paying a price, the P.A. continues to get hand-outs from the international community. Western governments, including the U.S., which once refused to recognize the Palestine Liberation Organization, today declare Abbas and the P.A. peace partners worthy of diplomatic and financial support – $600 million from the U.S. this year alone.
Little wonder that former Peace Now activist Professor Yuval Steinitz, today a Likud member and recently chairman of the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee has opined, “The idea of a two-state solution should be dead, today, because unfortunately a Palestinian state in Judea and Samaria would bring about Israel’s demise.”
Steinitz passionately believed in Oslo but has had the courage to admit his mistake. So too should the U.S., Israel and American Jewry.
Morton A. Klein is national president of the Zionist Organization of America. Dr. Daniel Mandel is director of the ZOA’s Center for Middle East Policy.
Mort Klein, on a Palestinian State
Israel News
October 20, 2008
Zionist Leader’s Take on Palestinian Statehood
New York
Morton Klein
Though Israelis and Palestinians have been involved in ongoing negotiations since 1993, terrorism has increased and casualties have mounted. Nearly 2,000 Israelis have been killed and more than 10,000 maimed.
So why do some people persist in urging still more negotiations?
It’s because they believe two things: The absence of a Palestinian state is the cause of the continuing conflict and such negotiations can produce a Palestinian state and therefore peace.
Wrong on both counts. Under prevailing conditions, negotiations will not create a peaceful Palestinian state and in any event, Palestinian statehood is not the issue.
Palestinians were offered statehood in 1937 (the Peel Royal Commission), 1947 (the United Nations Partition Plan) and 2000 (the Clinton-Barak plan). The proposals were rejected.
Rather the issue was, and remains, Palestinian non-acceptance of Israel within any borders. Only this year, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas issued a new P.A. emblem showing Israel covered with a Palestinian headdress labeled “Palestine” with a Kalashnikov rifle next to it. Abbas has stated publicly that Hamas and others do not have to recognize Israel.
After the Palestinian Authority was established in 1994, Yasser Arafat readied Palestinians for war and confrontation, not peace. After receiving the highest per capita international aid, the Palestinian Authority spent it on building the largest per capita militia in the world and hidden arsenals, not industrial parks and development projects.
Instead of educating Palestinian youth for peace, a cult of suicide bombing and “martyrdom” was inculcated and its practitioners glorified by P.A. leaders. Thousands of their pictures and posters were plastered throughout the Palestinian Authority calling them heroes.
Only recently, Abbas lowered Palestinian flags to half mast and declared three days of mourning when veteran PLO terrorist George Habash died. When Israel released this year perhaps the most vile of terrorists, Samir Kuntar—a man who had crushed the life out of a small girl with a rock after murdering her father before her eyes—Abbas personally sent congratulations to Kuntar’s family and later met him on a visit to Beirut.
In the P.A.-controlled media, mosques, schools and youth camps, incitement to hatred and murder of Jews and glorification of terrorism as a religious and national duty is routine. To this day, P.A. maps and atlases pretend Israel does not exist; P.A.-salaried clerics call for murdering “the sons of monkeys and pigs”; TV and radio, popular songs and poetry extol the glories of suicide attacks; textbooks teach that Israel is a Nazi-like state; and streets, sports teams and schools are named in honor of suicide bombers.
In short, more than their own state, Palestinians want victory in the form of Israel’s demise.
Nor is this only a matter of the Palestinian leadership, whether Fatah or Hamas, both of which call in their respective charters for the elimination of Israel and the use of terrorism. Rather this goal is something that is reflected repeatedly in Palestinian opinion.
A poll by An-Najah National University in May showed a clear majority of Palestinians rejecting statehood alongside Israel. Two months earlier, the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research found that 84 percent of Palestinians supported the terrorist attack on the Jerusalem yeshiva that killed eight Jewish students. The same poll showed that 64 percent of Palestinians support missile attacks on Israel.
Despite this evidence, many prefer to believe that Israeli occupation is the core issue and that creating a Palestinian state will produce peace by ending it. This, too, makes no sense. It is simply a flat-earth statement to describe Judea, Samaria and Gaza as occupied.
Article 6 of the Fourth Geneva Convention defines foreign power as “occupier” “to the extent that such Power exercises the functions of government in such territory.” Yet since 1993, Israel relinquished to the Palestinian Authority all of Gaza and about half of Judea and Samaria, along with administrative functions and 98 percent of the Palestinian population.
These territories are now ruled by Palestinian regimes, Israel’s writ no longer runs there, nor does it any longer maintain law and order in the territories in question. By no stretch of the imagination can these territories be described as occupied. Such Israeli military incursions within them occur as a function of continuing terrorism and would end if the terrorism ended.
In short, occupation is not the issue and Palestinian statehood has never been the answer. Only when Palestinians demonstrate acceptance of Israel as a Jewish state will negotiations produce peace, not bloodshed.
(Morton Klein is the national president of the Zionist Organization of America.)
October 20, 2008
Zionist Leader’s Take on Palestinian Statehood
New York
Morton Klein
Though Israelis and Palestinians have been involved in ongoing negotiations since 1993, terrorism has increased and casualties have mounted. Nearly 2,000 Israelis have been killed and more than 10,000 maimed.
So why do some people persist in urging still more negotiations?
It’s because they believe two things: The absence of a Palestinian state is the cause of the continuing conflict and such negotiations can produce a Palestinian state and therefore peace.
Wrong on both counts. Under prevailing conditions, negotiations will not create a peaceful Palestinian state and in any event, Palestinian statehood is not the issue.
Palestinians were offered statehood in 1937 (the Peel Royal Commission), 1947 (the United Nations Partition Plan) and 2000 (the Clinton-Barak plan). The proposals were rejected.
Rather the issue was, and remains, Palestinian non-acceptance of Israel within any borders. Only this year, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas issued a new P.A. emblem showing Israel covered with a Palestinian headdress labeled “Palestine” with a Kalashnikov rifle next to it. Abbas has stated publicly that Hamas and others do not have to recognize Israel.
After the Palestinian Authority was established in 1994, Yasser Arafat readied Palestinians for war and confrontation, not peace. After receiving the highest per capita international aid, the Palestinian Authority spent it on building the largest per capita militia in the world and hidden arsenals, not industrial parks and development projects.
Instead of educating Palestinian youth for peace, a cult of suicide bombing and “martyrdom” was inculcated and its practitioners glorified by P.A. leaders. Thousands of their pictures and posters were plastered throughout the Palestinian Authority calling them heroes.
Only recently, Abbas lowered Palestinian flags to half mast and declared three days of mourning when veteran PLO terrorist George Habash died. When Israel released this year perhaps the most vile of terrorists, Samir Kuntar—a man who had crushed the life out of a small girl with a rock after murdering her father before her eyes—Abbas personally sent congratulations to Kuntar’s family and later met him on a visit to Beirut.
In the P.A.-controlled media, mosques, schools and youth camps, incitement to hatred and murder of Jews and glorification of terrorism as a religious and national duty is routine. To this day, P.A. maps and atlases pretend Israel does not exist; P.A.-salaried clerics call for murdering “the sons of monkeys and pigs”; TV and radio, popular songs and poetry extol the glories of suicide attacks; textbooks teach that Israel is a Nazi-like state; and streets, sports teams and schools are named in honor of suicide bombers.
In short, more than their own state, Palestinians want victory in the form of Israel’s demise.
Nor is this only a matter of the Palestinian leadership, whether Fatah or Hamas, both of which call in their respective charters for the elimination of Israel and the use of terrorism. Rather this goal is something that is reflected repeatedly in Palestinian opinion.
A poll by An-Najah National University in May showed a clear majority of Palestinians rejecting statehood alongside Israel. Two months earlier, the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research found that 84 percent of Palestinians supported the terrorist attack on the Jerusalem yeshiva that killed eight Jewish students. The same poll showed that 64 percent of Palestinians support missile attacks on Israel.
Despite this evidence, many prefer to believe that Israeli occupation is the core issue and that creating a Palestinian state will produce peace by ending it. This, too, makes no sense. It is simply a flat-earth statement to describe Judea, Samaria and Gaza as occupied.
Article 6 of the Fourth Geneva Convention defines foreign power as “occupier” “to the extent that such Power exercises the functions of government in such territory.” Yet since 1993, Israel relinquished to the Palestinian Authority all of Gaza and about half of Judea and Samaria, along with administrative functions and 98 percent of the Palestinian population.
These territories are now ruled by Palestinian regimes, Israel’s writ no longer runs there, nor does it any longer maintain law and order in the territories in question. By no stretch of the imagination can these territories be described as occupied. Such Israeli military incursions within them occur as a function of continuing terrorism and would end if the terrorism ended.
In short, occupation is not the issue and Palestinian statehood has never been the answer. Only when Palestinians demonstrate acceptance of Israel as a Jewish state will negotiations produce peace, not bloodshed.
(Morton Klein is the national president of the Zionist Organization of America.)
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