Monday, August 04, 2008
How to Get the World to Hate Israel
How to Get the World To Hate Israel
By Richard L. Cravatts
Mr. Cravatts, PhD, director of Boston University.s Program in Book and
Magazine Publishing at the Center for Professional Education, writes
frequently on terrorism, higher education, politics, culture, law,
marketing, and housing, and is currently writing a book about the
world-wide assault on Israel taking place on college campuses.
As part of evaluating the competitive landscape of the popularity of
nations, in a process referred to in marketing circles as .place
branding,. Israel, to no one.s great surprise, comes up short in brand
likeability, ranking last out of 35 nations included in an August 2006
survey conducted by nation branding expert Simon Anholt, even less
attractive to respondents than Indonesia, Estonia, and Turkey.
How could this have happened to a country that is the Middle East.s only
thriving democracy and enjoys a remarkably robust economy that has spawned
some 1000 startup high tech companies, for example, second only to the
U.S.? How, in short, would you go about making the world hate Israel?
This is how you would accomplish that objective if you were an enemy of
Israel:
Even after 60 years of its existence, you question the fundamental right
of Israel to even exist and regularly, though falsely, condemn it for
being created .illegally..through the .theft. of Palestinian lands and
property.and thus decide, because of its original sin, it has no .right to
exist.. You accuse the government of a .brutal,. illegal .occupation. of
Palestinian lands, especially Gaza and the West Bank (but for many, all of
Israel), of being a .colonial settler state,. a Zionist .regime. or
.project,. a land-hungry nation, a usurper of property that was lived on
and owned by a Palestinian .people. .from time immemorial..
You describe the very existence of the country as being the .greatest
threat to world peace,. the core cause of all Muslim anger toward the
West, the root of all of the Palestinians. suffering and economic plight,
and describe Israel as a nation that has even been referred to publicly as
a .shitty little country. by the French ambassador to Britain.
You make .Palestinianism. into a virtual cult whose members offer a
world-wide reverence for the Palestinian cause and repeat without end that
their nationalistic striving is inviolable, a basic human right, Of all
the 100 million refugees who were dispersed around the globe and were
re-assimilated since World War II, you chose only the Palestinians to
languish, as if in amber, in barbaric refugee camps where their lives are
used as political fodder to denounce the existence of an Israel that
supposedly has deprived them of a home.
You have the United Nations set up an agency whose sole function it is to
make sure that this one group of refugees in the whole world are coddled,
advocated for, and repeat, mantra-like, that a human .right of return.
has been sanctified and assured by international law for the Palestinians,
giving only this group of refugees a collective, as opposed to individual,
right of return.and not only to those refugees who supposedly lived in and
left what is now Israel, but all of their descendents, as well.
You use the General Assembly and the Human Rights Council of the United
Nations to further demonize and delegitimate Israel, making it a pariah
in the world community and issuing an edict that equates Zionism with
racism. In 2006-07, if you are the Human Rights Council, you pass one
hundred percent of your condemnatory resolutions against Israel.
If you are the autocratic, despotic states of the Arab world, you initiate
a prolonged, unceasing propaganda war against Israel and Zionism, in which
it is your intention to encourage your citizens, not to question why they
live under tyranny and despair under their own corrupt, defective
governments, but that their circumstances are bleak because of the success
and very existence of Israel. You depict Jews as apes, pigs, and subhuman
monsters, and regularly produce Nazi-like propaganda and cartoons in your
state-owned media that accuses Jews and Israelis of blood libels,
bloodthirstiness, militarism, a desire for world domination, imperialism,
and complicity with the U.S. and the West to destroy Islam.all which make
Jew-hatred inevitable.
You inculcate Palestinian children, nearly from birth, with seething,
blind, unrelenting, and obsessive hatred of Jews and the 'Zionist regime,'
so that kindergartners graduate with blood-soaked hands while toting
plastic AK 47s and dedicate their lives to jihad, and older children are
recruited to hide explosives on their bodies to transform themselves into
shahids -- a new generation of kindling for radical Islam's cult of death.
When Israel launches a military strike against nests of terrorists or in
response to ceaseless rocket barrages, you term their response
.disproportionate,. another escalation in the .cycle of violence,. a
violation of human rights, aggressive, militaristic, with Apache gunships
.pounding. terrorist neighborhoods.
If you are the Palestinian media, and members of the world media who are
either intentionally biased or willing to be duped by anti-Israel
propaganda, you repeatedly report on supposed Israeli human rights
violations, such as an alleged .massacre of the 21st century,. a horrible
war crime and example of .genocide. committed by Israel against
Palestinians in the village of Jenin.
You talk about the Israeli security barrier as an .apartheid wall,. and
describe it as a massive, soaring, unbroken division through Palestinian
neighborhoods and communities, overlooking the fact that the wall is
towering and solid concrete only in those regions that have been
repeatedly assaulted by terrorism, and that 90 percent of the hundreds of
miles of barrier is comprised merely of wire fence.
You use the .apartheid wall. image to create a broader misconception about
the Palestinians living under a South African-style apartheid regime,
disingenuously equating race restrictions that blacks lived under in
Soweto with the open society of Israel in which Israeli Arabs have more
rights than in any Arab state and are asked only not to murder Jews in
their midst.
On campuses where a coddled and insulated professoriate often express
antipathy for the perceived ills of capitalism, the usurpation of
.Palestine. by Israel, .land grabs. through occupation, and the denial of
the civil and economic rights of the Palestinians, you contend that
Israel.s very existence is not at all about self-determination (something
you deem appropriate only for the Palestinians) and all about greed,
globalism, colonialism, exploitation, and undeserved political and
economic might. No longer able to fight apartheid in South Africa, you now
try to transmogrify that racist social system onto Israel, holding rallies
and encouraging the signing of petitions which call from divestiture from
companies doing business in Israel.
You fund Middle Eastern Studies centers on university campuses and use
them as anti-Israel, anti-American .think tanks. where scholarship is
tainted with ideology and singularly focused on the Palestinian cause. You
fund the active and vocal Muslim Students Association on campuses across
the country that hold .Israel Apartheid Week. and .Holocaust in the Holy
Land. festivals at which propaganda, Jew-hatred, apologies for terrorism,
and further demonizing of Israel takes place.
In the Arab world, you play fast and loose with history in your attempt to
create a historical narrative conforming to your own political agenda,
erasing any link between Palestine and the Jews. Though Jerusalem is
mentioned not once in the Koran and over 669 times in the Jewish Bible,
you claim that Jerusalem is now the .third holiest site to Muslims,. that,
as Yasser Arafat announced at Camp David in 2000, the Temple Mount was
never a Jewish site, that Jews now .occupy. Muslim lands, and that the
archeological and historical evidence that confirms an uninterrupted
3000-year presence by Jews in the Holy Land is merely a .construct,. yet
another lie promulgated by Israeli historians and archeologists as way of
erasing and obscuring an Islamic past.
If you are in the traditionally Arabist U.S. State Department, or in the
.realist. school of diplomacy, or part of the European Union, and you have
an insatiable need for oil, you overlook the tyrannies and unfaithfulness
of our Middle Eastern .friends,. and ask nothing of them, but demand that
Israel, the only democracy in a sea of despotism, continually prove its
loyalty to us and embrace policies that could potentially threaten their
own security. You write academic books questioning the strength of the
"Israel Lobby," and wonder out loud if Jewish influence and wealth forces
us to lose credibility and threaten our national security on behalf of
Israel.
You do all of these things, as part of a concerted effort and also as
random, independent efforts on the part of Israel.s enemies, and you do it
for the 60 years of Israel.s existence, and then you are shocked, shocked,
when Israel is shown to rank unfavorably in surveys which measure the
public.s perception of nations and how they compare to one another in the
world community. But you are pleased, because you know that if Israel
cannot be annihilated with armaments and rockets, perhaps you can make it
cease to exist simply by making the entire world loathe it for being what
it is.
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2008/aug/04/in-academia-hiring-token-jews/
[1] Monday, August 4, 2008
IN ACADEMIA, HIRING TOKEN JEWS
BY ASAF ROMIROWSKY, THE WASHINGTON TIMES
OP-ED:
The Israeli-Palestinian conflict long ago spilled over into
America's education departments of Middle East studies. In an attempt
to appear balanced in the face of charges of anti-Israel biases, some
departments or programs of Middle East studies have added Israeli
scholars to their ranks - a move that at first glance appears welcome.
Yet many of these Israeli academics have built their reputation on a
scholarship that is harshly critical not only of Israeli policy, but
of Israel's very existence. Anti-Israel scholars who hail from Israel
are cited favorably by the entire range of Israel's critics. These
range from pro-Palestinian groups like the Committee to Stop
Demolition of Houses in Palestine, the Committee to Stop Torture and
Breaking the Silence to Jewish anti-Zionist groups
like the American
Council for Judaism. They also include neo-Nazis and Islamists.
The international standing of such scholars received a boost in the
mid-1980s with the rise of the so-called "new historians" in Israeli
universities. These scholars sought to debunk what they claim is a
distorted "Zionist narrative" in Israeli historiography. In practice,
they twisted the history of Israel's rebirth by dismissing the efforts
of Arab states to destroy the newborn Jewish state as a Zionist myth,
and claiming that Israel is built on ethnic cleansing and brutality
toward the Palestinians.
Given this hostility to Israel's very existence, Middle East studies
departments in the United States are tempted to hire anti-Israeli
Israelis. They inoculate the employer against charges of anti-Semitism
while seemingly legitimizing their claims of ideological balance
gained through presenting an Israeli viewpoint. All this is achieved
without changing the radical, anti-Israel, Arabist
prejudices of their
departments.
This problem is noted by leading Middle East historian Efraim Karsh,
who in his book "Fabricating Israeli History" observes that propaganda
in the field of Middle East studies has become the accepted norm. In
other disciplines, this would have created a serious crisis of
credibility. Yet, Mr. Karsh notes, this is not so in contemporary
Middle East studies. For such is the politicization of this field that
the new historiography's partisanship has been its entry ticket into
the Arabist club and its attendant access to academic journals,
respected publishing houses and the mass media.
Today, these "new historians" teach at many North American and
European universities. In practice, it ensures that students are
taught an ahistorical, one-sided interpretation of the Arab-Israeli
conflict.
Some recent examples illustrate the problem: Ilan Pappe, formally of
Haifa University and now with the University of Exeter in England, was
one of the
driving forces behind the academic boycott movement against
Israeli academics that began in the United Kingdom. Mr. Pappe believes
that Zionism is a genocidal, racialist movement. Here he describes the
founding years of the Jewish state: As resistance to colonialism
strengthened, the Zionist leadership became convinced that only
through a total expulsion of the Palestinians would they be able to
create a state of their own. From its early inception and up to the
1930s, Zionist thinkers propagated the need to ethnically cleanse the
indigenous population of Palestine if the dream of a Jewish state were
to come true.
Neve Gordon of Ben-Gurion University of the Negev was a visiting
professor at the University of Michigan this academic year. Mr. Gordon
believes that Israel is not a democracy and that Israel controls the
Palestinian population in the occupied territories without giving them
political rights. Accordingly, the notion that the occupation is
provisional or temporary
should be considered an illusion concealing
the reality on the ground.
o Oren Yiftachel, a geography professor at Ben-Gurion University of
the Negev and a Diller Visiting Professor at the University of
California at Berkeley, states that: The failed Oslo process, the
violent intifada and - most acutely - Israel's renewed aggression and
brutality toward the Palestinians in the occupied territories, have
cast a dark shadow over the joint future of the state's Palestinian
and Jewish citizens. He also says that actual existence of an Israeli
state (and hence citizenship) can be viewed as an illusion, and that
Israel has ruptured, by its own actions, the geography of statehood
and maintained a caste-like system of ethnic-religious-class
stratification.
Sanford and Helen Diller endowed Mr. Yiftachel's position at
Berkeley. Helen Diller admits that she was motivated by the
pro-Palestinian activism on campus: With the protesting and this and
that, we need to get a real strong
Jewish studies program in there,
she said, expressing the hope that it will be enlightening to have a
visiting professor and that it would calm down the situation on
campus. Her comments, though well intentioned, illustrate the core
mis-assumption that the presence of an Israeli scholar guarantees
ideological balance in a department.
Sanford Diller has noted the risks involved in trusting the
university to fulfill his and his wife's wishes, and stated that it
was never their foundation's intent to supply a platform at Berkeley
for someone of Mr. Yiftachel's views, to which he and his wife are
strongly in disagreement.
In Middle East studies, politicized writing and teaching have
displaced scholarship, and academic freedom has been redefined as the
liberty to dispense with academic standards. Hiring token Israeli Jews
who share these views eliminates debate while providing the illusion
of balance.
Asaf Romirowsky, an adjunct scholar for Campus Watch, is manager
of Israel and Mideast affairs for the Jewish Federation of Greater
Philadelphia.
3. Phyrric Peace
http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/Read.aspx?GUID=4AF26BCF-43EE-40E8-BE0E-2A1CC32AAB2F
4. Lies of the American "New Historians":
http://hnn.us/articles/52502.html
5. Was Ehud Olmert the very worst Prime Minister in Israeli history? The
competition for that title is tough but I think the answer is NO. Ehud
Barak was even worse, and a good argument could be made that Yitzhak Rabin
was even worse - esp in terms of the long run effects of his reign.
