Zionist Conspiracy: BGU Post-Zionist Professor Equates Naqba with Holocaust

Tuesday, August 14, 2007

BGU Post-Zionist Professor Equates Naqba with Holocaust

1. BGU Post-Zionist Professor Equates Naqba with Holocaust

http://www.israelnationalnews.com/Blogs/Blog.aspx/1#2265

Ben-Gurion University is host to many of the worst anti-Israel extremists,
tenured traitors, "New Historians", and "Post-Zionists" in Israel
academia. Some openly call for Israel to be annihilated. Unlike other
universities where such people are repudiated by the institution officers
and officials, at Ben Gurion University they are celebrated and endorsed
by the university officers as fine scholars and sensitive peace lovers.
This has earned Ben Gurion University its frequent nickname, the "Bir Zeit
of the Negev." BGU is so obsessed with hiring and promoting anti-Israel
extremism that it sometimes trashes academic standards of scholarship
altogether.

While Ben Gurion University is also home to many serious researchers and
to some departments that are scrupulous in maintaining serious academic
quality, it hosts academics who endorse law breaking and terror, who call
for Israel to be boycotted, and who denounce Israel as a Nazi apartheid
regime. University officials there have never been bothered by any of
that. In fact, they celebrate their Post Zionists as heroes!
Among the many extremists at BGU is Professor Dan Bar-On, a "Post-Zionist"
professor of psychology who used to be Dean of Social Sciences at BGU.
Writing in the pro-Palestinian Middle East Times of April 27, 2007 with an
Arab co-author, Bar-On mimics so many of the vogue radical haters of
Israel in drawing moral-historical comparisons between the Nazi Holocaust
of Jews in World War II and the "Naqba" (catastrophe in Arabic), the
fashionable nonsense term that is often used by such people when
describing the "sufferings" of Arabs when Israel was first created.
Bar-On, who was active in the movement to organize mutiny and insurrection
among Israeli soldiers until Israel capitulated to the demands of the Far
Left, writes:

The Yad VaShem Holocaust Memorial in Jerusalem and the ruins of Deir
Yassin may be in geographical proximity, but a world apart in the psyche
of Jews and Palestinians. While the first commemorates the systematic mass
extermination of European Jews under Nazi occupation prior to and during
World War II, the second marks the village where Palestinians were
massacred at the hands of Jewish extremists in April 1948, and symbolizes
Palestinian dispossession and their struggle for
self-determination....Israeli Jews have generally refused to take even
partial responsibility for the Nakba (the Catastrophe) that befell the
Palestinian Arabs in 1948. Such an acknowledgement, in their mind, creates
a moral obligation for the Right of Return or its equivalent, thereby
undermining their majority in the State of Israel....It may be not a
coincidence that the new exhibit of Yad VaShem in the form of a deep
mountain tunnel opens up unwittingly toward the hill where Deir Yassin was
once located. That, for sure, was not the intention of the architect. It
takes a new kind of courage to recognize the symbolic importance and
implications of both Yad VaShem and Deir Yassin in order to go beyond them
and envision a better future for both Israelis and Palestinians.
He has been arguing that the Holocaust and "Palestinian suffering" in
1948-49 are moral equivalents for many years. He signed a statement
claiming Israel was about to perpetrate genocidal atrocities against Arabs
the moment Allied forces invaded Iraq, but never apologized when this
proved completely false.

Elsewhere he writes: "Some of the aggression that the Jews did not
exercise against the Germans, they are expressing against Palestinians."

He has been active in producing and promoting textbooks that present the
historic falsehoods that comprise the anti-Israel "narrative" as at least
as valid and true as actual history. For example, terrorists were always
described also as freedom fighters.

2. A few days back we reported about how 14 conscripted professors of
law, some of them people whose appointment to the court had been blocked
by Minister Daniel Friedmann, were agitating against Friedmann and
circulating a petition attacking him
(http://thejewishpress.blogspot.com/2007/08/danger-conscripted-academics.html

). Meanwhile the number on it grew to 22. Well, now it turns out there
is an even bigger petition of law professors ENDORSING and backing
Friedmann! Haaretz mentions it in passing and "forgets" to tell us how
many names are on it (http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/893009.html )
but it is the initiative of left-leaning law professor Amnon Rubinstein
(Meretz) and right-leaning law professor Shimon Sheetrit (Likud). The
fact that Haaretz refuses to give a number probably means it is several
times the 22 who oppose Friedmann.

3. Golly what a shame:
http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1186557430820&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull
On the other hand: http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/891427.html

4. From the Wall St Journal:

August 14, 2007

REVIEW & OUTLOOK

DOW JONES REPRINTS
Cleansing the ACLU
August 14, 2007;
The latest battle of religion in the public square is unfolding in
Dearborn, Michigan, a city with one of the highest Muslim populations in
the country. At the University of Michigan's local campus, administrators
have recently refitted several school bathrooms to include small footbaths
in the corner -- an accommodation for Muslim students who must perform
ritual washing as part of their daily observance. The issue has more than
a few of the usual suspects trying to explain their way out of their usual
positions on the separation of church and state.
The Detroit chapter of the ACLU has scrambled to find a way to recuse
itself from the matter, claiming that the footbaths qualify as secular
since they could be used by non-Muslims, and therefore don't cross the
group's usual bright church-state line. Further, the ACLU explains, the
university's decision to take on the $25,000 expense was motivated
primarily "by health and safety" because some students didn't like washing
their hands in the sinks after others students had washed their feet. If
that hadn't been the case, the group says this religious accommodation
would surely have merited greater investigation and criticism.
Uh-huh. This is the same ACLU chapter that in 2005 objected to a
high-school wrestling coach saying a prayer with his team before meets,
calling the action "inherently coercive." And the ACLU of Michigan is
already on the defensive for its non-action this time. In a letter
explaining its silence regarding university footbaths, the ACLU notes that
it "has often come to the defense of other religions when the state has
attempted to interfere with their religious expression." The letter even
includes a list of cases in which the group has defended Christian
clients. Too bad none of the examples prove much of a parallel to the
current recusal over state recognition of a religious practice.
Truer to form was the Council on American Islamic Relations, which
immediately hollered that objections were all a case of Islamaphobia, and
fear that the university was going to become "Islamified." But that's a
hard assertion to prove in an America that frequently goes 10 rounds over
the sight of a Christmas creche in the public square. CAIR's invocation of
American bigotry has become so reflexive that we wonder if its spinners
even bother to rewrite their press releases.
For our part, we see no reason to object to University of Michigan's
gesture to some of its Muslim students. Freedom of religion has never
meant freedom from religion, and making it easier for people of different
backgrounds to practice their faiths is a perfectly American thing to do.
Many schools have chapels on campus, a fact that bothers very few. And few
places object to kosher offerings in school cafeterias -- an accommodation
for Jewish students causing no inconvenience to others.
A university is entitled to some discretion in how it serves its student
body. Let's hope the ACLU takes this case as an opportunity to cleanse
itself of inconsistencies.
URL for this article:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB118705410302696737.html

SP: The ACLU has been the main group in Michigan DEFENDING affirmative
action apartheid.

Zionist Conspiracy

Tuesday, August 14, 2007

BGU Post-Zionist Professor Equates Naqba with Holocaust

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