Tuesday, May 05, 2009
University of Haifa Gets "Queer" about the Holocaust
1. The Israel Prize generally goes to the most anti-Israel or anti-Semitic professor that the leftists on the prize award committee can identify.
And this year was no exception. My guess is Iran's Ahmadinejad should get it next year.
The recipient this year was Professor Yehuda "Judd" Neeman, from the TV and Film department at Tel Aviv University. Neeman is one of the most open haters of Israel in Israeli academia, and that is saying a lot. For an expose on him, go to http://www.isracampus.org.il/third%20level%20pages/Editorial%20-%20Alon%20Ben%20Shaul%20-%20Yehuda%20Neeman.htm
There are layers upon layer of irony in all this. The word "Neeman" means loyal in Hebrew, while Comrade Judd's loyalty is clearly to the Palestinians seeking Israel's annihilation. He has devoted his career as a film professor to destroying any loyalty people may feel towards Israel.
If you think that is an overstatement, consider an Op-Ed article carried by YNET recently, published on Holocaust Memorial Day, crayoned by Comrade Judd. (In Hebrew, it can be read here: http://www.ynet.co.il/articles/0,7340,L-3706887,00.html )
His article is entitled "Nationalism is the Religion of Murderers." It is entirely an indictment of Israeli young people who agree to serve in the army to prevent the Arabs from carrying out a second genocide of Jews.
In the article, he pretends to be showing compassion for young people who undergo tough things while serving in the military. His point is that brutal totalitarianism subordinates the bodies of young people to the state, and he makes it clear he considers Israeli patriotism or nationalism to be right up there with Stalinism and Nazism. He then cynically mentions that in Judaism and Islam the circumcision is supposed to mark the body in a way that reminds young people that their body belongs to the Creator and not to the state. All this is his preparation of the reader for his broadside against the Israeli state and educational system, which seek to motivate young people to serve their country and defend the civilians of their country from annihilation. He mocks soldiers who say about serving in the army, "It is work that has to be done." The Hebrew word for "work" is also a word for a religious ceremony (think of "Avoda Zara") and Neeman denounces such thinking as barbarous. He denounces patriotism as a new form of paganist barbarism. As a "religion of the murderers."
The article ends with a note that the contents are what Neeman was planning to speak at a ceremony for fallen soldiers to be held on Israel's Memorial Day for its slain soldiers the following week after it appeared on YNET. Try to imagine how parents who lost a son would react to Neeman's rant.
2. Well, you will be happy to hear that academic interest in the Holocaust and its history is not dead at my own University of Haifa. Which brings us to the most important scholarly event of the University of Haifa "Bucerius Institute for Research of Contemporary German History and Society." The Institute is holding a day-long conference on the status of --- and this is THEIR term, not mine --- "queers" in the Holocaust.
Now I realize you think this is just another Plaut spoof, the sort some people take seriously and do not realize is a sarcastic joke. But not this time, grasshopper. Take a look at this web page in English: http://bucerius.haifa.ac.il/ . Yes, this Thursday, May 7, the University of Haifa is holding a conference on "Queer experiences during the
Third Reich and the Holocaust," together with the University of Hamburg. The "Queer" word in the title is part of the official conference name. I am not making this up.
From the names of the "papers" to be presented there, it is pretty clear that the entire conference is going to be devoted to misrepresenting the treatment of homosexuals in the Third Reich as comparable with that of Jews. This is the new PC fad in some quarters, to speak about multiple "Holocausts" of fashionable groups as being morally equivalent to the Shoah, be they Armenians, Gypsies, homosexuals, dolphins, or chicken roasters.
Now let me venture to name two things I am willing to bet a month's salary will NOT be discussed at this conference. The first is that most "homosexuals" arrested and deported by the German Nazis were in fact communists and other political dissidents being tagged "homosexuals" for purposes of discrediting and embarrassing them. In other words, lots of the so-called members of the "homosexual genocide" by Germany were not gay at all.
The second topic that I am willing to wager will NOT be discussed is the role of homosexual ideology in the early Nazi movement, to the point that it became the official doctrine of the Brownshirt SA before the Night of the Long Knives, that numerous Nazi Party leaders in the 1930s were proud homosexuals and homosexuality was promoted as an ideal and ideology by many in the party, and that one reason for the Night of the Long Knives was Hitler's fear that the open homosexuality in the party might produce grassroots opposition to it.
Here are a few Lecture titles from Haifa conference (again, I am NOT making these up!):
The Implicit Comparison: The Nazi Persecution of Homosexuals and the Holocaust
Finding the Queer in the Search for "Normality": Thoughts on Emigration from and Survival After the Nazis"
Living in the Shadow of Persecution: Lesbian Experiences during the Third Reich
"The Right to be Different": LGBT Delegation to Yad Vashem. Israel 1994
And
Between Homophobia and Anti -Semitism. The Persecution of Jewish Homosexuals in Berlin during the Third Reich by a lecturer from Berlin named Pretzel (really!)
As far as we can tell, the star and singer of Springtime with Hitler in Germany from "The Producers" will not be performing at the conference.
