Saturday, August 11, 2007
Selective Outrage
Question: When is it a felony to yell "Drop Dead" at a cop?
Answer: When the person yelling is an anti-Left Israeli professor.
No, not THIS anti-Left Israeli professor; **I** do not yell at Israeli
cops.
The professor in question is Hillel Weiss, a controversial fellow who
teaches Jewish literature at Bar-Ilan University
(http://www.biu.ac.il/faculty/hillelweiss/ ). Weiss is active in the
decidedly anti-Left "Professors for a Strong Israel" (as am I) and in
pro-settler and "rightwing" protest groups. He was in the news last year
for being involved in a group calling itself "Sanhedrin," which threatened
to issue religious rulings against those who participated in the expulsion
of Jewish settlers. (Had they carried out their threat, there was an
off-chance that some officials might have been denied an aliya to the
Torah if any synagogues were to take the pronouncements seriously.) In
another matter, Weiss was cited in the press calling for "Acts of Pinhas"
with regard to the Gay Pride Parade in Jerusalem
(http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3322901,00.html ), and the
prosecutor investigated whether this might have been intended to be a call
to violence. (As far as I know, nothing came from the interrogations of
Weiss in the matter.) The amazing part of that episode is less the
McCarthyist interrogations by the police of Weiss than the fact that
anyone in the Israeli prosecutor's office knew what an Act of Pinhas was.
A few days ago Weiss was "overheard" (caught by news camera) cursing out a
Colonel in the Hebron brigade of the Israeli army when the colonel was
engaged in evicting some Jews from a home in the city. Weiss told the
Colonel to drop dead. Actually, he was a bit more lurid in his cussing
than that, wishing the colonel to be the source of mourning for his own
mother and that the colonel's wife be a widow and his children orphans.
It all amounted to "Drop Dead."
Now you might question the good taste of those comments, but should they
be a felony? Should Weiss be prosecuted and fired from his job at Bar
Ilan University?
Well, if you share the Haaretz viewpoint of what constitutes free speech,
you will agree that Weiss is a felon, but if you have any sense of
democracy and freedom of speech, you will not.
The President of Bar Ilan University, who never quite got around to firing
the OTHER professor there who made headlines this year - for endorsing
medieval blood libels against Jews (Ariel Toaff), set up a campus
committee of inquisition to see if Weiss deserves to be fired for his
"crime." No Bar Ilan sanctions were ever implemented against Toaff, and
Toaff was allowed to retire and draw his nice pension.
Meanwhile Weiss became overnight the right-winger that the Israeli media
and politicians most love to hate
(http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3435555,00.html ). Ehud Barak,
now again head of the Israeli Labor Party, demanded legal actions against
Weiss (http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3436030,00.html ). The
newspapers are calling for Weiss' defenestration. The police and Attorney
General are planning to crucify Weiss
(http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3435555,00.html ). The
Jerusalem Post claims Weiss will be probed
(http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?pagename=JPost/JPArticle/ShowFull&cid=1186557410145
), and I hope for his sake it is not the same way my doctor does it.
Now putting aside the questions of taste in the specific words chosen by
Weiss in what appears to be a moment of temper and hotheadedness, just
what did Weiss do that was so terrible? The media moghuls rolling their
eyes and beating the tables with their shoes are demanding action again
Weiss, but they are exactly the same people who have never had a word to
say about far-leftist professors in Israel endorsing terror, cheering when
Palestinians murder settlers, justifying terror, promoting boycotts of
Israel,
and so on. The late Professor Baruch Kimmerling regularly justified
terrorist atrocities against Jews. No reactions from th emedia. Nor have
they ever called for legal
actions or sanctions against Arab politicians or other Arabs who publicly
endorse terror, call on Israel to be annihilated, deny the Holocaust, or
in some cases engage in espionage. SO the outrage being expressed in
such elegant posturing by these people is highly selective.
Ehud Barak's sudden interest in academic extremism in Israel would be much
more convincing if he had ever spoken out about the trashing of academic
standards in Israeli universities in order to hire and promote leftist
traitors and seditious post-Zionists working for Israel's destruction.
What about those Israeli leftist professors who not only curse police and
soldiers but regularly attack them violently at "anarchist"
demonstrations. Prof. Anat Matar from Tel Aviv University, to name but
one, has been arrested for assaulting police. Why does Barak have nothing
to say about that?
