Zionist Conspiracy

Collaborators in the War Against the Jews: Tony Judt
By: Steven Plaut
Wednesday, September 09, 2009

The next investigative article in a series Frontpage is running about
collaborators in the Islamic war against the Jews.

Tony Judt is a _Jewish _
(http://www.camera.org/index.asp?x_context=2&x_outlet=35&x_article=1116) British professor of history now at New York
University. He was born in the same year as Israel. He has devoted his recent
years trying to lay the groundwork for Israel’s death. Although cloaking his
arguments in sophisticated post modern discourse, he has acted as an
intellectual collaborator with Islamists seeking to wipe Israelis and Jews
generally off the face of the map. Because he has been called on the
implications of his steady and increasingly radical attacks on Israel, Judt has come
to see himself as a victimâ€"so much so that Christopher _Hitchens says _
(http://www.slate.com/id/2152032) he has a “persecution complex.” The New
Republic’s Leon Wieseltier goes a step farther in characterizing Judt’s
grandiose sense of self and the intellectual violence of his writing when he
calls him “the shahid [martyr: as in suicide bomber] of Washington Square.”

Tony Judt’s own parents were Jewish refugees from anti-Semitic persecution
in Eastern Europe. Growing up in London, he lived briefly on a kibbutz in
Israel in the 1960s. At that point in his career, he liked Israel, perhaps
because France liked it and because the United States was ambivalent.
Later, when the United States liked Israel and France detested it, Judt made his
own political U-turn.

Unlike most of the leftist Bash-Israel academics, whose output consists of
predictably dreary attacks on “the Zionist entity,” Judt actually has
done some notable academic work. He considers himself an expert on French
history and has published widely on this subject to general acclaim, although
some French thinkers have challenged his credentials. But in recent years
he has made a transition away from intellectual history to an obsessive
concern with the Middle East conflict. As a _groupie of the late Professor_
(http://www.frontpagemag.com/readArticle.aspx?ARTID=12226) of English
Literature and of Terror at Columbia University, Edward Said, Judt wrote the
introduction to a recent collection of Said essays. The following lengthy
sentence summarizes the tone and viewpoint of his approach to Israel and its
quest for survival:

"Today [Israel] presents a ghastly image: a place where sneering
18-year-olds with M-16s taunt helpless old men (“security measures”); where
bulldozers regularly flatten whole apartment blocks (“rooting out terrorists”);
where helicopters fire rockets into residential streets (“targeted killings”
); where subsidized settlers frolic in grass-fringed swimming pools,
oblivious of Arab children a few meters away who fester and rot in the worst
slums on the planet. . . ."

Judt has done absolutely no scholarly research into the Middle East
conflict. His writing consists primarily in _issuing fatwas _
(http://www.frontpagemag.com/readArticle.aspx?ARTID=12226) against Israel for allegedly
conducting an “ethnic cleansing” of Palestinians in 1948. He also cannot
imagine any problems in the world that could not be _resolved through the
abandonment_
(http://www.jewishpress.com/page.do/17761/America,_Israel_and_Tony_Judt.html) of Israel by the United States. Not that he has any particularly
strong affection for America, which he holds guilty (gasp) of having
suppressed its liberals and leftists.

Judt was one of those who rallied in support of Norman Finkelstein, when
the loony pseudo-academic enemy of Israel and Jews was dismissed from DePaul
University due to his lack of any serious scholarly work. Like the other
Finkelstein apologists, _Judt insisted that Finkelstein_
(http://www.campus-watch.org/article/id/4274) was a martyr who had been victimized by the
all-but-invisible but nonetheless omnipotent Jewish-Israel Lobby.
In a superb expose of Judt and his problem with Israel, Benjamin Balint
argues that Judt’s hatred of Israel, however freighted with postmodern
attitudinizing, often resembles and imitates traditional anti-Semitism. Judt’s
insistence on the Jewish state’s “anachronism” edges toward a secular
version of Christian supersessionism. Where once Christians wanted Jews to
acknowledge the obsolescence of Judaism, Judt wants them to recognize the
obsolescence of the Jewish state (“an oddity among modern nations”). Where
Christianity considered the Jewish faith refuted by theological history, Judt
deems the Jewish state revoked by political history. Where once Christians
accused Jews of stubbornly refusing the inexorable advance of religion toward
messianic fulfillment, Judt charges Israel with declining to yield to the
inexorable progress of History toward enlightened universalism.

Judt pretends that he hates Israel because it is founded on nationalism,
and because nationalism is dangerous as well as anachronistic. Yet every
other state on the planet is also founded on nationalism, but he believes that
only Israel requires extermination. There is a word for double standards
that result in singling out the Jews and that word is “anti-Semitism.”
One of Judt’s most notorious tantrums against Israel appeared in the New
_York_ (http://www.nybooks.com/articles/16671) _ Review of Books_
(http://www.nybooks.com/articles/16671) on October 23, 2003. There he basically
insists that Israel and Israel alone is responsible for all continuing tensions
in the Middle East and for the failure to achieve peace. The entire
article is a call for Israel’s dismemberment and replacement by a single state
with an Arab majority, or what other anti-Semites these days are calling
the “One-State Solution,” although it might more accurately been termed “the
Rwanda Solution” for what would soon follow its establishment. The
article, which _David Frum called_
(http://www.frontpagemag.com/Printable.aspx?ArtId=13725) “genocidal liberalism,” triggered more than a thousand letters,
most attacking Judt. As a result of the piece, The New Republic, on
whose board he had previously sat, gave him the bum’s rush, and expelled him
from the magazine.

_In that same article_ (http://www.nybooks.com/articles/16671) Judt also
dismisses Israel as a country of fascists: “When one hears Israel's deputy
prime minister, Ehud Olmert, proudly insist that his country has not
excluded the option of assassinating the elected president of the Palestinian
Authority, it is clear that the label fits better than ever. Political murder
is what fascists do.” Judt there also excuses suicide bombing mass
murders against Jews because, “the Palestinians have no other weapons.” He
compares Israel’s security fence, designed to keep Palestinian suicide bombers
away from Jewish school buses and shopping malls, to the Berlin Wall, and
then challenges the foundational legitimacy of Israel: “The very idea of a
Jewish state"â€"a state in which Jews and the Jewish religion have exclusive
privileges from which non-Jewish citizens are forever excludedâ€"is rooted in
another time and place. Israel, in short, is an anachronism.” His anti
-Israel obsession prevents him from noting that there are 22 Arab states in
which Arabs and the Muslim religion have exactly the exclusive privileges
that he finds objectionable when Israelis enjoy them.

He then repeats the tired fiction about how the supposedly powerful Israel
Lobby prevents criticism of Israel. “It has also corroded American domestic
debate. Rather than think straight about the Middle East, American
politicians and pundits slander our European allies when they dissent, speak
glibly and irresponsibly of resurgent anti-Semitism when Israel is criticized,
and censoriously rebuke any public figure at home who tries to break from
the consensus.” This is a theme he returned to in the New York Review of
Books, July 14, 2005, when he wrote that “Israel and its lobbyists have an
excessive and disastrous influence on the policies of the world’s superpower.”

Writing in The Nation, January 3, 2005, Judt insisted that Israel’s evil is
_the cause of attacks on blameless Jews_
(http://www.alternet.org/story/20829) outside Israel: “It is the policies of Israeli governments, especially
in the past two decades, that have provoked widespread anti-Jewish
feelings in Europe and elsewhere... They can hardly be surprised when their own
behavior provokes a backlash against... Jews.)” He _also insists that all
of_ (http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=22429) Europe’s
problems with Muslim immigrants is due to Israel’s misbehavior. Writing
about the anti Israel tunnel vision that characterizes Judt’s writing, Sol
Stern has commented: “Judt’s free pass for Islam is the other side of the coin
of his recent obsession with the sins of Israel and Zionism, areas which
make the personal oh so political for Judt.”

Judt implies that his extreme views have brought some discomfiting moments
in the faculty lounge and that even in the current university, where it is
radically chic to vilify Israel, there are limits. But, the personal being
political, he is committed to following the logic of his obsessive desire
from Israel’s destruction to its logical extreme: "Every Palestinian must
clearly understand that the independent Palestinian state, with Jerusalem as
its capital, is not the end of the process but rather a stage on the road
to a democratic state in the whole of Palestine,” [as] Fatah ideologue and
PA director of political indoctrination _Othman Abu Gharbiya_
(http://www.cdn-friends-icej.ca/medigest/june98/quotes.html) stated in November, 1999.
“This will be followed by a third phase, namely Palestine's complete
amalgamation in the Arab and Islamic cultural, national, historic, and
geographic environment. This is the permanent-status solution.”
Making this omelet will require breaking eggs. Paul Berman, writing in
Forward, says, “[Judt] ends up commenting, ‘terror against civilians is the
weapon of choice of the weak.’ Presumably he means that the Palestinian
bombers are [politically] weak and have had no alternative way to claim their
national rights â€" though he doesn't explain why the ‘weak’ would have
turned to their ‘weapon of choice’ precisely in the aftermath of former
Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak's offer to create the Palestinian state in
Gaza and on almost all of the West Bank.”

Among those who have attacked Judt for his naked bias against Israel and
Jews was the _New Republic_ (http://www.mafhoum.com/press6/165P51.htm) .
Writing there on October 27, 2003, Leon Wieseltier mocks Judt and his bitter
chagrin at the way his Jewishness makes him complicit in what he regards as
immoral acts: “Consider his predicament again. He finds himself ‘
implicitly identified’ with Israel's actions in, say, Jenin. But he was nowhere near
Jenin. He killed nobody. Indeed, he is ferociously opposed to the
killings, and to the policies of the Sharon government in the territories
generally. All he has to do, then, is to say so, and then to express his anger at
the suggestion that he is in any way responsible for what he, too, deplores.
For the notion that all Jews are responsible for whatever any Jews do, that
every deed that a Jew does is a Jewish deed, is not a Zionist notion. It
is an anti-Semitic notion.”

But Judt has taken no concern about his contradictions. Since 2006, he
has spent much of his time peddling and marketing the anti-Israel book by
_John Mearsheimer_ (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Mearsheimer) and
_Stephen Walt_ (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Walt) entitled "_The Israel
Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy_
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Israel_Lobby_and_U.S._Foreign_Policy) ." Its demonization of a Jewish cabal that
controls US foreign policy and stifles freedom of speech has brought a cascade
of criticism that activates Judt’s feeling that his heroic stand against
Israel has made him too a victim of Zionist “censorship” and suppression.
The basis for this is that in 2006 the Polish Consulate in New York had been
planning to invite him to give a talk, but when it learned about how
hostile Judt was to Jews and Israelâ€"partly as a result of _some petitions signed
by_ (http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/3824ee52-d316-11db-829f-000b5df10621.html)
academics and others â€"the invitation was cancelled.

The _anti-Semitic Left_ (http://www.nybooks.com/articles/19550) , with Judt
on the charger, denounced the Consulate for capitulating to Zionist
terror. _Judt himself declared_ (http://www.campus-watch.org/article/id/2876) ,
"This is serious and frightening, and only in Americaâ€"not in Israelâ€"is this
a problem. These are Jewish organizations that believe they should keep
people who disagree with them on the Middle East away from anyone else who
might listen."

What could be more ludicrously hypocritical than a chaired professor at
NYU who uses his position there as a soap box for his political views, a man
best known for his “genocidal liberalism,” whining that those Jews are
suppressing democracy and freedom of speech in America? Only one thing: that
professor’s use of his privileged position to spread views that give aid
and comfort and intellectual legitimacy to those groups whose solution for
the Middle East conflict is for Israel and Jews to be dead.

Previous articles in the Collaborators series:

(http://frontpagemag.com/readArticle.aspx?ARTID=36178)
_Michael Lerner_ (http://frontpagemag.com/readArticle.aspx?ARTID=36178) _
Marc H. Ellis_ (http://frontpagemag.com/readArticle.aspx?ARTID=36028)

2. Dershowitz on the Toronto Porgrom:
http://frontpagemag.com/readArticle.aspx?ARTID=36219

3. How a Palestinian state will make things worse:
http://frontpagemag.com/readArticle.aspx?ARTID=36227

4. The wife of the new Prime Minister of Japan claims she was abducted by
space aliens. It looks like she has been reading Barry Chamish again.

5. The anti-Semitic Neve Gordon gets exposed:
http://www.isracampus.org.il/third%20level%20pages/BGU%20-%20Gordon%20likened%20to%20anti-Semitism.htm

Even the Israel-bashing self-hating "Jews" at J Street denounce Gordon,
sort of:
http://www.isracampus.org.il/third%20level%20pages/BGU%20-%20Even%20J%20Street%20denounces%20Gordon.htm

6. Berkeley lecturer spends her days working for Israel's annihilation:

UC Berkeley - Lecturer in Hebrew Rutie Adler spends her days on campus
urging boycott of and divestment from Israel
Her name is on the first boycott and divestment petition against Israel
ever created on a college campus in the US (number 45 there). The idea of
creating a divestment-from-Israel program on US campuses to break Israel
financially, help Arab terrorism, and curry dislike among Americans was
actually the brainchild of a law professor at the University of Illinois
named Francis Boyle. But Rutie Adler, who teaches Hebrew as part of the UC
Berkeley.s Near Eastern Studies Department, part of the Center for Middle
East Studies (CMES), was determined to help fire the first salvo against
Israel in the campaign. . Rutie Adler.s name even made it to the neo-Nazi
Stormfront website because of her adamant support for anything against the
Jewish state. She signed a petition that the US should not send foreign
aid to Israel when Ariel Sharon went into the West Bank to clean out the
terror cells that were routinely sending suicide bombers into Israel and
blowing up buses, schools and cafes almost weekly. . Ignoring the spate of
suicide bombings in Israel at the time in the petition is very telling. .
Of course, one could also speak out about what is going on in Darfur or
the denial of human rights in Arab countries, even the Palestinian
Authority, but Adler never finds time to address anything except Israel.s
alleged abuse of Palestinian Arabs.

UC Berkeley: Lecturer in Hebrew Rutie Adler spends her days on campus
urging boycott of and divestment from Israel

By Lee Kaplan, www.IsraCampus.org.il
6/9/2009

Her name is on the first boycott and divestment petition against Israel
ever created on a college campus in the US (number 45 there). The idea of
creating a divestment-from-Israel program on US campuses to break Israel
financially, help Arab terrorism, and curry dislike among Americans was
actually the brainchild of a law professor at the University of Illinois
named Francis Boyle. But Rutie Adler, who teaches Hebrew as part of the UC
Berkeley.s Near Eastern Studies Department, part of the Center for Middle
East Studies (CMES), was determined to help fire the first salvo against
Israel in the campaign. The campaign was led by the International
Solidarity Movement, but advised by Boyle, who was a US legal advisor for
the Fat.h Terrorism Organization. It decided to begin the boycott and
divestment campaign at Cal first and then in the entire University of
California system, the biggest university system in the nation. Rutie
Adler leapt to enlist in the new movement, despite her being from Israel,
and her anti-Israel activities on her campus to this day.

Considered by herself to be an expert in Hebrew, she is an instructor
whose students complain she is disorganized and uses class time to discuss
the politics of the Middle East rather than teaching the structure of
Hebrew. Adler.s office is just steps away from another UC Berkeley
ex-Israeli obsessive-Israel-hater, Prof. Daniel Boyarin, who was featured
earlier here at Isracampus. Hatred of Israel even by Jewish faculty on
the Bay Area campus is a common occurrence in the CMES at Cal, which is
itself funded by Saudi Arabia. It is a place where Israelis and Jews are
consistently hired based on their having anti-Israel views.

Thanks to Adler.s assistance, the Students for Justice in Palestine at UC
Berkeley, an ISM-affiliated group that also allies itself with the anti-US
International Socialist Organization (ISO) was able to launch almost
weekly demonstrations on her campus against Israel, falsely accusing
Israel of .ethnic cleansing. and .violations of human rights.. As an
Israeli and Hebrew language instructor on the campus, Adler was able to
lend the SJP an aura of credibility. Back in 2002, the SJP was actually
involved in violence against Jewish students on the Cal campus, from
pelting Jewish students with eggs to even smashing a concrete block
through the window door of the local Hillel. Such actions, however, never
daunted Adler, who continued to advise and help the anti-Israel and
anti-Semitic SJP movement grow on campus by spearheading the divestment
campaign. Lately, she has helped with fundraisers for the Free Gaza
Campaign and Norcal ISM, that seek to open the sea lanes to Gaza in order
to facilitate the smuggling of weapons from Iran

Rutie Adler.s name even made it to the neo-Nazi Stormfront website because
of her adamant support for anything against the Jewish state. She signed a
petition that the US should not send foreign aid to Israel when Ariel
Sharon went into the West Bank to clean out the terror cells that were
routinely sending suicide bombers into Israel and blowing up buses,
schools and cafes almost weekly. The incursions were legal per
international law and the Oslo Accords, but Adler signed a petition that
stated among other things, .We Jews, citizens of the state of Israel and
of other countries, are sickened that the Barak government would let the
war criminal Ariel Sharon enter a Palestinian area and provoke terrible
violence. Unfortunately this just illustrates the determination of the
current Israeli government to keep Palestinians permanently separate,
unequal, closed up in small territories, and exiled in foreign lands. We
protest the ever escalating violence against Palestinians. We urge the US
Congress to suspend all foreign aid to Israel."

Ignoring the spate of suicide bombings in Israel at the time in the
petition is very telling.

When Israel sent in the IDF to stop Hamas from firing missiles into
Israeli communities over the last eight years since the Disengagement,
Adler immediately signed a petition calling for a ceasefire. She never
drafted or signed any petitions for Hamas to stop firing those missiles
during those eight years but worked with the SJP on her campus that
encouraged it and tried to justify it. At the same time, Adler signed a
petition in support of Tali Fahima, who helped her Palestinian terrorist
boyfriend plan attacks against her fellow Israelis.

Adler.s hatred of Israel seems based on her hatred for the United States
and its influence in the Middle East, as well as her selective concern for
the Palestinian Arabs. She feels it is a duty as a professor to campaign
against the Jewish state, while at the same time she opposes America going
to war against Saddam Hussein, the guy who financed suicide bombings in
Israel. In 2002, Adler stated, .Anybody who says a professor is supposed
to be neutral is supporting whatever the common (sic) ideology is. If you
don't voice an opinion about what is happening in Israel and Palestine
now, you are supporting what is happening." We guess that anyone who has
never expressed an opinion over whether Adler is a twit must decidedly
hold the opinion that she is one.

Of course, one could also speak out about what is going on in Darfur or
the denial of human rights in Arab countries, even the Palestinian
Authority, but Adler never finds time to address anything except Israel.s
alleged abuse of Palestinian Arabs. She ignores attacks on Jews in Israel,
then insists that she herself is not anti-Semitic because she was born in
Israel. Talk about non sequiturs. That is like insisting that no one born
in the US is anti-American.

Adler co-authored a petition attacking Harvard University President Larry
Summers for his statement equating the US college boycott and divestment
campaign with anti-Semitism. According to Adler, .Mr. Summers thinks, as
many good Jews do, that we are anti-Semites, and I'm also getting e-mails
telling me I'm a Nazi. The Jewish community and the world in general
doesn't know the color gray. Either you're Nazis or you do what Sharon
wants you to do..

After Sharon was gone, the same rhetoric just changed to include Israel.s
new leadership. She proclaimed in a joint statement, "We reject the
allegation that our opposition to state violence by the state of Israel in
any way constitutes anti-Semitism, which, like all forms of racism, we
unequivocally reject." She continued speaking with her peers about such
Jewish faculty who, like her, .They feel an added responsibility to speak
out against Mr. Summers' brand of slander,. while pointing to her .Jewish
culture. as evidence that her position is not anti-Semitic. .I grew up in
Israel and I know the truth,. she continued. .The idiocy of calling people
like me anti-Semitic doesn't even merit an answer. It's ridiculous. This
has nothing to do with Judaism. It has to do with politics..

Adler.s being a Hebrew teacher does not excuse her from her working to aid
those who seek to harm her fellow Jews. If she really understood Jewish
culture she would understand the idea of Ahavat Yisrael. The boycott and
divestment campaign she promotes contributes to poverty in Israel. The
campus divestment campaign is an extension of the Arab League Boycott
begun after 1948 that seeks the destruction of Israel.s Jews, not just a
political end to Israeli sovereignty.

Disingenuously, Adler professes to be pro-Israel. In one interview she
stated, .If one more person calls me anti-Israel, I don't know what I'm
going to do. I'm more pro-Israel than your newspaper and many Jews who
think they are. I'm pro-Israel and I'm pro-Palestine; there is no
contradiction...You don't have to agree with me; just don't call me an
anti-Semite." She also has acknowledged in that article that anti-Semites
are taking advantage of the Israeli divestment petition to further their
own causes, but said she believed people who hate Muslims are jumping on
the pro-Israel bandwagon.

"We don't want to be called anti-Semites just because we critique the
policies of Israel. If the American government treated Israel as they
treat Iraq with all their misbehavior, maybe we would have peace in
Palestine by now," said Adler. "We are not anti-Semites and we don't like
to be called anti-Semites."

History is replete with anti-Semitic Jews who worked to harm others.
Rutie Adler.s .politics. are as anti-Semitic as those of Arafat or Hamas,
only hidden under a banner of leftist radicalism. She hates America where
she lives as much as she hates Israel where she came from, and is an
ardent supporter of the International Solidarity Movement in the San
Francisco Bay Area that is closely allied with the International Socialist
Organization (ISO) that hates America.

Meanwhile, note also how she talks above about .peace in Palestine. . not
peace in Israel and Palestine or simply peace in the Middle East. If
actions speak louder than words, Adler has shown her true colors by
supporting and allying with groups that seek for Israel to cease being a
Jewish state and to become .Palestine.. As one commentator on her has
noted: .What would you call someone who selectively ignores the
unspeakable cruelty of certain nations and goes out of her way to concoct
lies about the world's only Jewish State?.

7. Tel Aviv University's Jihadi Momma:
http://www.isracampus.org.il/third%20level%20pages/TAU%20-%20Anat%20Matar%20-%20supports%20Neve%20Gordon%20in%20counterpunch.htm

8. Too little, too late, too hypocritical:
http://www.isracampus.org.il/third%20level%20pages/BGU%20-%20Rector%20and%20President%20want%20Gordons%20head.htm