Friday, May 30, 2008
More Israeli Academic Disgraces
posting by an Associate Professor of education at the University of Haifa
to the Segel Plus chat list of professors. It is so breath-taking that I
am reluctant to comment on it or mock it. It does show you what passes as
academic inquiry at the University of Haifa. The professor in question
earlier published an article claiming that the tower in the center of the
University of Haifa is in fact a giant phallic symbol representing the
oppression of Arabs:
Dear Ilan,
I think you are right. And yet, there is an additional dimension to be
addressed.
If I may add, the boycotting of Israeli academia has to do not so much
with the "degree" of the implicit presence of old antifeminism as with the
explicit presence of the new-anti-Semitism. You might be interested to
read more about the boycott and the new anti-Semitism in the attached
lecture I gave on this topic in the Oxford 2006 conference on the issue of
boycotting Israeli academia.
In light of the relations between current postmodern rhetorical, psychic,
philosophical and political trends and its articulation within
postcolonialist frameworks it is a challenge well beyond the signification
of "degrees" of "old" anti-Semitic "influences" or "degrees" of Israeli
manipulations of anti-Semitic attacks as a gate for Israeli escape from
responsibility and self-awareness.
In my latest book I go into it in more detailed manner and here I will
offer it "AL REGEL ACHAT": you cannot disconnect the new anti-Semitism
from current global changes in cyberspace, post-Fordist
production-consumption-representation and postcolonialist/radical feminist
philosophy and the quest to trade "critique" with new relations with the
cosmos/body/spirituality.
It is not a mere political challenge; surely it transcends "Hasbara" or
"manipulations of bad consciousness". What we face here is a contextual
manifestation of the path-searching of the truth of "our" present
historical moment.
It is not so much a matter of the better argument having the upper hand,
surely not a matter of better being informed and political responsibility
headed by British academia that need so badly to purify itself from its
colonial essence and its colonialist history. It has much more to do with
the dialectics of the transformation of the humanist project and its
failure ito the opposing alternatives that serve-represent current
capitalist realities of "soft" poststructualist-postcolonialist politics,
on the one hand and the "new spirituality", on the other.
Many of these British professors are not committed to a serious
elaboration of the facts (more known as "facts") or the complexity of the
issue at stake in light of the burning quest for individual salvation in
the omnipotent presence of the colonialist cannibalistic triumph of
Judeo-Christian spirit that Israel and Jewish monotheism (and the quest
for homogeneity) represent and serve as its impetus. In boycotting Israeli
academia, therefore, you are closer to struggling the Lutziferian power,
or, the essence of colonialism, namely, the quest to overcome
heterogeneity, diversity, otherness and the quest for violent "consensus",
"truth", and (American like) "peace" that is conditioned by so much
suffering of the marginalized, silenced ones and all "others" to the
Judeo-Christian/phalocentrist colonialism that "America"/Israel serve
today as its most violent agent.
Boycotting Israeli academia, therefore, must overcome the facts of what
really happened in the Teddy Kats affair or in "Jenin, Jenin" and so
forth, since it is a moral and psychic drive to overcome this world of
facts, this triumph of the universalization of Jewish essence - AVODA
KODESH that many academics, NGO activist and so many
transformative-oriented frustrated soles are committed to, in face of the
absence of a guiding God, ideology or central committee of the party or
any of its subsidiaries. And, dear Ilan, it is so naive to try and face a
quest for redemption and AVODAT KODESH with challenging "facts"; not even
with facts and a serious invitation for a rational discussion.
With hope
ilan
Professor Ilan Gur-Ze'ev
Faculty of Education
University of Haifa, Haifa 31905 Israel
Website
http://construct.haifa.ac.il/~ilangz/
2.
http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/Read.aspx?GUID=D2026EAF-3AB0-4950-8F46-1BADABD88486
In Praise of Deportation
By Myles Kantor
FrontPageMagazine.com | 5/30/2008
When your country is under attack, common sense means that enemies aren't
welcome to visit.
Our era loves abstract language, and words like "attack" often signify
anything but their primary meaning. A recent editorial in The Independent
of England, for instance, referred to a think tank's "ideological attack"
on British trade policy ("Fair trade is growing.and working," May 24).
Israel does not live in abstraction. Since its restoration in 1948,
foreign and domestic enemies have committed violence against Israelis with
the goal of conquering the nation.
By their own perverse admission, these enemies define their .liberation.
as Israel's destruction. Hamas leader Mahmoud Zahar recently commented,
.After we defeat the Zionists we will persecute them. we will persecute
them to eternity, and the sun of the freedom and independence of the
Palestinians will burn all of the Zionists..
Pursuant to incinerating the Zionists and perpetrating a Middle Eastern
holocaust, Arabs in the Gaza Strip regularly launch rockets against
Israeli civilians. These rockets have murdered children like Dorit
Benisian, women like Shirel Friedman, and men like Roni Yihye.
This is how Israel is under attack.
So, when a notorious enemy of Israel recently tried to enter the country,
Israel made a logical decision: deport him.
To his credit, the American author and ex-professor Norman Finkelstein
makes his support for Israel's enemies obvious. In 2006, Israel fought
Hezbollah in Lebanon to stop its constant rocket attacks against northern
Israelis. On July 29 of that year, Finkelstein gave a speech in New York
City where he said, .Right now, and I say it publicly, right now we are
all Hezbollah. All of us..
To prevent any ambiguity, he added, .Every victory of Hezbollah over the
[Israeli] vandals and the marauders, the invaders and the murderers; every
victory by Hezbollah over Israel is also a victory for liberty and a
victory for freedom..
This January, Finkelstein praised Hezbollah.s .courage. on Lebanese
television and commented, .I have no problem saying that I do want to
express solidarity with them.. He also met with members of Hezbollah
including southern Lebanon commander Nabil Kaouk, who has called Americans
.all murderers and criminals..
In February, Finkelstein appeared on the London-based Arabic television
station Al-Hiwar. There he compared Israeli policies toward Gaza with Nazi
Germany, saying .The analogies are obvious.. He then called Israel a
.warmongering country. and a .lunatic state..
On May 23, Finkelstein arrived in Israel from Amsterdam with the stated
purpose of visiting an Arab friend. Israel.s security service detained
Finkelstein at Ben-Gurion Airport for approximately 24 hours, interrogated
him, and placed him on a flight back to Amsterdam with a ten-year ban from
Israel.
Finkelstein told Ha.aretz, .I told my interrogators I'm not an enemy of
Israel.. To paraphrase George Orwell, some claims are so obnoxious that
only an intellectual could make them.
Foreign media swiftly distorted Israel.s deportation of Finkelstein. .US
academic deported and banned for criticising Israel,. read the headline in
The Guardian of England. The Guardian must dislike fact checking, or it
considers terrorist sympathies the same as mere criticism.
Israel.s course of action was quite lenient; it simply made plain that
people who glorify and associate with anti-Semitic terrorists aren.t
welcome in the Jewish nation. This defensive policy of rational exclusion
is preferable to Israel dispossessing Israelis in the Gaza Strip,
releasing terrorists from prison, and contemplating surrender of the Golan
Heights.
In fact, Israel had a duty to deport Finkelstein. To permit him in the
country would have been an offense against Hezbollah.s victims. Would a
vocal foreign supporter of Al Qaeda who praised the September 11 attacks
be allowed to visit Manhattan?
No country should be expected to accept terrorist collaborators inside its
borders. Norman Finkelstein should thank Israel for only putting him on a
plane.
3. From Isracampus:
Israeli-Canadian Film Professor Dorit Naaman produces a different kind of
pornography
By Lee Kaplan www.isracampus.org
The dictionary definition of pornography is .obscene writings, drawings,
photographs, or the like, especially those having little or no artistic
merit.. While the popular connotation of the term used in media refers to
displaying lewd sex acts, Israeli-Canadian filmmaker Dorit Naaman from
Queen.s University in Canada doesn.t have to have sex scenes in her films
to make them pornographic; as she accomplishes her own manner of lewdness
by her encouragement of the murder of fellow Israelis by elevating female
Arab terrorists to a level of being just some women seeking equal rights
from men, rather than their being female primitives imitating their male
counterparts who engage in terrorism and the murder of Jews.
Naaman likes to contrast these Palestinian women with Israeli women who
defend the Jewish people in the IDF by using a form of equivalency that is
truly pornographic if one only takes time to smell the coffee, or look at
this woman.s work.
Get this description of her from another university.s website:
.Dorit Naaman is a film theorist and documentary filmmaker from Jerusalem,
teaching at Queen.s University, Canada. Her research focuses on Middle
Eastern cinemas (primarily from post-colonialist and feminist
perspectives), and she is currently working on a book on the visual
representation of Palestinian and Israeli women fighters. She published in
Cinema Journal, Quarterly Review of Film and Video, Style and Third Text,
edited a special issue of Framework and co-edited a special issue of
Public. Dorit Naaman is also an activist for a just solution to the
Palestinian-Israeli conflict (italics are this writer.s).
Naaman has received money from the Ford Foundation for some of her films
which explains why she tosses around the anti-imperialist rhetoric
(.post-colonial perspective.), as well as what also sells so well on
college campuses these days (.feminist perspectives.) and .social justice.
(a just solution to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict).
Here.s one of her presentations:
.Brides of Palestine/Angels of Death: The Representation of Palestinian
Female Suicide Bombers. Dorit Naaman, a Five College Women.s Studies Ford
Associate from Queen.s University in Toronto, Canada, will examine the
ways in which media representations deal with the loaded image of the
Palestinian female suicide bomber. Seminar room, *Five College Women.s
Studies Research Center, 7:30 pm..
If Dorit Naaman really wanted to show a .socially just. .feminist
perspective,. why not do a film about the mother of little Afik Zahavi who
spent fifteen years trying to conceive her child, then finally did so
through artificial insemination only to have him die at age 4 from a
Palestinian Arab Kassem rocket hitting his day care center in Sderot.? Why
doesn.t she shoot films about the mothers of IDF soldiers who defend the
Jewish people instead of romanticizing the few women suicide bombers that
the pathological culture of Arabs who call themselves .Palestinians. has
produced?
Israeli and American universities as bastions of radical leftist Marxist
ideology combined with Arab attempts to boycott Israel have made bashing
Israel, particularly among Israeli academics extremely profitable and
career enhancing. Who needs logic or real talent any more? Of interesting
note is how Ms. Naaman in explaining about her work says she prefers the
.documentary. style of filmmaking where her films look more like .home
movies..
As someone who has a degree in Motion Pictures myself from UCLA, and one
who took several writing courses on critical theory in film, I.ve always
found those too lazy to adopt professional shooting and production
standards in selling themselves with a produced film product always
falling back on saying they intentionally shot a home movie not because of
a lack of skill or hard work (that is usually the case), but because they
really aren.t capable of making a professional polished film with good
production values, so .chose. to do sloppy unprofessional film work. Its
an easy copout. At the same time, one learns what sells in academia to
advance one.s career: talk about .post-colonialist theory,. the same
gobbledygook that Edward Said, the Palestinian from Egypt, who spoke such
nonsense espoused in his books lambasting Israel, then throw in a little
bit of talk about Gender Studies and the inequality of women (the Arabs
are the biggest misogynists in world, but discussing the .oppressed woman.
in any academic community is a sure-fire winner), and, to top things off,
become another Israeli mouthpiece for the Palestinians who in fact do not
seek a just solution but rather the annihilation of Israel, and one has an
unbeatable combination for a Ford Foundation scholarship (as Naaman
received) and the latest traveling sideshow in academia across America as
a .film studies professor.. This is Dorit Naaman.
Dorit Naaman also penned a book titled .The Silenced Scream: A Feminist
Point of View from the Israeli Checkpoints in Palestine.. Of course, the
checkpoints doubly .oppress. Arab women rather than protect innocent
Israelis, both Arab and Jew, from terrorist attacks and suicide bombers.
One can be sure that Dorit Naaman did not include in her .feminist
perspective. of Israeli checkpoints the story of the incident took place
at 6 o'clock one Tuesday morning at the checkpoint near Beit Jalla, just
south of the tunnel road that goes through Beit Jalla into Jerusalem. The
sun had just risen. A Palestinian Arab from Bethlehem, who looked familiar
to the young IDF troops at the checkpoint, proceeded to get out of his car
with a prayer blanket. This was the last week of Ramadan, and the young,
devout-looking man made a hand signal that he wanted to pray. The IDF
troops at the checkpoint afforded him the opportunity to pray and did not
conduct a security search of his vehicle nor his person. The man then
knelt to the ground, spread out his prayer blanket, and proceeded to pull
out an AK-47 and murder two young IDF troops at point blank range. Moshe
Belsky, age 23, who was speaking on his cell phone with his mother, and
Shaul Lahav, age 20, the checkpoint commander, were killed instantly. (No
doubt the .feminist perspectives. of these Israeli Jewish mothers of these
two boys, especially Moshe Belsky.s, were not discussed in Naaman.s trope
about .Israeli checkpoints. in .Palestine.).
But then again, Dorit Naaman never seems to consider terrorism and murder
against the Israelis by Palestinian Arabs as something to be taken
seriously. She signed a petition demanding that Tali Fahima be released
from detention. Fahima, was caught smuggling weapons and explosives for
her Palestinian Arab boyfriend to kill Israelis.
Naaman explained her reasons for signing the petition: .Clearly, the state
would like to scare anyone seeking dialogue with Palestinians..
So an Israeli woman helping her Palestinian Arab boyfriend to kill fellow
Israelis is merely .seeking dialogue?. No doubt Naaman also found some
.feminist perspective. in signing the document also, but certainly not one
of Israeli mothers murdered by Arab terrorists.
Ah well, whatever sells. But Dorit Naaman is just another example how in
academia, even in film studies, there.s a career even for the illogical
and those lacking any real common sense or academic talent beyond jumping
on the bash Israel bandwagon.
That.s the new kind of pornography.
4. Also
Professor Alice Shalvi and the NIF disguise their real intentions against
Israel while professing love for the Jewish state
By Lee Kaplan, www.isracampus.org.il
5. Tel Aviv University.s Moonbat of the Day Bar-tal does Tikkun
Magazine:
Tel Aviv University. - Daniel Bar-Tal (Dept. of Political Psychology)
conveniently omits Israel.s Academic Fifth-Column in his list of dangers
confronting Israel at Sixty
http://www.tikkun.org/magazine/tik0805/politics/webarticles/surveyatsixty
A Survey of Israel at Sixty
